Margot Singer on Relics, Alchemy, and Primo Levi’s “Chromium”

Primo Levi’s essay “Chromium,” from The Periodic Table (1975), begins with a dinner party: “The entrée was fish, but the wine was red.” Why does white wine go best with fish? Nobody can say. “Old man Cometto added that life is full of customs whose roots can no longer be traced: the color of sugar paper, the buttoning from different sides for men and women, the shape of a gondola’s prow….” These questions set the essay in motion. What other things do we do habitually, blindly, unthinkingly, for reasons that have been forgotten or are obsolete?
     The essay proceeds, associatively, to examine other sorts of senseless relics: outdated metaphors in language, the coccyx bone (“the remains of a vanished tail”). The industrial chemists seated around the dinner table tell stories. Levi recalls a manufacturing formula that stipulated adding a slice of onion to boiling linseed oil—once a crude temperature gauge, now a pointless step. Old man Cometto tells of a factory that made varnish from phenolic resins using the same unnecessarily toxic process once required for insoluble copal gums. Bruni mentions a baffling recipe for anti-rust paint that called for ammonium chloride, an ingredient “much more apt to corrode iron than preserve it from rust.” Why did no one question these nonsensical practices? We are talking here about fascist and post-fascist Italy, of course—but most organizations operate the same way. No one was willing to challenge accepted practice, to speak up.
     The remainder of “Chromium” is part detective story, part memoir. Levi, it turns out, was the one responsible, twenty years earlier, for introducing the mysterious ammonium chloride to the formula for anti-rust paint. Working as a chemist in Bruni’s factory in the mid-1940s, right after the war, Levi was charged with determining what had caused a fatal “livering” of the paint. The factory yard was piled high with rejected orange blocks of gelatinous, liver-like paint—the result, Levi eventually determined, of a simple transcription error in the formula, the substitution of “23” for “2 or 3” drops of reagent added to the chromate. The chemical analyst, the laboratory chief, the technical director, and the general director of the factory had all signed off on a long string of dubious lab tests showing that the chromate was too basic without ever questioning the results. The antidote was ammonium chloride, and twenty years later, the stocks of too-basic chromate long since used up, the now-useless additive was still being mixed into the formula, for reasons no one could recall.
     I love this idea of the useless vestiges we carry with us—in language, in our bodies, in our daily work—detached from reason, decoupled from memory. I love the way the essay’s layers of story and images accumulate, resonate, connect. I love the way the scientific details blossom into metaphor, an investigation into a faulty chemical formula uncovering so much more than the causes of “livered” paint. Almost in passing, Levi links his quest to solve the mystery of the paint to two other significant events: his falling in love with the woman who would become his wife, and the writing of his first book, Survival in Auschwitz (1947, tr. If This Is a Man). Speaking the truth about his past—like uncovering the true cause of the tainted chromate—becomes a vital act of resistance and survival. “I was ready,” Levi writes, “to challenge everything and everyone, in the same way that I had challenged and defeated Auschwitz and loneliness.” The ammonium chloride turns the jelly-like paint “fluid and smooth, completely normal, born again from its ashes like the Phoenix.” In the same way, Levi, too, is reborn from the ashes of Auschwitz in the act of asking why.
     Recently, I assigned “Chromium” to a class of undergraduate writers, and to my dismay, it was unanimously disliked. The students struggled to articulate or respond to its themes, although none could say exactly why. Perhaps they were put off by the scientific details, I thought, or by Levi’s complex periodic sentences, or by the fact that the narrative wasn’t packaged in short segments like many of the contemporary essays we read. But I wonder now whether the problem was less a matter of reading comprehension than a generational  gap. These are students, after all, who seem to want the formula, the recipe, to be told what they need to do to get an “A.” Few are accustomed to challenging received wisdom, to taking that kind of risk. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that a generation so far removed from the Holocaust had a hard time making the connection between resisting compliance with a faulty formula and resisting fascism, between redeeming a batch of “livered” paint and redeeming a human life from the atrocities of the past.
     With The Periodic Table, Levi invented a new genre, a hybrid of science and literature, a blend of essay, allegory, fiction, memoir. Each of the book’s twenty-one chapters bears the name of an element: “Argon,” “Hydrogen,” “Zinc,” etc. (“Chromium” is the twelfth), each element evoking stories and memories of the past. Britain’s Royal Institution voted The Periodic Table the “best science book ever written.” It is surely the first (and only) work of literature to take the form of (to borrow Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola’s term) a “hermit crab,” the periodic table a kind of “protective shell.” Levi half-jokingly called Mendeleev’s table of elements a “poem”; as he explained to Gabriel Motola in a Paris Review interview (published posthumously in 1995): “You have lines, every one ending with a kind of element, like a rhyme.… there is something really poetic about science and chemistry in understanding matter.” Levi’s great alchemy is to transform the elements of the material world into poetry, into metaphor, into art.
     The Periodic Table is a beautiful and ultimately profoundly life-affirming book. But “Chromium” ends with an image not of remembrance but of forgetfulness and futility. “My ammonium chloride,” Levi writes, “twin of a happy love and a liberating book, by now completely useless and probably a bit harmful, is religiously ground into the chromate anti-rust paint on the shore of that lake and nobody knows why anymore.” Levi died in 1987, after falling, or jumping, from the third floor landing of the circular staircase in the apartment building in which he had lived since he was born. No one knows exactly what happened in that stairwell, on that day, but we do know that Levi worried that the lessons of the Holocaust would be forgotten, and struggled terribly with the burden of remembering and bearing witness to the past. And so I hope that someday my students will again pick up “Chromium”—perhaps having forgotten why or when they’d read it, back in college, long before—and in the reading bring the memory of Primo Levi and his wisdom and the goodness of his heart fully and magically back to life.

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Margot Singer is the co-editor, with Nicole Walker, of Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and the author of the short story collection The Pale of Settlement (University of Georgia Press, 2007). Her essays and fiction have appeared, most recently, in the New Ohio Review, The Normal School, Conjunctions, and The Kenyon Review. She holds the Dominick Consolo endowed professorship at Denison University, where she directs the creative writing program and the Reynolds Young Writers Workshop.

Paul Lisicky on The Fugue, Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother, DFW, and the Resistance to the One Thing

1. Rainy night, windy night. Subway Platform, A Train, 59th Street, Columbus Circle. Four bearded young men huddle by the turnstiles, lift their horns and begin to play Bach. Four melodies, four tones fill the tunnel at once. My eye fix on the tracks, on the junk down there. A little rat runs through the junk. Like everyone else on the platform, I pretend I’m not a struck tuning fork. That’s what the city exacts of us. We’re already dreaming into the thing we’re on the way to: workout, hookup, business deal, drink, dinner, that meeting with an editor. And yet something important is going on here. I know it, I suspect the men and women beside me know it. It’s our secret. This isn’t just music, but a village. Four voices in conversation, mimicking, talking back to one another. Sometimes in sync, sometimes in argument. I think there is something beautiful moving among them, between them. The sounds lean into one another. They lift us above the trash. The one light of my train is coming up the tunnel. Soon the village will be taken down into the noise of it, but that’s all right: that’s a part of the pact. Perhaps the playing (and listening) wouldn’t be so animated if there weren’t some shared awareness of interruption. And then it occurs to me: this might not just be a village we’re listening to but something nearer, inside us. It’s the sound of consciousness, the song of the human brain thinking four different things at once.

2. Simultaneity: the dream of getting that on the page. The composer has counterpoint. Or more typically: harmony. In pop music, bass line, drum, keyboard, vocal, etc. Many layers in the simplest piece of music, but in writing? One voice at a time, the tyranny of the singular. Not that words aren’t freighted with multiple associations, not that we don’t have puns, rhymes. But how does one begin to write consciousness on the page? Virginia Woolf made use of parentheses. David Foster Wallace tried the foot note. As D.T. Max says, the foot note was D.F.W.’s way to capture “all the caveats, micro-thoughts, meta-moments, of [the] hyperactive mind.” But all that leaping about, all those gaps in time between taking in the primary text and its subordinates. It doesn’t exactly happen with the grace of the fugue, even if there is something oddly stimulating about being wrenched back and forth between two tracks. It’s a little like being in the hands of a taxing trainer, who tells you to do ten lunges, ten chin ups, ten lunges again.

3. On pages 22-23 of Alison Bechdel’s book-length graphic essay Are You My Mother we have tables of romantic attachments, tables of therapists. A drawing of a young mother inside a circle, cigarette poised between fingertips. Boxed interpretations of D.W. Winnicott’s theories of the mother-infant relationship. A graphic representation of an exchange between the speaker and her therapist. Graphics at some (comic) odds with the fraught content of the exchange. A boxed statement concerning the “involuntary torrent of words and images” that came to Virginia Woolf in the writing of Mrs. Dalloway. Somehow these two pages manage to be orderly, meaningful, orchestrated. We’re given space to process this material. But graphics set their own terms, and we’re once again shunted back to the limitations of mere words.

4. ANONYMOUS: “A fugue is a piece of music in which the voices come in one after another and the audience go out one after another.”

5. MICHEL FOUCAULT, Of Other Spaces, 1967: “The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the side-by-side, of the dispersed...of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.”

6. I have a short attention span. I hope that doesn’t make me sound like an idiot, but I’ll risk it anyway. By that I mean a sensitivity to too-much-ness. The door swings open; too much light comes in with that flood. My eyes hurt. My brain aches. I need to pull the door closed before I can open it up again. Open-close-open-close-open: that’s the story of perception to me. Which is another way of saying the story of reading, writing.
     But that’s only half of what I’m struggling to say. I think my resistance might be to the One Thing. In my imagination the One Thing can loom like a Giant telling me to think this way, not that. The Giant prevents multiple viewpoints, The Giant ignores the fact that there are other truths, other colors, other sexualities: in-betweenness, paradox, ambivalence. The Giant can only see what’s in front of him. I need to look to the left and right of the Giant’s big feet. I need the village. I need the space between oncoming trains in order to hear the music in the tunnel.

7. No surprise we perceive in short bursts given the flood that’s coming toward us: 30 percent more information than 30 years ago. DFW anticipated it himself, from years back, when he talked of footnotes: “They might make the primary text an easier read while...[mimicking] the information flood and data-triage I expect would be an even bigger part of US life fifteen years hence.”

8. My best friend has brain cancer. My mother has dementia. Though they are decades apart in age, they share some of the same symptoms at the end, a loss of tact, a tendency to mash one layer of time into the next. They die within weeks of each other, one at the beginning of the summer, one at the end. The deaths of our beloveds are to be expected in every life, but I’m stunned by these losses, especially by the loss of my friend, who is unexpectedly easier to miss than my mom, who was gone long ago. In the months after her death, I start to write a book about her. She would love a book about her--a love song of sorts--even though it feels like hell to do it. I don’t want to say my friend is dead, I don’t want to say: the world is dangerous, brutal now, ugly. I want to write about joy. I try my best to represent my friend in emblems--”moments of being,” as Virginia Woolf would call them-- but the emblems aren’t enough. They’re not the whole story. The whole story is: a climate out of whack, rising water, a tsunami, an uncapped oil well slopping beaches, mangroves. Dolphins dead in the marshes. What’s outside the body is also inside, which is why the book must move back and forth between two tracks. The structure doesn’t quite resound with the simultaneity of the horn players but I’m once again dealing with the fact that words aren’t wind.

9. MICHAEL HAMMER, What’s in a Name... Fugue: “In a few seconds, this voice will be joined by a second voice, imitating it, at what we call a fifth higher....Now, it is one of the secrets of fugue writing that you have to know the best way to bring in that second voice--exactly as the first, or by ‘fudging’ it a little. There are rules for that, too. Then, after a brief bit of ‘connective tissue’ we arrive back in the original key, and a third voice enters, again with the subject. If there are four, or five, voices (Bach once wrote one with six!) the same thing happens with their entrances, alternating between the original notes and five notes up from the first. The whole section is called the subject area. During the arrival of the additional voices, the old ones keep on ‘singing’ but they do not have to keep to any particular tunes, because the newly arrived ones are not going to keep imitating them. It is only the subject that is important....When all the voice entrancing has been accomplished, they all begin to dance around according to the inspiration of the composer. This more optional section is usually referred to as an episode, as in ‘I’m having an episode, and if you don’t go away I may have another one.’”

10. What else could I do? If I had a stack of transparencies I’d print one passage per page, hold them up to the light, so you could see each text burning into the next.

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Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House, and Unbuilt Projects. His work has appeared in The Awl, Fence, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Tin House, Unstuck, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction and nonfiction in the MFA Program at Rutgers-Camden. A new nonfiction book, The Narrow Door, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2014.

Steven Church on Lia Purpura's "There Are Things Awry Here"

From Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, Fall 2012

Lia Purpura’s 2011 Best American Essays contribution, “There Are Things Awry Here,” begins with Purpura’s encounter with a Tuscaloosa, Alabama big box shopping center and her observation that this place, “feels like nowhere, is so without character that the character I am hardly registers,” a sentiment that many readers can understand; but what separates Purpura from the average observer or writer is the way she responds, the way she sees and thinks about this everyday landscape. She says, “I’ll get to work, in the only way I know how:” and what follows that colon is signature Purpura. In an essayistic “walk” around the perimeter, she processes everything through her own idiosyncratic lens and logic; the driver of a Chemlawn truck becomes a “proper farmer, bowlegged and leathery;” a man on a riding mower becomes a, “rancher coming over a rise, backlit and stiff, sure hands on the reins, eye for the dips that would wreck a fetlock; and a “farm woman, her shawl held against the wind,” becomes in reality a woman, “juggling bags and pining her name tag.” The existential sadness of this landscape is conveyed through the failure of both her imagined and then the true history of the place to speak, to live and breathe beyond the parking lots and big box stores and land that “babbled the way all useless things babble—fuzzy bees with felt smiles, bejeweled and baubly plaques for occasions.”

Though it’s not always easy to follow the leaps of her mind, it’s always fun and rewarding—sort of like you’ve joined an Olympic caliber mental gymnastics class. Part of the fun is Purpura’s ability to let the reader in on the project, to be conscious of her essay as essay, and to invite the reader along for her walks without it seeming condescending or patronizing. In nearly every piece, she’ll tell you, usually early on exactly what the project is, even if it seems impossibly complicated. She tells you the target, the “about” in her essays, and then she dares you to follow her flight there. She explains the origins of “There Are Things Awry Here,” by saying, “When the land would not speak and my characters failed, when the land was muffled and my characters stock, this piece was born,” and we see how, when a fairly common, everyday subject—the wrongness of a suburban shopping mall--is approached with such artistic grace, the artificial boundaries between poetry and nonfiction cease to matter much. What matters ultimately is the way that Purpura’s mind goes to work; and it is work to explore a landscape so deeply, so thoughtfully and so uniquely, work that is a pleasure and inspiration to witness.

The essays in her new book, Rough Likeness—whether the subject is woodworking, a postcard, the beauty of shit, or the bothersome descriptor, “gunmetal”--make sense in addition to making lyrical sound. They don’t really look like poems, but they probably sound like poems; and what matters most is that each essay indulges in the unique subjective and delightful weirdness of Purpura’s consciousness. Her honesty of intention inspires trust in her as a guide. Her voice commands authority and attention; and we are happy to follow her deeply and darkly into the meaning of one particular moment. At times it seems like it would be difficult to be Lia Purpura, as if she is afflicted with meaning-making, with this kind of obsessive, microscopic dissection of the everyday. I imagine that she takes very long walks.

In “Two Experiments and Coda,” a winter walk, a penny, a nickel, and a feather found in the snow becomes a challenge, “everything in the space of a block will be picked up and kept, and by way of that decision, a synchronic study, some kind of picture will emerge;” and when I read this I am reminded why I love Purpura’s work so much. She reminds again and again that the world is full of meaning, that each moment is capable of beauty and depth, and that it’s our responsibility to find it. What matters is how we think about and process the things we see, hear, touch, smell and taste, the things we think about in any given moment. This is one of Purpura’s great talents as a writer, to make her essays and her books as much about how a writer sees or listens to the world as they are about any one particular subject.

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Steven Church is the author of The Day After The Day After: My Atomic Angst, Theoretical Killings: Essays and Accidents, and The Guinness Book of Me: a Memoir of Record. His essays have been published widely; recent work can be found here. He's a founding editor of the literary magazine The Normal School and teaches in the MFA Program at Fresno State.

Eric LeMay (Sort of) on Montaigne, Metaphor, and the Thatness of the Essay

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an eye for resemblance. — Aristotle, Poetics (c. 322 BCE) Details from the Title Page of Essais (Paris, 1588, Villey edition) Michel Eyquem de Montaigne A metaphor is a brief similitude contracted into a single word; this word— being put in the place of another word, as if it were in its own place—conveys delight, but only when the resemblance is acknowledged; if there is no resemblance, it is condemned. — Cicero, Of Oratory (55 BCE) From Histoires prodigieuses les plus mémorables qui ayent esté observées, depuis la Nativité de Iesus Christ, iusques à nostre siècle: Extraites de plusieurs fameux autheurs, Grecz, & Latins, sacrez & profanes Pierre Boaistuau (Paris, 1560) Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish - a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. — George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (1980) From Balet comique de la Royne, faict aux nopces de Monsieur le Duc de Joyeuse & madamoyselle de Vaudemont sa sœur. Par Baltasar de Beaujoyeulx, valet de chambre du Roy, & de la Royne sa mere Jacques Patin (Paris, 1581) [A] discourse which makes use of metaphor has the extraordinary power of redescribing reality. This is, I believe, the referential function of metaphorical statement .... If this analysis is sound, we should have to say that metaphor not only shatters the previous structures of our language, but also the previous structures of what we call reality. When we ask whether metaphorical language reaches reality, we presuppose that we already know what reality is. But if we assume that metaphor redescribes reality, we must then assume that this reality as redescribed is itself novel reality .... With metaphor we experience the metamorphosis of both language and reality." — Paul Ricoeur, "Creativity in Language: Word, Polysemy, Metaphor" (1973) Details from pages 69 and 70 of Book One of the Essais (Paris, 1588, Villey edition) Michel Eyquem de Montaigne Considering the proceeding of a Painters worke I have; a desire hath possessed me to imitate him: He maketh choice of the most convenient place and middle of every wall, there to place a picture, laboured with all his skill and sufficiencie; and all voyde places about it, he filleth-up with antike Bostage or Crotesko [grotesque] works; which are fantastical pictures, having no grace, but in the varietie and strangenes of them. And what are these my compositions in truth, other than antique workes and monstrous bodies, patched and hurled up together of divers members, without any certain or well ordered figure, having neither order, dependencie, or proportion, but casual and framed by chaunce?          Desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne.          A woman faire for parts superior,          Ends in a fish for parts inferior. Touching the second point I go as farre as my Painter, but for the other and better part I am farre behinde: for my sufficiency reacheth no so farre, as that I dare undertake, a rich, a polished, and according to true skill, and arte-like table. — Montaigne, "Of Friendship" (trans. John Florio, 1603) From "Petites Grotesques" (Paris, 1562) Jacques Androuet Du Cerceau Title Page of Essais (Paris, 1588, Villey edition) Michel Eyquem de Montaigne While many expository analogues, as conventional opinion proposes, are casual and illustrative, some few seem more recurrent and, not illustrative, but constitutive: they yield the ground plan and essential structural elements of a literary theory, or of any theory . . . . There is a great deal of wisdom in the popular locution for "What is its nature?" namely: "What is it like?" We tend to describe the nature of something in similes and metaphors, and the vehicles of these recurrent figures, when analyzed, often turn out to be an implicit analogue through which we are viewing the object we describe. — M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) essays : subject commonplaces meaning quotations argument interpolations coherence questions form progression intention logic structure cohesion examples :: grotesques monsterous bodies mermaids : coincidental piecemeal misshapen motley unplanned figureless serendipitious jumbled disordered fantastical fortuitous disparate muddled incredible disproportionate accidental miscellaneous unnatural confused intermixed malformed unintentional Montaigne's marginalia on the Second Edition of the Essais (Paris, 1588, Bordeaux Copy) for the Third Edition Metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this. — Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945)

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For other pieces sort of by Eric LeMay on the origin and nature of the essay, check out "Of Studies" and his collaboration with Scott Black, "On the Early English Essay: An Experimental Array."

Thomas Mira y Lopez on Donald Hall’s “Out the Window”

I first read Donald Hall’s “Out the Window” [link to excerpt] [pdf] in The New Yorker a year ago at 5:30 a.m. I was a barista at a French-Moroccan restaurant in the West Village and the morning shift began at 6. Two or three times a week, I would wake up before dawn and take the L train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, in the gloomiest of moods if I did not have something to read.
     Subway reading is tricky business. You want to choose something that can withstand and accompany the bumps and jostles of the ride. Light and engaging is good, yet at the same time you are conscious that fellow passengers notice what you read, that they can either approve or disapprove, even read over your shoulder. I like to read magazines because they are pliable and compact and The New Yorker in particular because I want to look like a serious, informed, young man. Magazines are also ideal for prolonged visits to temporary spaces (the subway, the bathroom, jury duty, doctors’ waiting rooms). They serve as buffers and distractions to whatever waits on the other side of that space—the news the doctor will deliver or the fact that once again I will put on a striped, coffee-stained American Apparel shirt and cap in order to look like a French sailor as I work a job that has no foreseeable future but also no end.
     But Hall’s essay does not distract. It confronts, ever so quietly, ever so memorably. And so while the L at 5:30 a.m.—reggaeton muffled on headphones, passengers bundled up like pigeons, the car locked into its tracks—might not be the most suitable space to read an essay about a poet gazing out his New Hampshire window, it is an intuitive one in which to read an eighty-three year old’s acknowledgment of his own mortality and fatigue.
     What first drew me to “Out the Window”, what made me resist the urge to flip through the cartoons, is that it’s about nothing. I like essays about nothing—or essays that don’t feel as if they have to be about something—because they usually then become something only after they’ve spent a long time thinking and reflecting about how they’re in a sense about nothing. Or, rather, “Out the Window” is about the everyday, which can be everything and nothing. The essay opens with Hall simply sitting at his window, a place he often occupies now that he is eighty-three. He is looking out at the birds in his feeder and at his family’s barn that must withstand another winter. He begins: “Today it is January, midmonth, mid-day, and mid-New Hampshire.” We are trapped alongside Hall in his armchair, yet still we move, honing in both in time (from month to midmonth to a time of day) and place. The ease with which Hall directs our focus underscores the dexterity of the language: today, a day, is not exactly January, just as the movement from time to a place both catches us by surprise and yet maintains a fluidity in the repeated prefix ‘mid’.
     Sentences such as the above strike me as admirable. Hall’s tone is quiet, sober, considered. Most of all, it is considerate: as Hall documents his losses at eighty three (one of which he says is language), he retains a control over the very language that his admissions claim to contradict. These losses—that of his wife, Jane Kenyon the poet, who died of leukemia at forty-seven, or his father who died at fifty-two—cause Hall to reevaluate his own physical and mental regressions. In doing so, he makes a small, quiet observation, one I did not expect him to make, that lets you glimpse the full weight of his life’s sadness as well as its blessedness: “I feel the circles grow smaller, and old age is a ceremony of losses, which is on the whole preferable to dying at forty-seven or fifty-two.” Hall does not set these up as juxtapositions, but as co-existing, harmonious, residing in a state truer to this poet’s life. More than that, in writing that “circles grow smaller”, he rephrases a metaphor his wife used to describe his mother’s death and is thus enacting his own words, “a ceremony of losses”, by repeating and honoring hers.Hall goes on to write: “When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers. It is a pleasure to write about what I do.” He darkens over diminishments (a verb to match its object) and then sits, in the light, during the day, to watch birds and his barn. He is doing nothing, yet now we know the reason why: because if he were to do something (i.e. “lament and darken”), that would truly be doing nothing. We return to the essay’s beginning and feel the circles of Hall’s prose growing tighter.
     And then there’s his use of adjectives. Here is how he describes his grandmother’s death: “Three years later, in the Peabody Home, I sat beside her listening to Cheyne-Stokes breathing. I was holding her hand when she died.” It is difficult, I have found, to write death. Even more difficult to write it concisely. Yet here Hall nails it with one adjective that does not necessarily encapsulate death, but death in this specific case: not everybody has Cheyne-Stoke breathing when they die, not everyone who displays Cheyne-Stoke breathing is dying (they could be sleeping) but it is appropriate here. It’s a proper adjective, capitalized, a medical term in a poet’s lexicon, yet it does not feel out of place, nor like a difficult adjective just thrown in for the sake of opening our dictionaries. Earlier in the passage Hall has discussed his mother’s smoking habits: “two packs a day—unfiltered Chesterfields first, then filtered Kents”. Not only is this language rhythmic (from unfiltered to filtered, from first to then, from the Ch of Chesterfield to the K in Kent, unfil to field to first to fil to Kents, ter to ter to ter), but it surfaces very subtly, very coyly in the Cheyne-Stokes line: Cheyne-Stokes looks a bit like the word Chesterfield and, even though we are reading of Hall’s grandmother here and not his mother, I’m left scratching my head as to why this all sounds so familiar until I realize, ahh, that Cheyne-Stokes rhymes with chain smokes.
     Hall writes about difficult subjects—death and ageing—with seeming ease. Not just all ages (“thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk”) but old age. Not just old age, but his old age. As with the essay’s opening (“January, midmonth, mid-day, mid-New Hampshire”), Hall approaches his situation from all angles: how he sees himself, how he sees others and how others of all ages see him. Here’s one such passage: “Over the years I travelled to another universe. However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae. They can be pleasant, they can be annoying—in the supermarket, these old ladies won’t get out of my way—but most important they are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial.” How sly is this sentiment: we don’t become extraterrestrial, but we understand ourselves as such, which implies that others might have been understanding or seeing us like this long before we came around to such a viewpoint. This works because it’s true and not true (the elderly are not aliens but they can have greenish skin, extra (sort of) heads and most definitely strange protuberances) and because it both extends distance (by speaking of extraterrestrials and outer space) and collapses it in Hall’s honesty about his own condition, his own old age, his own body.
     This capacity for subtle surprise pervades the essay. “Cornflowers bloom,” Hall writes near the end, describing his landscape. Here is another great word choice—cornflowers are blue and so how much more important does that verb become, how much more connotation and suggestion does he get by pairing it with a cornflower instead of, say, a daffodil. He claims “New poems no longer come to me, with their prodigies of metaphor and assonance. Prose endures.” New poems might no longer arrive, but that assonance is surely there—even in the sentence where he doubts its place (“poems” and “no”, “me” and “prodigies”). And then there is metaphor. For the duration of the essay, Hall sits and looks out at his barn. As he traces its history, I do not realize till the essay’s end that this barn, its age, its past, runs concurrent with him. That it is, in fact, him: “Over eighty years, it has changed from a working barn to a barn for looking at.” That’s the thing about Hall’s metaphor, his prose in general: it is so quiet yet so in command that, like a hushed train trip at dawn, you do not realize you have reached your destination until you are already there. And while that destination—an essay’s end, a life’s end—may be both necessary and undesired, it at least leaves you with nowhere to go but walking up, through a turnstile and into daylight.

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Thomas Mira y Lopez was born and raised in New York City. He now lives in Tucson, where he is pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona. His work appears online in Green Briar Review.

Megan Kimble on Worms Eating Garbage and People Considering Lobsters

The worms are not eating my garbage. The book says that they would—the title is, in fact, Worms Eat My Garbage. Not all garbage, of course; just food scraps and coffee grounds. I’d bought my worms from Linda’s Vermillion Wormery; found Linda in the shade of a warm Sunday farmers’ market and asked, “What about worms?”

It’s called vermiculture, the culturing of worms, vermicomposting when these worms convert organic waste into the dark soil of humus. Worms eat discarded food—up to four times their body weight in a day—and make waste that is full of nutrients and microorganisms and all the good things that make gardens grow. The point of composting food scraps is to turn them into soil instead of mummified artifacts in our landfills, stuck among our dead toasters and discarded shoes. It is simple if-then logic: If food scraps make up nearly a fifth of what we dump into landfills, if food has the highest rate of methane yield of anything we throw away, and if methane contributes to climate change, then I bought worms.  

Linda Leigh sells me two and a half pounds of red wigglers—a breed with a hearty appetite and zest for reproduction—packaged in a gingham bag tied with twine. “What I do is cut up my food scraps and then freeze them and then feed them to the worms,” Linda tells me, handing me a two-by-three plastic bin, and even as she tells me—as I nod and exclaim, “Great idea!”—I know that I won’t. Chopping and freezing food scraps? For worms? I barely have time to chop and freeze my own food, thank you very much.

But when I pour a wriggling mass of worms into a soil-filled bin, as they uncurl and relax from a knotted fist into a writhing expanse, aiding by my prodding fingers—so shiny, so squirming, so other-worldly—and as they ease and furrow and burrow into the dark, damp soil, flicking their posteriors in a curly goodbye, they endear themselves to me. They are my worms and I have brought them into my home.

My purchase of two and a half pounds of worm comes with a cartoon-covered book called Worms Eat My Garbage: How to set up and maintain a worm composting system. A parade of cheese rings, egg shells, lettuce leaves, and carrot tops marches towards three upright worms, smiling big wormy smiles. “Worms don’t make noise and they require very little care,” writes Mary Appelhof in Worms Eat My Garbage. “In deciding where to put your worm bin, consider both the worms’ needs and your own.” What are the worms’ needs? Temperatures between 59 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Moisture—enough so they’re slimy, not so much that they drown—ventilation and slight acidity, a pH level around 5 or 6. What are my needs? Something between a garbage disposal and a pet.

My worms spend their first few nights in my home in a closet with the light on. Linda had said the light would help them burrow into the soil rather than venture onto my tile and this seems like a sensible use of electricity. Of course, worms can’t actually see—their anterior parts (as opposed to the posterior, the limited anatomical options available to a worm) are simply sensitive to light, leading them to furrow into the darkness of soil or a bruised banana peel.

In a dream, I wake up to find them spread over Saltillo tile like spilled water, like Ghostbusters slime, and they wind, delighted, around my toes.

I move the worm bin outside. It had been the plan all along, at least until triple-digit summer temperatures force them back into the closet. I begin feeding them radish tops and onion peels and citrus rinds, stirring the scraps in by hand, unsettled and unaccustomed to moving worms around, worried that I might pull them apart as I shift heavy soil.

“The effectiveness of your vermicomposting system will depend partly upon your expectations and partly upon your behavior,” writes Applehof. My behavior is erratic, forgetful and then rushed. There is a reason so many writers have cats, animals so stubbornly low-maintenance they seem to insist: I don’t need you.

If I leave my worm bin untended for six months—an option presented to me by Applehof—worms will eat all the bedding and organic waste, producing a bin full of vermicast, “completely worm worked and re-worked material with a fine, smooth texture.” Which means great for soil but bad for the worms—without food discards to eat, the worms die; their little worm carcasses will soon become castings and then rich humus as microorganisms digest their slimy spirals into soil. 

And then it snows—in Tucson!—and I panic, mid-day, remembering the worms in their bin outside, convinced I will arrive home to a heavy, decomposing knot of dead worms. Frozen worms. I'm sorry, worms, I think, when I get home and lug the bin back to the closet. And then I wonder if they care. They might be cold, but they might not know it—they might just die before they realize the air has frozen and they are still outside.

In “Consider the Lobster,” an essay published in Gourmet in 2004, David Foster Wallace uses worms as the counterpoint example that proves that lobsters have preferences and thus, that they feel pain. If a lobster claws the edge of its container as its tipped into a boiling kettle of water, if it clings to the edge and clatters when a lid is placed atop, it is reasonable to assume it is expressing a preference not to be boiled. “It may well be that an ability to form preferences is the decisive criterion for real suffering,” writes Wallace. “If you cut certain kinds of worms in half, the halves will often keep crawling around and going about their vermiform business as if nothing had happened. When we assert, based on their post-op behavior, that these worms appear not to be suffering, what we’re really saying is that there’s no sign that the worms know anything bad has happened or would prefer.”

Worms have sex. Of course this does not answer the question as to whether they prefer to have sex or not—whether they preferred that I not leave them in the snow—but even though a single earthworm has both male and female reproductive organs, it takes two to, well, do the wiggle. “Attracted by glandular secretions, they find each other and lie with their heads in opposite directions, their bodies closely joined,” writes Appelhof. Their clitella—the swollen band about a third the way down a worm, the presence of which signifies a worm is sexually mature—secrete mucus and pass sperm from one to another. Both worms form cocoons on the clitella—both cocoons receive eggs and sperm; both cocoons produce baby worms.

Worm sex doesn’t really have anything much to do with composting or climate change, but I think it does with preference and whether or not my worms are a pet or a garbage disposal or something in between. It also doesn’t have so much to do with lobsters or the considering thereof, except that when I read “Consider the Lobster,” I considered a lobster differently than I had before. At the Maine Lobster Festival, where is incidentally where his wonderful essay unfolds, mostly in a tent where 80,000 eat 25,000 pounds over lobster over five days in August, Wallace writes of how lobsters exhibit preferences—to be alone, to be at the bottom, of sea or tank, to be away from light. “In any event,” Wallace writes, “at the Festival, standing by the bubbling tanks outside the World’s Largest Lobster Cooker, watching the fresh-caught lobsters pile over one another, wave their hobbled claws impotently, huddle in the rear corners, or scrabble frantically back from the glass as you approach, it is difficult not to sense that they’re unhappy, or frightened, even if it’s some rudimentary version of these feelings …and, again, why does rudimentariness even enter into it? Why is a primitive, inarticulate form of suffering less urgent or uncomfortable for the person who’s helping to inflict it by paying for the food it results in? …The truth is that if you, the Festival attendee, permit yourself to think that lobsters can suffer and would rather not, the MLF can begin to take on aspects of something like a Roman circus or medieval torture-fest.”

A week or two after my worms nearly froze, after they have returned outside when the weather thaws, after I started offering food again, a little bit at a time, and nicely chopped, after all of it, I went out for tacos with friends. On special at our favorite taco joint: worm tacos. Corn tortillas and sautéed onions and crunchy worms. I was not one of the brave few who paid for the worm tacos—too close to home—but when they arrived, spilling out of the splayed tortilla, and I saw that they were not earthworms—too short, looking more like fat rice than squirmy noodles—I tried one. It crunched, crustaceous, a small explosion of flavor.

After I re-read “Consider the Lobster” and after I crunched on a small silkworm, I walked outside, took a deep breath, and stuck my hand deep into the bin of earthworms and turned over soil. They curl around my fingers, roll and roil, flick and burrow. They wind around each other, curl into the concavity of an orange rind, cluster towards the tail of a radish. There might be a few dead worms after the unexpected freeze, but other organisms will take care of them, just as the worms will take care of us—“A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him,” wrote Shakespeare. “Your worm is your only emperor for diet.”


Megan Kimble is finishing up her MFA in Creative Writing nonfiction at the University of Arizona. She writes about food and the environment. 

Patricia Vigderman on Alexander Stille

THE PRESENT OF THE PAST

In the ancient agora in Athens a recreation of the Stoa of Attalos occupies the same ground where it stood in antiquity. Among excavated ruins, just off the route of the ancient Panathenaean procession up to the Acropolis, it was recreated down to the last details by archeologists from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens in the 1950s. Inside is a small museum of objects retrieved from the local earth. There I saw the fragile skeleton of a child buried near this spot around 1000 BC, in the Protogeometric Age. Her grave is reassembled in a glass case: the flat stones that formed the edge of the tomb, her head now a half skull filled with packed dirt, the thin bones of her arms, pelvis, and legs still plausibly showing the shape, still the inner outline of a small girl. And little jugs for wine and oil, two bronze bracelets, a ring, the pins that fastened the garment she wore on her journey to the underworld. Those burial jars, the pin that once secured the vanished cloth: they spoke of a kind of grown-up dignity particular to her time and place.
    How touching it was to see her small bones in that reconstructed context. It would be wrong to call her an object of art, but she seems to offer something more than scientific knowledge: the opportunity to feel simultaneously our transience on earth, the importance of being alive in our own moment, and the particularity of hers.
    Thousand of miles to the west, at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, the intricate floor of a circular display space is composed of twenty-two concentric circles, four thousand triangular pieces of black or yellow marble, with a touch of rosso antico and green porphyry at the center. It’s a marvel of illusionistic paving. Like the Stoa of Attalos it was copied stone by stone from the original—this time the belvedere floor of a villa discovered a hundred feet underground in the course of excavations at Herculaneum, ancient city covered by lava in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD that also obliterated Pompeii.
    The villa’s excavation was carried out in 1750, on behalf of the King of Naples, and the workers were slaves, convicts in chains. The Guide to the Getty Villa adds parenthetically that their chains were removed so they wouldn’t damage the ancient mosaic floors. This eighteenth-century cruelty allowed the stones to be lifted out piece by piece and reassembled in the king’s museum at Portici, near Naples. Two centuries later, that floor was recreated piece by beautiful piece in Malibu, to satisfy the vanity of an American millionaire.
    In his wonderful book The Future of the Past, Alexander Stille writes about the way the future (us) is always taking up its own concerns as it goes about honoring, preserving, and collecting the past. He writes about nature in Madagascar and oral poetry in Somaliland, about the vanished and the vanishing, and the resurrected. He writes about the Sphinx as a monument constantly undergoing change—from the organisms and animals inside it, from water moving through it. He writes about trying to save the Ganges from pollution while respecting its cultural position in India, and about the efforts of one American priest living in Rome to live spontaneously in the city’s present through the Latin language, to share the ancient tongue’s lovely conjunction with the place. And he asks if our efforts systematically to understand the past paradoxically makes it recede.
    Stille allows his questions to remain open, as he gets close to those who live with them every day: an American scholar who spent weeks mapping the stones in the paws of the Sphinx; Somalia’s most beloved poet regretting his own literacy. An archeologist in Sicily hears in an inscription on ancient treasure taken from its ground “an ancient voice crying out at a moment of incredible difficulty, similar to what happened in Bosnia or Kosovo.” The meaning of the old things is not just in the past, but for the present.
    This meaning is what I have been looking for in the places of the past, and in the museums of the present. One ravishing space now at the Getty Villa is its triclinium (which would have been the dining room). Part of a recent lavish renovation of the 1970s original, the room is decorated in marbles from Egypt, Tunisia, Sparta, and Turkey. It incorporates design elements from three different villas at Herculaneum. Resting on a bench there one’s eye falls on an almost sickening display of gorgeous luxury. It’s simultaneously an evocation of the past and a denial of the actual experience of visiting what’s left of that vanished world, with its flaking columns and unlit frescoes. Here in the imagined loveliness of Piso’s time, how distant we are from the delicacies Piso served there as the long first-century afternoons drifted into evening: flamingo tongues, ibex, and even field mice (fattened in little cages).
     The past is a foreign country of ancient voices, slave labor, buried children, and field mouse stew. We stalk it like hunters immersed in a world of animals, at once predators and prey. It’s a dark cave into which we shine the flashlight of the present, exploring what it is to be human by feeling our way: recreating, reassembling our understanding of what is true. Rationality and pleasure together nose us into that dark space, trying to bring the past back from the underworld to speak to us. This reconstruction of Roman leisure on a California shore is missing the gravity of the child’s skeleton, that delicate memento mori among the fortuitous remains of urban life. Nevertheless its particular aesthetic reality creates a rich experience of immediacy, loss, and grandeur.
    Displayed in another room at the Getty Villa is an eerily satisfying group of terra cotta figures, Orpheus and the Sirens, the work of an unknown Greek artist working in southern Italy. How incongruous perhaps this display of Greek and Roman antiquity by the Pacific shore, and how much I would not want it sent back to its proper context in Italy! I don’t think my compromised desire is incompatible with paying proper respect to the people and places where art flourished. The scientific desire to know them and thus enrich our perspective on our own shifting place in the continuum of time is only part of what has us digging in the old earth, and filling our museums.
    Running side by side with human rapacity and exploitation is that marriage of skill and imagination we call art, without which we would indeed be the poorest of bare forked creatures. Art offers a way of being in the present--briefly unannexed to the dead, even while connected to the past and the future. Stille’s book is deeply engaged with how the past is constantly shifting, as its story is constructed. Yet I am still engaged in art’s shiftlessness.
    Our human intelligence gives us the power to go back through history up the stream of time, said Robert Frost, but the point is not chiefly that you may go where you will,/ But in the rush of everything to waste,/ that you may have the power of standing still. Frost’s poem is called “The Master Speed” and that speed is indeed just the capacity for stillness, for self-abandonment in the moment, for being free of past and future, of narrative or progress, of time and death. Predators, slave-owners, mourners, and creators, we plunder and rebuild. Alongside the vanishing particularity of our graves we want the suddenly expansive moments of delight that free us from the brevity of our tales.

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Patricia Vigderman is the author of a new essay collection, Possibility: Essays Against Despair (Sarabande Books) and The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner (Sarabande Books, 2007).  She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches at Kenyon College.