New England Review

Christopher Ross

NER Digital

Becoming Bill Sykes

The scene is choreographed as tightly as ballet. On a high narrow bridge Bill caresses Nancy’s cheek, pushes the hair from her face, then in a sudden fury makes a fist behind her ear. She snaps her head, arches her back, hangs from his arm. It should look from the audience as if he’s pulling her by the hair. Thus connected they perform a tense, aching pirouette until they’ve exchanged positions on the bridge. He looms over her and raises his shillelagh. The lights go red.

You’ve just eaten a handful of Altoids backstage to mask the anxiety on your breath. You’ve obsessively twisted the shillelagh in your hands until it’s warm and tacky, so that when you swing it down through the narrow space between Nancy’s head and the bridge’s upstage railing you won’t lose your grip and fracture her skull. (Though she can feel in her ear the air disturbed by your swinging, she says she’s never had a second’s worry.)

Nancy screams and goes down on one knee, head thrown back, still hanging from your arm. You step back, reestablish your footing, and swing a second time. Nancy crumples on the bridge as close to the downstage railing as possible so she’ll lie clear of the third and final swing.

You kill her.

You fall to your knees, carefully, one knee between Nancy’s legs, the other beyond her arm, wherever it may have fallen. You lift her hand, touch your cheek to it. You rock back and forth and back and forth.

You listen for your musical cue then haul yourself to your feet and move off—scalding and feral.

♦

An hour before this scene you were standing halfway down the hill to the train tracks behind the theater, ankle-deep in wet leaves, clasping to your head a pair of headphones way more expensive than is appropriate for your tax bracket, trying to perform with the Deftones’ Diamond Eyes at full volume something akin to an emotional lobotomy.

You began “using” this record several months ago, because Bill Sykes is your first acting role and you decided, without consulting anyone in the theater who could’ve disabused you of such notions, to take a page from those guys in Fahrenheit 9/11, the American soldiers who pumped themselves up with heavy metal music before going out to shoot Iraqis.

But no matter how much you tried to force them, the Deftones would not be thus used.

Later, you put on the headphones to thwart the urge to divide yourself onstage—one actor to commit the murder, another to receive the blows.

You put them on to regulate the suspicion that if your parents were here they would tell you you were being reckless and stupid.

But the Deftones would not be thus used.

You needed help processing the steady stream of compliments about how lifelike and scary your violent playacting is.

You needed help finding outlets for the vast unusable parts of all the personal unrest you’ve tapped into so you could infuse this role with emotional power.

You needed help reinforcing the line between violence performed and the potential for actual violence, which is surely lodged within you—perhaps within everyone—like a canker in a hedge.

But the Deftones would not be thus used.

You suspect you will need help reassuring yourself that these charged moments onstage will not have amounted to the most emotionally vital thing you ever get to experience, that when these moments are gone you will not feel destitute. The part of you that says you’ll from now on be incapable of appreciating anything short of the scalding, feral emotions you feel with the headphones on, or which you’ll be hungrily on the verge of experiencing as you climb the stairs to the bridge—this is a part of you that is interested in something other than making art, and it is telling lies.

It also tells you that you’ve misused the Deftones and that you should be ashamed of yourself.

But you can’t stop listening. You’re drawn to the album’s balance, its precision, its restraint. You feel expansive, cavernous in the thrall of its emotionally vital stuff. You know instinctively, though you’re not smart enough to unpack it, that with Diamond Eyes darkness was confronted and transformed into art—in a tone more positive, with compositions more painterly, and engagement with its influences more playful than anything the Deftones had ever produced.

Perhaps things were even misused in the process.

Clearly you’ve fallen for the Deftones. That’s what this is. You’ve fallen for the theater, too, of course. Perhaps it’s in their overlap that you’ve decided Bill Sykes must fall for Nancy after he murders her.

You bracket without comment the next four words—but it’s too late—because you are not an unpacker of time.

You are not an unpacker of music, either, or of darkness. You are an unpacker of “misuse.” Things became emotionally vital for you, you realize, as soon as you located the moment when the “misuse” of Diamond Eyes and Oliver! began to shape your relationship with those works so profoundly that it no longer qualified as “misuse.” It was like discovering that you didn’t need to keep doing drugs to return to the places they originally took you.

You will discover, long after the production ends, that even during the occasional descent into the dark performative confusions of that “villain in his prime,” you can locate and express tones more positive, compositions more painterly, and engagement with your influences that is more playful.

Eventually you will give yourself permission to use and misuse whatever inspires you, and to use and misuse (and reuse) the darkness.

Someday you will forgive yourself when you fall.

♦♦♦

Christopher Ross writes, acts (and will soon be directing) in Middlebury, Vermont. His stories and essays have appeared in Southern Review, Georgia Review, Cortland Review, Good Men Project, B O D Y, and the Rumpus.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

NER Digital

Wendy Willis

The Word Made Flesh:
On Encountering the Work of Marcel Broodthaers

Marcel Broodthaers—Maria, 1966

My husband and I fantasize about what we will do when we abandon poetry. He says cobbler. I choose seamstress. Anything to avoid the existential aggravation that comes from tying yourself in knots for a readership that seems to be made up almost exclusively of other poets. We got to see just such a transition enacted at MoMA’s retrospective of the work of Marcel Broodthaers, a Belgian poet turned visual artist, who died in 1976 at the age of 52.

Broodthaers announced his abandonment of poetry and embrace of the visual arts in 1964, after having spent several months holed up in his new studio. In the catalogue for his first show, he wrote: “I, too, wondered whether I could not sell something and succeed in life. For some time, I have been no good at anything. Finally the idea of inventing something insincere crossed my mind and I set to work straightaway.”

In that first show, Broodthaers encased leftover copies of his book, Pense-Bête, in plaster, eggshells, and plastic balls. The overall effect is both desecratory and dear. While it clearly could be interpreted as a rejection of poetry—“I am done with this art and all its petty, ephemeral preoccupations, I therefore subsume it into the more substantial, ocular, high-flying conceptual world”—it also has a quality of grasping for solidity and permanence, as if the paper and sentiment that make up these poems are too fragile to hold up to the forces of the world without a little plaster to stabilize them.

Though I identify strongly with the artwork Pense-Bête, I am most attracted to the work that immediately follows. Broodthaers spent from 1964 to 1968 building large sculptural pieces featuring shellacked mussel shells and others from heaps of cracked egg shells.

Granted, I am susceptible to the pretty, and these pieces are very pretty in their monochromatic simplicity and fragility. I cannot stop thinking about how hard it must be to transport these pieces from one place to another without a catastrophe of shattering shells. But I am also reminded of the Zen saying: “No matter how many times you say the word water, it will never be wet.” Of course, it is an exhortation toward direct experience, though when I first heard it, I resisted its tone of wise certainty. I do believe in the power of words. I believe in the power of words to make me feel wet even when my skin and hair remain dry. But even as an evangelist of the word, I am moved by the directness of Broodthaers’s eggs and mussels. They transport me to another family’s breakfast table. Into the life of a lonely office worker stopping for Moules-frites on his way home to his dim apartment. They reek with sorrow for the chickens and the mussels, too. And what about the busboy who cleared the plates? Who separated the trash?

There is one piece in particular that reveals the shallowness of Broodthaers’s bravado. He said he did it for the money, the art, but Maria is where his tenderness leaks through. Maria is simple enough—a navy blue housedress hung on a wooden hanger with the belt draping from it as it would in the closet. Tied to the bottom of the right sleeve is a paper shopping sack printed with a faded cheese ad dotted with broken eggshells. As these things do, the dress seems impossibly small and frail. But the cracked, stained, and haphazard eggshells glued to the shopping bag are all dailiness and loss and brokenness. It is as if mortality attached itself to a shopping bag.

It makes me feel naïve and provincial to respond to a major New York retrospective in such a simplistic emotional way. And in ordinary times, I would have walked away with a vague sense of affection for Broodthaers and his tender and rollicking transition from poet to conceptualist. But on March 21, 2016—two days after we visited MoMA—three men blew themselves up in massive, coordinated bombings in Brussels. Two were in the airport. One was at a Metro station. Thirty-two people were killed, and over 300 were injured. The news of the attacks spurred another worldwide wave of fear and recrimination, knocking even Donald Trump out of the headlines for a while. Even then he was already was ever-present in the news, though we did not yet know what was to come.

Though I hate to admit such superficiality, the experience of having been to the Broodthaers exhibit made Belgium feel much closer. Not only could I envision Brussels more clearly, but it sharpened my physical connection to the event itself. I could almost feel the reverberations of the blasts tremor through my body.

In the ensuing—and righteous—debate over why we publicly mourn brutal attacks in Brussels and Paris more than we do the ones in Lahore and Iskandariya and Kabul, we are right to question whether we are racist and colonialist and Euro-centric in valuing some lives over others. But I wonder if some of our failures in attention also stem from a lack of imagination. That is not to say that we should not interrogate our own callousness toward brutality everywhere, particularly if it is informed by colonialism and racism, but it is to affirm the value of art like that of the Broodthaers shell period. The straightforward connection to the body created by pieces like Maria tied me to Belgium physically and viscerally, increasing my imagination in favor of the people of Brussels.

That is a feat in this era of 24-hour breaking news, maudlin public mourning, and compassion fatigue. Broodthaers delivers breakfasts and dinners and off-beat patriotism. He forces me to imagine chickens and dockworkers and dishwashers with their particular sufferings and quickly passing lives. His work expands who I worry about and who I mourn. It takes Belgium off the map and places it squarely in the kitchen. It makes metaphor three-dimensional. It gives poetry flesh.

♦♦♦

Wendy Willis is a poet and essayist living in Portland, Oregon. She also serves as the Executive Director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, an organization representing more than 50 foundations, nonprofit organizations, and universities, collaborating to support research activities and advance democratic practice in North America and around the world. Willis’s next book of poems, A Long Late Pledge, will be released by Bear Star Press in September 2017.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

NER Digital

Jeneva Burroughs Stone

Disability & Space-Time Considerations:
On reading Gary Zukov’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters

Of quantum physics, Einstein remarked, God does not play dice, by which he meant the appearance of randomness is always an illusion. Scientific analysis must yield law, rules, properties. Other physicists disagree in an ongoing theoretical contest pitting Einstein’s classical determinism against quantum randomness. No victor has yet emerged: unity or scatter?

I thought of that debate after I dropped Robert off at his inclusive theater class. One Boy. The sun was shining, construction ongoing, tall buildings sending steel beams into the sky. I’d been reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters on quantum physics while drinking my morning coffee. Something about imagining the scale of atomic parts. Something about the nucleus of an atom as a grain of sand inside a 14-story building, the building mostly empty, a handful of electrons—smaller still than that grain of sand—whirring from floor to floor, just as they do among multiple atomic orbits.

Although electrons jump between floors (their atomic orbits), excited and turned on by whatever energy is applied to them, we cannot see them. Yet they leave traces of themselves, “light fingerprints,” in the wavelengths of light around us. These can be measured, but we can’t know which electrons will jump to which orbit or why. We can only calculate the probability of knowing, which is how quantum physics imagines a world: explicable by mathematics as a language, not a measure of absolute knowledge.

That science might not be impregnable after all, rigidly absolute, gives me hope. If the world were absolute, then One Boy wouldn’t matter. Literally. As an anomaly, nothing to him would accrue. And yet he assembled himself within me, taking up space and gaining mass (the scientific definition of matter), a footprint pressed in bas relief against my abdominal skin. A genetic anthology of family lore we vowed to raise as an individual. Let him be whomever he would be. Our boy: he mattered to me.

God may not throw dice, but some force in the universe does—to that I can attest. My son has two genetic defects which revealed themselves, suddenly, just after he turned one. For fourteen years, his disabilities remained unexplained. Before Robert was born, scientists of the Human Genome Project had begun mapping our species’ DNA structure and variants, all three billion nucleotides. They finished in 2003.

In 2012, Robert’s genomic analysis showed one mutation inherited from me, the other de novo, unreported or entirely new. A transcription error during gamete replication, perhaps. A silent ping from a heretofore unknown genomic universe. A one in three billion chance happening, his geneticist said of my son, a roll of the conceptual dice.

 

Peter Higgs first theorized the Higgs bosun, the “god particle,” in 1964, the year I was born. This subatomic particle, elusive, lacking quantitative measurements to prove its existence, marks the point at which matter, well, matters. To it, other particles accrue and the world takes shape around it. The Higgs bosun only appears to us as it emerges from destruction (literally), and from there, the world we know may be assembled as atoms, molecules, deoxyribose nucleic acid, cells, bacteria, eukaryotes, multicellular organisms. Molecules, elements, electronic forces, hammers, screws, machines, buildings. From many, one: from one, many.

 

One Boy has an uneasy glow. Why does one person matter? One person with as unique a biochemical profile as anyone might imagine. Or not. Robert is, of course, more like any of us than he is different. Only two errors among the three billion nucleotides of his genome. He has two arms, hands, legs, feet—although he cannot make them perform, as the social workers say, any of the activities of daily living. He has no language, yet leaves traces of himself in the light around him: subtle movements of one arm for yes and the other for no; smiles, laughter, tears, his pointed looks. His eyes activate word and phrase icons using a special camera attached to a computer.

One day he’ll form sentences, immeasurable, interpretable, if not absolute. By what measure are we known to any one, any other?

I can’t explain why one person matters. Perhaps an explanation doesn’t exist. The quanta in quantum physics simply assume a measurement for the unknown and undefinable exists. In one version of the universe, for every bit of matter, there’s an equal and opposite bit of anti-matter, dark matter. As One Boy moves through space-time, how do the particles of society react to him, how does he gather support? From the draw of recognition (a positive charge) or the simultaneous push and pull of a negative charge, a distancing empathy? His beauty and smile draw admirers toward him; from his speechlessness they wander away.

 

Physicists push and pull over two theories of the universe: Super Symmetry or the Multiverse. The familiar harmony of the poets sings forth in Super Symmetry, in which all is balanced, ordered, beautiful. The Multiverse posits innumerable universes, each with its own laws of physics—disorder, chaos, in which beauty implodes into particle randomness, like nucleotides. Raised to believe in beauty and order, I find the inexplicable has come to appeal to me, too.

My boy’s tracheostomy and gastrostomy stomas are symmetrical, but his wheelchair constantly loses screws. People speculate he suffers, but his eyes connect indubitably to you. Medically fragile, he needs us to clear his airway, feed him through a tube.

 

The Higgs bosun matters because it is unstable—the point of destruction at which all matter accrues, Higgs gives its being so that other particles may have mass. A messiah? Perhaps Lord Shiva instead. A creator and destroyer all-in-one, so the theory goes, this “god” particle might become visible only when speed and force recreate conditions of the Big Bang, the moment of universal conception.

And so the Large Hadron Collider was constructed over a period of ten years, from 1998, the year Robert became disabled, to 2008. In 2012, the year Robert was diagnosed, the LHC proved the existence of the Higgs bosun. The numerical value of the Higgs, physicists hoped, would prove whether the universe conformed to the laws of Super Symmetry, or rebelled in the form of a Multiverse.

Its only measurements mathematical—waves and points and digits—thus far, the Higgs numerical value sits, taunting, in between symmetry and chaos. Between repetition and the unexpected.

 

We searched fourteen years for a diagnosis, test after test, none mattered. But we wanted to know. Genomic sequencing became our antimatter: Dystonia 16, a disease so rare Robert became the only US case among nine worldwide. Each of us has hundreds of genomic variants, so why did his two matter?

 

Let there be anomalies within anomalies, as long as we may find something to know. For every theory there’s an outlier, something that cannot be predicted or understood. In any symmetrical system, can One Boy be more than negligible? Could a multiverse contain us all, each and every One?

We don’t see answers; we can’t. Only know that particles leave traces in wavelengths of light—it may not matter why. Mass can accrue from the instability of what surrounds it—he’s still human and still here. Antithesis. Antimatter. One Boy.

♦♦♦

Jeneva Burroughs Stone has published poetry and essays in many literary journals. Her work in nonfiction has been honored with fellowships from the MacDowell and Millay Colonies. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, a PhD from Columbia University, and a BA from Middlebury College. She is a contributing editor to Pentimento: Journal of All Things Disability, which is dedicated to promoting the voices of caregivers and writers with disabilities. “Disability & Space-Time Considerations” is adapted from Monster, a collection of poetry and essays, which is her first book.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Leath Tonino

NER Digital

Autumn Again

10665229_978810635478548_7983320116418097719_nIt is autumn across the country.  The aspen leaves in Colorado are yellowing and browning, the maple leaves in Vermont going red, purple, orange on their way to the forest floor.  Days are pinched, nights long and longer. Here is a killing frost, a pane of puddle-ice.  Here is the crock-pot, the chipped mug, the trusty sweater. The smell of smoke.  The shadows.  Here at last is the cold, the loneliness we have missed.

Summer is a pretty face, easy to love but without substance.  So writes my dear friend Sean, and I agree.  My body is tired with all the smiling, my mind heavy with that burden of relentless light.   Goodbye, pretty face. So long, fare thee well. Here at last is a snug wool hat over headphones and a walk through the folded hills on a cloudy afternoon, deep into music.

For a decade, autumn has meant Arvo Part and his ten minutes of pure drift, “Spiegel im Spiegel.”  I thank Sean for making the introduction.  I’d just moved from Vermont to San Francisco, a city of blossoms and hummingbirds that feels like birth even in October, and I was not doing well with the change.  A piece of me, a leaf inside, was withering, curling at the edges, drying out, as though trying to compensate for what could not be found in the local landscape.

When the song arrived, via e-mail, I was alone with a bottle of wine and an intention to drink it down to empty. I did, lying in bed, headphones on, the piano and violin speaking calmly to one another of sorrow and beauty, how the two are always one. I heard colors in the music.  I saw Sean in Vermont, in the mountains of our childhood, hiking beside a stream papered with foliage.  I listened for hours, nodded off, dreamed those colors, woke for more. Took another gulp, then another.

Young men grow and move and move again, and always the seasons cycle.  I’m in Colorado this year, rising with the dawn, walking with it, my ears searching for bugling elk.  Thousands of miles away in Vermont, Sean is tuned for geese, maybe the silence of moss. Come evening we are both inside our headphones, sitting by the fireplace, entrancing ourselves to the crumbling architecture of embers. Soon my friend will send a note that says we’ve made it through another pretty face, the time has come, have a listen, enjoy.

What we humans do is associate, constantly associate, and wonder over our associations. We wonder how autumn can mean an Estonian composer named Arvo, how Arvo can mean a friend named Sean, how Sean can mean a long-ago bottle of wine, a tree just barely holding the last of its leaves, a tree there in the distance letting go. We wonder how a season can be a song and a song can be sorrow tightening our chest, welling up as tears. We wonder how that tightening, that welling, can be the beauty we’ve waited all summer to feel.

I stop on the trail. In German, “Spiegel im Spiegel” means “mirror in the mirror.”   Closing my eyes, I see an infinity of images, everything reflecting everything else.  In the music’s inner darkness, vision reaches across the country, from Colorado to Vermont and beyond. I open my eyes. I glimpse dear old friends.  Colors. It is autumn everywhere, the aspens yellowing and browning, the maples going red, purple, orange on their way to the forest floor.

♦♦♦

Leath Tonino’s short story, “Salisbury Cathedral,” appeared in NER 33.3. He is a freelance writer and a poetry editor at the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

 

 

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