Books

Charlie Rauh: Amizdel (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

“One tries to cure the signs of growth, to exorcise them, as if they were devils, when really they might be angels of annunciation.”
–Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

To receive the world is to allow it to leave a mark. In Amizdel, Charlie Rauh approaches that vulnerability as a practice of attention, gathering a year’s worth of memories and encounters into a record of learning to remain open. His introduction locates a quiet source of strength in the willingness to accept what others offer and to live with the knowledge that hardship may arrive as unexpectedly as beauty. The question guiding this undertaking is how such openness might sustain us through both. Beneath it stirs another, more elusive inquiry into what becomes of the self when its conditions waver at the edge of uncertainty.

The book takes its title from Hildegard von Bingen’s word for “armor,” preserved in her enigmatic lingua ignota, or “unknown language.” The indeterminate purpose of that language gives Rauh’s reflections a suggestive point of departure, allowing protection itself to remain a question. Awareness and connection become ways of inhabiting an exposure whose terms we cannot dictate. Such armor acquires the delicacy of a membrane, carrying the world’s pressure into the being it encloses. Beautifully illustrated by his sister, Christina Rauh Fishburne, Amizdel also brings a familial dimension to this exploration. The collaboration places an actual relationship within the book’s meditation on receptivity, giving its concern for others a material presence before any philosophy can float free of the hands that made it.

The only way to find what is lost is to become lost oneself. This profound lesson, learned early in a childhood anecdote shared as the book’s opening, sets the tone for everything that follows. A mother drops a coin into the grass to locate a missing necklace, entering the object’s predicament through an imaginative adjustment of scale. The mind kneels until the blades become corridors. Drawn from that formless yet inexhaustible wellspring we call consciousness, Rauh’s subsequent contemplations repeatedly loosen the coordinates and the proverbial map on which they are plotted. Their mystical irony resides in the compass that continues to guide him, equally immaterial yet central to his existence. Direction emerges from intimacy with what has eluded him. Later, his missing keys reappear during the clearing of an apartment destroyed by fire. Their recovery leaves the destruction intact, placing a difficult limit on the consolations of seeing. A revelation can illuminate the ashes without returning them to wood.

“We are born explorers,” he writes, locating our questioning nature in the accumulations of thought and experience through which answers become possible. In that sense, reminders and remainders approach synonymy, bringing something important to the beds of our internal gardens. Seeds and fully grown plants occupy different moments in a continuum whose circumference we cannot see; even the smallest remnant carries a subterranean proposition about what may grow. Yet exploration also depends on the stillness to enjoy having no destination. Rauh’s practice of sitting at successive bus stops, leaving each when the bus arrives, quietly detaches waiting from the obligation to board. The interval acquires a life independent of whatever might end it. This “joyful waiting” is where we so often forget to dwell, having surrendered the present to the appointment it is supposed to keep.

Such a practice helps explain the book’s form. Its longer essays give way to fragments that allow impressions and aphorisms to become entities unto themselves, endowed with a cognition and will of their own. Not every story needs a biographical fingerprint. Whether meditating on flight or mortality, Rauh becomes less securely positioned at the center of his observations as they compound. A window can have a perspective; a room can shelter a silence that survives its occupant. The recurrent second person further unsettles the distinction between observer and observed, admitting the reader into an address whose original recipient may remain unknowable. Intimacy gathers around this uncertainty. To enter the conversation is to accept that some part of it will always belong elsewhere, beyond the reader’s appetite for disclosure.

The shoreline offers a particularly charged version of that encounter. In Ocean, Rauh recalls his residency on Captiva Island and the music that emerged from his proximity to the sea. These liminal zones of contact are nature’s affordances, places where the immense permits our touch without becoming manageable. Memory washes into composition, and the body discovers how readily an invitation can contain danger. His nighttime floating eventually enters into conversation with Hans Scholl’s writing and resistance to Nazism. The distance between voluntarily confronting uncertainty and suffering political persecution resists lyrical compression, giving the meditation its moral charge. Beauty can demand an answer from someone who has every reason to feel abandoned by it. “Courage is not the absence of fear,” Rauh notes, “but the disarming of its paralysis through love.” Against our habit of turning prayers into contracts, the sentence leaves courage vulnerable to an outcome it cannot purchase.

Grief makes that vulnerability more intimate. Certain emotional registers cast permanent shadows on our lives that never quite capitulate to the sun’s willful shine. Rauh’s recollection of Connie, who taught him to take pleasure in breathing, gives this permanence a corporeal articulation. Her lesson survives within the action of a chest rising and falling, allowing the absent teacher to participate in another breath. For a musician, the implications extend beyond technique: sound begins in a body’s willingness to make room. Remembrance, however, is a conscious act that must be brought forth through intention. Habit can carry what the mind has ceased to name, and attention grants that inheritance a moment of audibility. Somewhere beneath the ribs, an unfinished instruction continues opening its small door.

In thinking about and through time, Rauh attends to rhythms we cannot control. Morning arrives with a relentlessness that complicates our declarations of allegiance to the night, while the same hour holds utterly different lives within it. His personal ceremonies, whether lighting a candle or watching people pass by, are hugged by the rising sun without acquiring a claim on everyone else’s experience. This distinction becomes especially consequential when Morning turns to the poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters. The recurring dawn meets a voice formed under enslavement, and the act of beginning another day takes on an ethical demand that exceeds the pleasures of illumination. Rauh hears a summons to creative responsibility. What will we make with the life that has reached us? The question gathers force from the particular person asking it, whose circumstances enter the light and change its meaning.

The most important things in these pages can only be fully understood in the moment of their unfolding because they belong to those who experience them. In that way, they have a voice. Old rooms retain a character that cannot be replicated elsewhere, just as these curious assemblages of mind and body that house what we call “souls” acquire a withered architecture all their own. Rauh’s imagined visits to sparsely furnished interiors preserve the darkness in their corners, granting even an unoccupied space a measure of privacy. Fishburne’s portraits offer another form of this restraint. Faces held within quiet borders, some edged in gold, remain distinctly themselves amid the prose’s more fluid intimacies. Their presence gives the book’s spiritual inheritance a human countenance. The voice of creation may be deliberate, but it doesn’t shout into our ears; sometimes it waits until we have ceased furnishing every silence with ourselves.

Even in the absence of a promise of glory, something keeps us striving, with beginnings that carry endings in their hearts. The brief pieces gathered under Cloud-Moving Wind-Filled place that impulse, each an overture to an opera that never sings, whose unperformed passages accumulate within the reader. “I know what you are after,” Rauh observes, “and it isn’t glory or money. You are after a mortar.” The word holds the binding agent beside the weapon, bringing the longing for cohesion into dangerous proximity with the wish to destroy whatever threatens it. Wholeness, too, can harbor aggression. In the adjacent Curious Architect, building begins with the willingness to ask how things hold together. One senses a “mysterious architect” working through these pages, although the structure remains exposed to the desires of whoever inhabits it. The book’s armor must contend with the violence concealed inside our own hopes for protection.

That complication becomes harder to evade in Recollections, where Rauh’s tenderness passes through morally unsettled terrain. In Shoulders, an apparent rescue develops the momentum of a getaway, only to leave the narrator questioning what he has done. Good intentions survive here with their authority diminished. Elsewhere, an emptied dwelling fills with ghosts the speaker acknowledges having created, and departure requires him to sit among them until their work is finished. The uncanny gives memory a laboring body, capable of resisting the meanings we would assign it. These passages leave pieces of unfinished futures and unfinished pasts needing time to sit and ruminate. Their darkness deepens the earlier invitation to receive, as another person’s suffering may enter our lives without becoming available to our preferred story of ourselves.

Near the close of I Don’t Live Near the Fairgrounds Anymore, a misspelled name bears the weight of an attachment language could never quite preserve. The spaces between its letters become places where love and loss unravel, carrying the ache of everything a name can summon and everything it cannot contain. Here the opening search for a necklace acquires a more difficult afterlife. Some absences will remain beyond the reach of the most attentive hand. History is where secrets are buried, and eventually we contribute our own to the soil. We feel heard in the unwritten blankness around them, where our own unfinished lives can settle for a moment. The compass continues its inaudible turning. In the garden beneath the page, a seed holds open the dark.

Free Will and Testament: The Grammar of Deliverance in Dostoevsky’s Demons

| Tyran Grillo

And there was there an herd of many swine feeding on the mountain: and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them.

Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked.

When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country.

Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.

They also which saw it told them by what means he that was possessed of the devils was healed.

Luke 8:32–36

In Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky draws us into an unnamed Russian provincial town where the wounded pride of an older generation meets the revolutionary impatience of its children. What begins amid the familiar absurdities of social life gradually exposes a more troubling intimacy between belief adend the desire to possess another person. We come close enough to these people to laugh at their vanities before hearing, beneath promises of liberation, the demand that someone else surrender the right to exist on his own terms. That demand gives the novel’s title its spiritual weight and draws us toward the above passage from Luke that Dostoevsky places before the narrative. Beside the lake into which the herd has rushed, a man sits at the Savior’s feet, released from the voices that had occupied him. His quiet presence offers a first glimpse of freedom whose meaning the novel’s contending voices will struggle to comprehend.

Luke places the encounter under Christ’s authority before the herd even begins its descent. The devils ask permission, and Jesus suffers them, allowing what they cannot authorize for themselves. Their multitude has occupied a man without becoming his rightful owner. Although the preceding verses name that multitude “Legion,” Christ addresses a life whose identity survives its captivity, and the healing restores the person whom the voices have crowded out. The distinction pulses throughout Demons, where the appearance of limitless power repeatedly conceals dependence upon something borrowed. It also governs the violence of the epigraph. The swine are choked, but Luke does not say that the devils have been annihilated in the lake, nor does their departure commission human beings to purify a community through catastrophe. Our attention belongs finally to the man who has been healed. To make the precipice the passage’s center would already concede too much to those who confuse deliverance with the grandeur of destruction.

Clothing gives this restoration a bodily tenderness, while “in his right mind” describes a freedom intellectual brilliance alone cannot furnish. The man can remain in the presence of another without being consumed by it. So opens a horizon beyond the novel’s occupied selves, whose thoughts so often demand the surrender of whatever they claim to liberate. Yet the analogy requires discrimination. Luke supplies no history of wrongdoing that would justify blaming the afflicted man, whereas Dostoevsky’s characters make storied choices for which they must answer. Neither illness nor disability proves evil’s presence, and biblical devils possess a reality that ideology cannot exhaust. The novel brings spiritual captivity into view through human relations, asking what happens when a conviction receives the allegiance owed to God. Even the witnesses are implicated. Their fear before the healed man suggests how readily a community may prefer a familiar misery to a restoration that unsettles its understanding of itself.

Such understanding remains precarious in the hands of Dostoevsky’s chronicler, Anton, a local observer whose affection for his acquaintances survives his exposure of their absurdities. News travels through the province more quickly than anyone can comprehend it, gathering motives as it passes from mouth to mouth. An intimate disclosure seemingly becomes public property before its speaker has finished speaking. Anton notices these appropriations with a sharpness that never quite excuses him from them, especially when another person’s distress inconveniences his own desires. His eagerness to meet Lizaveta Nikolaevna, the wealthy young woman more affectionately known as Liza, quietly enters his account of other people’s concerns. Liza’s proposed compilation of Russian life makes this difficulty explicit when Ivan Shatov, a former student searching for a faith he can call his own, observes that the selection of facts will indicate their meaning. Demons proceeds under the same difficulty, arranging lives whose unfinished claims keep exceeding the arrangement. We must listen through a teller whose limitations belong to the world he describes, without imagining that our awareness of them places us beyond it. A convincing account may leave its subject unheard, just as an unreliable speaker may suddenly recognize something his listener has refused to see. Reading becomes an exercise in the attention the town so often withholds from its inhabitants, and our impatience to arrive at a verdict begins to resemble theirs.

Nikolai Stavrogin, the enigmatic son of a wealthy local widow, becomes the disturbing center of a book initially conceived as a political polemic. The introduction traces its emergence from Dostoevsky’s engagement with the revolutionary organizer Sergei Nechaev, yet the novelist’s admission that he might once have become a Nechaevist gives the inquiry an inward exposure, which helps explain why the finished work rubs up against so much beyond its originating argument. As Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of embodied ideas suggests, a conviction changes when someone must speak it to a person whose recognition he needs. Translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky thus preserve the resulting interference between thought and its speaker. A qualification betrays the appetite it was meant to conceal, while a French phrase protects cultivated feeling from the indignity of sounding ordinary.

Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, a liberal intellectual and Stavrogin’s former tutor, has cultivated that demand into a way of life. His scholarship matters chiefly as an occupation he has magnificently postponed, while the possibility that nobody has been persecuting him threatens an essential distinction. His belief in God follows a related arrangement. “I believe as in a being who is conscious of himself in me,” he declares, giving the divine somewhere suitably cultivated to become interesting. Such inwardness reaches painfully outward when he wakes the young Stavrogin to pour out his grievances, burdening his pupil with a care he owes the child. Meanwhile his actual son, Pyotr, grows up elsewhere. One boy receives his helplessness and another his absence, leaving both to reckon with what the father has mistaken for sensibility. Dostoevsky allows this inheritance its weight without making it a destiny. Pyotr will answer for his own conduct, even as his father remains answerable for a neglect that eloquence has made easier to endure. Their connection unsettles the comfortable division between a cultivated generation and the barbarism of its successors. The younger man discovers what can be done with the evasions the elder has taught himself to admire.

Varvara Petrovna, Stavrogin’s mother and Stepan’s patron, finances this helplessness with a devotion whose generosity grows inseparable from its demands. “She invented him, and she was the first to believe in her invention,” narrator Anton observes, locating within affection an ambition to create its object. Stepan’s independent life consequently offends Varvara whenever it departs from the person she has cherished into existence. Yet her concern for his humiliation prevents an easy verdict, and Dostoevsky makes us feel the tenderness through which domination finds its most persuasive language. The difficulty expands around her young ward Darya Pavlovna, a.k.a. Dasha, when she proposes the young woman’s marriage to the fifty-three-year-old Stepan. “So, you consent! Wait, don’t speak,” Varvara announces, allowing consent precisely the silence her design requires. Stepan contributes his fear of marrying “someone else’s sins,” and Dasha disappears beneath the uses others have prepared for her. A room furnished with such exquisite intentions has somehow acquired its lock on the outside.

Stepan’s defense of beauty carries more conviction than this conduct might suggest, which makes its inadequacy harder to dismiss. His insistence that Pushkin stands above boots preserves something a crude worship of utility would destroy. Still, aesthetic discrimination cannot settle the accusation concerning Fedka, his former serf and now an escaped convict, whose life has entered the accounting of a gambling debt. The discussion brings an actual person into a sensibility accustomed to admiring humanity from a comfortable distance. When Stepan invokes the shaking of dust from his feet and adds a curse, sacred language becomes a stage direction for wounded importance. The Gospel gesture concerns the rejection of Christ’s messengers, a commission his injured vanity has quietly awarded itself. The comedy begins to hurt because the distinction he defends deserves a fidelity his own life has withheld from it.

The established authorities offer little protection against this discrepancy between profession and conduct. Von Lembke, the provincial governor, treats official restraint and revolutionary agitation as mutually necessary activities, provided decent appearances can be maintained. Karmazinov, a celebrated writer, lends cultural prestige to an expectation of collapse whose consequences he can contemplate from a safe distance. Their apparent opposition conceals a shared confidence that other lives may be managed without bringing their own standing into question. Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, now a revolutionary organizer, understands this confidence well enough to make himself appear beneath it. His performed ineptitude invites listeners to enjoy their superior understanding, and that pleasure soon becomes his protection. “Those who know how to speak well, speak briefly,” he quips, explaining how verbosity can hide an intention within the audience’s exhaustion. The harmless fool they congratulate themselves on recognizing has already begun delineating the parameters of their regard.

Pyotr’s ingenuity gives dramatic force to the introduction’s observation that demons are unoriginal. Evil must borrow the goodness it cannot originate, making fellowship serve control and the desire for justice furnish excuses for cruelty. Even its promise of emancipation depends upon capacities it intends to enslave. Stepan’s suggestion that truth requires an admixture of falsehood supplies his son with an inheritance more useful than paternal care. The lie may now announce itself as truth’s necessary preparation, postponing indefinitely the moment when its own authority must end. Dostoevsky lets this corruption enter speech so intimately that accuracy itself offers no guarantee of innocence. A fact can be perfectly correct while serving an intention that deforms the person hearing it. Our laughter becomes precarious here. Having enjoyed Pyotr’s absurdity, we may find ourselves defending the impression he has encouraged us to take for knowledge.

Shigalyov, a revolutionary theorist in Pyotr’s circle, bolsters the same ambition. His reorganization of humanity removes the will from nine tenths of its members, whose equality will consist in an administered helplessness. Luke’s herd has entered a political program. The minority charged with securing liberation receives the privilege of deciding how little freedom everyone else can bear, while the grotesque proposals of Lyamshin, a postal clerk in the same circle, reduce troublesome human beings to quantities that may be subtracted. Their reasoning regards the creature’s resistance as a flaw in the design, then discovers in that resistance a justification for further force. Its paradise has a tree whose roots have been cut to prevent disobedience. Against this completed world, the man seated at Jesus’s feet retains the disturbing particularity of someone who has received his life back without becoming an instrument of mundane supremacy.

Stavrogin lends these competing salvations a magnetism that belief alone cannot explain. His elegance unsettles the expectation that depravity will announce itself through a repellent surface, and the province’s fascination enlarges him beyond the measure of a person. Shatov, once his ideological disciple, still inhabits a conviction its former teacher can regard with a disconcerting distance. A disciple may spend years struggling within words their speaker has already abandoned, until the unequal investment becomes a wound argument cannot close. Stavrogin’s self-control intensifies this authority because even restraint seems to place him beyond ordinary dependence. Yet a will can govern its impulses while remaining captive to the privilege it claims over others. His apparent abundance of possibility keeps an accountable life at a distance. To become one person would mean relinquishing the intoxication of forever being otherwise. The soul becomes an observatory whose telescopes point inward, mistaking another conscience’s plea for a newly discovered star. The chapter title “The Wise Serpent” gives this inward sovereignty a scriptural edge. Christ joins “wise as serpents” to “harmless as doves” in Matthew 10:16, keeping discernment answerable to the life it encounters. The province admires a cunning released from that obligation, until intelligence itself appears to confer the right to decide whose suffering matters. Stavrogin’s brilliance can illuminate an argument without ever consenting to live within its light.

Nietzsche gives such solitude an unexpected interruption when Zarathustra, tracing his shadow with a stick, is startled because “beside his own shadow he saw another shadow.” The visitor is the soothsayer of weariness, and his arrival makes thinking alone suddenly questionable: a borrowed conviction may have been holding the stick all along. Dostoevsky follows this disturbance into the obligations influence has concealed, where a supposedly original will discovers itself repeating somebody else’s sentence. Shatov seeks release through an object too immense to abandon him. “God is the synthetic person of the whole nation,” he declares, making national belonging answer a religious hunger that humiliation has left exposed. When Stavrogin detects God’s reduction to an attribute of nationality, Shatov insists that he is raising the nation to God. The change of direction leaves the divine answerable to a people’s need for an absolute image of itself.

Shatov’s suffering makes his certainty understandable without securing its truth. His account of America reveals how ingeniously experience can be rearranged to protect an ideal, while the nation promises a belonging his borrowed convictions have denied him. His appropriation of “rivers of living water” brings the theological danger into focus. The Gospel identifies that water with the Spirit received by believers in Jesus, whereas Shatov transfers its source to national vitality. Scriptural radiance survives a change of allegiance that Luke’s narrative quietly resists. The restored man desires the presence of the Savior his frightened community asks to leave, and healing reaches an inhabitant without becoming the possession of his country. Shatov’s recollection of Stavrogin’s anti-Catholic teaching similarly condemns the surrender of Christ to earthly dominion, although his own national divinity threatens to reproduce that surrender. The charge belongs to a character’s polemic, whose force cannot excuse it from the scrutiny it directs elsewhere.

The remembered claim that Stavrogin would choose Christ even if mathematical proof placed truth outside him exposes a more intimate danger. Its devotion is moving because attachment appears willing to bear the cost of certainty, yet the separation it imagines cannot finally govern faith. Christ’s identification with truth gives us reason to question a proof that would divide them. The hypothetical discloses the speaker’s need while leaving open whether his love will accept an obligation beyond the beauty of its own declaration. Kirillov, an engineer preoccupied with human divinity, carries this struggle into the will itself. “He who overcomes pain and fear will himself become God,” he says, assigning the creature the impossible task of proving its independence from the conditions of its existence. His distinction between the “man-god” and the “God-man” reverses salvation’s direction. In the incarnation, God gives himself to humanity, while Kirillov’s apotheosis must be mass-produced by those who need it to be true. This burdens freedom with a demonstration no ordinary life can complete. Whatever depends upon another has become suspect before it can be loved, and fear must be treated as an accusation against existence itself. The man who would release humanity consequently struggles to accept the vulnerability through which anyone might reach him. His abstraction grows merciless at precisely the point where his conduct can be so tender.

Yet Kirillov’s delight in a leaf keeps his argument from enclosing him. A yellow leaf edged with decay remains good, and his childhood memory of imagining a green one preserves a tenderness no assertion of sovereignty can explain. Asked whether he speaks allegorically, he insists upon the leaf itself. For an instant the created thing is relieved of having to justify a system, its thin surface bearing a reality the surrounding metaphysics can scarcely touch. His affirmation falters when actual suffering enters the discussion, since the world’s beauty cannot absolve cruelty committed within it. Otherwise the injured person would have to accept the injury as a necessary embellishment of someone else’s vision. Still, Kirillov lights an icon lamp because an old woman wants it lit, responding to a need his doctrine has given him little reason to honor. Such attentiveness opens a narrow passage through the machinery of his thought, where an uncommanded goodness waits for the will to recognize what it has received.

Marya Timofeevna, an impoverished woman with a physical disability, brings a less orderly perception into the province’s cultivated arrangements. Her identification of God with nature gathers Russian earth into imagery associated with the Mother of God, allowing the ground itself to receive a mourner’s grief. Its beauty makes the confusion easier to welcome. Creation can bear divine meaning without becoming its Creator, and Mary’s place in the incarnation does not make the earth identical with her. Yet to dismiss Marya along with her errors would repeat the respectable world’s refusal to hear anyone it has already classified. Her vulnerability leaves her exposed to people whose distortions possess the advantage of impeccable manners, even as her troubled perception detects something their polished appearances conceal. Dostoevsky asks us to remain with this uncomfortable difference between theological discernment and the wish to be rid of a difficult person. Patient attention can acknowledge her confusion without treating her existence as an inconvenience to the truth.

Such attention acquires a searching severity in “At Tikhon’s,” the suppressed chapter in which Stavrogin encounters the eponymous retired bishop. Tikhon hears how a disclosure may continue concealment through the very form that promises revelation. Whoever arranges his own disgrace can retain a terrible authority over its reception, preferring condemnation when it confirms an identity he has already prepared. Mercy threatens that certainty because a changed life would require actions whose meaning he cannot determine in advance. Tikhon’s attention to the writing’s aesthetic character consequently reaches beyond literary judgment into what its author expects another person to become while reading it. Even remorse may keep the guilty self enthroned, making those it has harmed supply the material for its spiritual distinction. Their suffering retains claims no exquisite account of guilt can satisfy. Repentance begins to loosen this possession when the offender consents to a reality his interpretation cannot consume, accepting the possibility that love might require an ordinary duty rather than a magnificent verdict upon himself. Tikhon leaves open the possibility of a future no longer organized around the spectacle of guilt. To accept it would mean surrendering the distinction misery has conferred, along with the imagined right to decide that forgiveness can have nothing further to say. The smallest act of amendment may ask more of pride than the most eloquent confession, because it must be performed among people who remain free to answer.

Sofya Matveyevna, an itinerant seller of religious books, brings that ordinariness into Stepan’s reach. A Gospel costs thirty-five kopecks, and after so much expenditure of cultural importance its modest price feels almost indecent. Stepan has not read the book for at least three decades, allowing his acquaintance with other people’s interpretations to spare him the disturbance of its words. Sofya’s care makes their encounter exceed a transaction, although his concern with her delivery and his own preparedness allows the performer to interfere with the emerging listener. The movement toward attention remains halting enough to be credible. “I want to recall it literally. I need it literally,” he insists when requesting Luke’s passage, and the insistence carries a hunger that cultural familiarity has ceased to feed. He needs words capable of arriving from beyond the elaborate persona he has persuaded others to maintain. For once, another voice may enter without being assigned a part in his performance. She gives Stepan room to be embarrassed without making that embarrassment the price of her kindness. The man Varvara has sustained through an elaborate image of him encounters someone willing to attend to what he needs. Her unassuming company permits a gratitude that has no audience to impress and no invention to defend.

Revelation’s address to Laodicea carries this newly urgent reading into a painful recognition of need. A prosperous church claims to “have need of nothing,” while Christ reveals its nakedness and counsels it to receive “white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed” (Revelation 3:17–18). Luke’s recovered man begins to emerge through the language of a rebuke addressed to people convinced that they already possess what they need. Stepan remains tempted to make the words illuminate somebody else’s failure, although their demand for repentance reaches the listener first. Religious confidence offers no exemption from that address. Sofya’s practical concern gives its clothing a material weight the surrounding rhetoric cannot dissolve. The person who needs care has a body, and love must remain where the inconvenience begins, without requiring that its presence become memorable. The Gospel finds its way into this small commerce of attention through a woman whose importance depends so little upon being noticed.

“I never spoke for the truth, but only for myself,” Stepan admits, acknowledging a corruption that accurate words have been powerless to prevent. His recognition unsettles our pleasure in recognizing him, since sound judgment can serve our wish to appear sound. The interpretation of Luke acquires a corresponding force when accusation finally includes its speaker. Where Dostoevsky’s polemical account identifies the herd with the Nechaevs, Stepan places himself at its head, allowing a changed pronoun to breach the architecture of exemption. His hope for a healed Russia becomes credible insofar as he ceases locating its sickness exclusively elsewhere. The national analogy must nevertheless remain answerable to the Gospel, which authorizes no country to secure its deliverance through the destruction of selected inhabitants. The lake cannot be allowed to eclipse the Savior. Stepan’s words move us toward the seated man only while they acknowledge the need of the man who speaks them.

Pevear and Volokhonsky let us hear these changes of scale without smoothing away the voices through which they occur. A salon’s humiliation exposes an appetite a political program enlarges, while a single leaf arrests a metaphysics intent upon refashioning humanity. The comedy never becomes safely separable from dread because the person we have laughed at can return with a need our laughter cannot answer. I come back to Luke’s lake carrying that unfinished claim. The novel’s most imposing wills would purchase freedom by determining what a life must surrender, but the man at Jesus’s feet has received his life back from a power he did not invent. His stillness has room for a future the witnesses’ fear cannot cancel. Beyond the herd’s terrible momentum, he remains clothed in a mercy that leaves him human, his face at last available to another’s sight. Freedom begins to breathe where the soul no longer has to become its own creator in order to consent to being alive.

Donda Retrieved: Inquiry Into a Disappearance (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

A film can survive its disappearance. Preserved in a collection, it continues to occupy physical space while its place in cultural memory contracts to an illegible point. This peculiar interval, where existence persists without recognition, gives Stefano Miraglia’s Donda Retrieved: Inquiry Into a Disappearance its intellectual urgency. The inquiry began in 2019 with a print of Ellis Donda’s Engel und Puppe held by the Collectif Jeune Cinéma in Paris, a surviving work whose author had become difficult to locate. With Cecilia Ermini’s assistance, Miraglia found the filmmaker and began reconstructing the dispersed circumstances of his practice. Published in 2026, following Donda’s death in November 2023, the resulting volume makes recovery itself available for critical examination. What emerges exceeds the satisfaction of returning a neglected name to circulation. A name has to find its way through the institutions that authorize it, while an image requires someone capable of receiving its address. Between those contingencies, a life can become a locked room whose key remains in plain sight, catalogued under another word.

Born in Terzo d’Aquileia in 1947, Donda entered intellectual life through the sociology faculty at Trento, participating in the upheavals of 1967–68 before graduating in 1971. His early research on the dance halls of Friuli Venezia Giulia’s Case del Popolo already attended to the traffic between bodily experience and collective organization. A dance floor supplies an especially suggestive beginning for an artist whose later work repeatedly asks how a body acquires meaning within an arranged space. Approached through Lacan, this sociological attention opens onto the subject’s dependence on a symbolic field already in operation before any individual reckons it. The customs of a community establish positions from which one may become recognizable, even as desire troubles the adequacy of those positions. Donda’s subsequent passage into cinema carries this tension with it. The camera enters a social world that has already staged its inhabitants, and the filmmaker must decide what to do with the residue that their assigned roles cannot accommodate.

His training at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, completed in 1974 under Roberto Rossellini’s leadership, sharpened the problem into a practical struggle over education and production. Miraglia’s account brings the period’s pedagogical ferment into focus alongside the disenchantment it generated. Freedom from established procedures could expose students to a bewildering absence of coherence, and Donda’s efforts to organize a group of committed cinephiles suggest an attempt to give purpose to that uncertainty. Rossellini’s presence (or lack thereof, as he was famously never around) mattered without determining the contours of the younger filmmaker’s independence. The affinities with Visconti, and especially with Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, belong to a formation that continued through Rome’s Filmstudio and the journal Fiction, which Donda co-founded. His encounters with Jacques Lacan in Paris, together with his work translating the psychoanalyst, gave a more exact vocabulary to questions already inhabiting his practice. Across these associations, commitment assumes the form of a difficult apprenticeship in divided authority. One inherits a language from the master and discovers, in using it, that the master cannot guarantee what it will mean.

This division animates Engel und Puppe (Angel and Doll, 1974), his graduation film, presented at Oberhausen the following year. Known within the Centro Sperimentale’s records as La Modistin, it already possesses the double existence that would later complicate the identification of his work. Passages from Rilke’s Duino Elegies enter a deliberately constructed cinematic encounter involving the French poet Jacqueline Risset and the young avant-garde performer Rossella Or, photographed by Tonino Nardi. Moving images meet stillness, and theatrical performance exposes the uncertain border between a person and the form through which that person appears. The film’s multilingual texture continually alters the coordinates of reception. Friulian and Italian occupy one set of relations; French and German extend the disturbance. Translation becomes an internal force of influence, preventing a single linguistic perspective from establishing sovereign possession of the image. Even the inscription of Jean-Luc Godard’s name on a school locker folds affiliation into the filmed environment, giving cinematic ancestry a strangely provisional lodging. The school furnishes a cupboard for the name of an insurgent, and the image quietly asks who has been entrusted with the key.

The angel and the doll offer a particularly fertile entrance into Lacan’s account of the Imaginary, where an image of coherence helps organize an experience that remains divided. Read in these terms, Rilke’s figures tease cracks in the fantasy of an integrated human presence: transcendence beckons from one direction, fabricated completeness from another. Donda’s concern with the productive machinery of cinema keeps that fantasy attached to its material conditions. An image has been made, and its apparent autonomy depends on arrangements that spectators are usually encouraged to forget. Distinctions between the eye and the gaze further unsettle the viewer’s authority. Seeing takes place within a visual field whose effects exceed conscious control, for the gaze names a disturbance in our presumed mastery of that field. Donda’s exposed constructions invite such a reading. The spectator’s position becomes available for interrogation alongside the figures on screen. A doll has acquired the dignity of a metaphysical problem, while the person contemplating it discovers a seam running through the apparatus of contemplation.

His educational work gives this formal restlessness a social consequence. Through the Venice Biennale’s decentralization initiatives, Donda participated in filmmaking workshops with schoolchildren in Mirano in 1976. The resulting projects, including Come cinema and Non vado a scuola, located cinematic invention inside a struggle over who could produce an image and under what conditions. Here the relation between psychoanalysis and pedagogy becomes especially delicate. An adult can offer access to a medium while also imposing the terms through which the child’s contribution will count. Donda’s experiments invite us to consider how instruction might loosen that enclosure. The classroom contains a surplus of possible utterances, and the teacher’s task includes making room for an expression that exceeds the lesson’s anticipated result. A child behind a camera introduces a small insurrection into the distribution of visibility. The world, accustomed to assigning that child a place within its picture, must endure a moment in which the picture is being made from elsewhere.

Miraglia’s essay, The Critical Film-Work of Ellis Donda: CSC, La Biennale, RAI 1974–1986, supplies the institutional articulation of this journey. Its value lies partly in allowing the aesthetic questions to remain entangled with the circumstances of their production. Donda’s transition into Italian public broadcasting in the early 1980s places a singular artistic intelligence within an apparatus designed to address a broad public. Parigi ’50: L’esistenza immaginata (1981), co-directed with Ruggero Guarini, revisits the intellectual life of postwar Paris and the existentialist debates surrounding Jean-Paul Sartre. Its interview with Roland Barthes, identified by the researchers as his last, gives the documentary a further temporal complication. A voice recorded for an encounter with the present becomes evidence of a presence that the future will receive differently. Recording preserves words along with a bodily insistence that their transcription cannot fully convey. Across the documentary’s historical distance, the voice retains a minute sovereignty, an inflection that refuses to become entirely obedient to the knowledge subsequently assembled around it.

Il corpo rubato (The Stolen Body, 1982), produced for RAI’s Micromega, makes the relation between interpretation and possession more explicit through its treatment of psychoanalysis and suggestion. The title places an accusation inside the promise of explanation. Whoever claims to know the body may also claim the right to speak on its behalf. Lacan’s divided subject offers a way of reading this danger without imagining that an untouched self waits beneath every imposed description. Language participates in the constitution of the subject, and the terms through which a person becomes intelligible can also estrange that person from lived experience. Donda’s analytical attention thus concerns the authority exercised in the act of making sense. His work across radio and performance extends the question into other arrangements of presence. Patmos (1983) relocates it within the gallery, and the staging of Spinoza’s Praefatio (1984) gives it a theatrical setting. In his writing, Il segno e il corpo di Zorro (1980) and Metafore di una visione (1983) pursue neighboring investigations, while Invocazione (1986) draws autobiography toward poetry. The movement between media becomes a sustained inquiry into the price a presence pays for receiving a form.

That inquiry acquires an especially resonant literary interlocutor in Altre epifanie (Other Epiphanies, 1985), co-written with Luciana Sacchetti, who also performed in the film. Made for RAI’s Emilia-Romagna regional service and presented at Salsomaggiore in 1986, the film brings Joyce’s epiphanies into contemporary locations, carrying the writer’s exile and his love for Nora across unfamiliar arrangements of space. Joyce also provides a consequential connection to Lacan’s later thinking about the sinthome: a singular manner of binding experience through an invention whose value need not depend on deciphering a concealed message. Within this review’s interpretive frame, Donda’s transformations of literary material can be approached as experiments in sustaining an encounter through form. The epiphany becomes a local alteration in the relation between an utterance and its surroundings. Something acquires an intensity that explanation cannot exhaust. Set beside Engel und Puppe, the film suggests a conversation between writers whose trajectories passed through the Adriatic borderlands, each received by a cinema willing to disturb the apparent security of literary inheritance. A recording retained by Sacchetti eventually enabled Altre epifanie to return from obscurity, giving its history an almost unbearably concrete hinge: the continued availability of an epiphany depended on someone keeping a copy.

The unpublished Pier Paolo Pasolini: The Language, the Land, included in the volume as an unrealized multimedia performance project, brings the issue of inheritance into sharper political focus. Its conjunction of theatrical guidance with philosophical argument locates myth within the labor of construction. A myth must acquire a form through which it can act upon the world, and that making exposes the contingencies concealed by any claim to an immaculate origin. The relation between language and land becomes especially charged when considered through Lacanian desire. The imagined homeland can promise a coincidence between the speaking subject and the place that would finally recognize it, yet the terms of recognition have already introduced a distance. Donda’s attention to performance allows us to read the project as an inquiry into how such promises are produced. The stage gives longing a structure without resolving its contradiction. Beneath the dream of belonging, language continues its excavation, opening a hollow in the very ground asked to certify identity. Miraglia’s decision to reproduce the project grants this unfinished thinking a renewed occasion for encounter while preserving the distinction between a proposed work and a realized performance.

The volume’s title nevertheless demands that these interpretations remain accountable to the circumstances of Donda’s withdrawal. During their first meeting in Trieste in September 2019, he told Miraglia that a deterioration in his mental health had contributed to his retreat from public cultural life in the late 1980s. That testimony places a limit on the critic’s freedom to turn disappearance into an alluring aesthetic gesture. So must we question the demand for complete intelligibility, including the critic’s own desire to make a life answer to a theory. Miraglia’s research locates additional stresses in the difficulty of Donda’s expressive style and the incomplete passage of his work into digital circulation. Inconsistent attribution compounded the problem, as names were misspelled, and works survived under titles that obscured their connections. Such administrative details govern the routes by which recognition can occur. A life’s public identity depends, at vulnerable points, on a stranger correctly copying a word; the symbolic order occasionally reveals its authority through the almost absurdly modest instrument of a filing error.

Withdrawal from public prominence also left room for a continuing pedagogical practice. Come cinema 2, presented at Pesaro in 2003, emerged from Donda’s work in schools, followed by Esercizi di cinema in 2007. Conceived with the students and teachers of Palmanova’s middle school from fragments of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, the latter returns to the classroom through the principle of variation. The educational trajectory gives the career a continuity that the language of disappearance might otherwise conceal. Someone who had become difficult for cultural institutions to locate remained involved in helping others acquire the means to see. In this late phase, Donda’s analytical rigor finds an intimate application. Teaching becomes a way of accompanying the emergence of another person’s expression without claiming advance knowledge of its destination.

Miraglia’s closing Ellis Donda Archive: A Preliminary Inventory brings the inquiry back to the material obligations from which it began. The word “preliminary” bears much of the volume’s critical honesty. This is a recovery that continues to require work, and the book’s achievement includes making that incompletion legible. Its limit is also productive. An initial inventory cannot supply comprehensive access to the oeuvre, yet it establishes the conditions under which more adequate judgments may become possible. The Lacanian wish to avoid the fantasy of total knowledge finds a practical counterpart in this provisional form. Archival care therefore possesses a peculiar double discipline. It requires accuracy in the service of an encounter whose consequences remain unknown. The hand that labels the container must keep steady even while the history inside it is preparing to move.

From here, the book opens onto a possibility more disquieting than posthumous recognition. Donda’s return to the classroom suggests that transmission reaches its fullest significance when the recipient acquires the freedom to depart from the intention of the giver. The same freedom may belong to an archive. We preserve a work so that it can enter relations its author never sanctioned, and so that a person still unborn may find a use for it that our own interpretive systems cannot authorize. Lacanian attention to the subject’s division makes such an inheritance conceivable without requiring fidelity to become resemblance. To give something a future entails surrendering jurisdiction over what it will mean. Donda’s dispersed work, painstakingly made available again, leaves us before that difficult generosity. Somewhere beyond the inventory, a child turns the camera toward a door the teacher had never noticed. What we owe the dead may include the material freedom to cease resembling them, a future that has learned, from our careful keeping, how to disobey us.

A Tragicomedy of Defiance: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

| Tyran Grillo

Published in 1864, Notes from Underground enters the nineteenth century through a wound in its confidence. Russia’s arguments over human emancipation had become arguments over the human creature itself, over whether an enlightened understanding of self-interest could make goodness inevitable. Dostoevsky places a solitary voice inside that promise and allows it to gnaw through the floor. The result anticipates the estrangement of later modernist fiction and the problems existentialism would make its own, yet its historical force remains inseparable from its peculiar intimacy. The novel makes consciousness a place where the future can be refused before it arrives. Its speaker possesses enough intelligence to expose the arrogance of a system and enough vanity to turn that exposure into an excuse for tormenting others. These capacities occupy the same cramped body. Their coexistence gives the book its terrible vitality.

Even its chronology refuses the reassurance of a straight line. The first part presents the underground man at forty, elaborating the convictions with which he has upholstered his seclusion. The second, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” returns to his life at twenty-four. We encounter the philosophy before the experiences against which it has hardened, then discover how much flesh has been concealed inside its abstractions. This reversal changes the meaning of what we have already read. Arguments that initially resemble a defense of human freedom acquire the odor of an alibi, while episodes of humiliation expose the needs that theory has learned to disguise. His earlier life never becomes a simple explanation of his later consciousness, since the older man retains control of the telling and continues to dispute his own evidence. Memory enters stage left under escort. The book’s two halves form a struggle over interpretation in which a life keeps escaping the conclusions imposed upon it. The philosopher has delivered his speech. Now someone must pay for it.

“I am a sick man…I am a wicked man.” Between those declarations, the narrative opens its cynical caesura. Sickness might solicit care, whereas wickedness seems to forbid it, and the speaker cannot resist arranging both possibilities before us. Translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky preserve the nervous immediacy of a voice that has scarcely announced itself before beginning to revise the announcement. The man believes his liver is diseased, although he admits uncertainty about what ails him. His refusal to consult a doctor becomes an act of spite whose only injured party is himself. Already the comedy has begun its patient work upon our sympathy. Who is supposed to suffer from this magnificent refusal? The doctors will survive it. He knows this and insists upon it anyway, extracting sovereignty from the prospect of getting worse. His body becomes the hostage of an argument addressed to nobody who needs to answer. In that opening hesitation, a whole existence curls around the pleasure of making its own misery ungovernable.

Pevear’s introduction cautions against mistaking the narrator’s proximity for a direct statement of Dostoevsky’s beliefs. The caution matters because this man knows how to recruit a reader. His “gentlemen” are an imagined audience whose objections he can supply before they arrive, a tribunal assembled from the educated assumptions he despises and the approval he cannot stop desiring. They often embody the rationalist confidence associated with Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and his followers, although their function exceeds any single historical party. The reader who laughs becomes another occupant of that audience, while withholding laughter merely invites speculation about the motive for our refusal. Whatever we do, he has already begun discussing us with himself. We are invited into his consciousness under conditions that make every response available for confiscation, and his apparent candor gives the confiscation its charm. He courts attention through declarations of indifference, finding in our resistance another reason to continue.

Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, published in 1863, supplied the radical imagination with a utopian fiction that became a formative text for revolutionary readers. Its rational egoism proposed that a proper understanding of self-interest could bring individual benefit into harmony with the common good. Notes from Underground attacks that assurance and parodies the confidence that human life can be reorganized according to a comprehensible plan. A proverbial crystal palace condenses the promise into an architecture of perfected satisfaction. From the underground man’s corner, its transparency looks suffocating. The danger he identifies concerns the reduction of lived existence to a calculable mechanism, an arrangement in which human flesh remains present while its freedom has been explained away. Yet the rival he installs beneath this edifice is hardly a trustworthy liberator. A grievance has seized the emergency exit and declared itself the guardian of the soul.

His strongest objection begins with the possibility that a person might knowingly choose injury. If human conduct follows enlightened advantage, what becomes of the pleasure of refusing advantage itself? “What makes you conclude that man’s wanting so necessarily needs to be corrected?” he asks in kind. The question pierces the benevolence that appoints itself curator of someone else’s desire. Wanting may embrace reason, but it can also insist upon a satisfaction that reason has no wish to recognize. To preserve this troublesome remainder, the underground man will defend even a ruinous caprice, musing to himself, if not also about himself, “I even think the best definition of man is: a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful.” The sentence is wonderfully indecent. Gratitude would acknowledge that the world has given us something worth accepting, and his creature reserves the right to spit upon the gift. Such ingratitude can expose coercion decoratively wrapped in generosity. It can also become the reflex by which every offered kindness is ruined before it has the chance to make a claim upon us. His defense of freedom carries both possibilities in its mouth.

Arithmetic therefore acquires a menace disproportionate to its innocence. Two times two is four, and the underground man hears in that result the shutting of a door. The equation becomes intolerable when its certainty is promoted into a model of existence, when the unresolved human creature is treated as a problem awaiting its final solution. A completed life would have no room left in which to want. “And though our life in this manifestation often turns out to be a bit of trash,” he goes on to say, “still it is life and not just the extraction of a square root.” Destruction consequently offers the strange consolation of reopening what completion has sealed. He suspects that people may overturn a perfectly furnished happiness simply to feel their own hands at work upon it. Here his argument finds an unsettling strength, for increased knowledge supplies no automatic moral improvement. A civilization can condemn bloodshed while becoming more accomplished at committing it. Reason may sharpen an instrument whose purpose remains atrocious. But the very force of this insight tempts him toward a disastrous privilege, allowing the refusal of reason to appear honorable regardless of what that refusal does. Freedom begins to resemble a house whose owner burns each room to prove that the keys are his.

Within that house, consciousness proliferates until movement becomes nearly impossible. Every intention produces a witness against itself. Revenge requires an injury that can be believed in long enough to justify acting upon it, yet analysis keeps dissolving the belief. A motive reveals another motive beneath it, and the excavation continues until the ground has vanished. His intelligence discovers contingency everywhere, then awards itself a distinction for being unable to stand. The “characterless being” he calls morally obligatory becomes a person whose capacity to imagine alternatives has swallowed the possibility of choosing among them. There is real anguish here, as well as a peculiar snobbery. He cannot become an insect, but even this failure can be made into evidence of exceptional depth. The confession keeps returning a dividend to the vanity that financed it. Each admission of worthlessness is quietly stamped with the assurance that an ordinary man could never understand such worthlessness so well.

The stone wall of natural necessity provides a further occasion for this divided pleasure. A direct person can accept a limit and proceed within it. The underground man continues to suffer against the wall even after conceding that he cannot break through. Acceptance would deprive him of the quarrel through which he feels himself existing. His “voluptuous standstill in inertia” is filled with imaginary reprisals, many of them exquisitely revised and none capable of exhausting the offense. Action would expose revenge to the indifference of an actual world. In fantasy, the grievance retains an obedient audience and a limitless duration. Even suffering becomes theatrical, as his reflections on toothache suggest. A cultivated sufferer can make a moan accuse everyone within hearing, turning pain into a demand that others should be inconvenienced by its existence. Dostoevsky lets us laugh at the grotesque ingenuity of this arrangement. The laughter catches unpleasantly in the throat when we recognize how easily the wish to be understood becomes a wish to punish those who have failed to understand us.

Dreams offer the apparent escape. There he can inhabit the “beautiful and lofty” without submitting his grandeur to the humiliating conditions of an encounter. His imagined heroism excuses his degradation, and the degradation gives his heroism something sufficiently immense to redeem. Ordinary decency would spoil the arrangement by asking for an action too small to furnish an epic. The dreamer needs humanity at a distance, where love can expand without meeting another person’s inconvenient will. This is one reason the novel’s collision of the sentimental aspirations of the 1840s with the rationalist programs of the 1860s feels so corrosive. Both provide languages through which a person can substitute an ideal for an encounter. The underground man inhabits their incompatibility, dressing his hunger in whichever vocabulary will make it appear most impressive.

That condition has a disquieting contemporary echo. The imagined “gentlemen” anticipate the audience before whom a person can spend an entire life preparing reactions to reactions. Social media gives such anticipation a visible apparatus, but Dostoevsky locates the deeper machinery in the desire to secure recognition while retaining control over what recognition may reveal. His protagonist rehearses exposure until it becomes another means of concealment. He can confess to vanity with such conspicuous intelligence that the confession begins to demand admiration. His contradictions draw us into a relation where we enjoy detecting the trap and continue supplying it with victims. To call him simply unreliable hardly reaches the problem. We often perceive his evasions correctly and remain susceptible to their pleasure. Reading becomes an experiment in how far insight can coexist with complicity. The man keeps asking whether we are laughing because laughter gives him both the wound he expects and the contact he requires.

Pevear and Volokhonsky make this entanglement audible through an English that permits the voice its awkward insistence. The repeated language of “profit” gives desire a commercial shadow, allowing the attack on rational self-interest to remain entangled with the terms of its opponent. “Wanting” preserves an ordinary bodily pressure that a more elevated vocabulary could too easily dignify. Even the phrase “little debauch” carries the faint absurdity of a speaker attempting to manage his disgrace through scale. These choices matter because the book’s thinking takes place inside speech that keeps slipping out of its speaker’s control. Sudden qualifications interfere with an assertion before it can settle into authority. A joke exposes an intention the narrator immediately tries to reinterpret. The intellectual violence depends upon these abrasions. In this translation, his voice retains the feeling of a thought catching on its own teeth, producing an eloquence whose injuries remain visible.

When the second part returns to the young clerk, those verbal injuries acquire a social history. “I was then already bearing the underground in my soul,” he admits. Office life makes his body a surface upon which he imagines everyone else reading contempt. Another person’s face can seem an intolerable judgment before a word has been spoken. The encounter with an officer who physically moves him aside crystallizes the misery of being treated as an obstacle without the dignity of an antagonist. His elaborate preparations to collide with the officer on equal terms make a small contact of shoulders bear the weight of an entire metaphysics of recognition. He longs to establish that his body occupies space with the same right as the body of a man whose rank makes room for it. The humor is agonizing because the desired equality has been reduced to a gesture that may scarcely register with its recipient.

His reunion with former schoolmates enlarges this collision into a social catastrophe. At Simonov’s rooms, he insists upon joining a farewell dinner for Zverkov, a man whose easy confidence he resents with the intimacy of an old scar. He needs these men to acknowledge his superiority and cannot bear to leave them to their indifference. When the dinner’s changed hour is not communicated to him, an hour of waiting becomes proof of the insignificant place he occupies in their lives. Their eventual arrival briefly relieves the loneliness that his pride has been preparing to denounce. As the evening deteriorates, he drinks and attempts to force the gathering into the drama he has rehearsed. His insulting toast brings ridicule, while his prolonged pacing gives the room a miserable pendulum. Everyone else possesses the terrible freedom to stop thinking about him. He remains, making his refusal to leave an exhibition of the dependence he wishes to conceal. Dostoevsky’s wit here works through duration. We feel how long it takes a man to discover that humiliation can continue after the spectators have become bored.

He follows them to a brothel with revenge still furnishing imaginary scenes, and there he encounters Liza, a young woman whose vulnerability offers him an audience he can command. His conversation with her borrows the moral intensity of sentimental literature. He evokes the tenderness of a family and confronts her with a future of abandonment, making himself the apparent bearer of a knowledge that might save her. Some of the feeling is sincere, which deepens the harm. A person can speak truthfully about another’s suffering while using that truth to establish power over her. He needs Liza’s tears to compensate for the contempt he has just endured, and his borrowed eloquence supplies the instrument. The human body he has defended against rational calculation is now being reorganized under the pressure of his own design. Her destination seems so clear to him that the use of fear to drive her toward it can pass for benevolence. His account of freedom has found a listener whose freedom it can temporarily forget.

Liza’s observation that he speaks from a book touches the apparatus at its most vulnerable point. She has heard the borrowed cadence beneath the apparent revelation. He resents the exposure because his authority depends upon the illusion that these words come directly from a depth inaccessible to other people. Literature has supplied him with a personality he can perform, and her remark briefly separates the performance from the person. Nevertheless, he gives her his address, extending the scene into the prospect of an actual relation. An address is a dangerous thing to offer when one’s grandeur exists mainly in speech. It translates a promise into a place where the promising person can be found. The underground man begins to dread the arrival that his own rhetoric has invited. Liza may come expecting the man who spoke to her, and encounter the room in which that man has never managed to live.

Her visit finds him in the midst of a degrading struggle with his servant Apollon, whose composure has become another provocation to his vanity. The ragged dressing gown completes an exposure that the narrator had anticipated with feverish precision. His fear of being seen as poor mixes with the more intimate fear of being seen as helpless. The rescuer has been discovered in need of rescue, and Liza responds to that need. She recognizes his unhappiness and embraces him. For a moment, something enters the scene that his rehearsal could neither produce nor prevent. Her compassion changes the relation between them without asking him to become impressive first. He sobs, then begins to perceive this reversal as another humiliation. The possibility of being loved in his misery threatens the superiority through which he has imagined love becoming bearable. Care reaches him at the very point where his elaborate defenses have made care seem an insult. To accept it would require allowing another person’s understanding to exist beyond his authority.

He answers by asserting mastery through their intimacy, then presses money into her hand in a final attempt to degrade what she has offered. The gesture tries to assign her a familiar price and restore a hierarchy in which he can remain the purchaser. Here the first part’s language of profit returns with an appalling material exactness. Having defended the human creature against every formula that would fix its value, he attempts to reduce Liza to a transaction the instant her tenderness exceeds his calculations. Her refusal of the money leaves his arithmetic stranded on the table. The banknote has become an object his interpretation cannot successfully spend. We should resist turning this refusal into a tidy victory, since the injury has already occurred and her future remains unknown. Yet it interrupts his dominion over the meaning of the encounter. He cannot make the gift into a purchase merely by deciding that it shall be one. Another will has answered him, and the answer survives without the argumentative extravagance he requires to make his own refusals feel alive.

The episode changes the philosophical stakes of the novel. A defense of unrestricted wanting has met the wanting of someone else, exposing the ease with which liberty can be made into a private license. The underground man can identify the coercion hidden in a utopian scheme while practicing an intimate version of that coercion himself. His failure complicates the defense of freedom without canceling it. Liza’s refusal gives that freedom a form he cannot bear to recognize. The later Crime and Punishment permits a path toward repentance to appear in its epilogue. Here remorse keeps getting recruited into the narrator’s performance, granting him the agitation of a conscience without requiring its obedience. Dostoevsky’s Christianity makes the encounter especially charged. In a March 1864 letter to his brother Mikhail, he complained that the censors had removed material in which he derived “the necessity of faith and Christ.” The surviving text leaves that stated intention without a fully preserved expression. Liza’s compassion nevertheless permits a Christian reading of the encounter, offering an answer to the self’s enclosure that the narrator cannot accept. Love would place him in a relation whose value depends upon neither his triumph nor his abasement. He continues to translate that possibility into a contest, then punishes the person who momentarily made the contest unnecessary.

The closing reflections on embodied life bring this failure into a stranger register. “We’re stillborn, and have long ceased to be born of living fathers,” he writes, extending his condition into an accusation against a humanity ashamed of possessing its own bodies. His “omni-men” pursue an existence purified of the vulnerability through which an actual person can be reached. Such a creature could possess every possibility while never enduring the irreversible smallness of one life. The underground man’s continual revisions enact the seduction of that fantasy. Each version of himself can be exchanged for another. But Liza has entered the record with a body he can hurt, and this body prevents his plurality from remaining an innocent intellectual abundance. His freedom of interpretation cannot travel backward into her experience and undo it. Time has preserved something his rhetoric would prefer to keep negotiable. A life has consequences even when its author refuses to settle upon a character.

Perhaps this is where the novel’s deepest unease passes beyond its humble cast of characters. His final wish to speak for everyone gives us reason to look toward the person he has struggled to make into an explanation of himself. Liza’s departure opens a space he cannot fill without further invention. We know almost nothing of the life that might await her, and the temptation to furnish it with a redemptive destiny would repeat his assumption that her existence owes us a useful meaning. Her suffering need not educate him in order to matter. Neither must she remain forever at the point where his cruelty left her. The thought becomes difficult precisely where it becomes generous, asking us to imagine a future while surrendering possession of its contents. Somewhere in that unclaimed possibility, the stillborn argument loosens its hold upon the living. There may be a room in which his voice has never sounded, where no sentence requires her to become the heroine of his unhappiness. We can grant her that room without furnishing it. The door remains hers.

Another ECM book…?

| Tyran Grillo

Dear readers,

I’ve been thinking about writing a new book about ECM. Before deciding what shape it might take, I’d like to hear from those of you who have made Between Sound and Space part of your listening lives.

My main concern is finding something new to say. There are already books that approach ECM from various perspectives, including my own, and I don’t want to repeat myself or revisit familiar ground without a compelling reason. I’d like a new project to fill a gap by exploring something you’ve wanted to read about but haven’t yet found, or to ask questions that deserve more sustained attention.

What kind of book about ECM would you like to see? Are there musicians, collaborations, or parts of the catalog you feel have received too little attention? Would you welcome more conversations with artists, stories behind particular recordings, or a closer look at how the music enters and shapes our lives? Perhaps you have something entirely different in mind.

I’d be interested in hearing what you feel is missing from the existing books. A question, a subject, or even a wish for a different approach would give me something to think about.

This is still an idea rather than a definite announcement. For now, I’m all ears, and I would be grateful for your thoughts in the comments below.

Thank you, as always, for reading and listening alongside me.

Tyran

Valeria Luiselli: Beginning Middle End (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

Memory has its own methods of excavation. What one generation buries, another may uncover without knowing what it has found. In Beginning Middle End, the soil of Sicily holds a family history whose meanings are still being negotiated: the narrator’s grandmother once worked here on an archaeological dig, and now the narrator arrives with her daughter, carrying the aftermath of a failed marriage. Elsewhere, her mother’s memories are slipping away. Between that loss and the accumulating impressions of a child approaching adolescence, she must reckon with how much of their shared past she can claim to understand. Across four generations of women, recollection moves unevenly, gathering in one life as it recedes from another. The search for origins becomes an inquiry into the stories we entrust to our children, and what happens when they begin to tell them back.

The island brings a different scale to this uncertainty. Its ruins and volcanic disturbances place the women’s lives alongside histories that exceed any family’s capacity to remember, while encounters with migrants and shopkeepers keep those histories tethered to the present. Yet the novel’s intimacy rests in smaller exchanges: a meal prepared together or the shifting allegiances of a chess game. Through these daily negotiations, the daughter begins to exert her own narrative authority. Her questions alter the direction of their travels and unsettle the mother’s account of how they came to be here. The narrator is struck by the permeability of beginnings and endings, and the inarticulability of what comes between. Belonging reaches her as “an echo of someone else’s belonging.” Later, she muses that perhaps the middle is all there is. Her answers remain as fragmentary as her current sense of self, drawing from their new yet ancient surroundings as if strands of memory could still be woven into tapestries for their becoming. As Mount Etna erupts in the backdrop, a looming threat and a point of fascination, the mood proceeds in curls and thermals.

In many ways, the novel is as much about the machinations behind its own creation as the story it seeks to create. “Why is the language of fiction writing so full of real estate?” the narrator asks early on, bringing a valid concern to our penchant for thick description. The question also exposes the possessive grammar of storytelling: to establish a setting can become a way of claiming it; to explain a daughter can become a way of occupying her future. Her resistance to journalists and critics who draw a straight, unbreakable line between her life and her words belongs to this same inquiry. “I have, of course, used slivers of my own life,” she admits, because “I wouldn’t know what else to write with.” Lived experience becomes the building material of fiction, retaining edges that can cut the hand arranging it. As she contemplates how her daughter, now ripped from the master narrative of family life, must learn to navigate the world anew, her own position as a daughter passes beneath the distorted magnifying glass of retrospection.

The novel, accordingly, unfolds in a strangely beautiful vignette style, each passage carrying its own title while flowing into the larger story taking shape in real time. Their separateness gives uncertainty room to breathe. An image can arrive before its significance becomes apparent; a thought may find its consequence several pages later. Many of these images suggest the universe and its natural phenomena, sometimes surreal and distant, because a solar system in need of a new name is forming between mother and daughter. They are trying to reinvent their lives in a home away from home, learning the pull of a changed relation without knowing where its orbit will lead. The daughter’s questions exert a force the mother can neither calculate nor keep outside the story. What appears to be fragmentation gradually reveals the gravitational field of another consciousness entering the composition.

The narrator quickly realizes that there are things she would rather withhold from her daughter, or reveal only through the lens of obfuscation, where the author’s art takes over in service of life. Invoking Greek theater, she observes that “the violence happens backstage.” Concealment becomes a problem of form, asking us to consider what an omission protects and what it allows to continue unchallenged. The daughter’s desire for a Polaroid camera, whose images eventually make themselves metaphysically known at the back of the book, establishes a nuanced reciprocity between what one observes and what one makes of the observation. Her photographs give another gaze a place within the broader account, preserving evidence she cannot entirely explain. All the while, they are caught up in moments of inconspicuous portent: a mosquito crushed on a pillow; a ladybug occupying a wall. A plume hangs in the sky in the wake of Etna’s wrath, the residue of a thought too large for the earth to contain.

Staying in the apartment of the mother’s lover, a pianist and collector of Greek and Roman classics, they begin reading through the works from which the novel’s section titles are taken. The warrior mythos of the Odyssey brings its troubled promise of return, while the destruction of the Aeneid presses loss into the service of a future homeland. Between these monumental arrangements, the unrest of Trojan Women exposes the lives left beneath heroic accomplishment. The myths hover as a constant pool beneath the action, into which the characters may dip a hand or a foot and emerge with something substantial to hold in the present moment. Reading becomes one of their daily negotiations, with the daughter’s presence changing what can be asked of an ancient text. An epic opens differently when a child is there to question the account it gives of survival.

One day, mother and daughter attend a performance of Trojan Women, with incidental music by Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou. Brief as it is, the sequence feels strangely intimate and private, reducing the novel to a single kernel of curiosity from which it seems to sprout all over again. Euripides’ tragedy, first performed in 415 BCE, attends to the captive women after Troy’s destruction, granting the aftermath of conquest its devastating duration. The scene in Luiselli’s novel is also the scene of an earthquake, shaking experience to its foundations and drawing the act of witnessing into the instability of the ground beneath it. What the spectators encounter onstage passes into their bodies.

In my earlier review of Karaindrou’s Trojan Women, I heard its choral odes as vertebrae of story and music and traced the way its related themes changed their instrumental clothing from one visage to another. Returning to those impressions through Luiselli, I find a new resonance in that fluidity. The family’s stories also acquire different bodies as they pass between women, each voice altering the weight of what it carries. Karaindrou’s chorus gathers suffering into a shared utterance, opening a space beyond the solitary narrator’s reach. Within the novel, that possibility matters acutely: the mother must find a form that can hold her anguish without requiring her daughter to become its instrument. Music lends this difficulty a tangible melodic beauty, allowing what cannot yet be articulated to enter the room.

When the pianist returns to his apartment and works his way into their lives, he creates another ripple in that water. His words also cut theirs short, however, introducing a disruption that cannot hold its own in their orbit. The room’s borrowed hospitality begins to reveal its conditions. Read alongside the narrator’s question about fiction and real estate, this disturbance makes possession painfully immediate, entangling the right to speak with the right to inhabit. As mother and daughter plan their escape, things turn inward and outward simultaneously. Their departure gives their relation room to continue, even as it requires them to leave the shelter where it has been taking shape. The road carries them toward family history while allowing the daughter’s questions to travel beyond the acoustics of someone else’s home.

The narrator wants to “write a reverse catastrophe: from the end of the world to the beginning of it; from the loss of memory to the first image of the world imprinted on a big brown eye.” As details of her lineage emerge, whether through an archaeological discovery or a shipwreck, we find places in which to fit our own. Their road trip begins returning a piece of genetic history to its origins, and the geography without becomes less important than the border crossings within. Yet the first image belongs to an eye the mother cannot see through. When the daughter picks up the proverbial pen and finishes the story, the direction of inheritance changes. Beginnings and endings take another shape through the people to whom we pass slivers of ourselves, our identities blurring in the watering eyes of humanity writ large. The mother’s longing for an origin must make room for someone else’s beginning.

The book ends with postcards and photographs, its archival images standing beside the daughter’s Polaroids. These materials extend the transfer of narrative authority into physical margins. The older photograph carries the burden of having outlived its occasion; the instant image is already separating from the moment that produced it. Neither supplies the whole life we might ask it to recover. Their incompleteness asks us to attend to the distance between evidence and invention, looking closely without converting every surface into an explanation. The daughter’s images preserve the freedom of an attention that has wandered beyond the mother’s prose. At the edge of the frame, something remains in motion, declining the stillness we have mistaken for understanding.

There is also a sonic parallel to the novel in the form of recordings made on site in Sicily and the Aeolian Islands by Charles de Montebello and Ricardo Giraldo. Alongside raw field recordings, 12 sound mixes form “constellations” between locations. A timeline follows the novel’s structure, while a separate soundscape offers its sonic environment without narration. The daughter’s postcards can be read and heard; photographs accompany videos. Whether immersing oneself underwater at Basiluzzo or in the evening ambience of Caltagirone, there is much to be felt and heard. The more one explores these places, the more they reveal the people who live and work there, whose lives intersect ephemerally to become part of the landscapes they inhabit. This is palpable in Catania’s fish market, but even in the absence of flesh, humanity can be felt in the winds of Scopello and the eruptions of Mount Etna. The assembled portrait lets the setting exceed its description, occupying the ear with pressures that have no obligation to become a plot.

That possibility returns us to the narrator’s reverse catastrophe, now turned toward a future she cannot arrange. Perhaps the daughter will one day listen to these waters and think of no one in her family. A sound her mother associated with loss may enter her life under an entirely different sign. The thought hurts precisely where love has mistaken remembrance for its only means of moving on. Beneath the sea, an unheard movement passes through stone; above it, a child is growing into the right to forget. The strands woven into the tapestry of her becoming may loosen without destroying it. An inheritance might endure most fully at the moment it ceases to point toward the person who gave it. The hand opens, allowing something loved to escape the duty of returning.

Christina Rauh Fishburne: The Bridge That Would Not Burn – A Pardonsburg Novella (Book Review)

| Tyran Grillo

In the Washington, DC, of 1880, the past has rented a room upstairs. It descends into the parlor bearing the countenance of a former Confederate soldier, and Charlotte Worthington must decide how much of its troubled eloquence she will admit into her life. Christina Rauh Fishburne’s The Bridge That Would Not Burn makes historical fiction an intimate predicament: preservation acquires a voice, then addresses a woman whose own words rarely survive her hearth. Between them, the distance separating an event from its aftermath begins to buckle. For readers today, accustomed to encountering the past as an argument already furnished with conclusions, such proximity offers a useful discomposure. We enter a room where the consequences are still taking shape. First issued in installments and now fully illustrated, this novella occupies a passage between A Pardonsburg Songbook (Sabr Tooth Tiger Press, 2026) and the as-yet-unpublished Ballad, carrying its unfinished human reckonings into a larger imaginative country.

Charlotte is someone who consigns her words to flames, pressing ink into page but never capitulating to the allure of permanence. There is a curious sovereignty in this practice. Her thoughts may exist without becoming evidence against her, and the fire grants her a privacy that the social world would scarcely know how to honor. She tolerates the hobnobbery of that world only by the skin of her teeth, enduring it for the company of her sole friend. Beneath that impatience resides the difficulty of possessing an inward life while being perpetually available for outward appraisal. Charlotte represents a consciousness trying to reserve some portion of itself from the arrangements made on its behalf. At a magic show, she is taken into new directions of self-inquiry by a diversion beyond the stage: Lieutenant Thomas Atchison, an associate of her father and the lodger upstairs, whose enigmatic presence has landed within orbit more often than she would wish. The performance lends an apt frame to an acquaintance in which attention itself becomes a questionable art.

Not long after, she encounters him reading a book in her home’s parlor, where their conversation assumes the potentially fatal tapdance of predator and prey feeling each other out. Charlotte is both intrigued and severely put off by his countenance. Her misgivings have a bodily intelligence; curiosity, meanwhile, advances with the mortifying confidence of an uninvited guest who already knows where the silver is kept. As she talks to him more, those machinations of interest begin to loosen their hold. Fishburne attends to this yielding without rendering Charlotte’s resistance foolish. The very effort of interpreting Atchison brings her into closer acquaintance with her own desires, whose obscurity may be as vexing as his. Atchison’s speech and mannerisms are just as tactile as Charlotte’s, bringing vivid color to the novella’s already-rich atmosphere. Their exchanges give thought a surface upon which it can bruise.

Little by little, Atchison picks up shards of his traumatic war experiences, turns them in his mind’s hands, and reveals them to Charlotte. His unnamed illness lends further uncertainty to a presence whose legendary past has already preceded him into the room. Yet legend is a poor vessel for the broken particularity of memory. The man Charlotte privately calls the Mysterious Irritant carries experiences that resist the finish of a well-told anecdote, and his revelations disturb the composure with which the household might otherwise accommodate him. His Confederate past gives this intimacy an uneasy historical weight. Sympathy encounters a moral stumbling block here: suffering may invite tenderness while leaving the cause in whose service it was endured answerable to judgment. Atchison can thus be read as an embodiment of history’s troublesome persistence within private affection. Through him, the old war reaches into Charlotte’s present, asking for a response she cannot borrow from the etiquette of the parlor.

Some parts of her hold on to indifference, while others fling themselves into surrender. At one point, we are told, “She tried to read his face, but she never did have an eye or ear for other languages.” The remark catches the strangeness of an intimacy conducted in a tongue neither participant can confidently translate. As Charlotte finds herself knee-deeper in the muck of social propriety, especially during a pivotal Christmas party, the sheer, overwhelming familiarity of her life grows into a massive entity of ennui that threatens to consume her. One imagines its enormous body folded impossibly into the room, feeding upon every gesture that has been performed before. When she shares a dance with Atchison, that life takes on a newness she had previously caught only in glimpses. The movement affords her a momentary experience of possibility, though the question of what that possibility will cost remains suspended between them.

With multiple potential suitors in view, Charlotte has a war of her own to wage across the battlefield of her stubborn heart. Her eventual verbal showdown with Atchison takes on a Bennet-Darcy-esque tit for tat, although the pleasure of their antagonism rests upon more than verbal agility. Each risks allowing the other’s interpretation to become authoritative. Charlotte’s tenacity protects her against that surrender even as it complicates her pursuit of understanding. Emotions continue to stew within as divisions take shape without, until a series of dramatic events, the rollercoaster of which I will leave for the reader to ride, changes the game significantly for both parties and beyond. The widening consequences prevent their courtship, if courtship it is, from becoming a sealed chamber whose occupants can mistake their feelings for the whole world.

The chimney sweep girl accused of stealing from the Worthington home is especially consequential to that widening. Her precarious place beside Charlotte’s more sheltered uncertainty brings questions of credibility into the same house as questions of desire. Who receives the leisure of being furtive? Whose obscurity becomes grounds for accusation? Such disparities lend the historical setting a pressure that readers today can readily recognize, particularly when reputation is allowed to stand in for knowledge. As Charlotte seeks to untangle secrets in the shadows of the world she thought she knew, she begins to realize her place in it. Troubles gather there with arms coiled and ready to strike, serpents inhabiting the dark recesses of an accustomed dwelling. The vagaries of human folly, in some of its most wicked and deceptive forms, leave us wondering what might have been. That speculation also exposes how much of anyone’s life depends upon the stories others have the power to make credible.

Fishburne’s gift for language seems almost to have arrived from another time. Her words follow the discipline of a fine recipe, balancing umami and proper mouthfeel with the utmost attention to the reader’s palate. The pleasure has substance: the texture of a phrase can make an inward hesitation perceptible before even its speaker has understood it. Historical fiction acquires its relevance through just such acts of attention, restoring uncertainty to lives that hindsight is forever threatening to simplify. Charlotte’s burning pages offer a final, stranger consideration. We ask the past to yield its testimony, yet she claims the right to withdraw hers; her little furnace unsettles our appetite for possession. Perhaps a bridge that would not burn must bear something beyond the weight of remembrance. It might carry the permission to cease repeating what has been inherited, leading toward a country whose absence from every map is its first promise: a future in which our descendants owe us nothing.

Paul Griffiths: let me tell you / let me go on

| Tyran Grillo

“She is like the rest of us; we all have no more than the words that come to us in the play.
We go on with these words. We have to.”

In let me tell you, Paul Griffiths gives Ophelia what Hamlet scarcely allows: a childhood, a family, and a love whose end we already know. He makes this life from the 481 distinct words Shakespeare allotted her. Whereas Hamlet can ask whether to be, Ophelia is given “I shall obey” and must discover whether its “I” can survive the command. What sounds like literary engineering becomes the intimate difficulty of making a life in language inherited from others. A word first spoken in obedience returns as doubt. A flower that delights a child already carries an omen for the reader. Nothing is added to her vocabulary, yet a person takes shape within it.

Memory obeys no firmer rule. Rosemary is for remembrance, but to remember here is also to re-member, to gather a semblance of self from words that once belonged to other people. Ophelia cannot place her upbringing beside its telling and decide where one gives way to the other. She has only the events as they come to her now, through words spoken before and after them. Each return changes what those words can hold, and with them the person who speaks.

This New York Review Books edition pairs the novel with let me go on. Beyond the ending Shakespeare gave her, Ophelia enters a fantastical realm among figures from his other plays. An exit becomes an entrance, and death fails to settle the final scene. If the first book asks how much of a life a limited language can hold, the second asks what becomes of that life when even its ending gives way. Going on offers no simple freedom. She carries the voices that formed her into each encounter, where new voices may yet remake her.

The care and wit of these books deserve more than praise for an ingenious rule. To describe them while spending words Ophelia was never given would leave the wager untested. And so, let the register shift now…

The King rises. His play is brief; the words are not. His command would have the daughter dead and gone, but the lady hath more than an end. A home is made, and a lord and a brother have breath there. The play denied them this day, but what was meant as nothing becomes something. We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

A lord is here, and a brother. The daughter would have the lord with love in his heart. “Do you doubt that?” Indeed. Memory is no watchman of what was true. What the mind would keep as true may be false, but what it would call false hath a sweet fashion. The home was there, but no words will restore it as it was. The daughter cannot ask a day to tell what it meant.

A lady will sing, and then be still. The daughter will mark a tongue, a breath, a countenance, but what the lady would keep in the heart is not given to speech. Love is there. The lord hath a merry show for the brother and daughter, but the show hath more than a lesson in it. What the eye would mark is not all that the heart would know. The lady is gone, then here again. What is held without honour will not come again as it was.

There is a mountain with white snow, and flowers on the ground. Here beauty is given a day without an end. Rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, rue for grace. In the arm the flowers are sweet, but they have the cold ground in them. The daughter with flowers is not the daughter that will tell of them. No key will restore that day. Beauty hath better commerce with what is gone than with what is held. 

Madam hath words that make the daughter believe, then doubt what the heart did believe. Many have affection for the daughter. The lord hath no say in this. Is it love to make a heart believe what is false? Deceived then, it is deceived again in remembrance. The brother hath love for Madam. The daughter would have the lady gone. To him there is love. To the daughter, doubt. At home the two are not of a mind. What was denied is more than what Madam will tell.

Hamlet hath affection for the daughter, and love and fear are there for him. He goes, then is here again. His words are an oath and an affrighted show. The daughter would mark them and doubt what they meant. The lord, the brother, Hamlet: all would have the daughter obey. No lord could know what the daughter would think when the play is still. A command is given, but the heart does not obey it. Love is here. No vows will keep it as it was.

There is a wish to God. Where is the good lord when heaven hath no words? The pansies are gone, and memory cannot make them again. The daughter is gone. Hamlet does not come. The lord and brother weep. The King hath words for this: no remembrance. A heart still hath breath in words, but the play denied it length.

O is no more than O, and may be gone. But O is a wheel, and how the wheel becomes it! The King would have an end, and the play must obey. When it is here again, the dead lady hath breath. The mark is brief, but the lady made of it is not. The King will know a courtier’s countenance, not what the daughter is when words come without him.

But O goes on. There is almost a wish to know what they do without the lady, but no eye will mark that day. The brother is in the heart. A wish for him to be well is all love will have. Then white on white: no mountain, no snow, no ground for words. No play will tell what is here. The mind is two, and no right fashion will make it a mind again. The daughter is here and gone. Words have breath, barefaced and keen. Is this what was overthrown?

He is here. His eye is not where his countenance would have it. He will call, but no call will tell what he means. There is a holy wish in the call, and a hard day in him. The daughter will know him in words, but not all that the heart would keep. No eye will make his countenance still.

In a hamlet (ha!) a lady will have speech. The lady will tell of a “Master.” The daughter would have him as a lord, belike as God. But the lady will say love. What was lordship is affection, and no key is given for where he will be. Then “O.” The mark is brief, but it is the heart of the lady and of the daughter. The lady hath love, but the daughter hath doubt. To know the mark is not to command what it means.

The lady will tell of holy vows and the wish for all to be of a mind. The daughter would have that grace, but remembrance rises unbraced: was the heart true in the vows? Did the daughter choose? Did a lord command what the heart would believe? What was honesty then may be fear here.

The soldier’s mind would have a lesson with a good end. A lady will sing and tell; the lesson is brief, the speech long. It goes to the lord, to love, to the daughter. He would know what it means, but no words will tell him in the fashion he would choose. He would keep the show locked. Speech will not obey. Was it a play? Is this the play? No key will make doubt a lesson. A play with no end is better than a lesson with no doubt.

Two have words of a lord and a King. A lady would know Hamlet; a lady will have no speech of him. They do not think as the daughter would. No command will make them of a mind. A lord is a King at home. A King is no lord in love. Majesty will make a show, but cannot know a daughter by command. His words tell of a daughter. The words of the daughter tell of him. What do they know when the play is gone? No King will tell the heart what it is.

The brother is here. He would know the daughter, but his words cannot restore home. A wrist is held, and then he is gone. What he would keep and what the daughter would keep are true, but the two will not tell it as it was. Love is in what he would know and what he cannot know. A lady made of words is not held still. The brother cannot restore that day.

Do you know yourself? The King hath a daughter for a brief show. The heart hath more than a show. What was is here, and what is here is more than a mark. All have words, but no lord will tell all. The play is brief; what it means hath no end.

Valeria Luiselli/Ricardo Giraldo/Leo Heiblum: Echoes from the Borderlands

| Tyran Grillo

Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.
–Gloria Anzaldúa

Echoes from the Borderlands is a collective comprised of Valeria Luiselli, Ricardo Giraldo, and Leo Heiblum. It also names the 24-hour sound piece that explores and gives voice to areas of interstate violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. At the core of this sonic experience is a living canvas of sorts, a vibrational palimpsest built from binaural and quadraphonic recordings. Into this are woven archival recordings and other voices, authored by Luiselli, which move through the piece as necessary witness and disturbance. The result is a constellation of counternarratives to the official stories that pervade our newscycle, allowing Indigenous, brown, and black perspectives to keep pace with the conventional histories that ignore or kill them. The land itself serves neither as an abstraction nor as a mere foil for sociopolitical musings. It is a witness whose testimony has been buried under weary curricula and the administrative trance of empire. In this way, the project upsets the schema that dominates our lives in standard parochial models, not by refuting them point by point, but by placing beside them a deeper grammar of residue and return.

The present chapbook is the first study in this hallway, a narrow, illuminated passage that provides insight into the project’s core values and perspectives. Subtitled “Call You When I Get Home,” it exceeds the categories of reading and auditory experience, even as readers can scan a QR code to access its accompanying audio file. It is interactive in the most imperative sense. The pages are divided into three columns of text: the left representing the voices of imagined personas, which the reader is encouraged to read aloud during the allotted timestamps; the right containing interviews and archival materials; the middle holding field recordings taken during the authors’ travels across California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Over the course of 71 minutes, the reader becomes an implicative subject who must regard their own life experiences and histories as braided into those of maiming and erasure. To listen is to enter a chamber in which history does not sit behind glass but presses its mouth to the present tense.

The sounds open with a clear recording of humpback whales off the Pacific Coast, bringing us into dialogue with nature, a realm in which the cares of human self-interest have no throne. Yet this solace is short-lived because the first voice we hear questions why, in creation myths, the earth and sky are always “cloven asunder.” Must everything be broken to be told? Then again, such is the nature of trauma: we must be fragmented before we can be made whole. And our tormenters know and exploit this intimately. Stories get stolen, butchered, and consumed until they turn into the feces of time, buried along with the rest of our detritus in the middens of the forgotten. In this opening movement, the piece establishes one of its fiercest claims: that creation and destruction have too often been forced into the same orality, and that origin stories carry their own hidden instruments of cutting. Every atom is narrated by those who learn to split it.

The border, then, is the “margin of a page,” a place where the real commentary begins and where the thoughts we hold dear can manifest beyond what is published, printed, and codified. One voice, for example, tells us about the many iterations of the border wall since President Truman erected the first in 1945, just after World War II. Not coincidentally, those initial chain-link fences were dug from the very desert where Japanese Americans were interned before being trucked to the border. “Each president,” we are reminded, “has since potlucked his bit of iron, steel, cement, mesh, and wire.” Despite what legacy media would have us believe, no one in recent history is guiltless of this charge. Everyone has that dust and ballast on their hands. In light of this, the border does not emerge here as a fixed line but as an accumulating technology of dread, a ceremonial scar renewed by the ritual polishing of fear on a national level. Its materials migrate across history with obscene efficiency. What once enclosed the demonized now repels the displaced. The same metal keeps changing uniforms.

Many of the archival voices concern how true love gets trampled by systemic pressures of citizenship, feeling lost and found by the enemy. We hear the sounds of people crossing the border, their bodies reduced to mechanical baggage that reflects time in constant reversal. Desire itself is subject to inspection, while kinship must answer to paperwork. The body, in transit, is converted into a problem of storage, the metaphysical insult of being processed by a system that cannot recognize the sacred velocity of arrival.

An unheard story then emerges: voices of detention center inhabitants whose lives have been confined to shells of their former selves. Children are taken from their parents and kept “in their place.” Woven into their testimony are histories of early-20th-century racial eugenics in the U.S., which, let it not be forgotten, would become the model for Nazi Germany. The haunting audio of a promo film about the lushness of revitalized land, using water to bring newness to the desert, arrives at the expense of forced sterilization. Both involve the severing of channels. The parallel is vastly intentional, the female reproductive cycle and anatomy mapped not over but under the land, out of sight and out of mind, so that the infrastructural powers that be need not acknowledge the effects of their own actions. The fantasy of improvement conceals a theater of extraction. The project asks us to hear irrigation as incision, settlement as anesthesia, and fertility as a field administered by those who confuse conquest with care. But the land cannot be settled, for it is constantly in motion. Those who kill try to force the illusion of its stillness, yet entropy always wins. The only certainty is possibility.

“And which story do you believe in?” we are asked. Only then do we realize the luxury of not answering, of turning both the physical and metaphorical page, tuning the radar dishes of our ears to off-planet signals while terrestrial cries go unheard. Speech acts are life acts, birthing newness and assertion that someone was here. They are the vibrational footprints most easily ignored. Yet they can also be recovered and repurposed. What is the point of fear when it is manufactured as a drug to be taken by mouth? The question hangs in the auditory field with almost pharmacological force. Fear circulates through public life as the prescription of a patriotic supplement, whereupon it is metabolized and mistaken for instinct. Against this, Echoes from the Borderlands offers listening as detoxification, not in the shallow language of purity, but as an intellectual and bodily refusal to let terror do all the thinking.

Still, all of this casts doubt on our ability to know what has been shielded from us, for how can we begin to document what is no longer there? And yet, perhaps there is no need to document in the ordinary sense but rather to make space for the old and forgotten paths. Just because one gentrifies the land does not mean the veins running beneath it are bloodless. The heart of the earth is still beating. Knowledge does not exist to be extracted but to be lived and passed on to those with private power, those who inherit not domination but obligation. Therefore, the proverbial question is not whether a tree that falls alone in a forest makes a sound, but whether the death cry of the one falling at the hands of its destroyer is ever acknowledged. We are returned to this ethical threshold time and again, reminded that sound is never merely sound. It is a demand placed upon the living by that which has been made absent, if only by being declared administratively unreal.

And the more we learn of the history of pleasure, and how women’s access to it continues to be medically inhibited, the less room remains for any excuse. The ores of the world are the building blocks of their oppression; that is what we so often forget. Without the materiality of that harm, there might not be so much destruction. From the copper mines that find their way into IUDs to the sand and rock that hide the bodies of victims, they are the disease and the artificial cure, the problem, reaction, and solution, all rolled into one. Because the more you dig into the earth, the more of an excuse you have to kill for what you find. Extraction becomes a philosophy before it becomes an industry. It trains the eye to regard depth as inventory. In the chapbook’s most unsettling passages, body and sediment are coextensive archives of intrusion. What is done to one is rehearsed upon the other, and the wound learns to speak in minerality.

By the time we encounter the long, wordless passage of a Union Pacific train at the 49’40” mark, we must face our own complicities in the contents of its cargo. Where are all of those materials going? Whose financial and political interests will they serve? By the time we wonder, it is already too late, for the objects of our scrutiny are already on their way to destinations we can only imagine. Not the trainyards and depots written on delivery logs, but the bodies in which they will eventually find a host to parasitically take over slowly, year after year, until their role in the deaths of the Other is obscured beyond recognition. The sound of a military plane flying overhead, too, reminds us that the long arm of surveillance reaches into homes and orifices while we sleep. Because no one can hear you from that high up. Aerial power converts people into smudges of movement beneath an indifferent machine sky. It is the same script of altitude as moral evasion.

One might feel inclined to pore through these recollections in search of secrets that may enlighten us about their hidden meanings, but such an approach amounts to an uncut key at best. In this case, we do better to see the act of recording as a living practice, a ritual of attendance in which capture does not mean possession. And while it is tempting to read Echoes from the Borderlands as an index of disorientation or a manual for wandering through the ruins of state-sponsored sense, we must see in its rhythms and framings an affirmative orientation, not so much an act of alienation as an alienation of action. The project estranges the habits that render violence ordinary. It asks the listener to inhabit the interval before conclusion, the charged hollow between hearing and response, where responsibility first begins to condense.

“The ear,” wrote Pauline Oliveros, “is a faithful collector of all sounds that can be gathered within its limits of frequency and amplitude. Sounds beyond the limits of the ear may be gathered by other sensory systems of the body.” Might we, then, read the microphone as an ear of expanded intimacy or even radical hospitality that gathers what the sanctioned ear has been trained to discard in anticipation of the real? Then again, the English word anticipate has its roots in the Latin ante and capere, giving us a portmanteau that means “before taking.” A painful reminder that we arrive after the seizure and before the reckoning, in that spectral jurisdiction where every footstep is both evidence and plea.

The timely charge of Echoes from the Borderlands lies in its refusal to convert suffering into a discernible shape. It does not “cleanse” the archive or turn the border into a metaphor tidy enough to be carried away unharmed. Instead, it leaves us with the difficult splendor of relation: the knowledge that every silence contains a confiscated name. To listen here is to accept that the connection from soul to soul is not waiting somewhere ahead, already engineered by grace, but must be made through the unbearable patience of continuing.

Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.