Search Results for: High-School

I Think, Therefore I Am Getting the Goddamned Epidural

Illustration by Annelise Capossela

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | November 2017 | 16 minutes (3989 words)

Until I was 34 weeks pregnant, I only considered the act of childbirth in blurred, vague terms, and this meant I was unusually impressionable. Hence, the entrée in week 35 of one Ina May Gaskin, legendary midwife, and successful deliverer of eleventy-dillion babies at what definitely didn’t seem like a very creepy commune in the middle of Tennessee. “You must read Ina May,” explained my friend Charlotte (not her real name), who’d recently driven 80 miles across state lines to push out her second child in a midwifery center. “She will make you SO CONFIDENT about what your body can do,” all caps in original. I was intrigued — and, a few hundred pages deep into Spiritual Midwifery and Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, equal parts tentative and enamored.

Both books consisted primarily of first-person accounts of sublime natural birthing. “The ecstasy of birth was so wonderful,” wrote one mother, named Kim, after her daughter simply “slipped out.” Another went for a two-hour hike in the middle of labor. “I could feel my baby move me open, and when the intensity of the rushes increased, I just leaned on a tree.” First-time mother Celeste, furthermore, wouldn’t call labor painful — she’d call it “INTENSELY NATURAL,” all caps, once again, in the original. Then there was my favorite, Mary, who “visualized [her] yoni as a big, open cave beneath the surface of the ocean,” and “surrendered over and over to the great, oceanic, engulfing waves. It was really delightful — very orgasmic and invigorating.”

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The Ghosts of the Tsunami

Illustration by Dadu Shin

Richard Lloyd Parry | Ghosts of the Tsunami | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2017 | 19 minutes (5,224 words)

I met a priest in northern Japan who exorcised the spirits of people who had drowned in the tsunami. The ghosts did not appear in large numbers until autumn of that year, but Reverend Kaneta’s first case of possession came to him after less than a fortnight. He was the chief priest at a Zen temple in the inland town of Kurihara. The earthquake on March 11 was the most violent that he or anyone he knew had ever experienced. The great wooden beams of the temple’s halls had flexed and groaned with the strain. Power, water, and telephone lines were fractured for days; deprived of electricity, people in Kurihara, thirty miles from the coast, had a dimmer idea of what was going on there than television viewers on the other side of the world. But it became clear enough when first a handful of families, and then a mass of them, began arriving at Reverend Kaneta’s temple with corpses to bury.

More than eighteen thousand people had died at a stroke. In the space of a month, Reverend Kaneta performed funeral services for two hundred of them. More appalling than the scale of death was the spectacle of the bereaved survivors. “They cry,” Kaneta said. “There was no emotion at all. The loss was so profound, and death had come so suddenly. They understood the facts of their situation individually — that they had lost their homes, lost their livelihoods, and lost their families. They understood each piece, but they couldn’t see it as a whole, and they couldn’t understand what they should do, or sometimes even where they were. I couldn’t really talk to them, to be honest. All I could do was stay with them, and read the sutras and conduct the ceremonies. That was the thing I could do.”

Amid this numbness and horror, Reverend Kaneta received a visit from a man he knew, a local builder whom I will call Takeshi Ono.

***

Ono was ashamed of what had happened, and didn’t want his real name to be published. It was difficult at first to understand the reason for this shame. He was a strong, stocky man in his late thirties, the kind of man most comfortable in blue overalls, with a head of youthfully dense and tousled hair. “He’s such an innocent person,” Reverend Kaneta said to me. “He takes everything at face value. You’re from England, aren’t you? He’s like your Mr. Bean.” I wouldn’t have gone so far because there was nothing ridiculous about Ono. But there was a dreamy ingenuousness about him, which made the story he told all the more believable.

He had been at work on a house when the earthquake struck. He clung to the ground for as long as it lasted; even his truck shook as if it was about to topple over. The drive home, along roads without traffic lights, was alarming, but the physical damage was remarkably slight: a few telegraph poles lolling at an angle, toppled garden walls. As the owner of a small building firm, he was perfectly equipped to deal with the practical inconveniences inflicted by the earthquake. Ono spent the next few days busying himself with camping stoves, generators, and jerrycans, and paying little attention to the news.

But once television was restored, it was impossible to be unaware of what had happened. Ono watched the endlessly replayed image of the explosive plume above the nuclear reactor, and the mobile-phone films of the black wave crunching up ports, houses, shopping centers, cars, and human figures. These were places he had known all his life, fishing towns and beaches just over the hills, an hour’s drive away. And the spectacle of their destruction produced in Ono a sensation of glassy detachment, a feeling common at that time, even among those most directly stricken by displacement and bereavement.

“My life had returned to normal,” he told me. “I had gasoline, I had an electricity generator, no one I knew was dead or hurt. I hadn’t seen the tsunami myself, not with my own eyes, so I felt as if I was in a kind of dream.”

Ten days after the disaster, Ono, his wife, and his widowed mother drove over the mountains to see for themselves.

They left in the morning in good spirits, stopped on the way to go shopping, and reached the coast in time for lunch. For most of the way, the scene was familiar: brown rice fields, villages of wood and tile, bridges over wide, slow rivers. Once they had climbed into the hills, they passed more and more emergency vehicles, not only those of the police and fire services, but the green trucks of the Self-Defense Forces. As the road descended towards the coast, their jaunty mood began to evaporate. Suddenly, before they understood where they were, they had entered the tsunami zone.

There was no advance warning, no marginal area of incremental damage. The wave had come in with full force, spent itself, and stopped at a point as clearly defined as the reach of a high tide. Above it, nothing had been touched; below it, everything was changed.

This was the point at which shame entered Ono’s narrative, and he became reluctant to describe in detail what he did or where he went. “I saw the rubble, I saw the sea,” he said. “I saw buildings damaged by the tsunami. It wasn’t just the things themselves, but the atmosphere. It was a place I used to go so often. It was such a shock to see it. And all the police and soldiers there. It’s difficult to describe. It felt dangerous. My first thought was that this is terrible. My next feeling was ‘Is it real?’”

***

Ono, his wife, and his mother sat down for dinner as usual that evening. He remembered that he drank two small cans of beer with the meal. Afterward, and for no obvious reason, he began calling friends on his mobile phone. “I’d just ring and say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ — that kind of thing,” he told me. “It wasn’t that I had much to say. I don’t know why, but I was starting to feel very lonely.”

His wife had already left the house when he woke the next morning. Ono had no particular work of his own and passed an idle day at home. His mother bustled in and out, but she seemed mysteriously upset, even angry. When his wife returned from her office, she was similarly tense.

“Is something wrong?” Ono asked.

“I’m divorcing you!” she replied.

“Divorce? But why? Why?”

And so his wife and mother described the events of the night before, after the round of needy phone calls. How Ono had jumped down onto all fours and begun licking the tatami mats and futon and squirmed on them like a beast. How at first they had nervously laughed at his tomfoolery, but had been silenced when he began snarling, “You must die. You must die. Everyone must die. Everything must die and be lost.” In front of the house was an unsown field, and Ono had run out into it and rolled over and over in the mud, as if he was being tumbled by a wave, shouting, “There, over there! They’re all over there — look!” Then he had stood up and walked out into the field, calling, “I’m coming to you. I’m coming over to that side,” before his wife physically wrestled him back into the house. The writhing and bellowing went on all night until, around five in the morning, Ono cried out, “There’s something on top of me,” collapsed, and fell asleep.

“My wife and my mother were so anxious and upset,” he said. “Of course, I told them how sorry I was. But I had no memory of what I did or why.”

It went on for three nights.

The next evening, as darkness fell, he saw figures walking past the house: parents and children, a group of young friends, a grandfather and a child. “The people were covered in mud,” he said. “They were no more than twenty feet away, and they stared at me, but I wasn’t afraid. I just thought, ‘Why are they in those muddy things? Why don’t they change their clothes? Perhaps their washing machine’s broken.’ They were like people I might have known once or seen before somewhere. The scene was flickering, like a film. But I felt perfectly normal, and I thought that they were just ordinary people.”

The next day, Ono was lethargic and inert. At night, he would lie down, sleep heavily for ten minutes, then wake up as lively and refreshed as if eight hours had passed. He staggered when he walked, glared at his wife and mother, and even waved a knife. “Drop dead!” he would snarl. “Everyone else is dead, so die!”

After three days of pleading by his family, he went to Reverend Kaneta at the temple. “His eyes were dull,” Kaneta said. “Like a person with depression after taking their medication. I knew at a glance that something was wrong.” Ono recounted the visit to the coast, and his wife and mother described his behavior in the days since. “The Reverend was looking hard at me as I spoke,” Ono said, “and in part of my mind, I was saying, ‘Don’t look at me like that, you bastard. I hate your guts! Why are you looking at me?’”

Kaneta took Ono by the hand and led him, tottering, into the main hall of the temple. “He told me to sit down. I was not myself. I still remember that strong feeling of resistance. But part of me was also relieved — I wanted to be helped and to believe in the priest. The part of me that was still me wanted to be saved.”

Kaneta beat the temple drum as he chanted the Heart Sutra:

There are no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue,
no body, mind; no color, sound, or smell;
no taste, no touch, no thing; no realm of sight,
no realm of thoughts; no ignorance, no end
to ignorance; no old age and no death;
no end to age and death; no suffering,
nor any cause of suffering, nor end
to suffering, no path, no wisdom
and no fulfillment.

Ono’s wife told him later how he pressed his hands together in prayer and how, as the priest’s recitation continued, they rose high above his head as if being pulled from above.

gone gone gone beyond
gone altogether beyond
O what an awakening
— all hail!

The priest splashed him with holy water, and then abruptly Ono returned to his senses and found himself with wet hair and shirt, filled with a sensation of tranquility and release. “My head was light,” he said. “In a moment, the thing that had been there had gone. I felt fine physically, but my nose was blocked as if I’d come down with a heavy cold.”

Kaneta spoke sternly to him; both understood what had happened. “Ono told me that he’d walked along the beach in that devastated area, eating an ice cream,” the priest said. “He even put up a sign in the car against the windshield saying disaster relief, so that no one would stop him. He went there flippantly, without giving it any thought at all. I told him, ‘You fool. If you go to a place like that where many people have died, you must go with a feeling of respect. That’s common sense. You have suffered a kind of punishment for what you did. Something got hold of you, perhaps the dead who cannot accept yet that they are dead. They have been trying to express their regret and their resentment through you.’” Kaneta suddenly smiled as he remembered it. “Mr. Bean!” he said indulgently. “He’s so innocent and open. That’s another reason why they were able to possess him.”

Ono recognized all of this and more. It was not just the spirits of men and women that had possessed him, he saw now, but also animals — cats and dogs and other beasts that had drowned with their masters.

He thanked the priest and drove home. His nose was streaming as if with catarrh, but what came out was not mucus, but a pink jelly-like nothing he had seen before.

The wave penetrated no more than a few miles inland, but over the hills in Kurihara it transformed the life of Reverend Taio Kaneta. He had inherited the temple from his father, and the task of dealing with the survivors of the tsunami tested him in ways for which he was unprepared. It had been the greatest disaster of postwar Japan. And yet the pain did not announce itself; it dug underground and burrowed deep. Once the immediate emergency had abated, once the bodies were cremated, the memorial services held, and the homeless sheltered, Reverend Kaneta set about trying to gain entry into the dungeon of silence in which he saw so many of the survivors languishing.

He began traveling around the coast with a group of fellow priests, organizing a mobile event that he called “Café de Monku” — a bilingual pun. As well as being the Japanese pronunciation of the English word “monk,” monku means “complaint.” “We think it will take a long time to get back to a calm, quiet, ordinary life,” read the flyer that he distributed. “Why don’t you come and join us — take a break and have a little moan? The monks will listen to your complaint — and have a monku of their own too.”

Under this pretext — a casual cup of tea and a friendly chat — people came to the temples and community centers where Café de Monku was held. Many were living in “temporary residences,” the grim prefabricated huts, freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, where those who could afford nothing better ended up. The priests listened sympathetically and made a point of not asking too many questions. “People don’t like to cry,” said Kaneta. “They see it as selfish. Among those who are living in the temporary homes, there’s hardly anyone who has not lost a member of their family. Everyone’s in the same boat, so they don’t like to seem self-indulgent. But when they start talking, and when you listen to them, and sense their gritted teeth and their suffering, all the suffering they can’t and won’t express, in time the tears come, and they flow without end.”

Haltingly, apologetically, then with increasing fluency, the survivors spoke of the terror of the wave, the pain of bereavement, and their fears for the future. They also talked about encounters with the supernatural.

They described sightings of ghostly strangers, friends and neighbors, and dead loved ones. They reported hauntings at home, at work, in offices and public places, on the beaches and in the ruined towns. The experiences ranged from eerie dreams and feelings of vague unease to cases, like that of Takeshi Ono, of outright possession.

It was not just the spirits of men and women that had possessed him, but also animals — cats and dogs and other beasts that had drowned with their masters.

A young man complained of pressure on his chest at night, as if some creature was straddling him as he slept. A teenage girl spoke of a fearful figure who squatted in her house. A middle-aged man hated to go out in the rain, because of the eyes of the dead, which stared out at him from puddles.

A civil servant in Soma visited a devastated stretch of coast and saw a solitary woman in a scarlet dress far from the nearest road or house, with no means of transport in sight. When he looked for her again, she had disappeared.

A fire station in Tagajo received calls to places where all the houses had been destroyed by the tsunami. The crews went out to the ruins anyway, prayed for the spirits of those who had died — and the ghostly calls ceased.

A taxi in the city of Sendai picked up a sad-faced man who asked to be taken to an address that no longer existed. Halfway through the journey, the driver looked into his mirror to see that the rear seat was empty. He drove on anyway, stopped in front of the leveled foundations of a destroyed house, and politely opened the door to allow the invisible passenger out at his former home.

At a refugee community in Onagawa, an old neighbor would appear in the living rooms of the temporary houses and sit down for a cup of tea with their startled occupants. No one had the heart to tell her that she was dead; the cushion on which she had sat was wet with seawater.

Such stories came from all over the devastated area. Priests — Christian and Shinto, as well as Buddhist — found themselves called on repeatedly to quell unhappy spirits. A Buddhist monk wrote an article in a learned journal about “the ghost problem,” and academics at Tohoku University began to catalog the stories. In Kyoto, the matter was debated at a scholarly symposium.

“Religious people all argue about whether these are really the spirits of the dead,” Kaneta told me. “I don’t get into it, because what matters is that people are seeing them, and in these circumstances, after this disaster, it is perfectly natural. So many died, and all at once. At home, at work, at school — the wave came in and they were gone. The dead had no time to prepare themselves. The people left behind had no time to say goodbye. Those who lost their families, and those who died — they have strong feelings of attachment. The dead are attached to the living, and those who have lost them are attached to the dead. It’s inevitable that there are ghosts.”

He said: “So many people are having these experiences. It’s impossible to identify who and where they all are. But there are countless such people, and their number is going to increase. And all we do is treat the symptoms.”

When opinion polls put the question “How religious are you?,” Japanese rank among the most ungodly people in the world. It took a catastrophe for me to understand how misleading this self-assessment is. It is true that the organized religions, Buddhism and Shinto, have little influence on private or national life. But over the centuries both have been pressed into the service of the true faith of Japan: the cult of the ancestors.

I knew about the household altars, or butsudan, which are still seen in most homes and on which the memorial tablets of dead ancestors — the ihai — are displayed. The butsudan are cabinets of lacquer and gilt, with openwork carvings of flowers and trees; the ihai are upright tablets of black lacquered wood, vertically inscribed in gold. Offerings of flowers, incense, food, fruit, and drinks are placed before them; at the summer Festival of the Dead, families light lanterns to welcome home the ancestral spirits. I had taken these picturesque practices to be matters of symbolism and custom, attended to in the same way that people in the West will participate in a Christian funeral without any literal belief in the words of the liturgy. But in Japan spiritual beliefs are regarded less as expressions of faith than as simple common sense, so lightly and casually worn that it is easy to miss them altogether. “The dead are not as dead there as they are in our own society,” wrote the religious scholar Herman Ooms. “It has always made perfect sense in Japan as far back as history goes to treat the dead as more alive than we do . . . even to the extent that death becomes a variant, not a negation of life.”

At the heart of ancestor worship is a contract. The food, drink, prayers, and rituals offered by their descendants gratify the dead, who in turn bestow good fortune on the living. Families vary in how seriously they take these ceremonies, but even for the unobservant, the dead play a continuing part in domestic life. For much of the time, their status is something like that of beloved, deaf, and slightly batty old folk who cannot expect to be at the center of the family, but who are made to feel included on important occasions. Young people who have passed important entrance examinations, gotten a job, or made a good marriage kneel before the butsudan to report their success. Victory or defeat in an important legal case, for example, is shared with the ancestors in the same way.

When grief is raw, the presence of the deceased is overwhelming. In households that had lost children in the tsunami, it became routine, after half an hour of tea and chat, to be asked if I would like to “meet” the dead sons and daughters. I would be led to a shrine covered with framed photographs, with toys, favorite drinks and snacks, letters, drawings, and school exercise books. One mother commissioned carefully Photoshopped portraits of her children, showing them as they would have been had they lived — a boy who died in elementary school smiling proudly in high-school uniform, an eighteen-year-old girl as she should have looked in kimono at her coming-of-age ceremony. Another decked the altar with makeup and acrylic fingernails that her daughter would have worn if she had lived to become a teenager. Here, every morning, they began the day by talking to their dead children, weeping love and apology, as unselfconsciously as if they were speaking over a long-distance telephone line.

The tsunami did appalling violence to the religion of the ancestors.

Along with walls, roofs, and people, the water carried away household altars, memorial tablets, and family photographs. Cemetery vaults were ripped open by the wave, and the bones of the dead scattered. Temples were destroyed, along with memorial books, listing the names of ancestors over generations. “The memorial tablets — it’s difficult to exaggerate their importance,” Yozo Taniyama, a priest friend of Kaneta’s, told me. “When there’s a fire or an earthquake, the ihai are the first thing that many people will save, before money or documents. I think that people died in the tsunami because they went home for the ihai. It’s life, the life of the ancestors. It’s like saving your late father’s life.”

When people die violently or prematurely, in anger or anguish, they are at risk of becoming gaki: “hungry ghosts,” who wander between worlds, propagating curses and mischief. There are rituals for placating unhappy spirits, but in the aftermath of the disaster, few families were in a position to perform these. And then there were those ancestors who lost all their living descendants to the wave. Their well-being in the afterlife depended entirely on the reverence of living families, which was permanently and irrevocably cut off: their situation was as helpless as that of orphaned children.

Tsunamis anywhere destroy property and kill the living, but in Japan they inflict a third kind of injury, unique and invisible, on the dead. At a stroke, thousands of spirits had passed from life to death; countless others were cut loose from their moorings in the afterlife. How could they all be cared for? Who was to honor the compact between the living and the dead? In such circumstances, how could there fail to be a swarm of ghosts?

It was in the summer after the tsunami that Naomi Hiratsuka began to speak to her dead daughter, Koharu. At first, and unlike most people she knew, she had hesitated. Shamanism, and varieties of mediumship, were deeply established in Tohoku, and many of the bereaved were turning to those who practiced them. Naomi had her doubts about the existence of such gifts, but above all she detested the way in which some people, especially in the media, treated the subject, in an effort to squeeze spooky entertainment out of tragedy. She had been especially sickened by an article in a Japanese magazine about teenagers daring one another to make nighttime visits to the site of Okawa Elementary School, in the hope of encountering its ghosts.

But the search for Koharu and the other missing children was going so badly, bogged down both in the literal mud and in a morass of bureaucratic complication. Naomi was in close touch with the police unit, which was carrying out its own search, and got to know its commanders. One day they made a suggestion that surprised her at the time — that if she knew of any mediums or psychics who had advice to offer, particularly about specific places to direct the search, she should pass it on.

A friend introduced her to a young man in his twenties who was known to have the ability to see and hear the dead. Recently, people said, he had heard a voice in a dense bamboo thicket by the Fuji lake — and when it was searched, bones were indeed found, and identified as the remains of a missing woman. Naomi arranged to meet the young psychic late one evening at the ruin of the school. It was the summer festival of Tanabata, the star festival, when people hang trees with handwritten poems and prayers, and with delicate paper decorations: streamers, purses, birds, dolls. They walked side by side in the humid darkness, between the shell of the school and the hill behind it. At a small shrine on the hill, Naomi tied decorations of her own around the bamboo and prayed for Koharu’s return. It was a hot, windless night, but the colored paper danced and shivered strangely in the motionless air. “It is the children who are moving the decorations,” the psychic said. “They are delighted with them.”

They walked past a long line of rubble, roughly heaped up into great mounds. Hundreds of people had died in this small area. It was possible that bodies were still contained within the heaps. The psychic said, “I can hear a voice. I think it is the voice of a woman, not a child.” And Naomi, straining, also heard it, although too faintly for the words to be distinguishable. “It was just an ordinary voice,” she said. “It sounded as if she was having an ordinary conversation. But when I looked around, there was nobody there.”

Naomi said, “I didn’t used to believe in such things, and I’d never had an experience like that before. But having lived through the disaster, having been through what I had, perhaps it’s quite natural that I would hear such a voice.”

She spent a lot of time with the young man. They walked together for hours through the wide environs of the school — around the Fuji lake, and as far in the other direction as the Nagatsuura lagoon. He gave Naomi a crystal on a length of cord, which she would hold suspended over a large-scale map in the hope of divining Koharu’s whereabouts. She told the police about the voice she had heard at the rubble mounds, and they were thoroughly sifted. But no human remains were found.

During their long walks, the young psychic would describe to Naomi the invisible scene surrounding them. One might have expected a consoling picture of life after death, but the vision he described was appalling. Naomi compared it to a famous Japanese horror film, Ring, which itself drew on the hell imagery of medieval art. “He said that there were pale figures like the ghosts in that film, many, many of them crawling on the ground. Some of them were stuck in the water, covered in mud, and swallowing the dirty water in terrible suffering. Some of them were trapped and trying to get out. But he couldn’t tell which of them were the spirits of people who had already been found, and which of them were those like my daughter, who were still missing.”

Naomi began to seek out other means of reaching the dead. The introductions were easily made — many of the Okawa mothers were consulting one psychic or another. Having started out a skeptic, she found herself holding conversations with Koharu herself.

The medium, whose name was Sumi, ran a small coffee shop in the city. Sometimes Naomi and Shinichiro went to see her in person; sometimes Koharu’s utterances were conveyed over the telephone, and even by e-mail and text message. But Naomi was quickly persuaded of their authenticity. Sumi conveyed so perfectly the tone and character of the Koharu that her family remembered — the chattiness, bossiness, and sweetness of a girl about to become a teenager. Through Sumi, Koharu dictated a detailed list of presents that were to be given in her name to members of the family — a particular kind of drawing pad and pencils for her brother, a pink bag for her little sister. She instructed Naomi to serve the family with powdered green-tea sweets, which she had always loved. But apart from the convincing childishness, there was an unexpected maturity in much of what she said, which might have been that of the medium, but which seemed at times to be the authority acquired by those, even in their young years, who have passed through death.

Koharu asked in detail about the well-being of her family, especially her siblings, and showed great concern about her mother’s career. “She seemed to think that Sae, the baby, would be okay,” Naomi said. “But she wanted me to give a lot more attention to Toma, who was older. And she told me to finish my maternity leave and go back to work. All of this helped, it helped us so much to carry on with an ordinary life, even after death. It was so welcome.”

What neither the medium nor the spirit ever seemed able to say was the thing Naomi most wanted to know: the resting place of Koharu, or her bodily remnant. “Sumi told us that finding the remains is not everything. She said, ‘You might think that the kids want their parents to find them, that they are desperate to go back home. But they are already home. They are already in a very good place. And the more you bury yourselves in the search, the more desperate you will become.’”

Naomi’s friend Miho visited another medium and drew the deepest consolation from her conversations with her missing daughter, Hana. “It was just like talking to her,” Miho said. “It was just as if Hana was standing there, at my side. She said that she was in heaven and that she was very happy. The woman knew all about our daily life, how Hana talked, the kinds of expressions she used. If she said that she was suffering, if she’d been crying for help, and saying, ‘Mum, get me out of here!’ I wouldn’t have been able to bear it. But the words I heard always made me feel calmer.”

Sometimes the messages from the dead contradicted one another. One of the first things Hana told her mother, Miho, was that she should not harbor any blame or resentment towards the teachers at the school. “The teachers are crying in heaven, and that is hard for us,” she said through the medium. “They are suffering, and watching them makes us children feel sad.” But another psychic, at another time, told Miho the opposite: that the children were bitter and angry towards the teachers for letting them die so needlessly, for failing to lead them to the obvious places of safety and survival.

* * *

From Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone by Richard Lloyd Parry. Published by MCD / Farrar, Straus and Giroux. © 2017 by Richard Lloyd Parry. 

Multi-Level Marketing’s Feminine Mystique: A Reading List

Women attend a Tupperware party, 1955. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)

The commodification of female friendship began in the living room, often with a small party or a conversation between neighbors. Then the goods came out: cosmetics, vitamins, jewelry. The multi-level marketing scheme was a suburban phenomenon, a way for homemakers to earn some money among friends. In the 1960s and 70s, Mary Kay, the pink-hued cosmetics company, dominated the market; in the 1980s, it was the Pampered Chef, with its kitchen tools and cookbooks; in the 2010s it’s LuLaRoe, a clothing company with coveted patterned leggings that are sold primarily through social media.

Today, multi-level marketing is booming online, with entire transactions taking place in the comments sections of Facebook posts, and aspiring entrepreneurs dispensing tips on YouTube about unloading their inventory. The products may vary, but the tactics don’t. Products are displayed, promises made. And whether a woman calls herself a consultant, a retailer, a partner, or distributor, there’s always a thinly veiled sense of desperation beneath the pitch.

Women who participate in MLM companies make a hefty up-front investment. To profit, they’ll need to recruit others to invest, and once drawn in it can be difficult to get out. Take a look at any website for an MLM company, and you’ll see sparkling promises of wealth for women. They don’t just sell products; they sell fantasies of empowerment, control, and financial freedom. Thanks to the stories below, it’s easy to understand how and why these companies target women, and what happens when they do.

1. “How a Single Mom Created a Plastic Food-Storage Empire” (Jen Doll, Mental Floss, June 2017)

It’s easy to associate Tupperware with beehive hairdos and grimy leftovers, but the company—pushed to success by social networker Brownie Wise—set the stage for today’s MLM culture. Doll tells the story of how Wise grew the company from a food storage novelty to an unstoppable national phenomenon. Why did hosting home parties as a Tupperware consultant appeal to so many women? For many, it meant a chance to work again, after the loss of employment after World War II.

Most of Wise’s Tupperware recruits fit neatly into the stereotypical role of a proper housewife. But, in reality, they surreptitiously represented a new kind of female empowerment. During World War II, many women had no choice but to enter the workforce. At its end, many of them had no choice but to leave it. Suddenly, selling Tupperware at parties allowed women to straddle both worlds. They were employed, yet they didn’t appear to challenge their husbands’ authority or the status quo. This pioneering entrepreneurial model allowed them to inhabit a workforce outside of the one the hustling salesman inhabited, and, in many cases, to do even better than he did. And that power relied specifically on a network of female friends and neighbors.

The parties weren’t just a way for women to keep occupied—it was a way they could contribute to their family’s bottom line. Most women who worked outside the home had low-paying jobs in fields like light manufacturing, retail, clerical work, and health and education. The money—committed dealers could bring in $100 or more per week—was a revelation. The opportunity for success was so great that the husbands of some Tupperware ladies left their own jobs to work with their wives.

2. “The Pink Pyramid Scheme” (Virginia Sole-Smith, Harper’s, August 2012)

For decades, Mary Kay has sold a two-sided promise to women: You can buy cosmetics for youth, but for actual power, you should sell them. When Sole-Smith became a consultant for the cosmetic brand, then nearly fifty years in business, she witnessed the revival-style tactics used consultants to recruit women. She also saw a flip side of the brand for women who found both friendship and financial peril in their new roles.

Lynne resigned from her directorship soon after, but she stayed on as a consultant. She had over $15,000 in credit card debt and a basement full of unsold products inching closer to their expiration dates. It took three more years to fully extract herself, paint over the pink wall, and get rid of the products. In 2011, her husband filed for divorce, citing as one of the reasons their “different attitudes towards money.” “He meant the whole Mary Kay thing,” Lynne said. “We just never got past it.” But it wasn’t for lack of trying. When her husband first began to talk about leaving, Lynne cleared every last Mary Kay product out of the house, selling much of it at a loss and throwing the rest in the trash. “I didn’t want him to see so much as a bottle of lotion and be reminded,” she said. “I didn’t want to be reminded either.”

But she hasn’t left Mary Kay behind entirely. The consultant who debuted with only two guests at Lynne’s party remains one of her best friends and is her son’s godmother. Lynne’s new career in real estate allows her to apply her sales knowledge, and the commission checks are at least bigger.

“Oh gosh, we were all so happy,” Lynne said as we looked at a picture of women in sequined cocktail dresses and layers of Mary Kay makeup smiling into the camera, their arms slung around one another. “I guess I didn’t know who I would be without Mary Kay to define me.”

3. “How Essential Oils Became the Cure for Our Age of Anxiety,” (Rachel Monroe, The New Yorker, October 2017)

When Monroe embroiled herself in the wild world of MLMs that sell essential oils, she found that it meant more than money for its sellers. Part of the appeal of grassroots-style selling came from consultants’ belief in their products. And when it comes to essential oils, it could feel like a matter of life or death.

Lara distributed a handout that listed various ailments and their oil treatments: eucalyptus for bronchitis, lavender for third-degree burns, cypress for mononucleosis, rosemary for respiratory syncytial virus. Diffusion “kills microorganisms in the air which helps stop the spread of sickness,” the pamphlet read. Oils “repair our bodies at a cellular level so when you are not sure which oils to use, don’t be afraid to use several oils and the body will gain a myriad of benefits.” Lara told the people in the room that doTerra had oils that were “very antiviral” and could knock out bronchitis in twenty-four hours. She shared essential-oil success stories—her migraines gone, her friend’s rheumatoid arthritis reversing, a colleague’s mother’s cancer in remission. A blond woman at the back of the room raised her hand. “Cancer?” she said, sounding both skeptical and hopeful. She explained that her sister-in-law had recently been treated for breast cancer, and was taking a pill to prevent its recurrence, but the side effects were terrible. The blond woman was hoping for a more natural solution.

“There is an oil for that,” Lara said cautiously. “There is some research. It is an option. It would not have those side effects.”

4. “The Truth Behind Rodan + Fields (And Its Takeover of Your Facebook Feed),” (Lauren Lipton, Allure, September 2015)

Women can become involved in MLMs for both friendship and financial gain. But what happens when everyone you know is involved in a sales scheme? After all, there are only so many showcases and special sales a person can attend, and for some, it might feel like an entire friend group has morphed into eager saleswomen. As Lipton learned, not everyone is thrilled about those endless invitations and events.

There’s a fine line between inspiring and annoying, and not all Rodan + Fields consultants tread it well. In fact, if you sell Rodan + Fields and think your friends might be dodging you, they probably are. “This is the suburban scourge,” says Rachael Pavlik, a Houston mother and the blogger behind rachriot.com, who says she goes out of her way to avoid anyone trying to sell her anything. “At first I would buy all of their stuff because I was kind of guilted into it….What is that? That’s not friendship.”

Pavlik is more outspoken than most. Most women we spoke to can’t bring themselves to hurt their friends’ feelings, so they roll their eyes privately, secretly blocking Rodan + Fields consultants who clutter their Facebook feeds and deftly fending off clumsy come-ons. One East Coast mother says she’s been approached multiple times by everyone from the woman who does her brows to childhood acquaintances she hasn’t seen for decades. Last year, an old high-school friend asked her to lunch — for reasons that soon became all too clear: “It wasn’t long into the conversation before I realized that this was a thinly veiled attempt to make me join her team,” she says. “She’s not trying to be friends with me; she’s trying to build her empire.”

5. “Multilevel-Marketing Companies Like LuLaRoe Are Forcing People Into Debt and Psychological Crisis” (Alden Wicker, Quartz, August 2017)

Wicker’s deep dive into the business practices of retailer LuLaRoe finds women grappling with everything from disappointment to financial disaster. On its website, LuLaRoe hypes not a company, but a movement—one that offers retailers a happy ending complete with balance, flexibility, and personal fulfillment. However, Wicker finds that the ending can happen quite differently for most consultants.

When consultants wake up to the fact they’ve been hoodwinked, many don’t warn their friends to stay away. That’s because if you speak out against any of LuLaRoe’s rules or mishaps, the community could publicly shame and harass you for being negative. “I can’t believe you call yourself a Christian,” one retailer wrote to someone trying to sound the alarm. “Where is the Jesus in you? I have to block you due to your constant-gross-delusional-uneducated opinions of LLR.” If you reveal you are struggling to make sales, you might be told to stop playing the victim, that you’re not putting in enough effort, to be more enthusiastic, and, of course, to buy more inventory.

“Success as a retailer results only from successful sales efforts, which require hard work, dedication, diligence, leadership, and perseverance,” says a LuLaRoe spokesperson. “Success will depend upon how effectively these qualities are exercised. As with any business, results will vary. In addition to the factors above, retailer success is influenced by the individual capacity, business experience, expertise, and motivation of the retailer.”

In other words, it’s not the system that’s broken — you’re just not trying hard enough.

We Need to Talk About Madness: A Reading List

When I was 15, a teacher I was very close with killed himself over winter break. I found out about it in an AOL chatroom the night before school resumed. My friends were talking about how the elementary school science teacher had died. “The one from when we were kids?” I typed into the chatroom, sitting on the couch between my parents, as the Jennifer Garner show Alias played on our television. “Shit,” one of my classmates typed. “We weren’t supposed to tell her,” another wrote.

Read more…

Is the Internet Changing Time?

Photo: AP Images

Laurence Scott The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World | W. W. Norton & Company | August 2016 | 20 minutes (5,296 words) 

 

Below is an excerpt from The Four-Dimensional Human, by Laurence Scott. This story is recommended by Longreads contributing editor Dana Snitzky.

* * *

Power has been wielded through the pendulum.

‘Now all the petrol has stopped and we are immobilised, at least immobilised until we get new ideas about time.’ This was how the author Elizabeth Bowen described wartime life in Ireland to Virginia Woolf, in a letter from 1941. Bowen explored some of these new ideas in her London war fiction, which is full of stopped clocks and allusions to timelessness, the petrifaction of civilian life in a bombed city. Across the literary Channel, Jean-Paul Sartre’s war trilogy, The Paths to Freedom, is, like Bowen’s Blitz work, in part a study on how time itself becomes a casualty of war. In one scene Sartre describes German troops ordering a division of captured French soldiers to adjust their watches to their captors’ hour, setting them ticking to ‘true conquerors’ time, the same time as ticked away in Danzig and Berlin. Historically power has been wielded through the pendulum, and revolutionary change has been keenly felt through murmurs in the tick and the tock of one’s inner life. King Pompilius adjusted the haywire calendar of Romulus, which had only ten months and no fidelity to season, by adding January and February. Centuries later, the Roman Senate renamed the erstwhile fifth and sixth months of the Romulan calendar to honour Julius Caesar and Augustus, thus sparing them the derangement still suffered today by those once-diligent months September–December. For twelve years, French Revolutionaries claimed time for the Republic with their own calendar of pastorally themed months, such as misty Brumaire and blooming Floréal.

The digital revolution likewise inspired a raid on the temporal status quo. In 1998, the Swatch company launched its ill-fated ‘Internet Time’, a decimalised system in which a day consists of a thousand beats. In Swatch Time, the company’s Swiss home of Biel usurps Greenwich as the meridian marker, exchanging GMT for BMT. This is a purely ceremonial conceit, however, since in this system watches are globally synchronised to eradicate time zones. A main selling point of BMT was that it would make coordinating meetings in a networked world more efficient. This ethos severs time from space, giving dawn in London the same hour as dusk in Auckland, and binding every place on earth to the cycle of the same pallid blue sun. As it turns out, we didn’t have the stomach to abandon the old minutes and hours for beats, and the Swatch Time setting that persists on some networked devices is the vestige of a botched coup. Although this particular campaign was a failure, digitisation is nonetheless demanding that we find our own ‘new ideas about time’. For as the digital’s prodigious memory allows our personal histories to be more retrievable, if not more replicable, we are finding in the civic sphere a move towards remembrance that shadows the capacity of the network to retain the past. But while time is not lost in the ways it used to be, the tendency of digital technologies to incubate and circulate a doomsday mood is making the durability of the future less certain. As a result, the four-dimensional human is developing new strategies to navigate a timeline that seems to thicken behind us and evaporate before us. Read more…

Here at the End of All Things

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad, based on cartography by Dyson Logos.

Adrian Daub | Longreads | August 2017 | 20 minutes (5,033 words)

1.

“The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars […].”

— Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”

I spent my adolescence around maps of places that didn’t exist. An older cousin read The Lord of the Rings over the course of a hot summer when I was nine, and I watched in fascination as he traced the Fellowship’s progress across the foldout map that came with the book in those days. This, I decided, had to be what grown-up reading looked like.

Maps were my entrée into geek life, and they remained the medium through which geekdom moved: beat-up paperbacks handed around between school friends, boxed sets at the local game store — we probably spent about as much time poring over maps as we did reading or dreaming up the stories that took place within the worlds they represented. The science fiction we read did without them, but any cover featuring a dragon, a many-turreted castle, or a woman in a leather bra suggested you’d find a map the moment you peeked inside the book.
Read more…

How to Stop Apologizing for My Stutter, and Other Important Lessons

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Rachel Hoge | Longreads | August 2017 | 17 minutes (4,315 words)

 

Róisín would do all the talking. She’s the chapter leader of the support group in Brooklyn, and accustomed to the microphone. She’d wear jeans and a tunic, glasses, her hair twisted in a clip. The only odd thing, to me, would be her mouth. It would be loose, relaxed—an intentional muscle movement, perhaps a symbol of acceptance after years in the self-help community that my strained jaw wouldn’t recognize.

There are 100 people in the conference room, 100 people waiting for her to begin. Half are in their 20s, from places like Boston or New York. Some have never been farther south than Illinois. Some are from Iceland, Serbia, and beyond. All convene in a hotel on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia—the blistering peach pit of the South.

They are all connected by the way they speak.

“Welcome to Take it to the Ssssssstreets,” Róisín would say into the microphone. Everyone would clap. “Thank you for p-p-participating in one of our most p-p-p-popular workshops. I’ll give a brief explan-explan-explanation, then we’ll bbbbbreak into small groups and head outside.”

Outside. Julia and I are already there and having our own unofficial panel. We call it Pool Time. We call it Necessary. We’ve spent three days in big groups, small groups, chatty groups, quiet groups. There are 800 people at the National Stuttering Association Conference. Most of them stutter, like us, but there’s also speech language pathologists, researchers, scientists, family members, significant others. More people than we could ever interact with, more names than we can remember. The conference has been held for over three decades, but Julia and I are both first timers.

Read more…

Falling in Love with Words: The Secret Life of a Lexicographer

Kory Stamper | Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries | Pantheon Books | March 2017 | 24 minutes (6,691 words)

 

We’re proud to feature “Hrafnkell,” the first chapter of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, by Kory Stamper. Thanks to Stamper and Pantheon for sharing it with the Longreads community.

* * *

Hrafnkell

On Falling in Love

 

We are in an uncomfortably small conference room. It is a cool June day, and though I am sitting stock-still on a corporate chair in heavy air-conditioning, I am sweating heavily through my dress. This is what I do in job interviews.

A month earlier, I had applied for a position at Merriam-Webster, America’s oldest dictionary company. The posting was for an editorial assistant, a bottom-of-the-barrel position, but I lit up like a penny arcade when I saw that the primary duty would be to write and edit English dictionaries. I cobbled together a résumé; I was invited to interview. I found the best interview outfit I could and applied extra antiperspirant (to no avail).

Steve Perrault, the man who sat opposite me, was (and still is) the director of defining at Merriam-Webster and the person I hoped would be my boss. He was very tall and very quiet, a sloucher like me, and seemed almost as shyly awkward as I was, even while he gave me a tour of the modest, nearly silent editorial floor. Apparently, neither of us enjoyed job interviews. I, however, was the only one perspiring lavishly.

“So tell me,” he ventured, “why you are interested in lexicography.”

I took a deep breath and clamped my jaw shut so I did not start blabbing. This was a complicated answer. Read more…

Stand Up For Transgender Equality: A Reading List

Photo: Ted Eytan

I was in the lobby of a theater in Washington, D.C. when I saw the first of the tweets about the Trump administration’s decision to stymie protections for transgender students on the federal level. It wasn’t until the play ended and I was on the Metro home that I had cell service; I began to piece together what exactly had happened. My palms were sweating. I tried to make conversation with my friend, but I felt nauseated and heartsick.

I thought of the transgender and gender non-conforming kids in the youth group where I volunteer and the outspoken, proud, lovely trans kids in our county’s schools. I thought of Gavin Grimm, who’ll stand up against the Gloucester County School Board in front of the Supreme Court on March 28. I thought of how often trans folks have to reduce their stories to make them palatable to cisgender people, smoothing all of our glittering edges into sameness, rather than celebrating our differences, to win over those on the fence.

That night, I felt hopeless and scared. Today, I’m angry. It’s Friday as I finish this post, and the people of Chicago will protest for trans liberation tonight at the corner of Wacker and Wabash. I wish I could be there with them, to celebrate our community’s strength and resilience and to honor the lives of the seven trans women of color murdered in 2017: Mesha Caldwell, 41; Jamie Lee Wounded Arrow, 28; JoJo Striker, 23; Keke Collier, 24; Chyna Gibson, 31; Ciara McElveen, 21; and Jaquarrius Holland, 18. Seven women, and it’s only March. Unacceptable and terrifying.

This Women’s History Month, I implore you: educate yourself and stand up for your trans sisters, not only your cis-ters. Stand up for all of your transgender and gender non-conforming siblings, especially our youth, who need advocacy and protection now more than ever.

1. “Trans Rights Already at Risk in Trump’s Bumbling, Bigoted Trainwreck of a Presidency.” (Rachel, Autostraddle, February 2017)

This article on Autostraddle was instrumental in my understanding of what exactly the Department of Justice put forth two weeks ago:

Under Obama, the Justice Department had been appealing a court injunction that prevents trans students nationwide from accessing the bathroom or other facilities consistent with their gender. Under Trump and Sessions, the first order of business was to cease that appeal, and to allow a lower court injunction to harm trans students unopposed.

Unfortunately, this lack of action? reversal? doesn’t bode well for trans rights. Rachel goes on to quote Mara Keisling of the National Center of Transgender Equality:

“While the immediate impact of this initial legal maneuver is limited, it is a frightening sign that the Trump administration is ready to discard its obligation to protect all students… Transgender students are not going away, and it remains the legal and moral duty of schools to support all students.”

Rachel also describes Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ historical support of anti-LGBTQ legislation, which is unsurprising but scary all the same, and explains how Gavin Grimm’s Supreme Court case could affect the administration’s decision to cease the appeal.

Update 3/6/17: The Supreme Court has referred Gavin Grimm’s case to the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Fourth Circuit and will no longer hear his case on March 28. Read more at NYT and BuzzFeed.

2. “Janet Mock: Young People Get Trans Rights. It’s Adults Who Don’t.” (Janet Mock, The New York Times, February 2017)

Janet Mock, transgender author and activist, is the author of two memoirs: Redefining Realness: My Path To Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More and the upcoming Firsts: A Memoir of the Twenties Experience. In this passionate op-ed, Mock does what she does best: Use her personal experiences to advocate for trans youth. Mock contrasts her different school experiences–one with supportive adults, one without.

It’s adults like those in the Trump administration who don’t realize that pitting young people against one another has consequences. It encourages some to be bullies and turns others into sinister objects.

When trans students are told that they cannot use public facilities, it doesn’t only block them from the toilet — it also blocks them from public life. It tells them with every sneer, every blocked door, that we do not want to see them, that they should go hide and that ultimately they do not belong. When schools become hostile environments, students cannot turn to them. Instead they are pushed out. And without an education, it makes it that much more difficult to find a job, support themselves and survive.

Related: “What Trans Youth Need to Hear Right Now, According to Trans Adults.” (Sarah Karlan, BuzzFeed LGBT, March 2017) This isn’t longform, but it’s rare that trans kids have the opportunity to hear from trans adults who are happy and thriving.

3. “Pseudo-Feminist Trolls are Still Trotting Out Tired, Anti-Trans Ideology.” (Larissa Pham, Village Voice, February 2017)

Transphobia isn’t exclusively conservative territory. There are self-proclaimed progressives and feminists whose philosophies harm trans people in subtle and overt ways. Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, better known as TERFs, are obsessed with the false notion that trans women aren’t really women, and, unfortunately, their illogical arguments continue to appeal to the fearful.

4. Telling Our Own Stories.

The following essays and interviews feature the experiences of trans and gender non-conforming artists, authors, activists, students, cartoonists, administrative assistants, analysts and teachers.

“Telling Trans Stories Beyond ‘Born in the Wrong Body.'” (Meredith Talusan, Tiq Milan, Jacob Tobia, and Nico Fonseca, BuzzFeed LGBT, May 2016)

“Transgender Stories: ‘People Think We Wake Up and Decide to Be Trans.'” (Kate Lyons, The Guardian, July 2016)

“My Life as a Trans Woman Teaching High School in a ‘Bathroom Bill’ State.” (Aila Boyd, Broadly, February 2017)

“This is What It’s Like to Be a Trans Kid in a Conservative School.” (Nico Lang, Rolling Stone, March 2017)

“Tomboys Don’t Cry: Edgar Gomez Interviews Ivan Coyote.” (LARB, December 2016)

“Five Trans Cartoonists Respond to Bathroom Hysteria.” (The Nib, March 2017)

Syracuse Transcript

THE MAN IN THE SHELL (OR CASE, DEPENDING ON WHICH TRANSLATION YOU READ, BUT IT IS KIND OF INTERESTING HOW “SHELL” AND “CASE” MEAN ROUGHLY THE SAME THING IN RUSSIAN, APPARENTLY)

So here are three frame stories, linked by various recurring characters. The first one opens with two men, one inside the barn, one outside; Ivan Ivanovich agitated and smoking in the moonlight, and Burkin asleep inside; at the end of the second story Ivan is asleep, and Burkin agitated and awake. (“I’m just kind of noting some broad things, so we can come in and look at them later.”)

[From here on, in this heavily abridged transcript, George’s remarks are in bold and everyone else’s, including my own, are not—just to simplify, because the rest of us just felt like one big student.]

One of the benefits of this framing stuff… and this is sort of hard to talk about, but in a room full of artists, we have to. One of the delights of this Belikov guy is that he’s so unlikable. Right? It’s such a beautifully cruel caricature of a guy, and there’s something about it that’s really fun.

If you hear someone saying, “You know what? I really did something bad.” And you say, “Well… I’m sure it’s not that bad,” and then he tells you, and it is really bad. You know. There’s something fascinating about that. It really is a basic human curiosity… or it’s a basic human delight in mocking someone else, or being able to look down on someone else.

So that’s one of the arrows in our quiver. And if you can do it, like we all can, actually—some of us do it better than others—that’s a valid… valence. You can almost feel Chekhov rubbing his hands together when he gets on that riff about: “He’s a man in a case.” “Yeah, that’s right! He always wears galoshes and—you know what else? His penknife! It’s in a case.

That’s a very simple pleasure. That’s actually what propels us through this story, is that there’s this despicable guy. Is he going to stay despicable? Yeah!—he is, actually. That’s kind of good.

Don’t you think that kind of necessitates the frame in a way? It’s easier to have one character tell a cruel caricature of someone else, than to have a narrative presence?

Now: how is it? I think you’re right, but how is this.

Because then we’re relieved of the burden of wondering like oh, is the narrator kind of a dick? Because ultimately, you enter other consciousnesses, but to some extent you want to trust the narrator the most. Absent “unreliable narrator” stuff. So here, you don’t have to worry about like: “Well, am I a bad person for laughing at this guy?” Because [a character in the story] is the one who’s doing it.

Yeah. Yeah. What it really is, is an unreliable narrator story with a sort of confirming device. You know, where the listener can go, “Oh, I don’t know! That’s a horse of a different color.” Or… he can kind of destabilize the main narrator. We’ll talk about this more, but it’s a really great technique, and Chekhov is the master of it…

That the stories are embedded, with another character telling it, everything becomes a little more acceptable: less trying to teach you, or preach to you.

Exactly. It’s like if I say, “I hate dogs.” You go, “Wow. What a jerk!” But if I say, “I hate dogs,” and this other guy says, “I don’t think you mean it”—already it’s a different rhetoric, you know.

The uber-narrator is saying he hates dogs—and we don’t know how we feel about that. As opposed to the uber-narrator seeming to say: “I hate dogs.” Maybe that’s the unreliable narrator, where we know the author isn’t the character. But this is a way of putting that right into the story. And it’s very, very powerful.

Other things about that central story that we should have on the map?

If he’s so unpleasant, why do all these chicks want to marry the guy off? I mean they pick the worst guy in town, and this beautiful girl?

[another student] … well, that’s the way it works.

[laughter]

That’s a good question; I mean, what was that—

I think it was something like—him getting married might fix him, or something? Like, as a solution to their problem, not a solution to his… get him a girl to focus on.

And he says, “he’d been in our town for ten or fifteen years,” I mean, that’s incredible.

She’s not exactly the most… um, marriageable… you know. I’m trying to say this in a nice way, but she’s “approaching thirty.”

[laughter]

The line was, “She was not young anymore, she was nearly thirty.” But these were, you know, they were different times.

But she was “a peach,” though! She was a peach.

Yeah, she’s a beautiful girl. She even walks with her arms akimbo! Which, to me… that’s it. Even though… I don’t even know what that means.

She’s a cyclist, though, he can’t get over the fact that she’s a cyclist.

Yeah. As in Tolstoy, one of the amazing things about this is the way that Chekhov can kind of peel off a very simple thing that we’ve probably seen millions of times in our own life and never thought of as literary.

There’s also the line about the women growing livelier and even better-looking, as if they’d found an object in life.

That “even better-looking” is a great addition to that, isn’t it.

And now… let me show you something in terms of just line-to-line stuff, the way this escalation might happen. Okay, so the marriage is suggested, and that great riff, that now Belikov is going to apply his same way of thinking to this marriage. Well, it’s very serious. We have to take this very seriously. “You don’t know what may come of it.

They handed you a peach! And you still don’t know how to take it.

So then, on 363, you can almost feel the storyteller working here.

Okay… we just got the beat that says Belikov is not overjoyed, he’s not really properly appreciative of this, he’s not a man in love, exactly; he’s sort of trying to be in love, but he’s too cautious. And Chekhov says, “And he did not propose; he kept putting it off, to the vexation of the principal’s wife and all our ladies.

Okay, so now Chekhov’s got a little bit of a checkmate going—he’s on the beat called, “we’re delaying the proposal.” Now you can see one good story might be, if he just keeps delaying. In other words, if his timidity disables him, and he can never get the job done, and she drifts off to another man; that might be possible. But then somehow Chekhov goes in another direction: “a colossal scandal.”

Now—so first he’s got to put some things into play here. I’m guessing that maybe he thought of this colossal scandal. Maybe he heard about it. Maybe he rejected the thing I just said as being too standard. But as soon as he said, you know: “If it had not been for a colossal scandal,”—I think he knew where he was going. But then he looks around a little bit and he says, all right, what do I need to pull this off. Okay. What do I have. Welllll, I’ve got this brother [of the “peach,” Varenka], with the big booming voice. I haven’t used him yet. Hmm. Let me turn my attention to him for a minute.

I must tell you that Varenka’s brother conceived a hatred of Belikov from the first day of their acquaintance and couldn’t endure him.” That’s an interesting thought. He’s there, but we haven’t thought about him.

And then the brother says what we’ve been saying. “I don’t understand how you can put up with that informer, that nasty mug.” There’s a little pleasure at that; our surrogate has kind of just stepped in. “The atmosphere you breathe is vile, stifling!” And you’re laughing, you know?

I think of this, where you know… “You’re marrying this guy? This is a lifetime of him sitting there going hmm. Hmm. This guy actually will take anything good in your life, and go hmm? ‘Are you sure you want to—oh, that’s—is that thing expressly permitted?‘“ You know? He’s death, actually. So Chekhov introduces the brother, lets the brother occupy our viewpoint, basically.

All right… Again, I don’t know how he does this, but first of all, look how deadly efficient it is. He’s got the brother calling Belikov a spider. Then he needs something else. You know, you can feel him thinking, all right, I’ve got to put the brother and Belikov in conflict. How do I do it? And some impulse of his says, I don’t do it directly. Let me reach for one other element. And he thinks up this brilliant caricature of “Anthropos in Love.” Just—it’s a perfect thing, because you know that’s exactly what would kill Belikov, to be publicly shamed. So somehow from the mystery of art, Chekhov comes up with that bit about that caricature. And that is like the catalyst for the explosion. That little illustration.

We might just pause at that moment and notice that most of us, myself included, would say, Oh, I’ve got the brother, and I’ve got Belikov; all I’ve got to do is get them in the same room. And that’s kind of true. Okay, once they’re in the room, what are they going to fight about? The obvious thing is the sister. But Chekhov somehow puts the [other] thing first; he comes up with that illustration, and puts it in the air first. Which then… I don’t know why that’s magical, but somehow it lets the confrontation feel more natural maybe… I’m not sure.

He was going to be in love, right? This was a guy who was ten, fifteen years being exactly the same. Now something happened in that guy’s life that creates mockery in this community. Who drew that caricature? And why didn’t he draw it five years ago?

No, that’s exactly… and I think you get the reason, one reason he did, is because, well, it’s “Anthropos in Love.” And this guy dared to budge. So the community’s a little bit harsh, I mean, this is not exactly a nice thing, either. So anyway, we’ve got that illustration; somehow, it’s a stroke of genius, he puts that in there before there’s any hint of a confrontation.

And then there’s the bicycle, which is a stroke of genius thing in that if he should be so outraged by the bicycle, it’s kind of the last straw for us, in a weird way. So again, we’re admiring, but there’s something about the constant escalation of this… also, notice how free of reality it is. Chekhov always gets called a realist, but this is as caricaturish or elemental as anything you’ll ever read, as elemental as Beckett, really. Chekhov doesn’t do soft edges. It’s kind of abrupt, and… okay, what else do you want to talk about here?

It’s kind of good to have the caricature and the bicycle, as well, because he’s kind of wronged by the caricature, whereas he’s definitely wrong, with the bicycle, so he goes into the confrontation armed and incorrect at the same time.

That’s right. And that confrontation is interesting because first Belikov says, basically, “I want to apologize, I want you to know that I had nothing to do with that caricature.” Well… duh. You know, then he wants to say—”This was very irregular, and I’m very sorry for my part in it and I apologize to your sister.” And then he segues and says: “And also. This bicycle.”

What I imagine is him at home, agitated by this double violation of his principles. One, he’s been caricatured—two, his fiancee! Is almost—is on a bike! Wait a minute! Wait a minute. Something’s going on here. I’m going to get myself together. I’m going to go take care of this… And he’s maybe not even sure what he’s going to say. And he says the first thing, and then he can’t help but slide into the second. Which is, “You know… you are wearing an embroidered shirt. Are you mad?” And then one more beat, into basically saying: “If the authorities found out about this!” And then the brother says, “Go ahead and inform.

The brother says: “Whoever meddles in my private affairs can go to the devil!” Now, he means Belikov; Belikov says, “He’s insulted our superiors!” and it escalates from there, and he says: “Well you know, I’m going to have to turn you in.” It’s a brilliant little escalation…

Doug Unger [who taught creative writing at Syracuse in 1983 – 91] used to talk about how, in dialogue—in good dialogue—people are never talking directly to each other. You ask me A, and I answer, A prime. You misunderstand A prime, and you challenge me with C. In bad dialogue, they’re always saying, well,

“How are you?”

“I’m fine!”

“Do you have issues with your mother?”

“I do! She’s always…”

[laughter]

They’re trying to reach out, but they’re like, poking each other in the eye as they reach, you know. So the way Doug used to talk about it would be that if I’m talking to James, I have a thought bubble here, and James has a thought bubble, and most of what we’re doing is, we’re dumping out our thought bubbles regardless of what the other person is saying. So if I wake up that morning feeling wronged in my life, and James says, “That’s a nice shirt!”—I say, “Yeah, but nobody ever—no one ever appreciates it!”

So that’s a really interesting way to take your dialogue from—I mean, he makes it poetry, basically. It’s two solitudes, trying to connect, and they fail. This is not a fight that had to happen, actually. But each person had their own little issues that they were bringing to it, so.

It’s [Belikov’s] attempt to regain authority, though. Here he’s terrorized these people for ten years, they all have to be all worried about what’s he going to think. Now the bicycle thing… and that was true, too, I remember like, Shaw writing about that, how bicycling was super eccentric and wild, like being on a skateboard, when you’re supposed to be having all this dignity? You’re not having dignity, and this guy was so into that. So now he’s going to assert his authority again, and be back in charge, and tell everybody how they are going to behave—and it completely fell to pieces!

Yeah. It’s like when you’re trying to get a big animal back in the basket and you have to use too much force. Not that I’ve done that a lot, but.

[laughter]

But he becomes overtly an informer for the first time, in that moment. It’s very sad, and tragic. And yet… let’s also note how much fun it is when he goes down the stairs. When someone finally stands up to evil, it’s really a thrill, you know. And that actually is, you know, that’s part of our job, to make situations where that thrill can be introduced. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure. I don’t know, maybe it feels a little movieish or something, but that’s fun, you know. When he grabs him by the… and gives him a push. And when she walks in at that moment, that’s even better. “Ha-ha-ha!

Before he’s been thrown down the stairs, he’s never been that offended in his life.

So he’s never been that offended verbally, he gets thrown down the stairs, and then the girl walks in and laughs. And all the Russian readers know that he has to die right away.

[Shocked laughter, here, but also acknowledging the justice of this observation.]

And then this narrator, at the bottom of page 368. It’s a tragic story, it’s a harsh story, it’s a little bit of an unbelievable story, actually, and you can kind of normalize it by saying, “I confess, it is a great pleasure to bury people like Belikov.” You kind of feel a bit of a shock, and you think, yeah it was! it’s a pleasure to get him out of the story, even. And that thing about him finding the case that he always wanted. Okay, that’s the story. Let’s see… so, when we sort of glance at that story, what’s coming off it, what are the themes, what vibe do you take from that story into what’s coming.

This is the thing about Chekhov. His themes are so photographic, that when you try to pin them down, you always reduce them.

One thing is that even the worst guy can be in love.

So even this lowly, terrible Man in a Shell has the desire for love. Now what Chekhov will always do is to present a duality. So… that’s true. And what’s also true is that that guy’s characteristics prevented him. So you see that it’s both possible, and impossible: a hundred percent.

Now at this point—the story, we’re done, right? And we’re reminded that there’s a frame. And this is a lovely little sequence, here:

The high school teacher came out of the barn.

Remember, we haven’t seen him yet.

He was a short, stout man, completely bald, with a black beard that nearly reached his waist.

That beard was kind of surprising: to his waist! Wow, really weird!

…two dogs came out with him.

Oh!—and he says:

“What a moon!”

You know. There’s that feeling of… what’s been in the dark, what’s been in the case, is out. And it’s a little crazy. We’ve got a long beard, and there’s two unexpected dogs, and you can see the moon. Just that kind of feeling. Now this is something very characteristic of Chekhov, which is [that] anybody reading that story, I think, is going to be struck at some level by that, right? It’s a story about compression, and closure, and darkness, and bluh. And when the story is done, and Belikov is dead—ding dong, the witch is dead—the barn door comes open, and Burkin comes out, and he’s kind of funny-looking, and he doesn’t mind, and the dogs come out… but. If we use our sort of, high-school minds and say, what’s the meaning? It’s a little beautiful… you know, it’s just a little beautiful. You can’t exactly say that it’s a metaphor… kind of, but… right?

Well… they start out, and they’ve gone outside, and they want to go shooting? And be in nature, and expose themselves to the beauty. And it’s also going to hurt you, maybe, to be outside. And that’s what happens to Belikov. He comes outside for a second, into the world, and it’s a disaster. So there’s this huge amount of shells, and inside, and outside, and exposing yourself to the elements or to feelings, or to life… it’s dangerous.

Right. So this is the way Chekhovian metaphor works is, you can say that this story is working with inside and outside. It’s in the barn, it’s in the story. But when your mind goes for the reduction, it can’t quite get it. It just knows that inside/outside is a thing. And that’s actually very sophisticated, because as we talk about those examples… sometimes the reading mind is just delighted by parallels, you know. Juxtapositions. It doesn’t really have to know what the juxtaposition amounts to. A good reader, where we are now, would be kind of aware that In and Out is working. Light and Dark is working. And I think that’s because of the barn. I mean, it’s not daytime: Chekhov goes a lot of trouble to point out that the barn is dark, and Burkin is invisible. That’s the subtlety of Chekhov; we feel that that’s a thing, but we can’t quite say why, and he’s not going to pause to tell us exactly.

The whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about the theme, like where fear makes humans animals? And that especially, like the Man in the Shell, I mean he was literally like a crab or something, in a shell. And thinking about in this period of dictatorship, and how sociological studies have shown that people hunker down and go into their family units, and are less on the streets, and have more privacy, and they’re more closed off.

I think that’s exactly right. I’m sure Chekhov at this time was feeling what was coming because what was coming was already happening. Which is that there were a lot of Marxists, and they were severe. I’m sure that there were already secret societies. And within the Tsarist regime, there were a lot of informers too. So this is something that he’s picking up on.

I was thinking well, yes, the story itself is a shell, but like, Chekhov and I—we know. We know what Ivan [the narrator of the story] doesn’t. I don’t know if anyone else felt that way.

Yeah, yeah, right. Well also because here, and at the end of “Gooseberries,” especially, we’re regarded as a sort of an accessory character. Which is a pleasure for reader and writer. So now, then, Burkin doesn’t want to hear that story. And Chekhov, for structural—for formal reasons, doesn’t want to tell it right here. So they went into the barn; now they’re both in the dark, they’re both covered up; and then they hear these footsteps—

[here you can hear the tick-tick-tick of the chalk against the board, as he draws the path of footsteps outside the barn]

—and that is Mavra, who started us off. So let’s not underestimate the pleasures of symmetry. Mavra is actually… she was the way we got into the story in the first place, if you remember. She’s the one who never left her town, and so on. There’s something—and it’s so simple, and I don’t know that there’s quote-unquote “meaning” in it. But there’s something really pleasurable about having her just come out there for a second. Again, this is subtle.

Now they’ve gone in. This is—in and out, they have both gone in now, and so that’s a change: one out, one in. And then… there’s something really sensual about the fact that she’s walking out there, this woman who’s never been anywhere is now coming to them a little bit, to see what’s going on, and it’s just symmetrical, which is very nice. It doesn’t make or break the story but it’s just a nice thing, that Chekhov remembered that that ball was up in the air. In a small way, Mavra was in her house, where she likes to be. And she came out, right? She came out why? Because she’s curious, I think, a little bit.

* * *

GOOSEBERRIES

Okay so now we segue into “Gooseberries.” Burkin goes, “Last time we were in the barn, you were going to tell me a story.” And [Ivan] says, “Yes, I wanted to tell you about my brother.” And we feel a little bit like, “Okay, good, let’s hear it.” And we think: This is a response to “The Man in a Shell”—what’s it going to be?

He heaved a slow sigh, lit his pipe, but then it began to rain.

Now we notice—I mean structurally—that is a three-page digression; he’s going to tell you a story, and then he doesn’t get to it until 374. “We were two brothers,” he began. And you know, a bad workshop would say, “Why don’t you cut that out that whole thing?—’I wanted to tell you about my brother; my brother, who was two years my junior… I went in for a learned profession.”

This is a great place for you to find out about your narrative instincts. Because we’re reverse-engineering this story, basically. There’s a three-page digression. As you look at it, you should be asking: Why is this necessary? Why is it justified? How do you do that? So let’s look at it, starting from 372-373, what are the main beats in there—and I say “beats,” like in the Hollywood sense—what happens? What are the elements.

They’re wet and uncomfortable?

Right [writing at chalkboard] so they’re wet… For me—when I say “beats,” I think what I’m looking for is action. There’s actions—not so much mood or tone, but the specific action that we notice as we go through. They felt cold; they meet Alyohin; they go to the house; so… on 372, I’m not finding anything that feels beat-ish, this is all sort of just stage mechanics.

We go to the house, a large structure, he lived downstairs…

They see the maid.

Yes. Pelageya. Now, again, we notice, one of the reasons she stays in our memory I think is because that little thing is so cool, where the two guys go: Whoa. She’s one of the most beautiful women in literature, even though she is never described, and it’s because of those guys, literally, in a stranger’s house—you just walked in, and you’re a little bit rude, you go: Ohhh. So she’s suddenly on the page.

Then they go swimming. Alyohin, a little funny bit where he gets in the water and it turns jet black. “I haven’t bathed in quite a long time.” Then Ivan comes out, and jumps in with him, and I think this is a beat: Ivan is so delighted by this. It’s a very unforgettable image, and we’ve all done it, coming out of a cool lake: Ah, my god! Life! You feel so good. He swam to the mill…

So that’s a beat [writing at board], let’s just say he’s delighted, let’s just call it that, he’s having pleasure. Then that is complicated by Burkin. “You’ve had enough!”

I think it’s neat to introduce her that way and then to have him be so dirty, actually? Because I thought oh, she’s beautiful, maybe she’s his mistress. But like it just adds to the energy of this contradictory guy. Maybe she’s not, and that makes me like him more.

Right. Here’s how I see it. Everybody can see it differently, and you’ll all be correct. You could take a Chekhov story and say, I’m going to look at this in terms of gender roles, and it will fall open at your feet. You could say, I’m doing it in terms of light and dark. It will fall at your feet.

But in this case, the one thing that I notice is that Ivan is having this moment of pleasure—just sensual, happy pleasure and indulgence. Burkin says ahahhhhh—stop it. Now, we feel that Burkin is playing a Belikovian role. We also then, suddenly—pleasure becomes a thing, again. Like In and Out was a—pleasure becomes a thing.

And jumping ahead a bit, Ivan is about to give a big speech about how there shouldn’t be any happiness in the world. Right? There is no happiness and there never should be—a very beautiful, convincing speech, that his actions directly contradict.

He does say, “Lord, have mercy.

So now we’ve got pleasure, is in the mix; there’s Pelageya, she’s a maid, but she’s so beautiful that they have to stop, you know, so there’s another beat of sort of, life. So now let’s get into the heart of the story here, to see if we can make more sense of this.

So he’s got a brother, they have a taste of the country, they’re little tiny petit-noblemen. His grandfather or father was a private, who just barely made it over the line into the nobility. Then they lose their money—so they’re not nobility.

On page 375, Ivan, there’s a little bit of an aside where he says—here Chekhov/Ivan is responding to Tolstoy—he’s got a story in which it says a man only needs six feet to be buried in. And Chekhov says, or Ivan says, “It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man.” And he makes a beautiful little speech that I totally believe, about what we need in the world. We need to be expansive and free. I think this is basically Chekhov talking; you know, you can read his letters and he says very similar things. But we just note that he’s attributed it to Ivan; this is not Chekhov talking, this is Ivan. Ivan gets on his soapbox there, a little bit.

Also, it recalls the last story.

Yes. That’s right. Right. Which is why he’s telling you, presumably.

So then, what happens. Oh, the guy kills his wife, right? The guy wants this land so much that it’s his single focus in life, and he gets married to a widow, and basically starves her to death and takes her money, and, you know—it’s really comic, the way it’s presented, and he’s looking through the ads, and he says, “Country life has its advantages,” and all this kind of thing. He draws a plan of the estate.

Now here’s a brilliant thing that Chekhov does, and it’s a habit we should all get into: When you find yourself in your stories asserting something general, then you always should be pushing, pushing to get to the objective throughout. “My brother loved the country life, and he had a big fantasy of getting a farm.” The inner editor in you should say, How so? Tell me more. Well, he always wanted an estate. What kind? Ah, well, different kinds, but always they had these four things. Da-da-da-da, gooseberries. Really? And then you push one more, and you say, Let’s just keep it simple. He wanted gooseberries. Let that be the emblem of everything that he wanted.

And somehow, you know, it bites.

They’re tart; they’re not the sweetest berries.

They’re not the sweetest.

They’re good!

When we get through this whole story, he gets his gooseberries, the brother comes to visit him. There’s that bit where everybody looks like a pig on his estate; that’s on 378. “It looked as though he might grunt into the quilt at any moment.” Because Chekhov knows that that’s where he’s going with these people. They are self-interested and selfish, piggish people.

Okay. So when we step away from that story, which actually is very sophisticated; the story is made a story by Ivan’s beautiful speech about the happy man. What do you take away from that?

Let’s make sure we have it truly right… At the end Ivan, who’s told the story, says, “Lord forgive us sinners,” and he pulls the bedclothes over his head—which again, evokes Belikov, a little bit—and goes to sleep. But he’s left his pipe on the table, right? And the pipe stinks, and keeps Burkin awake. And… but also, you remember that what keeps you awake is agitation, and so maybe Burkin is agitated, also… something like that.

Of all the things we’ll talk about this year, this is the most useful tip I can point out.

Get ready for this.

[laughter]

All right, so. We all know that one of the problems, when you’re young—younger than you are now—is that you always keep showing up in your stories. Your opinions keep showing up in stories. And at some point you’re told, that it’s not—the story is not just your opinion. The story is of you, but it’s not you, so let’s just…

On 381 there’s a beautiful speech. “Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws”—I mean, to me that’s one of the most truthful statements about the purpose of fiction, maybe. But just, in general. Don’t, don’t—don’t you agree with that? And all he says about how, you know—most people are so happy, and it seems as if that happiness is supported by the misery of these silent masses, you know, it’s a really beautiful statement. And I’m going to say, that’s Chekhov. That if you go into his notebooks, and—that’s basically him. It’s pretty much his opinion.

So he embeds that in here. And I think anybody reading that goes, even if you didn’t like Ivan so far, you kind of go, well, you know what? I have to say… you’re right about that one, I agree with you on that. There’s something about happiness that’s a little… We’ve all felt that, too. You got everything you wanted, and you do feel a bit like a pig. It makes you actually insecure, when you get to have happiness…

But there’s something very comforting in it. Because life is going to come and show you its claws no matter how comfortable you are.

Well, that’s true.

So… it’s kind of this egalitarian, like—let’s all be quite comfortable that terrible things are coming, together.

Yeah. That’s right. But his thing here is, I don’t want to be happy. And he says, to his friend: You’re young! Do good, do good… he’s kind of a little bit obnoxious. So anyway, the mechanical move is simply, this is truth. Your truth. You go home right now and write two paragraphs that you really believe in. Your ethos, your manifesto, based on what you know so far. You know that that doesn’t belong in the story. People will yell at you for that, you know.

So this for me is a model. The thing is, okay. Are we limited people? We have limited imaginations.

Actually, no. Because if I say to you: defend Obamacare. You can do it. And if I say, I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you can tear Obamacare down, you can do it. Or if I said: come up with a scenario where abortion makes sense. You could do it. Come up with a scenario where you cringe when you read about abortion, that you feel so sad about it… you could do it.

We actually have quite unlimited powers of imagination. This is a little trick for allowing anything and everything you can make up into a story. And the trick is: attribute.

Anything you feel, if it’s an unholy impulse. You know. An evil thought. A naive thought. Just… if you say it clearly, then you just push it away from yourself, like Chekhov does. I just made a rant against the uh, Latvians. Whatever, you know. That’s not very nice. Do I really believe it? Well, no, but I said it. And I said it pretty clearly. Okay. Give it to somebody else, to say it, you know.

It’s a very powerful thing, because you have complete access to your imagination, in all the moods of you—you know? Your meanness, your idealism, your everything? You have access to it, because you don’t have to claim it. You make it and—that’s Dylan’s trick, actually. If you try to construct a coherent persona from Dylan’s body of work you can’t, it’s just an incredible multiplicity. But once you create it, then you can consider it an object to be used, as Chekhov does.

Let’s take a little break.

* * *

ABOUT LOVE

What Chekhov is doing is he’s stepping out, and he’s asserting at least two things on a given topic and then going, “Yeah.”

[laughter]

It’s very powerful, and it goes back to his statement that art doesn’t have to solve problems, it has to formulate them correctly. So the problem, one of the many problems this story raises: Can we trust our own pleasure, that is a simple way of saying it. Can we trust our own pleasure? And his answer is yes and no, and then he just walks. Because… he’s not here to answer that question, because it’s such a profound question that it’s not answerable.

But if you really look under the surface, you can manifest an unbelievable number of viewpoints. I mean… that’s called empathy, actually. Especially people who are as language-gifted as you are. You can do an exercise: Put in a box, fifty viewpoints. Even, onerous ones—it doesn’t matter.

Uh. Skinhead. OK. You could all do a skinhead, no question about it. But one of the moves is that you have to allow yourself to do it joyfully, without any kind of like… you know sometimes when we’re doing a viewpoint we’re not entirely sure of, we might undercut it as we’re doing it. But I would say do a full-out racist, crazy, xenophobic skinhead: just do it. You know. Now, it’s scary that you can. That’s a little scary; but then you have the text, then, what you do it from there. I mean, this is Shakespeare’s thing, right? Shakespeare can do anybody, and he has them talking to each other, you know. It’s very powerful…

But now let’s think about this in like, Tolstoy. Tolstoy is simpler; he’s more elemental, in a certain way, than Chekhov. Because Tolstoy will sort of build the opinion right into the story. Chekhov is a gentler soul, actually. There’s a great story that illustrates the two of them. Tolstoy was of course much older, and in youth a giant. Chekhov was also quite famous, but he was younger. And Chekhov was from peasant stock. His grandfather was a serf, and his father was this kind of brutal, I think he was some kind of church musician or something, but he beat the boys… Chekhov just barely made it out of the real difficult provincial life.

So Tolstoy was sort of bragging about what a player he was. He says something like—and Chekhov’s very goodlooking, you know—he says, “I bet you are a real,”—and in the translation it has an f and then a line, so you don’t know what the word is. And you think, I bet you are a real fucker, basically, or something. And Chekhov blushes, and he doesn’t answer. And Tolstoy says, “Ah, when I was young…” and Chekhov just kind of… you know, he’s actually more genteel than, uh, impulsive.

But I think Chekhov always—I think he was sort of a guy who was always having strong opinions, and then reconsidering. You can kind of feel that in his work. He’s able to put up these very strong, fiercely drawn caricatures, and then kind of say to the reader, “I know. I feel the same way, kind of. So, let me put this dirty pipe on the table. Now you know where we stand with him…” Then he says, “But also, didn’t he have kind of a good point?” There’s that constant back and forth which is very… That’s—that’s why we love him, I think…

Maybe we should start with this: What’s the thumbnail version of this one, this story here?

Like in a Hollywood version, like can you say it in one sentence, you know: “In a world where…”

Guy loves this woman that he can’t have…?

Yeah. Guy loves his best friend’s wife and does nothing about it. Right? And that’s basically it.

He gets taken in by this couple, falls in love with the wife, seems like the wife maybe falls in love with him. But he also kinda falls in love with the husband, right? He falls in love with the friendship. And in the end, it’s like a Waiting for Godot. They are attracted and they don’t do anything about it. Except at the last minute there’s a little burst of kissing in the train and then he gets in the next car, right, and rides a whole town down, gets off and walks home. That’s it. Very simple.

It seems to be a medium though… in the first story, under the guise of total deprivation in the other one people turn into pigs, right?—and here it’s like there’s a bit of indulgence in the love and the feelings. There’s also restraint and respect for the marriage, maybe.

I feel that very strongly. I always find it very moving when he doesn’t, you know, when his respect for the friendship is enough to counterweight his attraction; for him to say, “In this life I won’t have full love…” because it would be so damaging and that very… that practical consideration, about would her life be better?… I find that very moving.

A lot of times, if you were to bring up… you know, I saw on the news today, these people were convicted and I think they were innocent. A lot of people. because they don’t want to have to deal with the fact that the system is kind of broken, they say, “Oh no, it couldn’t be, couldn’t be.” I think that was really realistic.

And you know one thing that’s worth mentioning is that that, I often remember this story as being, a very good marriage, very good people, and this sort of possible interloper. But actually the husband in that story is a little bit less good than the narrator, he’s got that shut-down mentality, he’s a little dull, and yet he’s a good friend and so they don’t…and the thing about this story too is that there’s a cost, right?

You can see that they’re in love in a way that the husband and wife, I’m going to say, weren’t ever, maybe, would you say? So do they the right thing, which is to not pursue it and it’s not free… It’s corrosive. She starts snapping at him. Like, I love that whenever he would drop something, she’d say, I congratulate you.

She got nervous prostration. So that didn’t work out.

They both knew they’d missed the boat. They’re sweet, I guess.

Ok, let’s cut to the chase. I think this is a beautiful story and a beautiful ending of the trilogy. What is it that, if you were moved by the story, what moved you?

It’s like the ideal love is the one that doesn’t get satisfied, kind of like… the moment in the theater where their shoulders touch. It’s not going to get better than that. Like, that’s it.

And for me, like, I’m supposed to root for him…but the problems, I thought, were so… I’m not so sure there was a way for him to be happy, even if he had acted on it… I don’t know what they would have done. That’s a scandal, like to do something with his best friend. There’s so many things that go with that. Oh we’re in love, but …our lives are still ruined. In that sense, I was kind of happy. He kind of did the right thing. I kind of did not want him to do the other thing.

That’s what Chekhov does. He takes the argument at its highest level on both sides, and he puts them there and they both sit there. And I don’t think you can really…I never walk away from this story sure of what they should have done. As I’m getting older, I’m happier that they did what they did, I noticed. You can always think, “Oh, that’s so painful.” And also when you get older you think: imagine! He breaks off this marriage, she probably loses her kids. They go back to this house that we’ve been hearing about, and they’re living with Nikanor and Pelageya in this shithole. He’s gotta work 24/7 to keep the thing afloat. And then there’s that thing between them, where he’s always looking at her to see if she’s happy, she’s always looking… you know, it gets very complicated. I don’t feel like it’s gonna go very well.

But he doesn’t even remember why he liked her so much. That was what made me think: OK, you’ve dodged a bullet. Or at least, you’re now saying to yourself that you dodged one. Because this is all happening many years later, you’re hearing the—and he’s all fat and doesn’t bathe now. So, he’s remembering something, who knows how well or clearly. But because he doesn’t remember—if you really fall in love with somebody you know all the reasons why, you know? I think. I mean, I do. The ideas and stuff that a person had that attracted you to them? And it doesn’t really exist in her. She was just this beautiful, elegant, charming… those are the adjectives that keep coming up. But it’s not like, this is the one person who could make sense of the world for me, it’s not like that.

Whatever the reality of their relationship would have been, I think there was something that was sort of devastating about this that reminded of both moments of “In the Cart” [another Chekhov story] and “The Overcoat.” [Gogol] For me, the emotional core of the story was at the bottom of 393, when he says, “I would take the opera glass from her hands without a word and feel, at that moment, that she was close to me, that she was mine, that we could not live without each other, but by some strange misunderstanding, when we came out of the theater we always said goodbye and parted like strangers.”

And something about misunderstanding, there, is like in “In the Cart”, that sort of beautiful moment at the end. And then, in “The Overcoat”, there’s a sense, there’s this brief glimpse of an idea, of a life that you think could be yours. And it’s just, like, in this road that’s right next to where you are, and you can’t quite bridge it…

Now, we might, technically we might just notice this is a story—that’s exactly it—and that is something that doesn’t happen. You know, we always think we have to make drama. Well, you know, when you make a desire as beautifully as Chekhov has made it here, that’s the energy you have to work with. And at that point it’s kind of your choice. You know, you can do whatever you want with that energy. The only thing you can’t do is forget that you made it. So what he does is, he says is, they’re there, and at that moment they know. There’s like a mutual confession that, yeah, OK, all this time, yes: yes. And Chekhov just knows that there’s energy in that. And he does a very sophisticated thing, which is to have them not act on it.

That’s really hard to do, and to take away from the story. I feel like this is something I really would have loved when I was in high school, or something… and just like totally missed the point, insofar as I would have been like: “Oh, you can have a story where nothing happens! I want to write a story where nothing happens.” But that’s not what happens.

Right, and what it does though, maybe, is that it redirects our minds, because…it’s not really about what happens, but it’s about the energy that gets created by those things. The energy of the first story gets made by that delicious description of a jerk. The energy, you can feel it, the energy gets made. So in a certain sense, what you’re trying to do in prose, by any means necessary, is make that energy. I’m just calling it energy, you know. It’s just kind of a fullness that gets made. Once you make it, you have to be aware that you’ve made it, and then you somehow have to dispense with it.

It’s almost like… in a simple way, it’s a sort of three-ring circus where he raises the issue, here. Isn’t it terrible when people oppress one another? Yes.

Isn’t over-caution terrible? Yes it is.

Shouldn’t you be open-hearted? Yes.

All right then, come over to the second ring: let’s make it a little more complicated. Here’s a guy who, the brother, who’s very energetic in pursuit of what he wants. He loves, he has a great love in his life, which is his farm. Unfortunately, he killed a lady to get it, and when he got it, he turned into a pig! Well, what do you think now?

And then the reader might say, “Well actually, that’s true, you know.”

“And so how do we feel about pleasure? That swimming, that was pretty unclean, wasn’t it?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean that.”

Or maybe you come out of this saying, “Right, so what we need to do is be moderate in all things, and shoot for the greater good.”

Good! Come over here.

“You’re the guy who’s very moderate about love. How’s it working out for you?”

“Terrible.”

“Oh, you’re right, so he probably should have, you know, gone for it, right?”

“Yeah?”

“How would that work out for him?”

Terrible.”

I sometimes think Chekhov’s stories work like that. You get to the end and, the whole time you feel this moral presence: “Anton, what should I believe? What do you want me to believe? ‘Love is good.’ ‘No, it’s not good.’“ And he’s constantly guiding you by the shoulders. Every time it gets too simple he goes, “No no no no no…no no…no no no no…no no.” And at the end he just kind of drops you off a cliff.

[laughter]

So there isn’t any—he’s not gonna have—last week I sent that thing, you know, his “holy of holies” is freedom. So even freedom from being statically connected to any one idea, which is pretty…and also the freedom of not being connected to that one either, you know. He’s remarkable.

There’s a really, there’s a very symmetrical thing. That’s what resonated for me from your Hollywood idea, because there’s always a freedom speech in the movie. There’s a freedom speech in each of these stories, and it’s all against conventionality. It’s not that it’s necessarily going to work out for you, but there’s an underlying moral message of, “Consider taking a shot at freedom. Maybe it doesn’t work out for you, but it’s something to think about, rather than just like, hiding in the conventional bullshit.” And he talks about this, too. There’s a really good potted biography in the front of this book about how Chekhov escaped serfdom, and almost didn’t become a human being. Like—almost didn’t achieve the awareness. You know, he got enough education to bust out of conventionality.

For all the subtlety, all of which is present, there’s a very, very simple thing underneath there. You know, to be aware and to try to be free if possible.

And he talks about that, that his life has been a process of trying to wring the peasant blood out of himself. But even there—and I think you’re absolutely right—freedom, for him, he says, is “my holy of holies”…but then he does this very adult thing, which is say, “OK, you guys, be free.” And then see that you—that you’re not.

Freedom is also to choose not, too.

Right, but it’s laden with cost.

There’s that line in the first story: “Ah freedom, freedom! A mere hint, the faintest hope of its possibility gives wings to the soul. Isn’t that true?” Yeah.

That’s it.

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