Editors note: When NYRB sent me this book, I was totally blown away by it. Carlisle is a brilliant and thoughtful philosopher; a biographer of Søren Kierkegaard and George Eliot who manages to write about the great themes with deep care and attention, and in a way that is fresh and accessible. What follows is a small meditation on the relationship between writing and life. If you are a fan of the kind of thing we publish here, Transcendence for Beginners is well worth the purchase.

Consider this childhood memory. When I was a little girl, before I started school, my mother taught me to write. First I learned to write the alphabet with a pencil on lined paper. Letters were a mixture of curved and straight lines. An ‘a’ was quite difficult: you began to draw a circle—but you didn’t make it a whole circle—and then you put a straight vertical line on the right-hand side of it. ‘b’ was a tall letter, made from a circle and a vertical line twice the height of the ‘a,’ on the left side. When I wrote my name, I had to draw a ‘C’ as tall as a ‘b.’ The lined paper helped me get the proportions right. My mother’s writing was round, clear, flowing, very beautiful. She could join all the letters in each word together. I tried to make my letters more beautiful, like hers. I tried hard not to make any mistakes.

At some point in primary school the daily act of writing became so habitual that I no longer thought about it. Even as a philosophy student and, eventually, a professional philosopher, I hardly paused to wonder, what is writing? What are we doing when we write?

Recollecting the experience of learning to write helps to lift this veil of habit. When I bring my attention back to writing, I discover that in some ways it resembles life. Writing a text means drawing a certain line on a page; living a life means drawing a certain line through the world. These lines move through space and through time.

A path seems a fitting metaphor for writing as well as for life. In each case you must find or make a path through terrain that is teeming with possibilities. And yet the path of writing, like the path of life, can quickly acquire a trajectory that feels irresistible, even necessary. Often your path is formed by following others who have gone before you. Sometimes it is formed by choices—a decision to go this way, not that way. Every path is a combination of following and choosing, and choosing whom to follow, and following others’ choices. Every path is some combination of finding and making.

Life is relational, and so is writing. It is the relationships between words, and then between sentences, that make a meaningful text. And in writing as in life, linearity combines with complexity. On the one hand, the line of writing is unidirectional. It only moves forwards. On the other hand—yet at the same time—it loops, folds, gathers, knots, stitches itself together, forming layers. For example, a recurring metaphor, a rhyme, or a repeated word tacks one point in the line to another. Life shares this double character. It flows irrevocably in one direction: sooner or later (it’s taken me many years) we learn that we cannot travel back in time. Yet our experience continually folds back and loops forward—in memory, in habit, in the deliberate repetitions of practice and ritual, in all the moods of anticipation, and in all the moods of looking back.

The line of writing, like the line of living, has an intermittent and rhythmic quality. On paper there are spaces between words; in our bodies there are spaces between breaths, between heartbeats, between footsteps. In consciousness there are longer intermittencies of sleeping and waking, and irregular intermittencies as attention lapses and returns. Underlying these stops and starts is a flow, such as the flow of blood through the body, and the flow of thought—unconscious as well as conscious—that underlies the act of writing. A piece of writing, like a living being, has rhythm, and its rhythm is essential to its structure (how it moves) and its texture (how it feels).

Inseparable from this rhythm is temporality. As soon as a text comes into being it is there all at once on the page. Yet writing and reading are active, imaginative experiences that unfold in time, bringing the text to life and sustaining it in existence—just as a footpath through the countryside is formed and renewed by each person or animal who walks along it. Likewise, we can distinguish these two aspects of a human life: it is a dynamic shape unfolding moment by moment, and it can be conceived as a whole. Then it transcends the flow of time. Indeed, this is an image of time, like an aerial view of a great river from its source to the sea, seen from miles above the earth—‘under the aspect of eternity,’ as Spinoza put it. When we imagine it this way, it becomes quite beautiful. A whole life, moving through the world from its source to its end: unique, slender, searching. A God looking down on it may well be moved to love—and also, perhaps, to tears.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

Two summers ago, I bought a condo down the street from an empty lot. It was empty in one sense. There was a chain-link fence around the perimeter, and behind the fence, a pit. I often walked past this minor pit, this rectangular space where, presumably, a building used to be, on my way to the co-op or the library, or on one of my aimless, hourish walks. The pit was attractive—not pretty, of course; it was just a lot of dirt and some litter—but it always drew the eye. It was probably as deep as a backyard pool—just deep enough to be mysterious, and a little bit threatening. You wouldn’t want to fall into the pit; it would be hard to climb back out.

Whenever I walked by this pit, I thought about holes. It put me in mind of John Berger’s “ideal field”: “the field most likely to generate the experience” he’s trying to describe in his short essay, “Field.” The pit, to be clear, was not a field; it was a pit. It was a hole. But was it an ideal hole, the type of hole best suited to my contemplation? An ideal hole has roundness—draw a circle on a piece of paper and it already looks like a hole. My friend Sommer wrote a book, called The Circle Book, in which she drew 99 circles and assigned each circle an interpretation: atom, manhole cover, doorknob. Peep hole. Entrance wound. Abyss. I once read that snails chew perfectly square holes in leaves, but a square hole is not a perfect hole. A hole can make up for what it lacks in roundness or legible shape through grandeur—the wider or deeper or more bottomless the hole, the more sublime it is. The 9/11 memorial holes are square, yet vast, yet so deep you can’t see the bottom of the holes from any angle. The edge of an ideal hole is more vertiginous. I think of the feeling of dropping a ring in the shower. If it lands too close to the drain, the drain becomes a precipice. Edges are where meaning gathers.

John Berger passed his field often, though not every day. “From the city centre there are two ways back to the satellite city in which I live,” he writes:

The main road with a lot of traffic, and a side road which goes over a level crossing. The second is quicker unless you have to wait for a train at the crossing. During the spring and early summer I invariably take the side road, and I find myself hoping that the level crossing will be shut.

This paragraph, the fourth in the essay, is where it becomes clear what Berger is talking about. The first three paragraphs of “Field” are strange, by which I mean, strange for John Berger. His essays usually begin quite directly. “Uses of Photography,” which also appears in his book About Looking, begins with this almost absurdly direct sentence: “I want to write down some of my responses to Susan Sontag’s book On Photography.” The essay “Millet and the Peasant” begins: “Jean-Francois Millet died in 1875.” “La Tour and Humanism” begins: “There is no doubt that Georges de la Tour existed.” “Field” stands out as the only piece in the book to begin with an epigraph, a Russian proverb (“Life is not a walk across an open field”), and the prose of the first page is lyrical, elliptical, almost fictive in its atmospheric approach. The first long meandering sentence is this:

Shelf of a field, green, within easy reach, the grass on it not yet high, papered with blue sky through which yellow has grown to make pure green, the surface colour of what the basin of the world contains, attendant field, shelf between sky and sea, fronted with a curtain of printed trees, friable at its edges, the corners of it rounded, answering the sun with heat, shelf on a wall through which from time to time a cuckoo is audible, shelf on which she keeps the invisible and intangible jars of her pleasure, field that I have always known, I am lying raised up on one elbow wondering whether in any direction I can see beyond where you stop.

Strange—again, for Berger—the way he meanders, and keeps adding clauses, and the way he uses pronouns, calling the cuckoo a she and then referring to the field in the second person (“beyond where you stop”). There are two more paragraphs like this before we get to the point. (If it were me writing this essay, I’d probably start with the fourth paragraph—but I am not John Berger.) That fourth paragraph is where we get the first turn: a shift in style and tone, and a moment of surprise: “I find myself hoping that the level crossing will be shut.” I almost always dislike the construction “I find myself,” or “I found myself”—it’s so often used as a fake transition, a way of pretending your character or persona just popped into existence somewhere, with no agency or memory of a chain of causation. I found myself at the Louvre, people write, as though they were drugged and kidnapped. But Berger’s employment of the phrase feels different. It reminds me of Nietzsche’s idea that a thought comes “when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish.” In other words, the thought thinks you. Berger here is noticing a counterproductive, contradictory desire: “invariably,” he chooses the route that should be quicker, but then he hopes to be delayed.

This moment of contradiction is where the cycle of the essay’s essential thinking begins: a moment of rupture, between the self’s apparent intention and the self’s underlying desire, which makes itself known through an unexpected hope. The rupture is a feature of the field experience. It’s like flipping a coin to find out which of two equally appealing choices you actually want. You don’t know what you want until you flip the coin; the desire thinks you.

“Field” could be classified as an “I noticed a thing” essay, as my friend Catherine has dubbed it: a meditation on something the writer has noticed. What Berger has noticed is his unexpected wish to be waylaid near the field, and the experience that follows. He knows it’s a recurring experience, familiar and in some way bounded the way that a field is bounded by fence. But the contours of the field experience are elusive. He’s writing in order to define for himself what it means.

The difficulty for him is apparent—it’s why he begins with such uncharacteristic, almost awkwardly lyrical reaching. He knows he is struggling, writing from a place of unsureness: “The experience which I am attempting to describe by one tentative approach after another is very precise and is immediately recognizable. But it exists at a level of perception and feeling which is probably preverbal.” This struggle reminds me of singing a tune that’s a little bit out of your range. The strain to hit the notes increases tension, and strain in a performance is sometimes more moving than mastery.

Berger never ventures to the field on purpose, in much the same way I never went down to the pit near my house just to look at it, to gaze in its abyss; I only looked at it in passing. And this, this accidental-ness, is the first important feature of the field experience: “It is a question of contingencies overlapping,” he writes:

The events which take place in the field … acquire a special significance because they occur during the minute or two during which I am obliged to wait. It is as though these minutes fill a certain area of time which exactly fits the spatial area of the field. Time and space conjoin.

My favorite kind of essay is what you might call a “long-thinking” essay. These are essays about something the author has been thinking about for months, maybe years, and maybe their whole life. “Field” could be classified this way too. One gets the impression that Berger has been having the field experience for a very long time. He’s been through this cycle of thinking repeatedly for years, but hasn’t allowed the thinking to rise to the surface entirely. “Preverbal” thinking, emotion and image, is only semi-conscious. You can’t tell it yet to others, or even, quite, yourself; you might say you literally can’t hear yourself think. In “Field,” Berger is accessing all this long, looping thinking, a messy layering of similar experiences like a Cy Twombly drawing, and trying to put whatever parts of the experience recur and overlap into language. This essay you’re reading, or will be reading, and which I am currently struggling to edit, could be classified this way too.

The long-thinking essay is ritualistic. Whatever experience or material you’re writing about, you’re also writing about the ritual of thinking certain thoughts, a ritual with certain steps or stages. Berger here is writing about the field, but more so, he’s writing about the self and its repetitive encounters with the field. The philosopher Samuel Scheffler has written of tradition as “repository of experience,” and “the kind of wisdom that comes from experience.” This wisdom, in my view, if given a long enough time frame, comes automatically. You may see the moon as an isolated instance for many years, beginning in childhood. Eventually, in your life on Earth, you look at the moon enough times that you start to understand how the moon behaves, day and night, in relation to Earth and the sun. This learning is mostly passive. Repetitive experience is cyclical, it generates automatic meaning, and ritual thinking generates automatic wisdom. This is why essays that come from long thinking are so powerful. Repetitive thinking acquires a tone, a mood, over time—the ritual makes you feel a certain way. And repetitive thinking is structural—it follows a pattern, a pattern that tells you the order of your thoughts.

Structure is a problem that every essay needs to solve. It’s partly one of information management. Consider this simple diagram:

Points A, B, and C are points in time, but also points in knowledge. If you’re writing about events in a linear fashion, you can still only write the events from the knowledge position of point C. The events in themselves have automatic “plot,” automatic suspense. This is because there is deep causation at work in the world, causation going back to the beginning of time in the universe—yet, we don’t know the future. We don’t understand the causation that well. To let this inherent suspense take effect, we can’t reveal everything we know at the beginning. We have to create an authorial persona that remembers what it felt like to be at Point A. (It’s important to note this is already hard. You can doctor the timeline, and structure information in other ways, but telling a story in order is already difficult.) However, the knowledge we bring from Point C, the wisdom of experience, imbues the whole essay, often in subtle, subliminal ways. It’s part of what gives the voice of an essay authority. The task is to bring readers with you on the cycle of thinking, to show the thinking happening, so they can get some inkling of the wisdom you’ve acquired through these years of experience. It’s almost like the essay allows you to cut out all the gaps, the empty time on the tape. You can show the reader a supercut of only the most relevant moments in all this long time. The essay is a way of distilling and concentrating long and slow thinking into something that can be absorbed quickly, in a handful of pages, a thousand or two thousand words, down the hatch, like a magic pill. How do we do that? How do we solve the problem?

Berger has solved the structure of “Field” by beginning the essay in a state of apparently limited knowledge—all evidence suggests that he started on the writing before he’d fully worked out what he wanted to say. When he writes it, in 1971, he may be at Point C, but he’s gone from Point A to Point B to Point C and around again many times, without yet fully understanding the cycle of thinking that accompanies the experience. We could also say he has understood it, but only in that preverbal way which makes it harder to communicate and harder to remember in all its aspects. In the same way that telling a dream to a friend makes it easier to remember, giving a name to a thing helps us know it. We may not have been so lucky as to walk down a country road with Berger, but reading the essay, we feel we’re thinking with and alongside him; we’re given the grace to witness him figuring all this out. And so, when we get to the essay’s last, beautiful sentence (“The field that you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life”) it’s almost as though the idea has occurred to him and to us at the same time.

“It is a striking fact about human life that we have almost no control over our movement through time,” writes Scheffler, in his essay “The Normativity of Tradition.” A personal tradition or ritual, according to Scheffler, is one way we wrest back a little control. These rituals can be very minor and still have significance. The first time I went to a divey karaoke bar in Denver that was called Barricuda (the name was misspelled, with an i), the poet I was with ordered a greyhound. I thought that sounded good, and I ordered the same. Afterward, for years, I ordered that whenever I went there, though I never ordered greyhounds anywhere else. This was a kind of tradition. However small and random in its origins, it lent a certain ceremony to the experience at the dive. The pit, too, became a kind of ritual for me, even though I didn’t really do anything when I passed by the pit, no dance or incantation. Just thinking of the pit as I walked by the pit was its own form of trivial prayer.

For Berger, stopping by the field was more properly holy. The ideal field, in the minute or two of imposed delay, became a kind of canvas, “having certain qualities in common with a painting,” as well as a kind of stage, “a theater-in-the-round.” The field, being framed in this way, in both time and space, allowed him to experience such quiet events as “two horses grazing,” or “an old woman looking for mushrooms,” as though they were art.

The essay becomes a kind of score for the performance, repeatable and enduring. The magical time pill of the essay allows us to enter the same state we enter in ritual, one where time feels layered, present over past, like a ladder we can climb up and down, instead of a relentless moving forward.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

“Where is the spirit world? It is right here. Do the good and evil spirits go together? Yes, they do. . . . Do they go to the sun? No.” (Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, 3:369.)

Quinn drops me off at the travel stop near Shelley, Idaho. It’s a Love’s Travel Stop, but we call it Mike Love’s Travel Stop, in honor of the worst Beach Boy.

It’s 5pm. We’ve fished the glacial channels of the Snake River below American Falls Dam since sunrise. A pallid, arctic, February day. We didn’t see another soul. My pincushioned waders had seeped river into my skin. The occasional fish lets you forget the cold, for a moment, but now here it was, a burning and frigid pain, rich and strange like polar bear milk.

I hadn’t eaten all day. Through my shivering, I ordered chicken McNuggets from the McDonald’s retrofitted to the side of Mike Love’s. A 20 piece. Sweet and Sour. I’m not scared.

Sitting in the oily, windswept parking area of Mike Love’s, where every Walmart bag on earth comes to die along a chain-link fence, the aroma of fried chicken parts fought through the dank dampness of me, inundating the oil-scorching SUV as the heater roared. I swear that light emanated from the chicken box as I opened it, as I peeled back the sauce so sweet and sour, dipped, and devoured.

I began then, in earnest, to eat the nuggets with a near maniacal fervor. The nugget number ticked quickly skyward, the pace of a turnstile in a rush hour subway tunnel. In my shivering gluttony, a gurgle, a guttural gulp came from me—the congress of exhaled air, and inhaled nugget, nugget sauce and Coke Zero. I startled myself, looked up, though completely alone, embarrassed of someone privy to the bacchanalia of Joe.

And in that moment, the memory. The Mormon belief that the spirit world is here, among us. The souls of those long passed browse the yard sales of our lives, watch us in our waking moments. My Scots-Irish ancestors, forging iron in smithy shops to pay their way across the Atlantic for a better life. The Voortrekkers, taking bullets and lion’s teeth for their children.

My namesake grandfather, having flown 50 harrowing missions in the South Pacific. Dusted, dysenteried farmers and drowned kinsmen, peering at me through the warped windows of my wagon, the sacrificing eyes of millennia resting full upon me, as I sat hobbled and hunched in my rattlecan Subaru Outback, inhaling chicken nuggets like a damp rat.

I paused for that moment in fearful deference of their certain disapproval; a stuffed mouth, a crumb-flecked flannel, these conditions my gauntlet, borne upon their centuries of suffering.

And then I inhaled the rest.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

Mom said Nini was my mom in a past life
and I got confused—listen to music afk with eyes
closed—most glass blocks UV light—the older
I get, the more I like clouds. Flashes of light
when startled by sound. My brother makes
a mysterious “tze” sound. We can’t read
literature from the Golden and Silver Ages
because languages morph like clouds and water
placed in moonlight becomes Moon water. My cats
look East Asian—a blue outer space—without time,
nothing moves. The avocado trees looked like eyes
in 2019, slowly crying happy tears of green fruit—
I’m covered in everything—a large enough number
becomes a cloud. Metaphor of broken screen
not being transmittable via screenshot. Watery
eyes don’t close—they’re covered—studies show
people experience aesthetic chills—peak emotional
moments often associated with perceived sadness.

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This poem is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

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There is an old cemetery in the lava out front. There’s free parking in back. The gardener has cataracts. The graveyard is in very bad shape. Everywhere they ask for donations. It overlooks Kealakekua Bay, where Captain Cook took his last breath for his arrogance. We traveled by rental car. Outside, there are fruit trees like starfruit, orange, and coffee. It reminds me of Sainte-Chappelle in Paris. It looks just like this Gothic cathedral in Burgos, Spain but with tropical flair. It is objectively a beautiful place. The murals were created by a Belgian Catholic priest using donated house paint. I can only imagine what it was like when the paint was fresh–1899. I loved the representation of a good death. Hell. Lives of the saints, and so on. The century of sharp sunlight has cracked the frescos and discolored the hell panel. Color is not among things that last. Some of the panels are blank and unfinished. The painter got sick and left one hundred years ago. Perhaps, one morning we will awake and find that he has returned to finish them! But when you leave things unfinished I think that means they are actually finished… The writing was on the wall. They did have bathrooms and a little stand of fruit and jewelry for donations to the church. I have a weakness for gift shops. Rosaries.. Pens.. Melons…Buttons…. I took the red reusable shopping bag and now use it for heavy groceries–meat, milk. I used the pen to write a little wishlist for God… Trust me, I make addendums. I did not have cash on me to make a donation. I don’t trust God. I am just a historian. The walls are covered in Celandine Green—Like Beryl. Pearl Grey. Purple Hesperia. Flint. Being writers, we decided to visit the small church instead of the erupting volcano—three of us, non-practicing Jews. Went to Mass. The Creed immediately contradicted the priest’s main point. I almost walked out. We could not get inside—construction. The woman at the ABC Souvenir Shop had said to make sure we went to the right church. The one on the postcard she sold me. A few miles away, in Kalapana, there was another church which was hauled off on one truckload away from the path of the lava and dropped down less than five miles to where it sits now. That is a copycat church. This is The Painted Church. I met a very handsome volcanist there who prayed behind me and then offered me aloe vera for my shoulder and a chocolate covered macadamia. I cannot tell if it was flirtation. If you read this, here is my number 305-281-2956. It's on the top of a hill so there is a large chance you will find it is windy. Wind is my least favorite element—I don't like being caught by surprise. The view of the ocean is so wide and so blue it feels as though the eyes on your head were spread further apart when you look out. God was beguiled by his own talents here. There are all the bells and whistles of heaven on hand and the green is enchanting in an almost sinister way. Like chewed grass! It brought back memories unrelated to the moment. It took my breath away. The church was very small so with a busload of people someone was always talking and there was no chance for reverence or peace. The century was blocked off, so really no place to wait for the crowd to leave. Otherwise, it was nice. It gave me real feeling. Prayed here for a miracle for a dying friend. He recovered & drs say it was a miracle. We lit up inside. Lots of open windows and the front door propped for good cross-breeze. Looks out over the sea—above it—as if the church is a plane landing. The curve of earth is visible. Missable. Unmissable. Don’t miss this. Skip it. A bit of a shabby place. I was enchanted. I was disenchanted. Unless you like art, don’t go there. I feel a little guilty whenever I am in a church because I am a liar. I have never been in love but I would like to get married there one day if I do end up finding love. I wish my dining table was made from the wood of the pews. There was a family of rabbits scurrying under the rectory. I went there with my brothers. I went alone. When it was time to go, I did not want to leave. We brought the rain in with us on our shoes and I slipped and scraped both knees as I approached the altar. I felt so badly I had no way to clean up the trail of blood. The restroom was out of toilet paper. It’s hard for people with bad knees to get to. Praying is just one of few things you do on your knees. I got down on my knees there for the first time. They leave the doors open at night.

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This piece is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

For a few months we lived in the Tower of Babel. Above, heaven. Above that, God. Between us and the firmament stood a single penthouse apartment, currently undergoing heavy renovations.

The word on the street was that multiple bathrooms and a kitchen were being rearranged up there, a process that reverberated in the human jaw. In the evenings, my husband and I turned our gaze to the jackhammers on high and asked, in all sincerity, “How is there any apartment left to renovate upstairs?” We fell asleep to Reddit-sourced mantras of structural integrity: beware the load-bearing wall. It never occurred to us that the primary risk was not the collapse of our Tower, but something insurance agents would soon translate as a rupture to the “water main.”

We were the good Babylonians: resigned, unambitious renters with no plans to renovate ourselves. If the ceiling fell, it was God’s will.

Most Swiss will tell you that Geneva isn’t really Switzerland, nor Europe, but some other, third, supranational thing. It is a whole collection of cities in one. A crude census puts the diasporas of Southern Europe and the former Yugoslavia alongside the acronymic expat workforce (UN, WTO, UNICEF, ICRC, CERN), alongside the asylum seekers, commodity traders, watchmakers, art dealers, and the Free Port, where much of that art is stored. Then come the actual Swiss, or the French who cross the border every morning in search of higher wages. The passport-rich stick to compounds in the suburbs, and exist in tax and legal brackets of their own.

This is to say there isn’t really a common language or city genevois. And yet public administration works world-famously well.

You know the story: Once upon a time, the people of Babel built a tower tall enough to touch heaven and rival God. It was an early experiment in urban mass housing, and a testament to human ingenuity at a time when the whole world was “of one speech and of one tongue.” As a display of hubris, it was all the more astonishing for arriving just after the Flood. To punish mankind’s inflated pride, this time God sent not deluge but division: “Go, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7). The citizens of Babel woke up mutually incomprehensible to one another. They scattered to the far reaches of the Earth to begin dysfunctional nations of their own.

The parable warns against hubris in general. More specifically, it guards against the particular megalomania homogeneity tends to spawn when humanity is of one language and one mind. I imagine a single bad actor with big dreams about that ancient Tower’s plumbing, and not a naysayer in sight. Humankind is terrifying when everyone agrees. Polyglotism is the gift that saved us from ourselves.

In retrospect, I think “water main” must have been a mistranslation. A “water main,” I have since learned, refers to the municipal supply—a collective resource, like the Nile or the ocean, that connects us even when we hate each other. The access point for any particular building is usually located in the basement. This makes it an unlikely culprit for a Flood originating on the top floor.

Pumping from the basement “water main” to the upper stories posed a challenge for early mass housing projects. The first developers relied on gravity, erecting the rooftop water towers you still see in cities like New York. By the 1970s, when our own housing block was constructed, engineers had figured out how to ratchet up the pressure to reach the highest floors, then lower it again through a series of valves. It is one of these pressure-regulating valves, I suspect, rather than the “water main,” that burst in our upstairs neighbor’s newfangled plumbing system sometime after midnight, raining many thousands of liters through the complex and flooding every single apartment below, especially ours. Gravity-powered plumbing was suddenly back in play. We woke up to a custom waterfall streaming down our bathroom walls.

At the time, we’d been in Geneva for a little over two years. When we first arrived, I spoke English and German; my husband, English, Bengali, Hindi, and a bit of Spanish. I had begun to learn French in earnest a few months before, when I’d found out I was pregnant. One of us would have to advocate for our child. I was up to the task. Then came the miscarriage, and I gave up. This complacency proved a liability in the aftermath of the Flood.

A lot of expats lack motivation to learn French in Geneva, and not only the Americans. You can get by pretty easily with the basics. Still, there’s less English than you’d think. At the tax office, or the immigration office, or over the phone with your healthcare provider, and especially in insurance disputes, people pretty reasonably prefer to speak French. Many don’t speak English at all. For the past two years, at the annual fête des voisins, my husband and I had stood in our building’s courtyard, nodding and smiling over glasses of wine, radiating what we hoped would be taken as nonverbal goodwill. There was linguistic friction, sure. But until we found ourselves trying to translate things like “water main,” the language barrier wasn’t really a barrier at all.

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to make myself comprehensible. Even before we moved to Geneva—my husband works for one of those acronyms—when I was first teaching myself to write, I used to type up stories during lunch breaks at my Midtown office job. It was during this period that I came across the work of Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist. He wouldn’t have thought much, maybe, of my professional obligation to project and regularize the future based on what came before, which is more or less what statistics is. (I was a number-cruncher for insurance.) Art, Shklovsky argued, is meant to do precisely the opposite.

Shklovsky is most famous for his concept of “defamiliarization,” more commonly captured under the writer’s imperative to “make the familiar strange.” Human perception tends toward routine. It renders our experiences “habitual” and “automatic,” to the point where we stop noticing things at all. The job of literature, by contrast, is to make us see the disaster-zone to which we have grown accustomed as if “for the first time.” Shklovsky was a smart guy. He has since been validated by neuroscience: today we understand that the human brain not only filters out but furnishes known variables, the white noise of our lives. When we enter a room, we supply what we already expect to see, rather than deducing dimensions and contents from scratch. We fill our prescriptions and fifteen minutes later ask, “Did I take my pill today?” We become quickly inured to the ribbons of paint peeling from the still damp walls. Leonardo da Vinci, by contrast, once wrote that a real painter, “by looking attentively at old and smeared walls,” can “see in them several compositions, landscapes, battles, figures in quick motion, strange countenances, and dresses, with an infinity of other objects.” If there were divine signs to be detected in our peeling living room, I missed them.

It is due to our tendency to project the familiar onto a world of strangeness that neuroscientist Anil Seth, professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, argues that consciousness is less a form of “processing” external information than a “sustained hallucination” originating in the brain. The most energy-efficient form of perceiving life starts from within your cranium, rooted in biological processes designed to recognize what is already expected, and then projects outward, rather than the other way around. In other words, we do not take in the world “as it is,” whatever that may be, but stage passive best guesses based on prior experience. Encounters with the unfamiliar—or the defamiliarized—interrupt this hallucination. They bring us out of ourselves. A Russian Formalist like Shklovsky calls this encounter art. A moral philosopher, someone like Levinas, might call it an encounter with “the Other.”

The actual brain-rewiring required to become more attentive to our surroundings is related to my favorite definition of plot, which Shklovsky later derived from this same concept. If slowing down is a “general law of art,” then plot is a “retardant force.” It’s what prevents a story from ending too soon, or at the wrong time. It tricks us into lingering where a more efficient storyteller would hurry on. To see or experience things as if for the first time, in other words, takes time.

Consider for a moment the Tower of Babel not as an isolated narrative, but as one episode in a much longer, more literary plot—the epic (and, from the view of most major religions, unfinished) story of humanity’s attempt to reach heaven. From this point of view, God’s motivation for sowing linguistic division on Earth isn’t “punishment.” It is, rather, what is needed to slow the story down, to keep the plot from ending too early, before its full effect has been realized. After all, at the time Babel fell, the human race hadn’t even founded its many nations yet. Pentecost was still a long way off, buried in the Book of Acts. On that day, the Holy Spirit—the water main of Christendom—flowed through the Apostles, allowing them to speak every language at once. Fluency became an act of grace. I find it increasingly significant that this miracle, often interpreted as a “reversal” of or coda to the Babel curse, did not, in the end, collapse the world’s tongues into one.

If you really want to learn a language, I suggest entering a legal dispute. I now speak Flood French, learned through months of wading through the insurance claims, repairs, and negotiations a major deluge entails.

It was in line at the renters’ association, where we pay dues, that I had my own Pentecostal breakthrough. Our landlords had denied our request for a rent reduction. There were still confusing disagreements over who ought to pay for repairs. The morning I arrived, there were maybe forty of us crammed into folding chairs in the carpeted lobby, clutching copies of our leases and awaiting appointments with association lawyers. An underpaid staffer took the opportunity to solicit us for a survey. Could we anonymously provide our addresses, rents, and approximate square meterage for a collective database meant to support future appeals for rent decreases? This rationale reached me with the burst of clarity that usually accompanies a righteous suggestion, soon overwhelmed by the clarity of actual comprehension: I understand.

Our new place is on the train tracks. I am eight months pregnant. From the front room, you can watch the express line come in from Paris. (The child in me imagines my own child doing just this, her face pressed up against the glass.) There’s a pawn shop across the street, next to an anarchist bookstore. Voltaire’s former villa is just up the hill.

My Flood French has since expanded to cover negotiations with movers, pediatricians, the nurse who administered my prenatal iron transfusion, the midwife who taught my birthing class. (Oui à la douleur!) At the Bureau d’information petite enfance, reserving my daughter a spot in publicly subsidized daycare (crèche) in my waterlogged accent, I feel vulnerable on her behalf. What if I miss something? What if I don’t understand? What if, by the simple fact of being foreign, I harm her chances of gaining access to services, of fitting in? These are the kinds of questions that drive you to the language school. My classmates were notably all women, mostly mothers, and overwhelmingly refugees from Afghanistan, Kurdistan, Iran, and Iraq. An interloping New Zealander claimed an allergy to the sun and to Geneva’s water supply, in response to which she’d developed a rash and a rich grammar of complaints.

One day, the exhausted teacher (nationality: French), out of tricks, posed a lazy conversation starter: “What is one positive and one negative stereotype about your country?” We spoke around the obvious. We lacked the vocabulary. The teacher conflated someone’s pronunciation of touriste with terroriste. We took to sharing wedding photos instead.

The above are also the kinds of questions—am I equipped to raise my child here?—that generate the baseline paranoia that is any parent’s due. Though one hardly needs to be a parent to be paranoid. There was another game we played in language class that I’ll call, How Swiss is it? The projector flashed images of mountains, a cow with its bell, Heidi from the famous 1974 Japanese anime series, whose avatar—now quintessentially Swiss—welcomes you on inter-terminal trains in the Zurich airport. We discussed the Swissness of swimming, skiing, fondue, glacial lakes. Geneva, for its part, is perched on Lac Léman, from which the canton’s water supply is sourced. It is considered “Swiss” to swim in it all year round, even in the winter; I know at least one foreigner who, in an arctic attempt to assimilate, developed temporary nerve damage. What is one positive and one negative stereotype about your country?

The construction of such clichés, Shklovsky taught me, amounts to the absence of mystery. A quest for purity always does. It imposes a totalizing familiarity. Its logical conclusion is a purge. Where cliché succeeds, everything worth looking at will disappear. In such a world, there is no need for language or stories anymore. (Why write, if I’m already convinced that your sustained hallucination is just like mine?) It occurs to me there will always be people with ambitions to divert the water main. How laughable that anyone could still believe that they, and they alone, will be spared the Flood.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

I grew up in a family where the practice of going to confession was actively discouraged. At liturgy with my Greek grandma, the priest suggested during his homily that we should all avail ourselves of the opportunity to see him for confession. My grandma whispered in my ear, “We don’t do that.” I asked her what she meant. “We don’t tell our business to other people,” she said, “because they might gossip about us.”

Gossip is part of the air that Greeks breathe. It’s part and parcel of our cultural legacy. After my religious awakening in college and my decision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church, I started going to confession regularly. But it wasn’t until I heard Pope Francis call gossip a “diabolical cancer”—“the worst weed” that can grow in a community, because it leads to division and resentment—that I started including the sin of gossip on my list.

Harsh condemnations of gossip date back to the early Church, when some desert fathers recommended putting a stone in one’s mouth in order to learn to keep silent and avoid vain talk about others. St. John Climacus called gossip a leech “draining and wasting the blood of charity.” Even recent Greek Orthodox writers have issued warnings about the evils of gossip. Hieromonk Gregorios said gossip is a form of lying: by spreading negative information about other people, the gossiper implies knowing the full story, including the state of a person’s heart (which only God knows). Saint Paisios insisted that Christians ought to be like the bee who looks for the flowers—only speaking about the good that others do—and avoid being like the fly who wallows in filth, dwelling on others’ worst attributes.

Living in the information age has not exactly made this easy. The expansion of technology—mass and social media, exposure to sensational public spectacles, and constant surveillance—subtly encourages the impulse to play God: to see, know, judge, and disseminate as much information as we can access about others.

But we ought to exercise caution and avoid moralizing—both about gossip and Big Tech—in simplistic ways. The more I’ve reflected on my seemingly endless battle against the sin of gossiping, which is likely fueled by my addiction to my phone and social media, I’ve come to see how much this struggle is not so much a curse from the devil as it is a source of divine grace.

The first time rumors spread about a girl in my eighth-grade class losing her virginity, I greedily consumed to all the information I could get so I could tell everyone, piecing together all the details and using my imagination to embellish them a little more each time I recounted the tale. I even told my mom, who found the story to be so riveting that she gathered everyone in the living room to have me tell it to them. My family didn’t even know who the girl was. What enticed them was not finding out private information about this girl or judging her. It was the sensationalism of the way I told it.

There is a real craft, an artform to gossiping. One need only watch a YouTube compilation of the “hot topics” segment from Wendy Williams’s daytime talk show to see someone who has truly mastered the craft. Her audience doesn’t only crave information about the private lives of the stars—they crave the salacious and witty manner in which Williams presents it. (Williams once took up the challenge to give up gossiping, which lasted a whole ten seconds. Some have dared to conjecture that her current cognitive impairment is divine intervention to stop her from getting—in the words of Mariah Carey—“all up in [people’s] bidness.”)

Some argue that gossip can be a force for good. Gossip in the form of venting can easily spiral into a bashing session, in which you wallow—like the fly—in your resentment toward the person who pissed you off. But it can also open the door to a constructive conversation about how to deal with said person and arrive at some kind of resolution. And some more socially-conscious voices have argued that gossip can be a means for powerless, underprivileged people to warn, protect, and uplift each other in the face of unjust treatment by those in power.

When it comes to my own taste for gossip, it’s a bit more complicated. As time went on, I began feeling like Gretchen Wieners of Mean Girls fame: my head was full of secrets. Somehow, I just happened to know everything about everyone. Perhaps it was because my Aspergers made me pay attention to and remember little random details I observed and heard. Maybe I have an unhealthy appetite for knowing information about others that I’m not entitled to, and am thus guilty of the vain curiosity that drove Adam and Eve to disobey God. Or maybe it’s just because my family groomed me to notice and retain information about other people.

Most of the gossip I grew up around was harmless. Yet I can’t deny that plenty of the gossip I indulge in is malicious. Sometimes I’ve said things that are really mean, and have spread information about people that ended up hurting them afterwards. The more I’ve examined my own conscience, I’ve had to admit that there’s more than just playfulness or curiosity driving my itch to gossip about people. Ultimately, it’s an attempt to compensate for my embarrassingly deep-seated insecurities.

Like most other millennial narcissists, my entitlement complex is fairly massive. I’m embarrassingly insecure and desperate for approval. When people don’t do what I want, I take it as a grave injustice, an affront to my dignity. Rather than accept that I’m not entitled to everything I want—and pull a Matthew 18:15 by confronting people when they actually disrespect me—I allow the resentment to fester internally. The resentment eventually oozes out of me in the form of talking shit about them—usually not in the aforementioned constructive manner, but as a way of punishing them for their affront to me. It numbs my insecurity by letting me pretend that I’m more powerful than them.

But there is also another mode of gossiping—one that’s less impassioned, requires less effort and serves a more mundane function—that risks being even more diabolical. Unlike the aforementioned forms of theatricality or maliciousness—this kind is gossip as mere filler, background noise used to numb boredom, a lack of passion for life and substance in a conversation.

I once asked my grandma why we gossip so much. She said that we weren’t gossiping, we were just making conversation. Gossip was a way to pass the time together. We didn’t give much thought to it; it was second nature. More often than not, it was done for sport. This form of gossip can be incredibly pernicious. When you’re engaging in malicious gossip, you can at least know you’re sinning and feel bad about it at some point. But this blasé kind of gossip requires no engagement of the heart or the mind. It’s most common among those who are accustomed to looking not up at the cosmos or into the eyes of the other, but down at the ground. Gossip of this sort fulfills the same function as other forms of algorithmically-regulated background noise like streaming services, AI, doomscrolling: it’s slop that distracts from the existential dread.

This apathetic, low-labor intensive form of gossip has followed in the direction of celebrity gossip: innovations in technology and media have moved us past the sensationalism of the paparazzi era, when tabloid photographers put their—and celebrities’—lives on the line in order to snap a shot that would get people around the world talking. Gone are the days of the paparazzi harassing Britney and Paris as they stumbled out of the club, and chasing Lady Di down the tunnel to her ultimate demise. The dawn of social media—where celebrities can determine which images of themselves get projected out into the ether—has taken the edge off the sensationalism of celebrity gossip. The sheer overload of information we’re barraged with has made it so that even the most scandalous image or story is quickly forgotten in a matter of days—or hours—as newer, more sensational stories make their way into the news cycle.

When the media that disseminates information about people’s lives assumes god-like proportions of omniscience and omnipotence, the thrill of “playing god” and gossiping loses its edge. Asking your friend if they saw Cardi B’s latest Instagram story performs that same space-filling function as commenting on the weather—indeed, information about the private lives of celebrities has become as pervasively unavoidable—and mundane—as the weather itself. Perhaps the greatest mark of the falling off of a friendship is when the two people cease sharing juicy, impassioned gossip with each other, and when they resort to DMing each other cringe stories of people they follow. (Lately, I’ve been indulging in DMing friends politically-charged posts by our mutuals, deriding them as libtards…and conservatards. My new low has been DMing our mutuals’ thirstraps and bodyshaming them...)

From the artful, to the malicious, to the lazy varieties, I’ve employed various tactics to conquer my pet vice of gossip. I’ve done that thing when you start saying “Did you hear about…wait no, nevermind.” I’ve tried highlighting a person’s most positive attributes after talking shit about them (“He’s such an asshole…but you know, when you think about it he’s actually kinda smart…”)—simultaneously being the fly and the bee. In an attempt to adhere to the Golden Rule, I’ve tried conjuring up memories of how I felt after being told that people were gossiping about me, hoping that would keep me inflicting the same pain upon others. I’ve tried looking at the log in my own eye before talking about someone else’s log, probing my conscience for the ways that I’ve perpetrated the same crime as the person I’m tempted to gossip about. I’ve tried—as much as it goes against my millennial temperament—to get a little more confrontational and tell people how I feel to their face rather than being fake nice venting my emotions behind their back. And I’ve even asked people forgiveness for what I’ve said about them after the fact.

But much like my addiction to doomscrolling, I’ve come around to accepting that gossiping is a vice I’ll never fully kick. Neither denying the sinfulness of my habit nor moralizing about it have been useful. Rather, the most helpful advice I received was from a priest to whom I was (yet again) confessing the sin of gossip, who recommended that I focus my energy not on avoiding the sin, but on looking at God Himself. When tempted to look at people’s faults and talk about them with others, when hurt or scandalized by people’s actions, even when I’m bored and feel the need to fill the empty space—direct my attention toward Him. Even if I’ve already started indulging in the act of gossiping, shift the focus of the conversation back to Him. Offer everything to Him—your resentment, your scandal, your insecurity, your boredom. Trust that he can transform and elevate all of these things. For it is only in this dialogue, in this humble act of offering, that the empty vacuum that gossip tries to fill can be filled with something of true beauty and substance.

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What does your house smell like?

Wood
Earth
Malt
Linden

Trunk of a live oak
Disemboweled black and thick
Contents spilling
Not exactly unpleasant

List only types of clothing
That are carriers for scent
Pillowslip impregnated with sweat
Grotesque conditions inside of a shoe

Sometimes a smoky smell from outside
Smell of old leather

Famous smell of rotting garbage
Savory smells
Animal smells

Please bury your face in
This is too strong to be truly shameful

“Nor is it beside the point to remember that
Births as well as deaths are announced
By stunning, singular smells” (Saenz)

Your spit interfering with your hair
What kind of an event is that
Or is it hair that entraps

Receptacle of a human life’s
Intake of cigarettes

Another thing about smell is it can feel like
Being enveloped in someone else’s world
I find that very appealing

When you enter on a cold day and you

Fabric sucks to your body
Wraps around and picks up some of the seasoning
I mean what you leave on your
Bicycle seat is only a shadow

Chrome

Smell of wetted fur
Felt drenched to the core
A syrupy smell

And a vulgar scent

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This poem is part of our ongoing series, Strange Visions.

We live in an age of stylized truths and simplified realities, video snippets and short-form fragments of text that each claim to stand in for reality itself. Describing how short-form, aphoristic writing related to the radically “cutup” and abbreviated media landscape of the early twenty-first century, Jean Baudrillard sought to draw some distinctions between these kinds of content. “The aphorism, the video-clip and the advert seem to share an instantaneity, rapidity and ephemerality,” he allowed, but the aphorism represented a different kind of phenomenon:

It’s a fragment, but a fragment that creates a whole symbolic space around it, a gap, a blank. Whereas our techniques and technologies create the instantaneous, but linked by continuity with the whole network. They are networked fragments, if I can put it that way!1

Aphorisms (while they might superficially share the fragment’s brevity) are dense, compacted, and complex statements of truth that are often posed in the form of riddles or paradoxes. They stop readers in their tracks and demand to be unpacked. Their meaning tends to make itself apparent only after a period of meditation. The kinds of media fragments represented by the video-clip and the advertisement, on the other hand, only make sense when viewed as constituent parts of a larger stream. They capture viewers’ attention only momentarily before the next piece of serial content in the queue makes its appearance.

The tensions between the word and the stream have only intensified in the twenty-five years since Baudrillard made his remarks. The most obvious contemporary manifestation of Baudrillard’s “networked fragments” is the algorithmically generated social media timeline or newsfeed. Here, various “shards and fragments of discourse” are placed in relation to each other and the assemblage presented to the end user as a supposedly faithful representation of current social reality itself.2 However, social media has just as profoundly reshaped our understandings of writing itself, rendering it, too, into a series of fragments within a network.

When users join social media, they are given a profile, which both authorizes and assumes responsibility for whatever content is posted under its name. Profiles work via a logic of networked affiliation. On X and Bluesky, for instance, statements and ideologically-coded emojis entered in the free-text biography and display name fields enable users to position themselves in ideological space and to affiliate their profiles with workplaces and institutions, as well as with political movements and moral causes. These are complemented by the “public displays of connections” (lists of following and followed accounts) accessible from users’ profiles, which provide additional evidence of network affinities. Those who encounter these profiles in digital space will (provided that they are familiar with the visual “codes” of affiliation on X and Bluesky) know in advance where their creators stand in ideological and political terms. Users can further indicate that they are members of their communities “in good standing” by editing a profile to keep it “up to date” as new norms of ideological signaling or new “causes” gain currency within particular follower groups.

Ideologically coded profiles signal to the like-minded while simultaneously deterring those from different platform subcultures. They also contribute to a phenomenon I call metadatafication—the way in which status and reputation online is influenced by users’ network affiliations. Metadatafication inheres in the impression given by the other users one chooses to follow, or the ideological flavor of the content one chooses to post or reshare. In a world of linked profiles, whoever one chooses to associate with, link to, or follow back, has become a marker of credibility. Information, too, has become newly coded by the logic of metadatafication, according to who shares or engages with certain “facts” or particular sorts of content, and who rejects or ignores them.

Knowledge has been reduced to its associated topics, relationships, and keywords. Follow circles, filter bubbles, and digital cliques may seem congenial to those within them but will inevitably appear alienating to those from outside. We still lack an agreed-upon language to describe what this sense of being involuntarily exposed to “someone else’s bubble” feels like, beyond a general unease when faced with unfamiliar facts, or an information environment that is not our own. Anxiety is therefore the defining emotion under the regime of metadatafication, particularly with regard to ambiguous or as-yet undescribed material or figures located on the edge of bubbles of acceptability. Is it safe for us to engage or connect with these people or forms of content? What might these engagements say about us? Is to engage necessarily to endorse?

We have been culturally conditioned to accept a certain kind of condensed writing and speaking as an urgent expression of an underlying truth. As the literary critic Ben Grant writes, the aphorism (crystalline and gemlike in its textual economy) tends simply “to declare what it says as true, and to brook no response.”3 Dicta similarly declare what they say to be beyond question. Protest slogans are devised in order to be unerringly and unquestioningly repeated. When chanted in ritual fashion by crowds, they resemble charms or spells, creating the illusion that their demands could be brought into being through the simple act of ardent mass expression. Although the vast majority of social media posts lack the verbal complexity and involuted cleverness of “classic” aphorisms, they have arguably inherited some of the cultural legacy of the aphorism, the slogan, and the dictum.

The assumption that what is condensed and immediate is also somehow true is intensified by the affordances of social media. The profile claims to represent the poster’s “authentic self” at its most unguarded (and therefore “real”) level, granting whatever is posted under its authority the seal of personal truth. The newsfeed and timeline make similar, quasi-aphoristic truth claims. Their constantly self-updating immediacy mimics what Susan Sontag calls the “rapidity” of the aphorism, the sense in which the aphorism’s recipient “gets” the truth “fast.”4 In the same way that early Midjourney fakes like “Balenciaga Pope” hacked into a culturally specific cognitive weakness (the belief that the camera never lies), the baseless online assertion exploits our cultural expectation that speed and concision signal the presence of the plain truth.

During a meeting with X employees in October 2023, Elon Musk claimed that the social media newsfeed was not simply in the process of replacing the news media, but that it was somehow resolving into an unmediated expression of collective psychic reality itself:

There’s really, I think, a profound shift in news. When you really think about information, I sort of approach this as like the collective consciousness, where if you can think of humanity as a superorganism and all the humans are basically the eyes and ears of the collective mind of humanity, you want to have all those eyes and ears feeding information into the collective mind. Not going through the slow and often distorted lens of media but actually just directly.

Instantaneity, combined with human connectedness, fosters the illusion that what appears on the timeline is unmediated and, in Musk’s words, “direct.” It resolves in real time into the thing in itself rather than a belated and “distorted” media representation of it. If there is an ideology of the timeline, it is fundamentally fractal or hologrammatic, representing the logic of the network itself. Every part is supposed to contain (or at least reference) the whole. The most globally circulated fragments of discourse and moving imagery posted to the stream—a stabbing in a train carriage captured by surveillance cameras; a shooting on a Minneapolis street—scale up into absolute truths imbued with an immediate planetary significance. However, what we might call “the algorithmic construction of social media reality” militates against Musk’s naïve (or cynical, or naïve and cynical) suggestion that the newsfeed represents some kind of “human superorganism,” whose every pair of eyes and ears has access to the “full picture” through media participation.

The mass audiences that existed up until the early twenty-first century were temporally synchronized around their consumption of the same programmed media objects (broadcast television; cinema releases) together at the same time. Now, however, programming works differently. Audience members continue to consume media objects en masse and at the same time as one another, but the feed is personalized. The old monoculture (centered on the shared exposure to the same content) has given way to a new monoculture (centered on synchronized behavior on the same digital platforms). Increasingly, what the content-siloed members of the new media audiences have most in common with each other is the fugue state of simultaneous screen fixation. However, rather than leading to a state of total atomization, this divided state of affairs instead intensifies the desire of all parties to represent their own algorithmically constructed social realities as normative and universal.

The need to be seen “communicating what is right” (and one’s own affiliation with that rightness) has led social media users to become skilled in a particular mode of writing—cant. Cant, as Todd Gitlin defines it, is the reduction of speech to sloganeering. It is “the hardening of the aura around a concept.”5 Like the dictum, cant acknowledges no legitimate opposition to its point of view. Each statement stakes a claim to absolute truth. Ideas and political positions are made to seem unimpeachable through the armoring of the language in which they are expressed. Cant simplifies, compresses, and places an enormous stock in the sincerity of the speaker, but, as Gitlin writes, that claim to sincerity “also protects it against scrutiny.” Cant has now become the dominant register in which political and academic arguments are conducted on social media. Anchoring one of her daily anti-immigration posts on X in the coercive moral certainties of the Second World War, the right-wing British journalist Allison Pearson reposted a picture of an exhausted Royal Air Force fighter pilot taken during the Battle of Britain with the text: “Imagine if [Flight Lieutenant] Brian Lane came back and saw what they’d done to the country he fought so valiantly for.” A reply to her post countered this emotive historical simplification with some emotive historical simplifications of its own: “He didn’t fight for a small, fearful England. He fought against the hate that divides us. Brian Lane flew beside Indians, Muslims, Caribbeans, Poles, people from every corner of the world who stood together to defeat fascism.”

Cant inevitably invites its opponents to express their arguments in its own terms. Both sides seek to have the final word, but finality is impossible given the endlessly self-regenerative nature of the social media stream. The discourse thereby devolves into the repetitive sparring of binary moral certainties—fragments purporting to offer the whole picture. Each piece of discourse manifests as a series of capsule “truths” and snippet-sized assertions (“fought so valiantly”; “the hate that divides us”), each packed together like alleles in the pared-down genome of a virus. While they deliver maximum emotive payload for minimal semantic content, each seems capable only of maintaining the balance of the polarity itself. There is no final resolution, only the armored intensification of emotions and moral certainties on either side of the divide.

With the ability it offers users to snippet images and discourse and paste them into new contexts, social media has become the ideal medium for perpetuating the culture war. When Tate Britain organized its “Hogarth and Europe” exhibition in 2021, it generated immediate pushback from visitors, who posted images of the exhibition’s gallery texts on social media (with their own derisive commentary), and then from journalists in the right-wing British press, who turned those initial posts into news stories. However, what was also notable about the exhibition’s wall texts was how they, too, seemed like a series of “networked fragments,” governed by similar social media logics—simplification, the need to immediately grab a reader’s attention, and the anxieties about association typical of metadatafication.

In the exhibition, The Tête à Tête (the second painting in Hogarth’s Marriage-A-la-mode series) was accompanied by a wall text that focused on one tiny detail in the painting—the pamphlet visible in the pocket of the steward, who is exiting the composition with his sheaf of unpaid bills. The caption writer (the University of Pennsylvania’s Chi-ming Yang) noted that the pamphlet’s title:

references a sermon by the Methodist evangelist George Whitefield, who preached moral purity in North America and Britain while helping legalise slavery in colonial Georgia in 1751. However indirectly, in this painting the atrocities of Atlantic investments are invoked in relation to the outsized expenditure on Asian luxury goods – overall, a picture of White degeneracy.

Of the chair in Hogarth’s 1757 self-portrait, Hogarth Painting the Comic Muse, an accompanying label suggested that its (presumably) imported timber might “stand-in for all those unnamed Black and Brown people enabling the society that supports his vigorous creativity.” The aim of these captions was to encourage visitors to think in terms of networks as well as objects, and to be as mindful of what was not on display as they were of what they could see on the wall in front of them. At the same time, however, they excluded the kinds of specific details about the original contexts of these artworks’ creation (and their intended meanings) which might have enabled a viewer to make sense of them as art objects. Potential associations, rather than the art itself, now seem to set the terms for exhibitions and what can (and cannot) be said about the art objects in museum collections. The logic of the feed, metadatafication, and cant trespass on the viewer’s ability to have an un-premeditated aesthetic experience.

As anxious as institutions are to provide them, labels like this can also get between the works and those who simply want to engage with them on their own terms. Years ago, a work colleague described to me some of the frustrations she had felt when she was an English Literature student. Her course readings came to her as a weekly succession of sublime experiences, but in the seminar room she was compelled to discuss them in the much drier terms of applied theory and historical context. There was no opportunity, no space, no language, for talking about the poems in the terms in which she had actually experienced them. Narrowly prescriptive labels risk taking the air out of museum and gallery visitors’ lungs in the same way.

What matters here is not the specific political content of any one label, but the form of explanation that now predominate. In each case, the artwork is treated as a node in a moral network, requiring immediate contextualization. The label becomes a kind of terminal—less an aid to looking than a screen through which contemporary norms are continuously refreshed.

Following its 2022 refurbishment, museum texts at the Burrell Collection in Glasgow now obey similar logic. A sixteenth-century brass dish from Germany depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian now has a label noting that, although St. Sebastian was originally a religious figure, he is now “seen as a gay icon” and that “the arrows fired into his body are like the words that can still prick us as LGBTQI+ individuals.” The label reframes the image through contemporary identity categories and invites visitors to locate themselves personally within its meaning, asking, “Who is your icon?”

Although the new Burrell Collection texts are printed using the same authority-signaling fonts and visual formats as a conventional museum label, they in practice function more like screens or terminals, receiving and displaying (as though in real time) the most up-to-date signals from “the discourse.” What we might call “activistic ways of knowing” are given formal recognition as a kind of “expert knowledge” through their consecration in the form of gallery text, with its aura of expertise and definitiveness. The new Burrell Collection texts are knowingly provocative. They break the fourth wall of professional convention in order to center (as cant does) the curators’ own emotions and ideological commitments. They make a claim to an unassailable emotional truth through subtly coercive normative frames. The controversial 2025–6 “Hear Us” graffiti exhibition inside Canterbury Cathedral operates according to a similar “terminal-style” logic. Exhibition text posted on the cathedral’s website reported that:

The workshops conducted as part of this project not only ignited inquiries but also stirred up poetic expression, leaving participants feeling affirmed, empathised with, and embraced by their peers. These gatherings offered a platform for individuals to share their perspectives, connect with others who resonated with their questions, and delve into profound discussions about their lives, experiences, and aspirations for change.

Combining public relations and therapeutic language with the style and syntax of a ChatGPT-generated student essay, this text takes one of Gitlin’s definitions of cant (“automated thought”) to its logical conclusion. In the subsequent social media furore, the cathedral walls effectively became a screen for the projection of the contemporary culture war, the (as ever unresolved) clash of polar perspectives offering both sides the illusion of total righteousness.

Liberated from the duty of explaining the past in its own terms, and following the logic of short-form content, cultural history has become increasingly judgmental and present-focused. A compulsion to signal one’s responsiveness to contemporary moral concerns by finding fault with history has become pervasive within the institutions. Even very recent cultural artifacts have come to seem retrospectively “problematic” and in need of mediating commentary and “correction.” Streaming and the culture of the rewatch put older movies and TV shows back into current circulation, inviting new audiences to judge them by contemporary moral norms. As a result, culture is becoming flattened and simplified into a decontextualized mulch, reduced to the lists of rules, shortcomings, and topical talking points that can be applied to it.

The role of rules is to ensure accountability; new categories of retrospective judgment function similarly. The new forms of present-focused cultural criticism enable users to redescribe past works, making them accountable to contemporary moral norms. The result is something like a return to the neoclassical literary criticism of the early eighteenth century, in which the role of the critic lay in separating a past work’s putative “faults” from its “beauties.” The rules of neoclassical criticism included the requirement that virtuous characters be rewarded, while the wicked were made to atone for their actions. Contemporary “culture auditing” performs the same function with new ideals. Now, as then, the moralized idea of the “fault” becomes a way of retrospectively dealing with the problem of historical distance, of squaring past practice with current frameworks. Past “content creators” (working in less “aware” eras) cannot be blamed, it seems, for failing to anticipate current sensibilities. Nevertheless, apparently “outdated” material must be identified (and disavowed) before a work’s “beauties” can be fully endorsed for viewing by contemporary audiences.

The new content warning devised for Mad Men’s season 3 episode “My Old Kentucky Home” (aired originally in August 2009) illustrates the mixture of moralism, auditing, and compliance that typifies the new culture. When the episode was made available for streaming for the first time in July 2020, it was prefaced by a sternly moralistic new title-card, which stated that the episode contained “disturbing images” of “one of the characters … in blackface,” but that “the series producers are committed to exposing the injustices and inequities within our society that continue to this day.”

In this case, it did not matter that the image of Roger Sterling bellowing the episode’s title song in blackface at his country-club Kentucky Derby Day party was clearly intended as both an historical and character critique by the makers of the show. Viewers in 2009 were given strong cues for how to interpret the scene from the visible horror on the faces of in-show moral barometers Pete and Trudy Campbell, as well as by Don Draper’s equally disgusted decision to quit the party at this point and look for the bar. For the episode to be streamed uncut only a decade after its first screening, however, it had to be redescribed (with cantish corporate sincerity) as an “exposure” of “injustice” and “inequity,” as though it were a piece of sociology rather than a self-supporting work of art. As such, it illustrates what the French political scientist Olivier Roy calls the characteristic “explicitness” demanded by the new communication norms associated with digitalization, in which content must be “constantly explicated” to remove ambiguities and “only literal meanings matter.”6 A TV episode that was easily comprehensible in 2009 as (among other things) an implied critique of 1960s upper middle-class American racism becomes “problematic” in 2020 because it trusted its original audience to know what they were seeing.

The contemporary dominance of short-form writing and thinking speaks to our contradictory desire for immediacy—to be “told it like it is”—and our need to feel protected from the potential harms of immediacy’s disclosures. The caption, the content warning, the AI summary, the list of followed accounts—all make versions of the aphorism’s promise (the rapid revelation of an absolute truth). In practice, however, they offer us predigested snippets of information in lieu of the things themselves. What the reduction of reality to tags and topics really enables is ease of consumption. In a world dominated by the logic of flows and timelines, information must be flattened and standardized, its meanings redescribed according to their observable relationship with—their relevance to—other fragments in the feed. When imposed as an explicatory overlay across culture, this logic ultimately negates any sense of ambiguity and strangeness in favour of binary moral certainties.

Cultural explanation is increasingly moving away from describing direct encounters with works or objects in favor of broader commentary with a public relations or stakeholder agenda—how can we make this seem relevant to current issues? To put it in metadata terms, the tag or “topic relationship” must be asserted, no matter how reductive and anachronistic this move may seem according to pre-feed understandings of culture and history.

The consumerist logic of the timeline (with its intrinsic bias towards “new content”) is now being applied to cultural zones that have traditionally been cordoned off from this way of thinking by the concept of historical distance. If it was until recently acknowledged that “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there,” this exemption no longer seems to hold. The universalizing imperatives of “communicating what is right” must be extended to history’s territories also. In the process, historical explanation has been exchanged for the more immediate pleasures of instantaneous moral judgment. The graph-like certainties of guilt-by-association reasoning are thereby replacing explanation and analysis.

No matter how attractive the “new topicality” may seem to cultural institutions looking to assert their legitimacy and satisfy funders in a rapidly changing environment, it nevertheless imposes significant costs. Once institutions step onto this path, it can become a never-ending treadmill. When cultural value is transferred from the object itself to the object’s capacity for being deemed relevant to “topics of contemporary interest,” the fashion system’s dance with perpetual obsolescence ensues. Topics, jargons, and “critical approaches” move relentlessly onwards. “Badly needed” new contextual labelling needs to be continually updated if it is not to later appear “unresponsive” and cringeworthily behind the times. Nothing ages more rapidly than something specifically engineered to seem fully up to date.

In promising immediacy and easy access to topicality, short-form truths short-circuit our intellectual understanding and aesthetic responses. The crisis of meaning for the arts and culture industries in the 2010s and early 2020s has been the global generalization of these ways of understanding cultural value. Social media has enabled members of the global intelligentsia to become networked and ideologically synchronized with each other, forming an interlinked “global new class” of symbolic workers. The end result of these synchronizations, however, is that everyone has seemingly started speaking and thinking in the same American-derived, quasi-academic jargons, as though standardizing our disciplines in this way was the only path to “contemporary relevance.” In seeking new routes to legitimacy as therapeutic mediators and commentators on the globally agreed Big Topics, we risk cashing in our old institutional legacies for the timeline’s more ephemeral assurances of perpetual relevance and up-to-date-ness, promises that stay good only so long as we remain compliant and connected to the network.

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For the last few weeks, there’s been a monster living with me. He wakes up and thrashes his tail whenever I leave him out of some mundane activity: leaning to pick up a fallen spoon, putting on my socks, taking off my socks or trying to get into bed. We’re both big fans of painkillers. We’ve been living together since I broke my shoulder.

What happened was that I went out with my brother for his birthday (20th November if you wanna send him a card.) That morning, I swapped my trusty Timbs for my relatively dainty Nike Dunks. We had a bunch of drinks at different spots—I didn’t count how many. As we were leaving the last pub, I stepped down from the doorway onto the street. Or I tried. My back foot was not where I expected it to be, no longer twice its normal size in a Timberland. I overstepped, I tripped and fell with a thud onto the pavement—the slapstick classic. I heard a blitzed girl drawl, “Oh, my god…” on impact—one of the traditional sounds of London nightlife. I scrambled upright and wished my brother a happy birthday before he went for a midnight feast at McDonald’s. No biggie. I mean, I fall down a lot.

Earlier this year, I broke my toe tripping over a stick looking for the grave of a vaudeville comedian, a tribute act that was both fitting and painful. I’m so flat-footed that an orthopedic specialist once called over a colleague to marvel at the sublime mystery of my clodhoppers. I stood in my examination room shivering in my underwear. I promise you, no matter how many slack-jawed medics tell you that you’re rare, you don’t feel special afterwards—you feel lonely.

I got the bus home. A nice lady pointed out I was gasping from pain and I waved her concern away like a dandy lightly wounded in a duel: “Merely a scratch, I assure you!” I crashed onto bed and snoozed. It was only when I woke up the next morning and couldn’t get my shirt off without a lurch of nausea and some wicked flinching that I thought, Maybe I should get this checked out.

I’m lucky enough to belong to the cadre of freaks who like hospitals a lot. They’re a whole world within the world, humming away. I have warm childhood memories of blonde angelic nurses leading me down labyrinthine corridors that smelled like medicine cabinets—artificial pine, disinfectant, alcohol, gauze. I’m happy just to wait somewhere and hang out inside my brain. Also, on a Friday morning, the emergency room is weirdly chill. There’s one guy asleep on the floor and a middle-aged woman who insists she needs to be seen next for reasons known only to her (there’s someone like this in every emergency room in the world), but other than that, it’s people sitting still, mumbling, roaming around the wilderness of their minds while occupying physical space, or staring at their phones—all totally normal.

Maybe I’m OK because this isn’t my first time. When I was twelve, I went to a birthday party disco held in a Holiday Inn. A pack of boys hyped into madness by the discovery of a condom machine in the Gents’ toilets knocked me down on the dance floor and broke my tibia. I huddled in the lobby waiting for my mum and trying not to cry while the DJ, a morose white-haired ogre in a Hawaiian shirt, sat next to me and smoked. My mum was a doctor in the NHS for forty years and flat-out refused to go to A & E on a Friday night when all the gore, trauma and chaos would be at their peak. On Saturday, she gave me codeine for the pain. I gulped it down while E.T. was on TV, and by the time Elliott and the alien got airborne I was higher than either of them. I stroked the screen.

Another time I somehow lacerated the flesh around my ankle getting out of the shower and left bloody footprints all over the floor. My dad was downstairs air-drumming to Abraxas by Santana so he didn’t hear me yelling. The foot got infected, blowing up all red and infected like a clown shoe made of meat. Probably the most painful was the time I accidentally emptied a panful of boiling hot water into my left sneaker. My brain caught fire; I yowled like Tom from Tom and Jerry when the piano lid smashes onto his tail. I remember the thin sizzling noise as I pulled off my sock—the layer of skin came away like silk. The pain afterwards was like I’d dunked my foot in a cloud full of lightning. An underrated aspect of injuring yourself is the psychedelic aftermath. It redefines your relationship to time and space.

I’m seen by a nurse. She asks me if I want something for the pain. I try not to sound too thrilled. She asks me if I hit my head. I say, Nope, throwing the pills into my mouth like I’m performing some weird party trick because I can’t lift my arm.

“Hey, your face is bruised,” she says in a fearful cartoon puppy voice. Her scrubs are siren blue.

It’s never occurred to me that my face is my head, although obviously it is. She sends me for an X-ray.

Things around me seem to be happening but also to be totally dreamt at the same time, which is magnificent. I stare at a clock and roll my tongue around my cheek. A red-faced man explains in detail how the steak at his daughter’s birthday dinner was a disappointment: “Look at the color, mate, tell me that’s rare. That is well done.”

One porter tells another, “If you’re in there, you’re there.” An old woman looks at me benevolently. I’m in this gooey dreamscape prickled with nausea for about forty minutes before I remember that I need to tell someone why I’m there. The X-ray confirms the break. My arm is nestled in a fetching blue sling. Another nurse wolf-whistles at my X-ray. “You’ve done it!” she calls down the hallway. I remember I was trying to cook up a metaphor about existence itself being a long hallway between two doors at this point and thinking I’d probably stolen it from Beckett. The nurse tells me I’ll get a call about a follow-up appointment but nobody can tell me when that might be. “There’s no Caller ID,” she says with a Wonderland grin that acknowledges the lunacy of the situation without trashing it, “so a lot of people, they never answer the call, never show up.”

At 3 a.m. the next morning, I try to get out of bed without using my right arm to help me balance. I go cubist, I writhe. I decide I should probably go back to my parents’ house for a little while.

Back home, there’s no time. Days just melt together, grey and sleepy. Normal things suddenly scare me—stairs, mud, toast. OK, the first two aren’t hard to fathom—what if I slip on mud or stumble down stairs in my wonky state and hurt my shoulder again? But it’s suddenly revealed, too, that making toast involves a baroque duet between the right and left hand which I can’t perform anymore. Without even thinking, ordinarily I’d use my left hand for traction on the counter while I spread butter on the abrasive wilderness of the toast with my right. My hands don’t like being repurposed. I’m Edward Scissorhands trying to use a knife and fork at dinnertime. I have to cajole my socks onto my slab feet with my big toe. I’m bad at this.

My mum gets pills from the pharmacy. She says, “Well, just take six a day and see how you feel…” I don’t use the bathroom for five days and when I do it’s a mystical experience, like birthing a griffin. I stare at the winter sunlight inside some raindrops on my window and think, Yes. The dead trees outside nod in magical agreement with me like tired witches. I’m floating above my normal mind for several days, thoughts coming to me like debris on a multicolored breeze, nice and soft. I pick up a copy of Bleak House and start laughing but I’m not certain why. There’s a huge bruise like a toxic waste spill oozing from the knuckle of my shoulder to just below my right nipple, rotten tooth yellow. It’s so tender for a couple of days, the air around it tingles, halo’d with pain.

Meanwhile, my unconscious has massively upped its production budget. I begin having mad vivid dreams every night. I’m somehow both watching and fighting in a boxing match where my opponent is telling me to stay down—depressingly obvious symbolism. I’m a fire engine. I’m riding an enormous dog across the surface of a dead planet and then I’m the dog eating tons of fudge from a wrecked shipping container. And then two furry green arms are cuddling me on a rollercoaster and I know they belong to something like an angel and my brain is flooded with joy. I wake up tired, my face and pillow coated in drool. Two days into this woozy hibernation phase, my friend texts to tell me she had a dream about something bad happening to me on the night I tripped up. Every time I stand, I say, “Whoa…”

This is when being in the land of illness is kind of a golden treat. If you blank out the flammable rushes of pain and horrible dream residues haunting your wide-awake life, it’s pretty good. It’s like permission to disappear. For a little while, nobody expects you to call back or do anything except read about legal chicanery on foggy Victorian streets. It’s literally fine to be in your childhood bedroom jellifying.

Inevitably this soon wears off. You become aware of how tired you are from the slow healing of a bone you never appreciated. You make lists of all the things you can’t do. Suddenly you’re trapped alone with yourself, newly powerless and fragile, in a kind of psychic abyss. Beyond the boredom lies the fear and beyond the fear lies the horror of what comes next.

Eventually an email summons me back to the hospital. There’s one of those sinister Amazon storage vaults in the main atrium. Are the patients getting stuff delivered there? Do they creep down at night and then sneak back to the wards to unbox power tools in bed? A kid’s spinning in circles and sobbing. A shellshocked faun with two broken legs is wheeled down a corridor.

I’m seen by a precise young man named Moritz—German or Swiss, I’m guessing—who explains the nature of my break to me. “No gym, no weights, no bike for three months,” he tells me. This is an epic tragedy. How will I pull through? I do none of those things. I fear the gym. I’m ambivalent about being outside unless I’m with a dog.

I ask Moritz if it’s a clean break. He says, “Clean is not a word we like terribly much in orthopedics because it implies dirt or infection at the site of the injury. The bone did not pop out. There is no evidence of infection.” He says, “You seem a reasonably happy bunny to me.” I nod. “We talk in bones about displacement,” he points to the fracture on the X-ray with his pen. “You can see here,” he says, “where things, they are displaced.”

The monster purrs under my skin: he goes to sleep but he doesn’t disappear. This morning in the mirror, the bruise was dark purple, like a storm cloud. Now, I stare at my bone on the screen. It glows.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

Magic Farm
New York, October 2024

“I need to see it to believe it.” “Pics or it didn’t happen.”

While visiting Argentina several years ago, my mother overheard a family conversation about one of her aunts—who still lives in the countryside—slowly losing her eyesight due to pesticide exposure in the area. Disturbed by the family’s apparent resignation, we did our own research and quickly discovered that this was not an isolated case, but a widespread condition across the Global South—particularly in regions where governments can be easily influenced by corporations such as Monsanto.

What shocked me most, beyond the grim health consequences, was how beautiful the transgenic soy appeared. Lush, green, robust—visually immaculate. Of course, this resilience is precisely the point. The plant has been genetically engineered to withstand poison.

As someone whose work consistently engages with appearances, I found this paradox compelling. How might one photograph such a plantation and ensure it is perceived as a toxic landscape? Is that even possible? When Joe Apollonio and I visited the rural outskirts of Buenos Aires for a location-scouting trip, we rode in the back of a truck at sunset, passing through soy fields in full spring bloom. “Wow, I love nature,” we said to one another, momentarily forgetting that earlier that day I had discovered a pile of empty Roundup bottles at the base of a tree.

Our experience of the soy fields was one of overwhelming beauty—almost a closeness to God, or to Nature—that felt profoundly authentic, even as we knew it was not. Pure peace, and notably, no insects. I am aware that a genuinely organic farm is imperfect and uneven, but it was difficult not to be seduced into perceiving paradise in these unmarred plants, despite their origins in a lab. We were inside the famous Windows 95 screensaver of rolling green hills—aptly titled Bliss—and it felt sublime. Only temporarily, of course. Prolonged exposure to such “bliss” would result in serious illness.

Humans struggle to distinguish essence from appearance. We know our food is contaminated and that microplastics accumulate in our bodies—yet we cannot see them, so we move on. A presidential candidate poses for a photo-op at a local restaurant and is instantly transformed into a community hero. A dog appears to be smiling in a photograph, though it is in distress. Sometimes all we want is a good image, and not to be corrected on our assumptions.

My parents are archetypal Gen X hipsters, deeply invested in underground culture. Their lives revolved around cultivating a particular aesthetic as a form of rebellion—ironically reinforcing the trend-driven arm of the capitalist system. My childhood memories are saturated with trivia about bands, fashion, and youth culture, accompanied by rigid systems of classification. In response, I rebelled by shapeshifting. I role-played as an office worker while my father collected early issues of Vice magazine and my mother mocked me for not being cool and having a disdain for subcultures. My soul wears no clothes, I would think.

Through my parents and my own life choices—I attended art school, and eventually nearly everyone I knew worked for either Vice or American Apparel—I became familiar with hipster media and its tendency to exoticize and exploit “bizarre” stories from the Global South. Like Vice, I initially found humor in the provincial and formally uneducated Andean musicians such as Delfín Hasta el Fin, with his infamous song about the Twin Towers, or La Tigresa del Oriente, whose music videos—shot in Indigenous reserves with leopard-print-clad backup dancers—circulated as viral curiosities.

Yet I am also Latin American, the unglamorous type, with a religious Abuela who cleaned hotels for a living. I spent my life navigating these parallel realities: the cosmopolitan art student and the peripheral other wiring money back to South America via Western Union. This tension became the driving force behind my film Magic Farm. What if Berlanga’s Welcome, Mr. Marshall! also included the perspective of the Americans? What if my grandmother were approached by a group of New Yorkers? I wanted to make a film about a “visiting crew,” seen from both sides, unfolding through a dense comedy of errors. Most of my scripts and short stories occupy this in-between space. I am drawn to moments where innocent misunderstandings generate narratives that feel unexpectedly truthful.

In flight
October 2025

What is true? Whose perception is correct? Perhaps paranoia and distrust are the only viable responses. It’s been two years since I shot Magic Farm, and in that time AI-generated video has advanced exponentially. I am currently on a plane en route to Luhačovice in the Czech Republic to shoot a short film. Before leaving New York, the friend I’m collaborating with created mock-ups using Sora, generating images of himself in locations we had never visited. Though unsettling, the results felt disturbingly real. They made me uncomfortable. If simulation is this effortless, what is the purpose of traveling—of enduring long flights, bad coffee, and petty conflicts over legroom?

Once again, images and their contradictions. As a filmmaker, I am not afraid of AI. On the contrary, I believe it can function as a mirror, exposing cinema’s most common shortcuts and bad habits. By reproducing clichés and overused stylistic devices, AI strips away illusion and forces filmmakers to pursue more rigorous and sophisticated narrative languages. Since large language models are structurally bound to the past, should we not aim to create something genuinely new? If a cinematic “look” becomes predictable, perhaps it is our responsibility to avoid it entirely.

Before passing through security at JFK, I encountered a mediocre Dior advertisement featuring Mikey Madison, Mia Goth, and Greta Lee gently caressing grass as they walked. You know the gesture—the performative melancholy with which actors touch objects in a way no one ever does in real life. I witnessed the same affectation at the Venice Film Festival during the premiere of a famous director’s latest flick. Shortly afterward, a screening by a younger auteur felt similarly hollow: visually polished but emotionally vacant, as though an AI model had been prompted with “A24 + Safdie + gritty” and produced an image without a soul. It made me cringe.

Filmmakers bristle at AI-generated videos because they reflect our own laziness—our reliance on tropes and familiar gestures. When something looks and feels like “AI vomit,” perhaps the responsibility lies with us to be more attentive, more precise, more demanding of ourselves.

If AI is doomed to remix what already exists, then maybe our job is to insist on friction: on the miscommunications and moments that don’t scan as “content.” To make work that resists immediate legibility and to trust lived experience over simulation, even when the simulation looks better lit. And yet, when a Monsanto field appears more “natural” than untouched land, I am reminded of how easily perception collapses—and how quickly I, too, become complicit.

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This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.

In 1917, the Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky wrote the essay “Art as Device,” in which he suggested that much of human experience becomes invisible by habit. Habit deadens the world and makes us effectively blind. But the purpose of art, he wrote, is to “defamiliarize” experience, in order to illuminate those aspects which have become invisible; to bring to life that which has died.

This process is illustrated in a passage from the memoir White Out by Cluny Journal contributor Michael Clune (no relation):

Something that’s always new, that’s immune to habit, that never gets old. That’s something worth having. Because habit is what destroys the world. Take a new car and put it in an air-controlled garage. Go look at it every day. After one year all that will remain of the car is a vague outline. Trees, stop-signs, people, and books grow old, crumble and disappear inside our habits. The reason old people don’t mind dying is because by the time you reach eighty, the world has basically disappeared.

And then you discover a little piece of the world that’s immune to habit.

Art is one endeavor that has strived for this habit-immunity. Art is a technology for defeating habit. But there are also other experiences that jolt us into new ways of seeing and being in the world—breaking a bone, encountering a genetically-modified landscape, limiting some of our senses, learning a language. Certain technologies, spiritual practices, and interdisciplinary encounters can also defamiliarize experience.

In daily life, perception becomes streamlined, flattened, and erased—walking up the stairs, turning the bathroom doorknob, endlessly scrolling the parade of fragmented images and texts, all of which are encountered more or less invisibly, and then forgotten. “Automatization,” Shklovsky writes, “eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture…and at our fear of war.”

By restoring vividness to experience—and by exploring rather than explaining—defamiliarization can restore reality itself. But in order to make us “feel objects”—to make “a stone feel stony again”—we have to estrange it, “to lead us to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than mere recognition.” The dominant culture deals in explanations and discourse—but these often fail to affect lasting change at the level of perception, unwilling to linger in the essential strangeness and surprise of life. In the face of the soul-numbing scroll, encounters that enlarge perception can make life itself again feel new.

In this new year, Cluny Journal is partnering with Unlikely Collaborators for a twelve-part series on defamiliarization.

Every Thursday for the next twelve weeks, we will publish pieces by filmmakers, artists, writers, scientists, technologists and others who engage with the theme on a formal and/or conceptual level. We will explore moments when habitual modes of seeing are disrupted; where mere recognition is replaced by strange visions.

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There’s only one clocktower on this street, with two clocks, and they each show different times. Andy walks with me, shortening his strides to match my pace.

“You don’t have to come in,” I say when we reach the office.

“I’ll come in,” Andy says.

The waiting room is encouragingly empty. We’ve only been there for a minute when a gray-haired woman in scrubs enters the room, clipboard in hand. She calls my name, drawing it out like I’m a lost dog.

“I’ll wait,” Andy says.

“It’ll stress me out to think of you waiting,” I say.

I turn away and the nurse leads me down a hall. She asks if I need the bathroom. I lie and say no. Her accent is heavy and unplaceable. We enter a closet-sized room containing only one chair. I sit down and flex my bladder experimentally.

The nurse stands before my chair, stooped at eye level. I could balance a glass of water on her back.

She asks for my name and birthdate, cross-checking my responses with the form on her clipboard. “Lamm,” she repeats. “Where is that from?”

“Germany,” I tell her, even though it’s not from anywhere. I just made it up a few years ago when I decided to change my name.

“Guten Tag,” she says. It takes me a moment to recognize the words through her accent. She swabs my arm with an alcohol pad. “Jesus loves you,” she says.

“Thanks,” I say.

“In German,” she says. “You’re German?”

“Oh,” I say, thinking hard. “Jesus liebt dich?”

“Jesus liebt dich,” she repeats, inserting a needle into a vein in my arm. “I won’t remember that. You can open your fist now.”

Dark blood spools out of me into a thin plastic tube, and it feels too late to clarify things.

“I was there in ‘95,” she says. “I did a semester in Berlin.”

She thinks for a long moment.

My blood waits suspended between containers.

I wonder about her other patients, other tasks. The door is closed. We’ve been in here a while.

“Can I take your jewelry?” she says, gesturing to my neck. “We don’t have much time.”

It seems like we have a lot of time. She opens the door and the time rushes out like air. I undo the clasp and hold the necklace in my palm. She looks at it. The cross looks up at her, its single diamond like a baby tooth. She lets the door close again.

“You’re a believer,” she says. She looks into my face with fragile hope. “Jesus Christ?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Jesus Christ?” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

“Jesus liebt dich,” she says.

“Nice,” I say. “You remembered.”

“My name is Maria,” she says. She already knows my name. “I went back in a dream once.”

I think for a moment, then realize what she meant. “To Germany?” I say.

“July 12, 2007. I dreamt I was on my way to a fellowship meeting, wearing a long green dress.” She gestures with both hands down the length of her brief body. “A dream,” she reiterates.

I ask her why she remembers the date.

“Some German festival or holiday. For Martin Luther King?”

“Martin Luther,” I say.

“King,” she supplies.

“But why do you remember it?” I ask again. There’s a new urgency in my tone that has nothing to do with the brain scan, the co-pay, my mother’s disease. It’s the urgency I feel in church when the music begins and I can’t find the right hymnal page.

“There was a man,” Maria says, her voice like something handed to me under a table. “A Christian man.” She pauses, closing her eyes.

I think of Andy, the first time he took me to church, how his fingers found the Holy Water automatically as he walked in. How I followed blindly, my hands dry.

Suddenly I can feel July 12, 2007 taking up space in the room, like another channel of reality. When I was a kid, the TV had a feature that let you watch two channels simultaneously: one at full size and one in a little square in the corner of the screen. That way you could monitor the football while watching a movie. Maybe July 12, 2007 is like that for Maria, playing on mute through the decades.

There is a silence that might go a hundred different directions.

I am about to ask about the man when Maria speaks.

“Listen,” Maria says.

I am listening so hard, fighting to hold onto every word.

“This contrast fluid they give you, it goes into your brain. So you have to eat brain-cleansing foods tonight. Radish, big-leaf celery, turmeric. No Chinese restaurants.”

“No,” I agree.

“It’s not healthy. When Giuliani was mayor, he took them to court.”

“Wow,” I say.

“It’s good you go to church,” Maria says. But I don’t go to church. Or, I go occasionally. I get anxious on Saturday nights, stay up too late, and miss the bells. I wake up refreshed but guilty, like I’ve gotten fat off stolen food.

Andy’s church is a big, neglected building in deep Brooklyn. Gilding and granite, stained glass and hand-painted murals, largely empty pews. I sing and he accompanies the choir on a baby grand, looking too good for a Sunday morning.

The songs take up space in our brains, but we hardly feel it. Andy once taught me that the simplest way to understand chord progressions is to write them out as Roman numerals. In the key of A, for example, an A chord becomes I.

“I had a vision at church once,” Maria says, looking up at the drop ceiling. “A huge bottle of B-Complex floating in the air, spinning like a globe. You know B-Complex?”

“Sure,” I say, thinking of the alphabetized vitamin shelves at CVS. I never know what I’m supposed to take. When my mom was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, she bought vitamins and expensive powders and medicinal teas, but she didn’t change anything else, didn’t quit drinking or start exercising, just layered holistic health on top of holistic unhealth, and nothing came of it.

I don’t talk to my mom anymore. But I drink all those same powders and teas. I swallow my bitterness. I pay for it.

“You can’t get B-Complex anymore,” Maria says. “Big Pharma shut it down because it was too effective at treating Covid.”

I give a neutral nod, wanting to share my own theories but not wanting to prolong the conversation. On Saturday nights when Andy’s asleep, I take the radio into the bathroom and listen to the after-hours conservative show. I sit on the plastic toilet lid and learn about UFO sightings, government plots. “We have all the information,” a man named Lionel yells into the microphone. “So why aren’t we doing anything?”

“Your mother is still in Germany?” Maria asks.

“No,” I say. “She’s over here now.” My mother is from Connecticut, of Jewish descent, and as far as I know has only visited Germany once, for the museums.

“Too bad,” Maria says. “In your country she could get stem cells.”

I was in middle school when my mom was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I didn’t know what it was then. I didn’t ask. I thought it would become obvious over time, as my mother went in for scans and experimental treatments, as her brain and body declined. I worried I had it too, but how would I tell? My mother’s illness was subtle but debilitating, marked by vague pain, fatigue, disorientation. It could only be described concretely with one phrase: “Lesions on the brain.”

You can’t see your own brain. You can’t even feel it. I started to think I had the lesions. It’s a detail that would make sense somehow, like a missing page of a manuscript. But I put off the scan for years, during which the lesions have either grown or remained imaginary. Now I imagine them eating my thoughts, munching me down to a wilted core of basic functionality.

The first time I heard the word “lesion” was on Law & Order, which my mom used to watch while folding laundry. “The victim had lesions on her neck.” Even then, I was too sensitive for gunfights and pedophilia and fish-netted bodies floating down the East River. All those lesions. Now, I can’t even watch the news. “These people need God,” Andy says when we walk past posters for violent movies. It’s strange to imagine him existing, unseen, for the first three decades of my life, like a latent disease.

An MRI technician arrives to take me to the exam room. I’m wearing a gown that exposes my back. “Can I take your form?” Maria calls out to me as I leave the room.

“Where?” I ask.

“Home,” Maria says, which feels illegal. She leans in closer, putting a hand on my arm. “If you could get stem cells for cheap,” she whispers, “would you do it?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly.

In the exam room, I lie down on a narrow plastic bed and look up at the drop ceiling. Some of the tiles have been replaced by an illuminated photo of palm trees. Instead of white foam, there are green leaves and brown coconuts and slivers of blue sky. Through the doorway, I can hear Maria talking with her next patient. “It’s hard here,” she says, “But the alternative is worse.”

With a mechanical buzz, my body slides into a truck-sized machine. Red lasers shine down on my face. I close my eyes against them. The magnetism passes through me, making my brain visible. I want to think flattering thoughts now, lesion-proof thoughts. I want my brain to be a dimpled thigh made beautiful in low light. I think about Andy. I think about us praying in my tiny studio apartment: pre-meal blessings, signs of the cross over microwaved beans, burnt kale, wet pasta. “This meal would cost $40 at a restaurant,” Andy says, and believes it.

I imagine us praying for a clean scan, a healthy brain, a long life. I imagine it working.

In my early twenties, I fell in with a group of Evangelical Christians in rural Georgia. We were young, adjusting to new freedoms, unsure whether to use them. I’d already lost my virginity. I worked overtime to compensate, reading the memoirs of repentant monks, memorizing hymns, hearing testimony from my new friends. In the evening, we hung around the living room of their big communal house and discussed the big questions. My New York friends never discussed the big questions. In the City, if you brought up death, purity, sin, you’d get only a dismissive laugh. These were questions we’d put to bed ages ago, in adolescent diaries and slumber party whispers. So what were the answers? No one knew, maybe not even the believers. But at least the believers were still asking.

I moved back to New York and gradually lost touch with the Evangelicals. In my last phone call with one of them, I confessed my doubts. All these months and still I could not honestly call myself a believer. There was a heat wave in New York and the block seemed oddly quiet, stunned like a slapped cheek. I looked up at the blazing blue sky and tried to merge my vague sense of The Divine with the highly specific personage of Jesus Christ. It didn’t work. I felt betrayed. I had taken a leap of faith but found nothing to support me on the other side. My friend was unconvinced. “If your heart is truly open to God,” he said, “God will find a way in. He doesn’t waste an opportunity.”

The machine turns off and my body slides back out into the room. I look up and see palm trees on the ceiling. This is an old photo, I can tell. They don’t print photos like this anymore. It’s a photo from a time before my mother was diagnosed, before my brain knew love or Christ or damage. It’s a windless day on the beach in a world without pain or age or Andy. It’s a tropical wonder in a grid of flat foam, a dream in the corner of a life. It’s not something I would ever choose.

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The tourists who come

Didn’t come this year

The restaurants are empty

The motels are vacant

The water on the lake is still

In the park, a passing Accord says

What we’re all thinking:

What y’all really want

*

But all this is subject to change

The length of a day

The size of a tee

The quality of methamphetamine

The love, and not love

Made within us

*

The sound of a fist on a man’s face

Is the body’s great gift

It’s hard to believe—like fear

You watch the energy ripple

From fist to cheek

From fist to rib

From sun to earth

Body to mind

And back to body

The book of today wasn’t written

But now it is:

Two cousins, heavy and red

Swollen fruit

Oozing on the ground

*

In a world without heaven

The body forsakes the mind

So the mind jettisons the self

Church bells ring through the woods

But do they move the trees?

Do they cause the birds to cry?

Wander within yourself

And see the people kneeling

See how few answers our dreams contain

*

In college, I learned big words

Then we’d give each other

Black eyes for fun

The assigned texts asked

Are men forged in strife?

Or self-directed leisure?

But who maintains

The great ledger of our lives?

Us?

Or the seven men

Standing around a rotted picnic table

At the edge of the park?

*

You might ask how I know

The two men are cousins

And the answer is—

I just do

The tall, thin one walks around

But the younger, heavier one

Doesn’t get up

He stays down, dirty and defeated

Spitting rehearsed threats

Mirrored, catalogued

And carried over to his new form

*

But the self, so long composed

Won’t return on its own

Not that easy—

Ask the heart, ask the body

Ask the mind

Real men don’t know what they want

*

They say if men move as water moves

And the lake is still

Their energy produces a film

A face can be opened

And a face can be closed

Trapped in this thought

God’s not dead

But he is getting older

And he was never young to begin with

*

Some men finish what

Other men start

And some men love to start over

Look close enough

And the edge of the park

Has everything in it—

A tree, a rock, an old boat

Battle hymns rattle the bandshell

With no one listening

The seven men turn blue

And the air turns green

A new shadow raises

Its hands in victory

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Shuffling this width of white
We are and must be hush
Mustering some private word
Up the tender steps of porch
Your living cheek melts life
From faces on the running flake
In glass a shape grows to the door
Mother willing there in wait

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Amid the holiday bustle of an outdoor shopping center, Sister Agnes stares up. Layers of interlocking metal shopping carts forming the shape of a Christmas tree tower above the busy shoppers. The weighty monument commands the otherwise stark space.

“That’s disturbing,” Sister Agnes adjusts her veil as she nudges the sister next to her.

Sister Faith gazes at the work of art for a moment and then agrees, “Yeah, that thing could come toppling down on us at any moment.”

Sister Agnes laughs. “That’s not what I meant.”

Sister Faith pauses. “Oh . . . I see what you mean.”

Several other sisters exit a nearby ice cream store, cones in hand. They join the two sisters gazing up at the metal tower. Everyone else quietly concentrates on their ice cream. Some take pictures of their perfectly sculpted ice cream scoops for social media until their ice cream melts over on their fingers.

Sister Edith points upward at the garish Christmas tree sculpture.

Several sisters look up and grimace at the stacked, shackled metal carts pointing heavenward.

Sister Edith frowns, then laughs.

A stream of raucous laughter escapes from the briefly-opened doors of a nearby bar. Several sisters turn their heads. Nearby shoppers look curiously at the group of young sisters, their habits a shock of blue amid the gray stores around them.

The bar door slams again, but it does not quash the laughter this time. A group of men in muscle shirts and the glitter of gold on their necks noisily makes their way down a ramp into the common area. The sisters are now debating whether mint chocolate chip is better than birthday cake ice cream. The men eventually regard the women with a cool, silent stare. Then they huddle together. After some whispered discussion, one of them begins to remove his shirt. He is short and muscular, his chest covered with tattoos.

The man springs toward the sisters and crouches down behind them. Inches away from Sister Edith, the half-naked man grins viciously. In his hand he holds a stiff, half-circle fan of hundred-dollar bills. The air in the shopping plaza sparks with tension. A few bystanders sitting on benches nearby no longer conceal their interest. While “Holly Jolly Christmas” crackles over the loudspeakers, all eyes rivet on the crass unfolding scene. The man notices the attention and physically deflates for a moment but then raises his chest, avoiding the sisters’ expressions. “Come on, take the picture,” he shouts to one of his friends. The man’s friend laughs uncomfortably as he frames the scene. The group of sisters look stunned and upright like tapers in a candelabra.

Then Sister Agnes shoves her chair back and roars, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The half-naked man blinks several times. He is still crouching, gripping the stiff green pieces of paper. Avoiding Sister Agnes’ eyes, he yells insistently to his friend taking the picture, “Come on, man!”

Sister Agnes turns and scowls at the photographer and the group of men behind her. They look away and then down at the ground. Her face shining like a Christmas star, Sister Agnes walks toward the crouching man.

“Okay, man, I got it,” the friend with the camera yells anxiously.

Satisfied, the shirtless man tucks the bills in his pocket and begins to walk back to the group of men. Hunched over again, he mutters something beneath his breath.

Sr. Edith remembers how her mother used to arrange the shepherds and wise men in a huddle in their family nativity, as if they were whispering secrets to one another. Sister Agnes’ cheeks are flushed red like two Christmas baubles. The metal shopping cart tree glistens behind them like an intricate altarpiece.

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Introduction

Some months ago, I invited three interlocutors with different metaphysical commitments to a Signal chat with me over the course of five days to discuss the role of myth. The deal: they would be anonymous to one another, with aliases used in the chat—until the end. We are publishing this Trialogue using their real names. It has been edited for flow and clarity. - Luke Burgis.

Michael Nielsen is an Australian-American quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco. His books include Quantum Country, Neural Networks and Deep Learning, and more.

Dylan O’Sullivan is a writer, and the creator of Essayful on X and Substack.

Michael Bonner is a communications and public policy advisor, and a historian with a PhD from the University of Oxford. He is most recently the author of The Crisis of Liberalism.

Luke Burgis: Are myths relics of the past—stories we’ve outgrown—or are we always generating new ones? How do myths relate to truth: do they illuminate reality, distort it, or do something else entirely?

Michael Nielsen: A successful myth is a (powerful, strongly shared) meaning-making story that explains our place in the world, some core aspect of life.

I’ve been revisiting the French Revolution, especially how all these new mythic ideas were established: freedom, liberty, equality! The People! And so on: all changing the basic myth of France. Of course, those ideas were grounded in earlier work by Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and so on.

That time aspect is important: myth-making seems often to be a process, with the myth growing over time. As time passes, the “ecstatic truth” at the core gets clearer, more powerful. Maybe that’s part of what canonization means.

For example: the stories of Jesus almost certainly had far less force in his own time; they grew in importance over the decades and centuries after his death. The Gospel of John, which was the last composed, many decades after his death, goes much further in mythologizing him than the earlier Gospels.

I’m not sure the author of the Gospel of Matthew would have approved of the Gospel of John.

Dylan O’Sullivan: People make failed attempts at mythologization all the time. That’s the blessing and curse of modern man. Nothing is given, everything is for the taking. The past, which is the soil of myth, is seen as something to be escaped. The same is true of all tradition, all convention. That has left us deracinated; mythologizing alone, in the Robert Putnam sense. In this way, the collapse of grand narratives goes far deeper than art. It’s not merely that novels are plotless now, life itself is; or is said to be, at least. You hear a lot about the demise of shared facts, and how that’s contributing to political polarization and the like, but the demise of shared stories worries me more. If the burden of mythmaking is to be placed on the shoulders of each individual, our culture had better be readying us, as children or adults, to carry that weight. And I don’t think it is.

The (strained) relationship between time and myth also factors in here. What time offers, like space, is distance. Myths require a certain blurriness around the edges to take hold. The everything, everywhere, all-at-once nature of the Internet has rendered this almost impossible. It’s an environment in which old myths are not only dying off, but new myths are struggling to be born.

Michael Bonner: The word ‘myth’ originally meant ‘word’, specifically the spoken word. Thus it comes to mean very early on any sort of narrative or story. Aristotle notably even used it to mean the plot of a drama, but the word certainly had an ancient, prehistoric connotation in certain contexts also, as in Plato’s Republic, for instance.

No society has ever been without myths, and new myths will arise if the old ones are effaced. This is, I think, obviously true. But I always reach for the example of the Azande people. Advanced thinkers of the 20th century West might have applauded the complete absence of religion among the Azande. And yet, in place of even a rudimentary theology or creation story, witchcraft was an object of universal belief to a degree which even the most disinterested anthropologist might find shocking. One set of “just so” stories drove out another at some time in the remote past, and the absence of religion did not incidentally produce an enlightened society bereft of mysticism or superstition.

Our founding myth is Christianity, and there is no question that it has been much degraded by supposedly enlightened skepticism.

M.N: That’s fascinating about the Azande! Curious in what sense you mean they lack a religion? Presumably you mean something quite different from their belief in witchcraft. The linguist Daniel Everett claimed that the Piraha people lack a cosmogony: when asked what the origin of the world was, he claims they reply that things have always been this way. I suppose that’s an origin myth of sorts: a very, very minimal one!

Also curious: you imply that an enlightened society is one bereft of mysticism or skepticism. I’m an atheist, but I’m very struck by the enormous variation in belief among many of the people I most admire. The great mathematician Ramanujan seems also to have been, in considerable measure, a mystic: when asked where his extraordinary mathematical ideas came from, he claimed they were from the Hindu goddess Namagiri, in his dreams. I don’t want an enlightened society without Ramanujan and many of his fellow mystics!

M.B: Apparently, the Azande lacked everything from public or private cults to formal theology and even mere curiosity about a supreme being. They seemed to know that one existed, but that was it.

L.B: Are there scientific myths? Is “Progress” itself a myth?

M.N: A straightforward answer to the progress question is the numbers-and-facts answer: no, it’s not a myth. Along many (though not all) of the most important axes - many things have gotten enormously better. Far lower infant mortality rates than a century ago. Far higher literacy rates. Far lower rates of extreme poverty. And so on.

But I guess your question is pointing at something deeper, some internalized and maybe collectively held belief in a God of Progress, a Promethean God worth sacrificing at the altar of.

D.O: There was an ongoing joke on Norm Macdonald’s show, where his cohost would ask the guest: “Where do you get your ideas from?” It was funny because, as of yet, nobody really knows. It’s an irreducible mystery at the heart of both art and science. Some of the greatest contributions to science came from intensely mythically-minded individuals (i.e. Newton). Even some intensely atheistic writers I know have inexplicable rituals and superstitions, as well as cognitively-dissonant stances on Muses and the like. Cormac McCarthy has this fascinating article on the chemist August Kekulé, who discovered the structure of benzene in his dreams.

M.N: I’ve been reflecting on Bonner’s assertion that the Western ‘founding myth is Christianity.’ That’s true, but of course it emerged out of older traditions, and often competed with them. In the 4th century there was significant pushback on the rise of Christianity in Rome, with figures like Emperor Julian the Apostate renouncing the Christianity of his birth and attempting to establish a competing neo-Pagan church. I wonder how much it felt similar to our own time, with an old set of (formerly) dominant myths in decline, but new dominant myths not yet entirely established or sure of themselves. I suspect it felt quite unstable, much as both of you have asserted about our own time.

As a kid I bought into a false dichotomy between myth and science as sharply distinct ways of making sense of the world. Let me pick on Genesis. You read Genesis naively and think “there’s no way this is what happened.” It just looks ludicrous, a ridiculous set of stories.

But of course stories like the fall, the tree of knowledge, Cain and Abel, are deeply, deeply resonant. Science adds a few big ideas into our sense-making toolkit, and that makes it markedly better in a whole lot of ways - it’s changeable, upgradeable, decentralized (in theory), predictive in new ways. But the questions posed by a story like Cain and Abel or the Fall are every bit as deep as the deepest questions posed by science. In some sense, they’re at the foundation of psychology and political science and behavioral genetics.

Let me ask a request of everyone: why do you care? What are you hoping to get out of this? I don’t want this to be a generic polite cocktail-party conversation!

L.B: Do you consider yourself religious, or having a “religious sense”, despite being an atheist?

M.N: My atheism is a deeply held part of my identity, something I arrived at and defended as a child. In that sense, I rejected religion quite thoroughly. As an adult, I’ve gradually come to believe that whether someone believes in God is surprisingly irrelevant to whether they’re religious.

M.B: Do you think that there is a kind of peculiarly Christian atheism?

M.N: I was raised in Australia, which is predominantly Christian-secular. I was shocked as an adult to realize that, yeah, I wasn’t just an atheist, I’d absorbed a huge amount of Christian stuff, both intellectually and emotionally. Christ-on-the-Cross, the Sistine Ceiling, all of that—you can’t help but be affected, if you’re immersed from birth. It’d be fascinating to understand the differences between, say, Christian atheists and Shinto atheists.

D.O: How you understand and tell your story, both to others and yourself, is perhaps the cornerstone of one’s singular trajectory through life. It can be the difference between life and death. Myths are what Kenneth Burke called “equipment for living.”

M.N: We’re nearing the end of the second day of this three-day trialogue. I think the conversation is mostly bland boring generic stuff. It’s been disappointing. Does anyone have anything they really care about here?

M.B: At some point after I got married and began to have a family, it dawned on me that the world was very much unlike what I had expected growing up. None of the promises of a more peaceful, more enlightened, more prosperous world had come to pass.

It became clear to me that what had been widely believed about the world simply wasn’t true. Somehow, I was drawn to Christianity, after a lengthy period of atheism.

M.N: What’s the convincing argument for Christianity? One that I think is immensely powerful as a narrative is that God loves people so much that he sent his only Son into the world, and he loved us so much that he was willing to die (terribly) to save us. No matter your belief, that’s an incredible story.

M.B: For me, there was no “argument.” It was more like a phenomenological experience through art and music, probably mostly music.

M.N: One of my favorite experiences is participating in the Hallelujah Chorus in Handel’s “Messiah.” And a recent discovery for me is the huge Christian rock hit, “Oceans”, which I love!

Another favorite piece is the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, which dates to 1400 BCE—the world’s oldest piece of music. Here’s one modern arrangement.

L.B: John Henry Newman said that if we had to use a number to give a value to a single human life, the only fitting number would be infinity. If I’m married to my wife for another 50 years, I will barely begin to see all that is really there. I suppose it’s like realizing that each person was more like an entire universe that I couldn’t explore in 1,000 lifetimes.

M.B: Yes, and for me this realisation only seemed right, justifiable, convincing, etc., within Christianity.

M.N: I instinctively very strongly believe it, as an atheist. Maybe that’s part of the Christian culture which I’ve strongly internalized.

I’m also certain it’s strongly grounded in my background as a physicist. You end up with an enormous internalized felt sense for and respect of the capacities latent in matter. A single helium atom is incredibly complex; indeed, in some sense a single electron is immensely complex. Never mind the many, many additional layers of meaning in a human being!

L.B: I failed my Bridgewater final round interview because they kept going after me with the “would you torture one person to save the world” line of questioning, and switching it up (what if it was a stranger, what if it was a criminal, what if it was your mom), and while 23 year old Luke wasn’t particularly religious, and I don’t think I had a firm stance on torture—I went back and forth on it—I did keep trying to bring the question back to human dignity, even then, and was basically uncomfortable with someone being used in an instrumental way, for any reason, even if it were someone guilty of some deranged crime. True story. The three guys interviewing me just grew increasingly agitated. It was hilarious.

I don’t think it’s possible to really have that discussion without laying some metaphysical presuppositions on the table. “Are you guys all materialists?” I don’t think I actually asked that, because I did want the job and the money, but I should have.

M.B: I would say that most of Western culture doesn’t quite make sense unless you understand Christian belief. The western interest in free will, for example, is extremely peculiar, and arises from late medieval arguments but remains with us though its origin and meaning are forgotten.

D.O: I’m on European time, so damn, I’ve got some catching up to do.

To me, free will is tightly bound to the via negativa side of agency; the ability to do otherwise, which stems from the ability to think otherwise. There are different opinions about Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, but an idea that really stuck with me is the rise of this “second voice” in the human mind, and how it relates to the evolution of conscience. The ability to engage in complex negotiations with ourselves about particular physical/psychological/metaphysical courses of action, to weigh counterfactuals and consequences (highly imaginative), without resorting to base instincts, seems central to how we use the term “free will.” Hence the legal idea of compos mentis, why a contract signed while drunk is void. We regard the drunk as raw instinct. They have the agency to sign, but potentially lack the negative agency not to. When a beaver builds a dam, it’s a marvelous feat of agency, but is it free will? I saw a video once of a beaver building a dam out of children’s toys in someone’s hallway.

L.B: What do you think is the most powerful story shaping the American public’s imagination right now?

D.O: One is the “myth” of meritocracy. Maybe we could say the central myth of meritocracy is something like: work as hard as you possibly can, and you will be rewarded. Now, this gets into interesting territory with respect to truth. Because it’s certainly untrue for some people, who work hard all their lives to no avail. But I think that’s the nature of myths: they’re generally true, not specifically true.

M.N: The myth of meritocracy - and I agree, it’s a myth expressed in many, many powerful forms - is one of those strange myths where believing it is often to your individual benefit, even if it’s in some sense terribly unfair to you or outright false.

I will be surprised if the most powerful story is not AI within five years. As one of many examples: substantial job displacement (perhaps through self-driving vehicles) will generate a huge amount of tension. You see this already in San Francisco, where there’s very mixed reactions to Waymo, with some people utterly loathing them. My most disconcerting Waymo experience was being in one that was kicked by a passerby, causing the car to go into a holding mode. The impact of humans forming relationships with these pseudo-people is going to have many strange and surprising consequences.

D.O: I think the myths surrounding AI are going to be tectonic, in both directions. AI-as-liberator versus AI-as-enslaver. Deeper than the myths themselves, AI as a myth-maker is also going to be formidable. Byung-Chul Han has written about the collective unconscious, which used to be embodied in humanity as myths (internalized religious, social, economic, political frameworks or narratives) are being replaced by a digital unconscious. One substructure is, almost invisibly, giving way to another. So after thousands of years, society is less built on stories now than algorithms, less built on atoms than bits. It’s hard to even guess how this is going to alter the evolution of human psychology, for the very reason that it’s taking place at a resolution invisible to the naked eye.

M.N: Back to points you all made earlier, about the rate of emergence of myth, there’s an interview with Brian Eno where he observes that wonderful new musical instruments are now being invented every day, and as a result no one really invests the time to master them, in the same way as Yo-Yo Ma mastered the cello. In fact, we never even begin to touch the limits of any of these new instruments, and some of them probably have truly incredible possibilities.

D.O: Orson Welles said the artist should be always “out of step” with his time. Our hyperconnected world has rendered this near impossible. I read something about the disappearance of subcultures, in that they’re no longer given the time or space to develop true individuality. At the slightest whiff of rarity or talent, they’re immediately spotted and uploaded into the main culture. This leads to a great and stifling sameness, which I think we see everywhere now. Grunge needed a period of isolation in Seattle to become grunge, just as folk needed that period in Greenwich Village. Had they become immediately viral, I feel they’d have been robbed of their chance to grow into themselves

M.B: I’ve written elsewhere that cultural exchange would be basically impossible in a completely globalised world, as it very nearly is now. But perhaps a world of one vast homogeneous culture would have nowhere to turn for new inspiration but to the past.

L.B: To close things off, I’d like to ask each of you: Where did we dodge the hardest question—and what is it?

I’ll start. One of my favorite novels is East of Eden by John Steinbeck, which is based on the story of his own family ancestry which settled the Salinas Valley in California. Two of the characters in the story re-enact what is essentially the Cain and Abel story, and the author realizes that there is a dark truth at the heart of his own family, which is illuminated by this biblical story from Genesis. The book perfectly illustrates the connection between “myth and metaphysics” at the level of the family. It’s highly personal, and I think Steinbeck wrote the novel in part to distance himself from the darkness—he could externalize the truth in his fictional characters. So while I certainly don’t expect anyone to spill the family secrets in this Trialogue, I would say the hardest questions of all are often the myths held within our own families, which we inherit and are often not aware of until much later in life, if we ever.

I suspect that some of our collective myths as a society are not formed from the top down, but from the bottom up—through millions of smaller units, primarily at the level of the family, which affect broader, macro questions of identity.

M.N: Philip Pullman has observed that our lives begin when we’re born, but our stories begin when we discover that we’ve unaccountably been born into the wrong family. I suspect there’s at least a little truth to that for everyone, and sometimes a lot. There’s also the myths we cloak ourselves in, self-protective stories, stories to help us avoid thinking about certain things. By definition we are dodging these! And, every once in a while, external reality, the unself, may help us unravel one of these myths. Not always pleasantly!

M.B: In my own life, I had long dodged what I think is the hardest and most fundamental question. This question surrounded the meaning of death. It is the hardest and most fundamental, I came to discover, because the answer that you give to it will, I think, also tell you about the meaning of life. I found that things went in exactly that order. When I was basically an atheist, it was the question of death that violently started to my mind one evening in my early 20s and left me suddenly feeling a great emptiness because I could not give myself a good answer about it. It was the Christian myth, at the centre of which is a supremely meaningful death, that gradually helped me to formulate an answer. And, to tie in the family theme, deaths have loomed over my family history since before I was born, and one of the family myths involved the premature death of my father’s elder brother when both were boys: an uncle whom I never met, but for whom I was named. I had meditated on that death for a long time as a boy and its meaning for me and my family, but always in fairly superficial ways and without much seriousness. In later life, it was again the Christian myth that has helped me make sense of it all, to find meaning in death and life—difficult questions which one probably prefers not to confront.

D.O: I’m currently quasi-inebriated at a wedding, so forgive my ineloquence, but I’ll venture a layer deeper. The beauty of the greatest myths, stories, narratives, is that they serve as mirrors. Read Dostoevsky. You’ll see what I mean.

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I spent much of my teenage years actively seeking out things that might depress me. I’d ask friends for recommendations, tell them my life was too easy and light. Bro… what do you know that will definitely depress me, something that will suck the air out of my mind? They told me to read Camus, Ligotti, Schopenhauer, Buddha, Houellebecq, etc., all outright hedonists as far as I could tell, empty basins waiting for pleasure to pour into them. It didn’t occur to anyone to tell me to read Hegel, possibly because all my friends were between fourteen and sixteen years old. If one or two of them had a vague sense of Hegel’s aura, extracted from Wikipedia or the eager tongue of some deranged relative, they knew him only as a tedious soothsayer of the irreducibly good, a standard-issue utopic-Teutonic conservative, who ate sausages and smiled in stiff benevolence at the cutely swelling bosom of his young, hot, aristocratic wife, who’d kindly agreed to adopt and raise Ludwig—fruit of Hegel’s liaison with his sexually powerful landlordess, Joanna—as her own.

In 2010, everything was still going fairly well in my life. I’d been unable, despite my best efforts, to break out of a general lightness and easiness that followed me around wherever I went, a sense that nothing was particularly true or untrue, nothing was determined, but nothing was not determined either; nothing was necessary, but nothing was not necessary either. Everything, I thought in my light-headed undergraduate egoism, existed on a spectrum, the worst you could do was move one or two inches in a given direction, slightly up or slightly down, slightly left or slightly right, but such adjustments were in the end so smarmily quantitative that overall it was better not to do anything except walk around with your headphones on, a bit of Handel, a bit of Bossa nova, your eyes seventy-two percent open to the extraordinary works of either God or nature, why should it matter which?

But at some point, wandering around various semi-European cities, distributing my time between (a) “looking at attractive people in the distance while listening to various songs composed between 1300 and 2012” and (b), “looking at attractive objects in the distance while listening to various songs composed between 1300 and 2012,” in short enjoying myself. I came across Hegel’s idea of Universal Reason and almost went insane1. A scene in the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski demonstrates the mad power of this idea very well. The film’s long-haired protagonist is minding his business when suddenly several nihilists invade his apartment. He’s uncooperative, even courageous; he doesn’t seem to mind very much what they’re doing. Yes, he’s upset when the Asian nihilist cynically micturates on his rug, but he’s not thrown into confusion; he takes everything more or less as it comes, offering by way of resistance only a gently pleading counter-commentary (come on… no, don’t do that… not on the rug, man.)

Something of him, then, is beyond all this, beyond the reach of the nihilists’ insults and cheap threats. This is confirmed when the more Germanic of the two nihilists drags him to the bathroom and jams his head down the toilet. He pulls him up, says where’s the money Lebowski, puts him back, pulls him up again, says where’s the money Lebowski, puts him in, pulls him out, says where’s the [redacted] money, shithead? Perfectly ventriloquizing Universal Reason, “the dude” answers: it’s down there somewhere, let me take another look. Meaning: sure, but bro, why don’t you take another look, the human community from which you’ve pointlessly excluded yourself might be down there somewhere too, how do you know if you don’t look? You look like you’ve already looked everywhere else, if you don’t mind me saying. But if you’re not willing to look for it this time, then hey, I’ll do it, I’m that kind of guy.

Herein the secret of Hegel’s rhetoric and system both: he nutritionalizes your critique. You push his head down the toilet, but it turns out he was just about to look down that particular toilet anyway; actually, it’s pretty difficult to jam your own head down a toilet, the physics are difficult, I was hoping you might come by. Whatever you do, you’re included; exclude yourself, and it will turn out to have been a necessary step—probably the ‘key step’—in your journey towards inclusion. And this is perfectly generalizable; the frantic energy of a rebellious child, interpreted Hegelianly, is merely an advance paid on his inevitable inclusion, the stamp of its authenticity.

Kierkegaard considered this philosophy a joke, the joke being that while the system of inclusion was perfect, the architect had forgotten to include any doors2. But Kierkegaard could only think this because he was already dwelling somewhere else, namely in God (or thereabouts). He was correct to observe that Hegel’s system is doorless. But contemporary subjectivity is homeless—where could the system be built but on the ground where you already are? The absence of doors, which meant for Søren Aabye Kierkegaard that there was no way in, means for you that there is no way out. What for Kierkegaard was an ‘almost funny’ joke is for you an impenetrable tragedy. Moral: to diagnose unbelief, measure how quickly humor turns into pain.

But you have to read Hegel twice, as, after being depressed for some time (2010-2023) for ‘no reason,’ I did; the truth is down there somewhere but you have to take another look. The first time you fail, the second time you fail again, but differently, revealing the necessity of your first failure; from this, you can infer that your second failure was necessary too. It’s not that Hegel himself succeeded and is mocking you from the skies, but that he failed before you, and even more horribly; he’s mocking you from below, punching up, as they say. Hegel’s point, in other words, is not that you are included, but that no one is—not-being-included is the only thing you have in common with anyone. The universal is a blanket you stretch until a small slit, shaped like a mouth, opens up in the middle; out of this the confession of the redeemed particular pours.

Until I looked down this mouth-like gap in the center of thought, I interpreted every attempt at inclusion as a power move of the cruelest kind. As the youngest child of four, perhaps this was natural; to be born last is to be nothing but included; your parents, your brothers, your sisters, they all, by default, know the world better than you, they know, even, of a completely different world, closed to you at the very point of your entrance, and they will take their double epistemological advantage to the grave. The includer, I said to myself, in including the includee, asserts total ontological supremacy; the includer is no less distinct from the includee than the murderer is from the murdered. And at least the murderer has no chance to celebrate his crime, having killed the real witness; the includer, on the other hand, extends his ontological priority as far into the future as possible (oh yeah, feel free to come back any time… don’t forget, there’s always a place for you here). I’d managed to escape the trauma of inclusion by doing exactly that, forgetting about it, but after finding out about Universal Reason this was no longer an option for me. Nothing, Hegel says, is forgotten; forgetting is a preliminary step in a process not of cognition but of revenge. But revenge, luckily, is beautiful.

And realizing this is the first step in becoming a historical subject. Until then, I’d had seen history as an endless series of people, a world-historical expression of the same glutinous logic of inclusion which I hoped to defy or at least ignore in my personal life. Like people, historical events were constantly being added onto each other, for no reason other than to increase their overall gravitational pull. And so to read history, I thought, was only to smear my bad conscience on its surface, which it would of course “welcome”—come back any time, history seemed to say, there’s always room for you here. But reading Hegel for the second time, it instead came back to me; the Spanish Armada, which hadn’t even seemed real enough to be fake, Hiroshima, Christopher Columbus, all of this actually happened, and the reason it happened is that it didn’t entirely happen, it wasn’t able to squeeze the fruit of itself to the last drop. And how else could I ever explain how, when my uncle died at the end of that year, I was able to climb down the ladder of the negative all the way back to the final solitary eyelash of Jesus Christ?

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But the man from Snowy River let the pony have his head.
And he raced him down the mountain like a torrent in its bed.
He sent the flint stones flying, but the pony kept his feet. 
And the man from Snowy River never shifted in his seat. […] 
On a dim and distant hillside the wild horses racing yet.
And the man from Snowy River on their heels. 
— The Man from Snowy River, Banjo Paterson, 1890

I was losing the pretty one. She was pulling ahead and away and almost past any influence and understanding I ever had of her. Ahead of me, below the cliffs, the glittering pale ocean and bright sky seemed to fold itself up toward me, out of any perspective, with the impossible logic of a painting by Matisse. For you, the pretty one, the horsewoman, all jeans and boots, had said, back in the muddy yard, as she assigned the dozen tourists to the waiting animals. On that day I had been desperately in search of omen and benediction—any hint of affection or adoration. That night I was scheduled to fly from Reykjavik to Los Angeles to meet up with the person I was seeing, and dreaming of marrying, in order to meet her circle of friends. I wanted them to like me. And so I took the pretty one to heart. And she was pretty. From her shoulders, what on a person you would call the nape of a neck, sprang an impossible mane: so thick, shaggy, glittering, the horsehair falling eighteen inches or more down her sides, wiry and silky all at once, and in so many colors: chocolate, coffee, honey, brass, copper, butter, gold.

Icelandics live longer than any other horses. They are all head, neck, and forequarters. They are tough and fast and sure-footed. They are the size of ponies, but there is nothing mild or diminutive or domestic about them. Visibly powerful and soft-eyed in a fay kind of way that’s almost sinister, they look like fairy tale illustrations of horses. They descend from a genetic bottleneck of the animals brought over on longboats in the century between about 850 and 950 CE—hardy animals in the manner of today’s Shetland and Connemara ponies, animals from islands and high places. There’s a theory that—by way of Kievan Rus and the Silk Roads—Icelandics closely incarnate the horses with which the Mongolians conquered their known world from Central Asia, where wild horses were first domesticated six thousand years ago. In the Icelandic Sagas the first named Icelandic is called Skalm, meaning sword-like. She was a living link to Sleipnir, the god Odin’s gray eight-legged steed. The name means the slippery one. Born of a union between the stallion Svaoilfari, meaning the unlucky traveler, and the god Loki incarnating himself as a mare. On Sleipnir—and in much tradition only on Sleipnir—Odin was able to travel between worlds, back and forth between life and the afterlife. And through the sky.

Icelandic horses are famous for possessing, in addition to the usual trots and canters and gallops, an additional gear called the flugskei∂, the flying pace, in which a complex kinetic and physiological magic makes the horse feel to its rider entirely motionless, even while moving at extraordinary speed.

It was at this flying pace that I was losing the horse out from under me.

The particular magic that, all my life, I had sometimes glimpsed in my father—the humor and glamor and even hauteur inside his cultivated placidity and his long working hours and business trips—was more accessible in his twin sisters. When I was seven years old, I lived for a while with the older sister, Marie, on her land outside of Canberra, Australia. When I was thirteen years old, I lived for a while with the younger sister, Lucie, on her land outside of Bogotá, Colombia. Everything I don’t long to change about myself—everything I was hoping those strangers in Los Angeles might perceive—dates from these two times and places.

My earliest memories of horses are of shoveling their sweet and barley-smelling feed pellets into buckets, in a big open-sided, corrugated steel and fiberglass shed. Marie had some kind of mean streak that was connected, at that time, to her boredom—and, I would work out later, to her feeling, at that time, of captivity. She liked to see what would happen. In the far paddock there was a tall and unruly horse, dark as a nightmare, that needed relocating from one field to another. Marie asked me to get on my bicycle and ride into the animal’s left side field of view. Which, she said, would help her steer the black horse through a series of gates, across some red dirt drives. Maybe she wanted me to feel like I was a part of things; maybe she wanted me outdoors; maybe she wanted to see what would happen. As I bicycled into its view, the horse spooked, ran, reared—a living thunderhead coming at me. I pedaled away, fell and bled onto the red dirt. A dog went crazy with animal delight at my falling and running. It was all claws and teeth, and it added to my cuts and scratches. Marie eventually corralled the horse. I had never until that moment been so physically afraid. Nobody noticed. Confounded by the experience, I stayed out of Marie’s line of sight for days. Years later she would divorce herself out of that hard place, and years after that she would tell me vaguely about her own year that followed that departure, when she had pretty much nothing—except eventually a new horse whose board she paid for with shifts driving taxis. When I first arrived on Marie’s property, I’d imagined my bicycle to be analogous to all her horses—it too had a saddle, the handlebars like the reins or the horse’s own ears, the front wheel like its heavy head—but after that moment the bicycle was embarrassing, tinselly, a tiny parody of all that beastly majesty.

Lucie’s land was a flower farm. Alstroemerias and roses. Green in its valley and forested and soft and lush where Marie’s—all ghostly white-barked eucalypts and black scorched gums—had been dry and stark and open to an infinite sky. Weekend after weekend, Lucie would send me up onto the back of Chocolate, the most placid of all horses, cocoa-colored, gray-muzzled, who had already by then seemingly lived forever, been the teacher of generations of cousins. Lucie, like her brother my father, knew how to recede: at first she would ride alongside on her high-stepping pale horse with its concave Arabian head; then she would only saddle up Chocolate and send me alone up and down the long drive. Then—a vagueness and a drift of interest that was also sufficiently a vote of confidence—she would leave the saddling to me and a farmhand. Forty or fewer weekends, forty or fewer rides in all. The drive was a kilometer or so through the long vault of tree canopies; the ride was back and forth from the farmhouse gate, curving and dipping out of line of sight from the house, to the main gate to the highway with its fast and colorful village-to-village buses. The trick was to shift through the gears—walk to trot to canter to gallop. It was like doing laps in an Olympic pool. When eventually I could reliably shift, with only the hint of a touch of the outer edges of my hands, below the pinky fingers, along Chocolate’s bristly shoulders, from the jostle of the trot to the smooth roll of the canter, I noticed that this was the greatest happiness I had ever known. Because I was so lonely I chose to take the infinite patience of the animal personally, as if it was there with me in some kind of unspoken conspiracy. Now it seems to me that all the children who rode Chocolate must have, to her, simply been the same one child. This sensation of tacit intimacy is the dream that horse riding encourages—of collaborative communion without language toward an inscrutable inhuman intelligence and a companionate vessel of life force and a far higher power. In other words, prayer.

When our mind compels us to speak of our soul, one of my spiritual teachers remarked many years later, we mean our body. We mean the twin being into which we are incarnate, whose independent interest in living and whose understanding of the means of life, by being constant and intricate, will always exceed our own. There is an education about our bodies to be found in the intelligence of animals.

Back home in my suburban public high school—its two thousand students; its dour red brick and its fake-Colonial white trim and its bright fluorescent ceilings and its chain link; its quadrangle hard and factional in a way that made me think of every prison yard on every cop and detective show I had ever watched on television after school—I tried one time to get back in the saddle. The school in some kind of aspirational affiliation with a nearby private academy ran a muddy green van on weekends out to its riding school. And if you joined the riding club you could go. There were prim whitewashed fences and tidy hedges. It was early spring—dew and mist. When I got there, they didn’t have enough gear—helmets and boots and tack—for everyone, and as the newest arrival of lowest rank I spent the next two hours waiting, in the parking lot by the barns, locked inside the van. It had been socially almost impossible as a boy to join that club because in that time and place there was something exclusively feminine about riding—unicorns and jodhpurs and horse girls—that invited bullying. I never tried again.

Until Iceland. It had been a work trip, a week of chaperoning college students not much younger than myself to look at hyperborean landscapes and Nordic architecture. It was the second week of March, still icy on that island. I had an extra useless day at the end of the itinerary, before a long overnight series of connections to California. I’d sat in the lobby of my dingy hotel late in the evening before—tired and restless with dread and hope—and not known what to do with myself until I picked up one of those colorful printed pamphlets of local activities and businesses that even in the age of the internet seem to survive in a certain kind of hotel lobby. I left a telephone message for their van to pick me up very early the next day. At the time, I wasn’t sure why I did that. Proud, I chose the advanced group. Looking back, I understand that I had, to myself, something to prove.

When the van pulled up to the barns I was relieved somehow that it didn’t seem all that slick—it all had the look of an extra business improvised onto inherited acreage—or even especially safe. There was a gratifying wildness to it. Everything had the jury-rigged look I remembered from working farms: loops of blue nylon rope as latches on gates, the stirrups for the tourists’ horses not fine leatherwork and ironwork but crude and heavy hand-made loops of heavy welded steel. I had been preemptively embarrassed that it was going to be some kind of dude ranch for city folk, or a cloying seaside pony ride out of a storybook British childhood. Everyone know how to ride? the horsewoman briskly asked as we stood in the cold and windswept yard. Nobody said no. Good. The horses know the way better than you, she said, keep your hands loose and low. Don’t cut into their mouths. The dozen animals spun around placidly as each tourist was boosted onto their backs. The ascent to their backs was a spiral. I was up and onto the pretty one. We went single-file out into the wilderness.

Ten years after that long flight to Los Angeles, I used to fly to San Francisco. By that time, my father was twenty years into his Parkinson’s disease, the neurological disorder that first paralyzes or involuntarily animates the body, and then progressively steals the mind. His neurologist was blunt: There’s no cure. But it’s very well-researched. The drugs are amazing. We want to maximize quality of life and we want the body to die before the brain takes the mind into the late stage psychosis. The drugs were amazing. He endured. But by the time of my visits to him in his facility, on a ridge at the tail of the Sierras overlooking the Bay from the heights of Oakland, he was far diminished. He spoke less and less. He walked not at all. The facility, in its red brick and chain link and fluorescent lights, and in its uncanny cheer laid over an ineffable and ubiquitous atmosphere of fury, reminded me precisely of my high school. The staff didn’t like it when you opened the windows. Everything was very clean.

One consequence of my dad’s disease, in combination with sitting alone in his room all the time, was a retreat into a private world—hallucinations, conversations with people who weren’t there. I remember overhearing him talking in that room to the high school versions of Lucie and Marie. He was persuading them he was old enough to come along with them to a party. So I tried to give him experiences of the world outside. Tactile and empirical evidence of the wild world as it was. There was a hippie spice and herb apothecary down on Shattuck Avenue, so I would stop on my way uphill and buy him a brown paper bag of cloves to smell. Here, I would think toward him, is something from the earth. At his previous facility back on the East Coast—even more red brick, even more ambience of violence—I had figured out that if I could dress him for outdoors and lift him into his wheelchair and then get that wheelchair across many curbs and down certain side roads and trails without sidewalks, I could steer him through a gap in a low stone wall into the back of an arboretum that a local university maintained for their research deliberately in a state resembling wildness, a simulated primeval forest. It was a little like making it into Narnia.

Pushing him those long distances in the wheelchair, over pine needles and broken ground, was like riding a horse. Just as sitting on the back of a horse exactly positions your field of view above and behind the field of view of the animal, aligns your spine with its spine, your eyes with its eyes, so does pushing a wheelchair align you with the person in the chair. You are looking at the nape of their neck. You are seeing, but not quite, what they see. You and they are moving exactly at the same pace, but not in the same way. You and they are in some kind of unspoken conspiracy that you hope is communion.

There was no simulated primeval forest near the Oakland facility. No local Eden. I had searched. There was a strip mall and an office park, a six lane surface road, following the line of the top of the ridge, that felt like a highway. Everything was made for cars. If you wanted to take a resident outdoors you were supposed to take them down a narrow ramp past the parking lot into a prim paved and fenced courtyard—no smoking—that felt like the quadrangle at my high school, and from which, if you were seated in a wheelchair, you could not see the view down to Bay and the distant Golden Gate. After many visits, I finally pushed him East: away from that notional view, away from the grounds of the facility and across those six lanes and downhill, to the back of the ridge. I had no idea what was over there. I was surprised to find, in some kind of surprising arroyo of wilderness that in a West Coast way had pushed deep into the exurban landscape, a horse ranch.

There was a dappled meadow where the horses grazed. There was a kind of yard, open to the sides under a high corrugated roof, not so different from the shed where I had shoveled the barley-smelling feed pellets for Marie. As at her farm, there was the smell of eucalyptus trees. Everything was in those colors I came to associate with that time: the trees a dark piney green or else the faded gray green of the eucalyptus, the tall grasses bleached a golden yellow. In the yard you could see riding lessons, the student rider doing loops and figure eights while the instructor stood holding a long stick or a parabola of rope. Suddenly seeing the big glossy animals with their flickering and muscular sides was, after the parking lots, the strip mall, the six lanes of the surface road, was, even from fifty feet away, like returning to your senses. Witnessing those animals was like welcoming messengers from another world. My dad sat up and attended. He observed them conscientiously. His gaze followed them as they walked around in steady ellipses. After that, visit after visit, we went back and back and back. We would stop at the point where the asphalt gave way to the dirt road, about fifty feet away and twenty feet uphill from the gates to the meadows on one side of the dirt road, and the training yard on the other. At this threshold I could leave the chair’s wheels on the asphalt but take my dad’s feet off of their footrests and sometimes also out of their shoes and place them in the dirt and he could with what remained of his physical ability, push his feet with discernible pleasure into its yielding surface and scuff them back and forth as from a distance we watched the horses below.

The last time we stopped to do that—which was also my last visit with him before the very last one—one of the instructors, a horsewoman, all jeans and boots just like the one in Iceland, noticed us from that distance. She had been riding at speed, languid, leaning far back in the saddle, one-underhanded hand scooped around the reins, with absolute grace. She dismounted and looped the reins of her animal around one of those dark and green trees that were like giant bonsai, and she walked slowly up toward us, with that cowboy walk of John Wayne. Far behind her in the meadow, the half dozen horses were placid, the twirling of their ears and the slow rising and lowering of their heads as they grazed almost the only motion, under the rustling eucalyptus. For the most part, when I pushed my dad around the world in those times, strangers were kind. Folded into his chair he had the strange charisma of a baby bundled into its stroller. I thought, maybe she’ll invite us to take a closer look. I thought—more wildly and more desperately and more insanely—maybe she will tell us about some program where we can get him up on horseback. She stopped at ten feet away. She stood with her arms folded and said, can I help you? Suddenly she reminded me of a cop. It’s a nice spot, I said. Looking more closely at her face I could see flicker across it familiar micro-expressions of disgust and horror. This was the other, rarer, reaction of strangers—to my dad’s hunched and twisted and visibly ravaged body with its uncanny combination of stillness and motion—that I had also come to recognize. He’s not allowed here, she said. His wheelchair is scaring the horses.

I could have argued the point. We were on a public right of way. The horses far behind her did not seem scared. I remembered how back on Marie’s farm my shiny little bicycle—not so different from a wheelchair—had maybe maybe maybe sparkled in the sunlight so as to spook the black mare. Horses could startle and stampede at something so small and so strange, I knew. So what she said, even as I knew it to be untrue in that moment, was not unfounded in possibility. She was afraid of something. But it was not fear on her face but disgust. The revulsion in her expression was something I knew myself to have felt—intrusively, unexpectedly, suddenly—at the spectacle of my dad’s body at stray moments, even as I had come to know it so well in the familiar routines of carrying and cleaning. When because I couldn’t bathe all of him, I just washed his feet with hot water in a heavy old porcelain salad bowl. There at the threshold between the asphalt and the dirt, my dad wasn’t attending to the content of the speech between me and the horsewoman—he was looking past her at the horses—but I knew that something instinctive and atavistic and animal in him would attune to the tone and tenor of whatever exchange the woman and I would get into. And would spook him. And that the emotional valence of that spooking would stay unresolved and perseverated in him for hours or days. I cannot lose control of this, I thought. Thank you, I said warmly and loudly and across my dad’s right ear, as if she had just made some kind of generous offer. Thank you so much! I put my body between him and her, my back to her, blocking her from his line of sight, and busied myself with putting on his shoes and putting his feet into their footrests, not so different from getting them into stirrups. I brought my eyes down into his line of sight to meet his. I prayed peace into him. Dad, I said, Are you ready to go?

I cannot lose her, I thought. I had already lost her. The pretty one, even right there below me, was, with me, beyond all communion. The wilderness of Iceland had been as sudden as the wilderness of that arroyo snaking its way toward the strip mall. As soon as we lost sight of the homestead we might have been on another planet. Because there were no trees, and in the strange northern sunlight, the faraway seemed distant and the distant faraway. The horses had surefootedly and methodically held their narrow lines, traversing hillsides so steep they were almost cliffs, above conical valleys that were the mouths of old volcanoes, they I could never have managed on foot. The ride had been long and bright. Scintillating wind on my face and hands. I had been blissed out by the pretty one’s precision, by the green land and the blue sky. When it happened I had been gazing lazily across the valley over my right shoulder at a pack of wild horses that were just starting to run—their heads suddenly high, their manes and tails unfurled straight out behind them like banners—on the steep hillside opposite. Faster and faster, they ran. Ahead of us, where the hillsides converged and the valley narrowed, the torrent of wild horses was suddenly all around us and with us and in us, and it became us—disillusioning us from any false distinction between wild and tame; over there and right here; consensus reality and psychosis; immanent and the transcendent. Everything moved ever faster as the two hillsides converged and all the horses ran shoulder to shoulder, mane to tail, and all sped up into the speed of the wild stampede. Here, at last, the flying pace.

If you’ve been in a car crash or a burning place, or even in smaller binds and disasters, you know how this works. Everything moves very quickly and also you have a lot of time to think. I saw a tourist just ahead of me fall out of the saddle and go under the horses. Afterward I heard someone say that their hip bones had been shattered. I saw another tourist dragged along, seemingly insensate, her ankle held in the steel loop of her stirrup. At the flying pace there was even above this violence a simultaneous sensation of placidity—it was instead the landscape of cliffs and hillsides and the strangely near horizon of the distant ocean that moved around us at impossible speed. There was no stopping anything. I have, I had time to think, to get off this horse. I have to do it gracefully. Her name was Josta—short for Jóarrstathir. Which meant the dwelling place of the horse warrior.

I remembered some Sunday afternoon, just before that time I spent at Marie’s land, in which my father—it felt like a visit even though it was his home as much as mine—had tried to show me how to ride that same little bicycle that had spooked the black mare. He didn’t succeed. I just watched him. On his own bike—an ancient and heavy and monumental green Raleigh—he had a nimble and gymnastic and European and old-fashioned and glamorous way of dismounting: a bella figura gesture of placing all the weight on the right pedal, straightening the right leg that held that weight to its fullest vertical, and—bicycle still at speed—lowering his spine to the horizontal, then raising the left leg to extend the line of the spine, and bringing it down across the centerline of the bike so it was free and next to the right, even as the right was still on the pedal. That left foot would hit the ground running—and then, off its pedal, the right—and dashing beside it he would gradually slow the pace of the bike itself.

I have never been able to do that on a bicycle, before or since. But caught in the stampede I was able to recall and recreate the procedure, there with Jóarrstathir. First I let her have her head—meaning first no tension, and then no hands, on the reins—just a trace of communication by touch through the knees, my right hand on her right shoulder. Then my left foot reaching for the ground between my right foot and her right side, and running by the time I lifted my right foot out of the stirrup. Then I was running beside her for an endless instant in a pocket of space between her and the wild horses. And then she was running, with the rest of them, far away. Leaving me in sudden silence and retching breath. I remember slipping down her side—my fingertips spread and light on her body to keep me oriented in space and time, smoothly with the whorling grain of the hair; touching her right hip with my left hip, her right shoulder with my left shoulder; my left toes reaching as long and delicately as if they had learned something from the horse’s own. Animal from animal. I was in congruent motion with her and even—and only in that moment of mutual departure—one in being. It all went faster than the time it has taken you to read this. But you know how time works. When I remember my life the longest years—the graded and measured years at that high school, the sanitary and clinical years at hospitals and facilities with my father—all accordion down in their repetitive way to nothing. The brief times that I lived on Marie’s land, and on Lucie’s land; and with the woman from Los Angeles—those times now billow out like banners and those days become longer than years.

Eternity, as the teaching goes, is not later. I suspect that by the moment of my death the time I spent sliding across and down Josta’s side, from hip to shoulder, there in the heart of the stampede among the wild horses, there at the dwelling place of the horse warrior as she pulled away into the further valley—as even in that very moment I was full and fully conscious of the hope simultaneous with fear of becoming and being someone in whom a beloved and her friends could see magic hidden even from myself, that hope and fear that had driven me to spend the useless extra day trying to ride a horse through a wilderness—will seem to have lasted as long as all the rest of my life. Hope that I could be that someone. Fear because if I could be, then all impossible things—including of course the moment of my death—might be possible.

Sometimes—say, a wedding day—all of life moves under you at the flying pace. Other times—say, my hundred identical walks to and through the supermarket during the two years of covid lockdowns in Manhattan that I like so many spent alone and unassisted—will collapse into nothing. My single achievement during that enduringly isolating time was to, on those supermarket walks, recite and memorize the first twelve lines of The Man from Snowy River. This is the canonical exemplar of folk Australian cowboy poetry written in 1890 by the irresistibly named Banjo Paterson. Whatever fog that the virus settled then onto my brain today already steals the words back. The hero of the ballad, the man from Snowy River, is an undersized rider on an undersized horse, who after being rejected by them joins a posse of the local country’s finest riders to retrieve a thoroughbred colt—offspring of the champion Regret—that had escaped to join the local wild horses. In legend, long after the end of the poem, the man from Snowy River dies at 33. In the action of the poem, this horse warrior finds his true dwelling place, which is far past the faltering posse and at the center of those wild horses’ stampede—down a steep stony valley, his own horse, “blood from hip to shoulder with the spur.” From which place, he, “alone and unassisted brought them back.” I think about him—the slippery one, the unlucky traveler—leaving and returning across that valley dividing wilderness and homecoming, mortality and divinity: a god between worlds.

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Blues Clues
(Under every rock I turned I found God)

Open my heart that I might love
And my mouth that I might sing of it
Open my soul that I might live
And my hands that I might give of it

Escape Me

First thing
Identify the killer—They are the key
Love them to Death,
Where you are free.
Now In the valley,
Ever Alone
Ensure you are safe from yourself.
Pull the sword out and break it
Like bread
Into a million pieces.
Hide each one in a friend
Until We hold a rose in common.
The petals return
To You, The Focal Point
And surround you,
complete.
Eventually
you remember me
Seeing you,
Perfect.

Atlas

It did not resemble my father
As nothing did
My father sparkled
Yes, like the sea
And He drank the whole thing
That my path might be dry

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*These poems appear in Bunny’s new collection Sadly Glass, now out from Cycle Press.