A Full Stop Short of Eternity: The Color of Absence in Jon Fosse’s Septology

October 24, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

For out of black minutes of madness ever more radiant,
The patient one wakes on the petrified threshold,
And is ardently clasped by cool blue and the gleaming decline of
the autumn,
The silent house and the legends of the forest,
Measure and law and the moonlit paths of the departed.
–Georg Trakl

A blank canvas seems to contain every possible image until the first stroke starts taking them away, so begins our story with a picture that cannot quite be settled, two painted lines, one brown and one purple, crossing upon a canvas, making a modest, wounded geometry whose light appears to originate somewhere beyond the pigment, while outside, on the western coast of Norway, the daylight contracts toward Christmas, and an aging painter named Asle stands looking at what he has made, though the more he looks the less securely the picture belongs to him, and this is the threshold of Jon Fosse’s Septology, a seven-part novel published in three volumes, The Other Name, I Is Another, and A New Name, translated by Damion Searls, in which Fosse, the Norwegian writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, gives us a single week in the life of a widowed, sober, solitary Catholic painter, yet a life entire within that week, beginning on a Monday in Advent and unfolding without a conventional full stop, a formal audacity that might demand admiration before granting pleasure but whose effect is almost disarmingly intimate, for I rarely felt imprisoned by the absence of periods, instead drawn into the velocity of someone thinking, a consciousness whose turns and retracings have not submitted to the editorial tyranny of retrospect, and one keeps reading because each thought opens another room, while the rooms have a troubling habit of opening onto the same darkness, each part beginning with the same astonishment, “And I see myself standing,” before ending in prayer, while between those gestures the conceit of chronology gives way to chambers of time without dependable walls, Asle living in his house in Dylgja, driving to Bjørgvin, visiting the gallery that sells his work, cooking for his neighbor Åsleik, considering an invitation to Christmas dinner, all the while his present being entered by lives that have already ended, for his wife, Ales, is dead and not dead, her absence factual, her presence no less persuasive, familiar objects opening suddenly into conversations with her, Asle speaking to her daily without pretending that speech will bring her back, their names exchanging almost the same letters, Asle and Ales suggesting a minute orthographical disturbance, a rearrangement through which a living man discovers he can never quite separate his name from that of the person he mourns, until even the novel’s tense seems to migrate with them, for yesterday has not receded into evidence but reaches forward and alters the pressure of every ordinary noun in the room, while in one recollection Ales becomes “the sky over everything in the world,” a wonderfully excessive image whose tenderness contains a threat, for if the beloved is everywhere, grief can scarcely find a place to put its feet, which returns us to the intersecting strokes of the opening picture, a cross being a place where two directions remain distinct yet touch, where the surface bears the mark of an event it cannot reverse, and Asle knows that a painting’s potential cannot be summoned through beauty alone, since Asle thinks that “a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it,” a proposition refusing the sentimental consolation that suffering automatically improves art, darkness being neither decoration nor an ethical entitlement to beauty but the resistance against which light becomes perceptible, though the picture remains answerable to whatever pain has entered it, the painter himself tormented by images lodged inside him, including his “innermost picture,” his work an attempt to release them into material form without reducing their mystery, paint fusing with canvas as he has fused with painting, and here his account of the image approaches a theology of embodiment, the painted surface inhabited by a spirit made of matter and soul together, so that the picture says something while refusing to say it, its speech impossible to paraphrase, just as there is no sentence in which grief can finally be deposited and left behind, which may be why memory returns Asle to a childhood of startling chromatic precision, to his sister Alida seeing a brown rowboat where he sees an abundance of different browns, objecting to the single word that erases them, her way of seeing providing the boundary against which his own perceptions emerge, his painterly vocation becoming an apprenticeship to colors the available vocabulary cannot hold, while the playground preserves a freedom of expression before the prohibitions of adult life harden into posture, and yet Alida, too, has disappeared into death, Asle’s mind storing the person and her absence in the same image, so the greater the fidelity of recollection the less certain it becomes whether remembering protects someone from oblivion or renews the fact that she cannot return, the novel’s repetitions performing the same experiment on its reader, each recurrence shifting the angle of incidence, until what seemed familiar acquires another hue, as though a remembered color had been mixed in darkness and returned to us altered, and then there is the other Asle, the Namesake, a doppelgänger of almost identical appearance who also paints and whose drinking has carried him into physical collapse, the men having first met through Sigve, an acquaintance from the narrator’s youth, their resemblance unbearable because it threatens to make identity an error of recognition, so that the narrator insists “if he and The Namesake look exactly the same then their souls, their spirits, can’t be as similar as their appearance,” a claim with a trembling logic, since outward sameness must conceal inward difference or the very idea of a singular life begins to fail, yet Fosse continually exposes that confidence to doubt, both men inhabiting ordered rooms whose neatness scarcely contains the disorder within, both carrying images that will not release them, both having known the devastation of alcohol, though one has stopped imbibing while the other cannot, his shaking body desperate for a drink that might briefly arrest its own rebellion, an apparatus of separation estranged from its agency, until the narrator finds the Namesake collapsed in the snow and takes him to the hospital, and this becomes the novel’s most urgent act of rescue, although what it rescues remains uncertain, the doubling tempting us toward a ready moral allegory, one man saved by love and faith, the other destroyed by addiction, yet Fosse’s art is better than that accounting, the other Asle neither a discarded draft of the narrator nor evidence of his triumph, especially when the narrator imagines dragging the other’s pain along with him only to correct himself, “share his pain, share his suffering,” the correction ethically enormous, for pain is neither luggage to be transferred nor property one may confiscate in the name of compassion, and to share it is to stand close without becoming the person whose body endures it, while the Namesake longs to disappear, that desire making the resemblance more frightening, since disappearance is also what the sober Asle’s dead have enacted, the question of who a person might have been had one decision, one drink, one intervention gone differently, a question Fosse makes physical without granting the false mercy of an answer, difference persisting even at the point of almost perfect likeness, and against this hall of doubles stands Åsleik, the neighboring fisherman whose habitual visits and obstinate speech supply the book with wonderfully undignified comedy, since Asle can think he has never much liked him only to conclude, almost in the same breath, that this is why he does, calling him a fool and then recognizing a wisdom beyond the sophistication of his own thoughts, that uncorrected movement allowing friendship its irritations and thought its refusal to reach a stable verdict, so when Åsleik wonders whether there is anything he has not already told Asle, the question becomes at once a joke about repetition and a miniature theory of the novel, what we say again need not be the same thing because the hearer has meanwhile changed, each man seeming to know what the other conceals while choosing not to expose it, and such tact is its own grace, an evening of eggs, bacon, and onions becoming unexpectedly delicious, and the kitchen does not suspend metaphysics, it discloses how existence can arrive with the intensity of revelation while announcing nothing grander than a good meal shared, even as the week’s paintings and conversations draw Asle deeper into the religious problem occupying him since adolescence, when he rejected the authority of Norway’s established church, later entering Catholicism through his life with Ales yet resisting doctrinal certainties, including the exclusion of the unbaptized from salvation, his faith less a collection of positions than a sustained pressure upon the limits of language, for with his phrase for God, “He doesn’t exist, He is,” Asle moves the divine from the category of beings available for inspection toward the condition under which being becomes possible, an echo of apophatic theology, with its conviction that God recedes from every predicate designed to contain Him, even if this risks rendering the divine invulnerable to argument, particularly when Asle supposes the very word God proves God’s reality, a proposition hardly satisfying logical scrutiny yet revealing a mind for which language has become both bridge and obstruction, the hunger for an answer and the wound opened by asking, while the tension between grace and truth grows especially acute around Christ, for Ales tells Asle that God’s power is found in powerlessness, in the crucified body unable to free itself from the nails, while Asle considers a God whose self-imposed limits belong to omnipotence, whose great silence is interrupted when the Word enters history, and this theology leads back to the canvas, incarnation becoming a form entering a world unable entirely to contain it, color interrupting blankness, stillness made visible through disturbance, truth insisting upon separateness, upon the finality of a breath that stops, upon the impossibility of another person’s suffering becoming our own, whereas grace arrives without overturning those conditions, asking what relation might remain when possession is no longer possible, though perhaps grace is merely the beautiful name given to our refusal to surrender the dead, a question Fosse leaves active as his painter speaks with Ales without cancelling her death, the novel’s Christian imagination most convincing where faith remains vulnerable to the contrary evidence of the body, and somewhere in the middle of this week, in Part V, a remembered trivial exchange in an art supply shop begins to radiate strange consequence, the Namesake complaining that the store never seems to have white paint, even wondering whether it refuses to stock any, white, the substance easiest to take for granted, becoming scarce, which opens a useful physical paradox, since white light contains the visible spectrum together while white pigment appears white by scattering light rather than by mixing every paint color into one, Fosse’s painter moving between incompatible forms of fullness, the untouched canvas seemingly complete in its whiteness until the first mark reveals a purity merely waiting for interruption, a blank canvas can be rolled away and stored, but a painted canvas carries the history of its wounds, the missing white, amid innumerable colors without names, suggesting the impossibility of gathering everything into a single unbroken presence, the imagined color of reconciliation that no shop can reliably sell, and as the book’s epigraph from Revelation promises, “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth,” thus altering the problem of doubling, since the two Asles share a name but perhaps any name given publicly is only an approximate address, a provisional utterance unable to exhaust the soul it designates, the other Asle’s struggle resisting the division of lives into successful and failed, just as Asle and Ales might be less two separate names than an alphabet still rearranging itself under the pressure of love, yet Revelation’s private name carries its own disquiet, since a name nobody else can know threatens to efface the social and historical person recognized through the names of loved ones, mystical union becoming a temptation to erase difference, from which Fosse repeatedly returns us to the stubbornly particular body, shaking, eating, waiting, aging, crossing a stretch of water to reach another person, while the approach of Christmas offers no simple resolution, obliging the narrator to confront the possible extinction of someone whose existence seemed to repeat his own, other figures receding into death, the painter meanwhile experiencing a change stranger than any vision as the need to paint begins leaving him, “I feel sure in my whole body that I have no desire to paint anymore,” he thinks, having spent a lifetime expelling images whose accumulation felt unbearable, now sensing they might gather into one stillness without requiring external form, though to read this as a neat ascension from art to God would reduce paintings to preliminary exercises for a more perfect silence, overlooking how the book itself depends upon the work of making, how art has permitted pain to become visible and shareable, and only then can Asle imagine relinquishing its necessity, an exhaustion we should not prematurely baptize as serenity, since it might be liberation or the symptom of a life preparing to close, until at last Asle accepts Åsleik’s invitation and travels by boat toward the Christmas gathering at his sister Guro’s home, crossing the water to return to what he has most fiercely withheld from himself, Ales’s final breath, the doctor’s announcement that she has gone to rest with God, a recollection that cannot give her back but allows the irreversibility of loss to enter the same consciousness that has insisted upon her continued presence, and at the house he offers a painting, enters a room to rest, encounters Guro’s invitation to intimacy, declining because he remains inwardly married to Ales, a scene resisting easy piety, since whether such fidelity is a magnificent continuity of love or the last enclosure grief has built around him remains uncertain, as does whether the beloved can remain present without making the survivor unavailable to everyone living, Fosse neither mocking the attachment nor guaranteeing its innocence, and the Christmas meal waits elsewhere while Asle withdraws into the most crowded solitude imaginable, attended by memory, desire, remorse, prayer, the final prayer repeating the novel’s movement toward a threshold it refuses to cross in the expected grammatical way, Asle reciting the Hail Mary and seeing a blue radiance burst into his forehead, perhaps dying, perhaps granted a mystical perception resembling death only from outside, the distinction suspended exactly where the reader wants confirmation in a full stop, the missing words making the ending more articulate than any completed explanation, Asle reaching the appointed hour while language cannot pronounce what it has approached for hundreds of pages, the all-engulfing white unavailable in the art shop returning as a possible image of wholeness but arriving in blue, the shade of a final, untranslatable experience, Trakl’s “cool blue” and his threshold of the departed trembling open here, seven days having passed while every now contains an eternity no calendar can measure, so the supposed extravagance of a novel made from one sentence eventually feels exact, even if this review does not, since Fosse does not abolish endings so much as make us inhabit their postponement, the form asking what truth can accomplish when its customary instruments of completion are withdrawn, what grace might mean if it cannot restore the dead or guarantee the salvation of those still suffering, Ales remaining dead, the Namesake’s anguish not undone by resemblance, the canvas still marked, even the promised new name arriving as a secret beyond verification by ordinary speech, yet something persisting in the space opened by these failures of possession, an attentiveness refusing to make a person identical with his worst moment or most visible form, Advent naming the coming of a presence into history while Septology imagines the reciprocal event, history becoming susceptible to what it cannot name, its last words stopping before death can be spoken, life in that interruption seeming neither concluded nor redeemed so much as held, for an impossible instant, in the white interval between a breath and the withheld mortis nostrae, in the silence allowing the prayer to remain forever nunc et in hora

In the AI of the Beholder: Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine

October 21, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

“There are now more cameras on planet Earth than human beings.” A curious arithmetic, given how thoroughly the eye has been enthroned as the guarantor of experience. For centuries, to see meant that someone was there, even if that someone could only be imagined through the image left behind. Now vision takes place without the consolations of a witness. A photograph can pass directly into coordinate data, then find its way back to the world as an instruction. The picture may never appear before a pair of human eyes, yet it can determine whose face opens a door or whose body invites suspicion. Somewhere between capture and consequence, seeing has detached itself from sight. Trevor Paglen’s How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI enters this dislocation with the curiosity of an artist and the suspicion of someone who has learned that even suspicion can be engineered. His central provocation concerns the fate of images after they cease to require spectators. Behind it lurks an even stranger question: When we speak of the inner workings of an algorithm, what qualifies as an inner? There is no private chamber in which the machine contemplates its findings, no secret eyelid folding over a remembered world. Yet something happens beyond our immediate access, and that interval has become one of the most consequential territories of contemporary life. We have built a new interior without inhabitants, then mistaken its opacity for neutrality.

Paglen arrives here by way of a computer vision framework called Chair, developed with collaborators in the early 2010s. A camera aimed through a studio window rendered streets and buildings into a mobile architecture of green lines. Cars acquired bounding boxes while faces dissolved into calculable expressions. The familiar scene was being quietly disassembled into a universe of features no pedestrian could inhabit. It recalls Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt, the meaningful surround constituted through the capacities and needs of an organism. A tick does not encounter the forest we admire. It finds a world articulated by warmth and the chemical trace of its next meal. Such worlds are neither incomplete copies of an objective landscape nor private hallucinations floating free of matter. They are modes of relation. Paglen extends this thought to machines, arguing that the sensors we construct establish the terms on which their environments become legible. Yet there is a philosophical splinter lodged inside the analogy. An organism lives the consequences of its perceptual limits. Can a classifier be said to have a world when it has no bodily vulnerability or stake in its own continuance? Perhaps its Umwelt belongs less to the machine than to the institution that designs it. The algorithm’s apparent interior would then be a delegated intention, a borrowed organ of attention through which distant authorities touch the surface of things.

James J. Gibson’s theory of affordances complicates the picture further. An environment offers possibilities for action relative to a perceiver’s capacities. A ledge affords sitting to one body and an impassable barrier to another. Perception, understood in these ecological terms, already harbors an incipient verb. Paglen’s machines radicalize that insight by severing affordance from the reciprocity of embodied life. For a facial recognition network, a face affords identification. For a license plate reader, the fleeting passage of a vehicle affords registration and a future knock on the door. Their worlds are assembled around authorized operations, with every feature waiting to become a task. What makes this arrangement so uncanny is that we occupy these constructed environments without necessarily perceiving their invitations. An innocuous patch of pavement may afford a camera an encounter that the person walking across it cannot refuse. The machine’s field of possible actions overlays ours, a second geography draped across the first, transparent only to those permitted to read its maps. To ask how a machine sees is therefore to ask whose purposes have been installed inside seeing, and who bears the cost when the world answers back.

The book’s decisive conceptual movement follows from this asymmetry. Paglen urges us to exchange representation for activation, abandoning the comfortable assumption that an image primarily stands for something. A digital photograph is fundamentally machine-readable. Before it becomes a luminous arrangement on a screen, it can exist as a file available to automated inspection and manipulation. The screen is an optional detour. In the vast circuitry of social platforms and industrial surveillance, images have become operational events, setting other processes in motion without ever needing to be understood as pictures. Here the old grammar of the gaze turns inside out. We no longer simply look at images. Images look at us, or, more exactly, systems enlist images to extract information about the people passing through them. The photograph in an album once preserved a moment against disappearance. Its contemporary descendant may follow that moment into the future, adding another entry to a dossier that changes what opportunities its subject receives. The image becomes a small administrative afterlife, an unfinished sentence whose final verb is conjugated elsewhere. And because its action can remain invisible, the usual politics of visibility offers scant protection. How does one contest a picture one has never seen, taken by an eye that has never needed to acknowledge one’s presence?

To understand the metaphysics of this arrangement, Paglen stages a mischievous encounter with René Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pomme. Magritte’s photorealistic apple refuses the equivalence of object and image, allowing meaning to proliferate in the gap between a painted thing and a linguistic declaration. A computer classifier, fed the painting, announces an apple with an assurance untroubled by surrealism. Paglen calls the resulting disposition machine realism. The machine’s declaration seems hilariously impoverished beside Magritte’s provocation, but that apparent foolishness conceals a formidable power. A classifier does not need to solve the riddle of representation to serve an automated sorting system. It needs only to place an input within a category that triggers the appropriate response. The philosophical complication comes afterward, when we realize that its certainty has material consequences. An apple rejected by an inspection camera may be diverted from the supermarket. A human face assigned to a category may be scrutinized or priced differently. Magritte’s cultivated ambiguity has entered a factory whose conveyor belts cannot wait for an answer. The joke turns on us. Our insistence that the machine has missed the point may itself miss the point of the machine.

Every classifier inherits a cosmology from its training set. Paglen’s account of ImageNet, assembled from millions of internet photographs and the nested categories of WordNet, makes the architecture of this inheritance unusually tangible. A taxonomy presents itself as an innocent solution to the problem of naming, yet its structure quietly decides which differences deserve recognition and which forms of life may be folded into the same drawer. Within ImageNet’s historical classification scheme, people were dispersed across racial designations and derogatory moral caricatures, while intimate identities appeared under demeaning labels. Such categories reveal an apparatus trained on culture’s sedimented injuries and granted the authority of measurement. The Japanese Female Facial Expression dataset offers a smaller, equally telling example. A handful of posed faces are used to construct a theory of recognizable emotion. Each photograph is assigned to a supposedly stable feeling, as though a woman’s expression could be detached from circumstance and reproduced as a universal psychological unit. Paglen’s point is not exhausted by the familiar warning that biased data yield biased results. The prior violence lies in the wager that reality comes furnished with fixed compartments awaiting discovery. Classification manufactures the stability it claims merely to record. To call a category universal is often to forget who had the power to write its definition.

This is why the book’s critique of machine vision moves so persuasively beyond the laboratory. Paglen follows automated license plate recognition into the municipal economy, where police departments and private contractors turn passing vehicles into continuously harvestable data. In his account of Vigilant Solutions, an ostensibly objective technical service becomes entangled with the collection of court debts and the extraction of money from vulnerable communities. The camera registers a plate. A database matches it to an outstanding fee. A local government discovers a revenue stream inside what had previously been an unmonetized instant of transit. Behind the frictionless interface is a deeply selective politics. People are individualized through exquisitely granular profiles, then treated as interchangeable instances of a bureaucratic type. Their specificity makes generalized discipline more efficient. The same logic enters delivery vehicles and retail stores, among other environments where movement becomes a metric and attention an asset. One begins to suspect that the alleged objectivity of automated sight has always been a costume for profit-driven appetites. What the camera sees with such miraculous accuracy is often whatever can be turned into a transaction. Far from merely describing the world, machine realism carves it into surfaces more easily seized.

Yet the book resists settling into a critique of databases. The deeper and more disquieting movement takes us into the alleged interior of images themselves. Early experiments in visual neuroscience suggested that cortical neurons respond to elementary orientations and patterns, from which increasingly complex perceptions might be assembled. Paglen recounts the notorious experiments of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, then Colin Blakemore’s work with kittens raised amid restricted visual stimuli. A kitten deprived of vertical lines could later struggle to perceive them. Sight emerged as an acquired choreography of neural responsiveness rather than a window installed at birth. These studies helped inspire a technological imagination in which computers might learn to recognize objects by detecting elementary features and building toward more intricate configurations. From AlexNet’s breakthrough in image recognition to the adversarial networks that began generating their own uncanny visual formations, the machine’s education was written in the borrowed vocabulary of nerves. The comparison remains illuminating only if we remember its limits. Contemporary neural networks are neither digital kittens nor transparent reproductions of biological sight, and the theory of perception itself has evolved far beyond those early experiments. The force of Paglen’s argument resides elsewhere, in the possibility that our images increasingly address the nervous system through its vulnerabilities rather than our judgment through its reasons.

The route from visual recognition to neural intervention gives Paglen some of his most startling pages. If images help activate patterns of response before conscious interpretation has finished its work, then the older dream of persuading someone through coherent messages begins to look quaint. The contemporary feed learns from hesitation and the fingers’ barely registered movements, refining its offerings around a portrait of desire that its subject never agreed to sit for. Paglen’s comparison with Nacho Cheese Doritos is both comic and exacting. Industrial snack food is engineered to recruit the senses beyond the modest business of nourishment. Networked images can be engineered toward an analogous excess, their textures and emotional cues calibrated for engagement rather than contemplation. He names the more aggressive possibility a cognitive injection attack, in which media exploit perceptual tendencies to elicit responses that evade deliberate reflection. The term risks lending too much coherence to a dispersed landscape of research and commercial experimentation. Still, it gives a troubling name to a familiar experience. We reach for the device before knowing what we hoped to find. We are the kittens, Paglen suggests, raised in perceptual enclosures whose narrow openings come to define the imaginable. Where, then, does the manipulated image end and the habituated mind begin? If the circuits that seize attention also educate the organ of attention, media have entered the very composition of the self.

Paglen’s excursion into magic reveals that this invasion of perception has a surprisingly elaborate prehistory. The stage magician John Mulholland, later recruited into the CIA’s MKUltra orbit, understood that deception succeeds by exploiting what an audience has already learned to overlook. An empty hand is effective because attention has been directed toward the other one. The secret of the trick resides in the spectator’s confidence that the visible sequence contains everything worth seeing. Mulholland translated these insights into covert techniques, while other researchers explored attempts to influence behavior through direct stimulation of the nervous system. Nearby in Paglen’s account stands ELIZA, Joseph Weizenbaum’s early chatbot, whose simple prompts led users to attribute feeling and intention to an arrangement of conversational rules. The magician and the programmer meet at a peculiar threshold. Both produce an apparent someone from a carefully arranged absence. Their effects depend upon an audience willing to complete the apparition from within. We tend to imagine the black box concealing a more sophisticated intellect than the visible output can disclose. Sometimes the supposed intelligence is our own, recruited without acknowledgment to animate the device. An algorithm can acquire the semblance of inwardness through the human habit of granting agency to whatever answers. The machine’s most intimate chamber may turn out to be the imagination we bring to its door.

That possibility becomes a political nightmare in the book’s extraordinary detour through UFOs and intelligence operations. Paglen revisits Richard Doty’s alleged disinformation campaigns around Paul Bennewitz, whose suspicions of extraterrestrial activity could be intensified by fabricated evidence and carefully staged corroboration. He also recounts Cold War experiments in electronic deception, including the Palladium program, designed to make adversarial sensors register apparitions that were never present in the form their instruments reported. The proposition is chilling in its simplicity. Make a system see what you want it to see, then allow its own authority to ratify the fiction. The dream of making anything appear as anything had entered the electromagnetic spectrum. UFOs become the ideal emissaries of this logic, hovering where a failure of evidence can always be converted into evidence of concealment. Paglen is most compelling when he treats these episodes as histories of managed perception rather than proof of some master conspiracy. His assemblage nevertheless requires a discriminating reader. Technical deception documented in government records is not evidentially equivalent to retrospective testimony or speculative interpretation. The book occasionally enjoys their proximity so much that the differences begin to shimmer. Yet this instability also exposes the dilemma it investigates. The better a manufactured revelation accommodates the desires of its audience, the more easily doubt becomes part of its sustaining mythology. Disbelief itself can be trained to serve belief.

Photography once seemed to offer an escape from this labyrinth through the authority of light. A photograph traditionally testified to a physical encounter between the world and a sensitive surface, claiming a material warrant that painting could never guarantee. While its indexical gesture could never claim innocence, the idea of a trace allowed an uneasy agreement between perception and external reality. Paglen brings this technological faith into contact with the suspicion of graven images in the Hebrew Bible. The prohibition recognizes how readily an image can usurp the authority of what it depicts, while prophetic tradition invests the divine Voice with the capacity to establish what must be believed. The camera, in modernity, appears to reverse that hierarchy. Seeing acquires a privilege formerly assigned to revelation. Yet the reversal may be less complete than it seems. Photographs have always required a surrounding apparatus of testimony and trust, an interpretive community willing to grant the trace significance. An image from Abu Ghraib can furnish evidence of atrocity, while its grotesque resemblance to religious iconography generates meanings no sensor could certify. The luminous record both exceeds and depends upon the circumstances of its making. Paglen’s account of generative AI unsettles this fragile covenant by permitting images to reproduce the aesthetic signs of photographic evidence without having passed through an equivalent encounter. Light survives as a style after losing its privileged role as witness. Its old authority remains available for counterfeit use.

The final chapter finds a remarkable laboratory for this crisis in the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, where accounts of extraordinary encounters coexist with painstaking attempts to verify them. Paglen moves between the elaborate inventions of UFO claimant Billy Meier and the empirical archive of scientist Richard Haines, whose investigations seek a stable account of anomalous aerial phenomena. The photograph occupies the uncertain ground between them. It offers an apparent piece of the world while inviting belief to complete whatever the frame withholds. Paglen calls this condition superpositional, borrowing a term from quantum physics to describe images that remain suspended between competing possibilities until some act of interpretation fixes their significance. A photograph can sustain incompatible stories because no image delivers its own rules of interpretation. Generative media radicalize that condition, multiplying plausible appearances while weakening the tacit promise that a camera stood before the depicted event. The UFO photograph becomes a strange ancestor of the AI portrait, each carrying a claim on the real that exceeds what its visible marks can secure. An archive intended to preserve marginal histories begins to resemble a rehearsal space for ordinary experience. We have all become custodians of images that might testify or simply ask to be believed.

The book’s great achievement is to refuse the comforting notion that such uncertainty concerns images alone. Paglen’s examples repeatedly return us to the feedback circuit between perception and the institutions shaping its habits. An AI-generated photograph of a suffering child can circulate as evidence of a disaster that never took place, yet provoke actual donations or outrage. The image becomes consequential through the reality of the responses it solicits. Political actors need no longer persuade an audience that every detail is verifiable if an image confirms an emotional world already held to be true. Here the distinction between authenticity and efficacy suffers a devastating separation. Something may be demonstrably false in origin and nevertheless function as an engine of social fact. This is the darkest extension of Paglen’s movement from representation to activation. The image need not win an argument with reality when it can help rearrange the conditions under which reality is encountered. But the book also leaves room for a necessary objection. If every image is understood chiefly through the actions it triggers, we risk granting manipulation the status of a complete theory of seeing. The same perceptual openness that makes us vulnerable enables surprise and the recognition of another person’s suffering. Art can interrupt an inherited category rather than reinforce it. Ambiguity need not be a weakness awaiting exploitation but can be the beginning of ethical attention.

Perhaps this is what it would finally mean to learn to see as a machine sees. Such learning asks us to identify the procedures through which a living world is rendered operational, then recover what those procedures are designed to discard. We must recognize the machine’s immense power without attributing to it a consciousness whose absence conveniently absolves its makers. We must also resist the fantasy of returning to a pristine human eye, for perception has never stood outside mediation. As Bruce Wexler’s neurological account suggests in Paglen’s retelling, media help flesh out the beings who encounter them. We are permeable to the very instruments we devise, and our capacity to imagine alternatives begins inside that permeability. The most radical gesture may therefore be an interruption of automatic legibility, an insistence upon the unclassified remainder that refuses conversion into an action signal. Such a remainder includes hesitation and contradiction, along with solidarities that cannot be inferred from a face or priced from a pattern of movement. Paglen concludes by reminding us that material existence does not wait for our consent: “Fires, floods, hurricanes, collapsing ice shelves, and mass extinctions do not care at all whether we believe in them or not. Some superpositions cannot be sustained.” This sentiment restores a necessary resistance to a world seemingly made of prompts. Reality can be wounded without being persuaded. What haunts this book, finally, is the prospect of an eye so perfectly trained to act that it can no longer encounter anything beyond its instructions. To see otherwise may require us to preserve a faculty machines cannot be commanded to value, the capacity to be changed by what we have failed to recognize.

Charlie Rauh: Amizdel (Book Review)

October 20, 2026 | 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

October 15, 2026 | 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)

October 11, 2026 | 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

October 9, 2026October 9, 2026 | 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.

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

September 30, 2026 | 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

September 27, 2026 | 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.

Roberto Masotti: Keith Jarrett – A Portrait

January 18, 2026January 18, 2026 | Tyran Grillo

Italian photographer Roberto Masotti (1947-2022) was among the most perceptive visual chroniclers of modern music, a figure whose work shaped the sensibility of ECM Records. His photographs graced nearly two hundred covers and booklets for the label, forming a parallel archive to the music itself. From the austere radiance of Officium to the quietly arresting portrait of John Cage that frames Herbert Henck’s recording of the composer’s early piano works, Masotti played a role in defining how this music would be seen, approached, and remembered. He was not merely a documentarian of studio sessions but a devoted listener whose camera functioned as a secondary instrument, tuned to the inner heartbeat of performance. Nowhere is this fusion of attention more evident than in Keith Jarrett: A Portrait, a volume that reads less as a record of appearances than as an extended act of listening rendered visible.

Masotti’s own words illuminate his method with uncommon clarity. “In this series of photographs that I observe with a retrospective gaze,” he writes, “I play with the concept of presence, that one of the body and the one of the instrument, which appear and disappear in the image.” He speaks not of capture but of exchange, of an intimacy grounded in restraint. These photographs arise from what he calls an “objective attention” shaped by long admiration, yet they are equally the result of Jarrett’s conscious acceptance and active participation. The images are thus collaborative in spirit, not imposed from without but allowed to unfold through mutual recognition. What remains is an archive that resonates with sound even in silence.

To move through the sequence so carefully composed in this book is to encounter a photographer who understands that an artist such as Jarrett cannot be approached through biography or chronology alone. Masotti storytells through a mode of looking that resembles ritual, one without a prescribed outcome, sustained only by attention. For him, photography does not consist of isolated instants but of moments, a distinction that carries ethical weight. Within a moment, an entire accumulation of experience can register itself through posture, gesture, or stillness. This understanding leads naturally to a deeper inquiry: what, after all, constitutes a portrait?

In Masotti’s hands, the portrait ceases to be an act of description. It becomes a site of encounter where identity is neither fixed nor fully disclosed. A portrait does not declare who its subject is; it asks how presence manifests, and under what conditions it withdraws. In this sense, the portrait is not a mirror but a threshold. It holds open the possibility that what is most essential about a person may resist total visibility. Masotti seems keenly aware of this tension. He recognizes the value of distance, of knowing when not to press closer, of allowing the subject’s aura to assemble itself without the insistence of the lens. This discipline is inseparable from his deep admiration for Jarrett, an admiration rooted not in fandom but in experiential listening. He does not set out to check off the pianist’s achievements so much as to dwell within their unfolding.

It was through Jarrett, in fact, that Masotti first came into ECM Records’ orbit. At the pianist’s recommendation, he traveled to Munich in 1973 to present a photo shoot to producer Manfred Eicher. The encounter proved decisive. The images were received enthusiastically and would soon be incorporated into the Bremen/Lausanne release of that same year, marking the beginning of a collaboration that would shape the label’s visual identity for decades to come.

Jarrett’s well-known sensitivity to distraction during performance posed a particular challenge. To photograph him in action required not only technical skill but a form of empathy calibrated to the moment. Masotti met this challenge with a chameleonic tact, adapting himself to the environment rather than imposing upon it. The resulting images often unfold in a montage that feels almost cinematic, though they never lapse into spectacle. Their power lies in continuity, in the quiet accumulation of gestures and expressions that suggest movement beyond the frame.

1971, Miles Davis Group, Philarmonie di Berlino

1973, Monaco di Baviera, America Haus, soundcheck

1999, Verona, Arena, Jazz Festival, with Manfred Eicher

Taken together, the images chart Jarrett’s evolution from a fiercely expressive sideman in the orbit of Miles Davis to an increasingly enigmatic figure, and finally to a singular presence in solo improvisation. Yet the photographs resist narrative closure. They do not resolve into a story so much as a constellation of states. Among them, one image stands apart. It is the second one above, where Jarrett’s face appears refracted in soft color, suspended between clarity and dissolution. Masotti, a photographer of formidable technical command, rarely indulged in overt manipulation. Here, however, he allows the image to drift toward the spectral. The effect is restrained yet profound. It touches something central to Jarrett’s music, its simultaneous rootedness in the physical act of playing and its persistent reaching beyond the self. The photograph carries within it a residue of sound, an afterimage of music that seems to hover just beyond reach.

Keith Jarrett: A Portrait proposes a way of seeing that honors absence as much as presence. Masotti reminds us that the deepest forms of attention do not seek to possess their subject. They remain open, patient, and receptive. The book closes with a quiet suspension between composition and improvisation, as though the music has not ended but simply moved elsewhere. In that lingering space, photographer and musician meet on equal terms, each attentive to the other, and to the fragile, enduring moment they share.

Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond

The only archive reviewing every ECM album in existence.

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