2020 Advent Calendar: Dec 18, Lauren C. Ostberg, Tardigrades v. Human Enterprise

 

Tardigrades v. Human Enterprise, ----E.D.A. 5th---- (2020). [1]

OPINION

Lauren C. Ostberg, Esq.

A Second Circuit case concerning the alleged infringement of copyrightable elements in the video game Tardigrades by the television series Star Trek: Discovery provides a launching point for one essayist’s mixed metaphors and concerns about the smallness of human creation. 

BACKGROUND

1. The Plaintiff and the Tardigrade

The Plaintiff, Adas Abdin, developed a video game, originally called Epoch, amended title Tardigrades. He submitted versions of the as-yet-incomplete game in internet forums in 2014 and 2015. In 2018, after receiving multiple comments and questions from fans [2] about the similarity of his blue, instantaneously-space-traveling tardigrades and those featured in the recently-premiered Star Trek: Discovery TV series, Abdin filed a complaint for copyright infringement and amended it thrice. The Southern District of New York dismissed Abdin’s suit in September 2019, so he appealed to a higher power: the Second Circuit.

 

App's at 71 (Abdin's tardigrade).

The tardigrade, the eponymous hero of Plaintiff’s videogame, is a creature that exists on earth. Also called a “moss piglet” and “water bear,” it is a microscopic, eight-legged animal less than a millimeter in length. [3] Experiments show that tardigrades can survive in boiling hot springs, being frozen and then reheated, exposure to pressure and radiation thousands of times stronger than what humans can endure. They retract their limbs and enter a “tun” state of mostly-suspended animation, from which they can sometimes be revived (even thirty years later) with a little rehydration. Experiments have (i) determined that tardigrades can survive in outer space for a period of at least ten days; (ii) sent tardigrades for one of Mars’ moons; and (iii) exposed tardigrades to variable levels of radiation. [4] Some of these experiments have gone awry. A failed lunar missions has left tardigrades, who are possible not yet dead, marooned on the surface of the moon. [5]

See App'x at 157 (photo of a tardigrade published on "BBC Nature Features" on May 17, 2011).

 

2. The Defendant

Abdin sued CBS and Netflix, alleging that several episodes of Star Trek: Discovery infringed on his work. Star Trek: Discovery is (or began as) a prequel to Star Trek: The Original Series. The entire first season of the series was examined by the trial court. In that season, there was a three-episode arc in which (spoiler) several crew members were slain, and the ship ultimately saved, through the actions of a giant tardigrade-like being called Ripper.  

Suppl. App'x at 143 at 25:42 (Ripper).

3. The Judge

Denny Chin, a justice of the Second Circuit, is supposed, by some, to be a fan of the Star Trek series. [6] His opinion quotes Captain Kirk twice; one of those quotations is in the form of a legal citation. [7] He not only cites a California case that defines Klingons—“a militaristic, alien species”—but also one that names their home planet—“from Qo’noS.” [8] He includes a gratuitous summary of the Prime Directive in his description of the Star Trek franchise, which shows the irresistibility of a (severely attenuated) guiding principle—a Constitution, if you will—to the Court. 

Judge Chin pays extensive tribute to the backlog of Star Trek related litigation, [9] but, after having some fun exploring the elsewhere-defined Star Trek Properties, he recognizes the frontier of this particular set of facts. This case is boldly going, Judge Chin writes, where no other court has gone before: to decide the narrow issue of “whether the television series Star Trek: Discovery (a recent addition to the Star Trek franchise) unlawfully infringed upon a video game developer’s videogame concept involving a tardigrade, a real life microscopic organism with a unique ability to survive in space.”

4. The Essayist  

I am of a generation that grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I owned The Nitpicker’s Guide and wondered how its author [10] could see so many small “mistakes” in a world that had wormholes and alternate timelines and very, very fake science to iron over inconsistencies. Mom took me to a convention when I was eight. There were Klingons there, with forehead ridges and combat uniforms. I trotted around like Wesley Crusher, a precocious ensign lucky to have found myself aboard the flagship of the fleet, a humanistic—no, broader. . . humanoidistic?—utopia. 

These days, I work as a lawyer. I tell people I do primarily intellectual property and cybersecurity, but there’s some general commercial litigation in there, too. The partner who supervises most of my work is a former engineer. (I am a former English major. “I’m fluent!” I declare, a little too often.) Sometimes, my boss laughs at my wordplay, but sometimes he says, “Lauren, this isn’t a short story; it’s a brief.” [11]

DISCUSSION

First, yes, I think Judge Chin was right, as was the district court below. Abdin didn’t invent tardigrades; he wasn’t the first to think about making a microscopic animal macroscopic. He wasn’t the first to send them into outer space, literally or fictionally. Also, the elements of Abdin’s work allegedly copied by Discovery—a large, blue tardigrade, who moves almost instantaneously through space—seem to fall on the unprotectable [12] “idea” end of the idea-expression spectrum. [13]

But these are all abstractions, and, honestly, while the outcome of this suit is meaningful to Abdin and Netflix and presumably the court below (affirmation always feels good), it is not likely to rock the Second Circuit’s jurisprudence or change the way anyone thinks about copyright law. I am delighted by this case, its warmhearted treatment of the facts, the image in my mind of a judge or clerk consulting a Klingon dictionary or another fictional guide for a proper transliteration of the spelling of an alien homeworld. I am exasperated by this case: how small are we—we, the legal system, we, creators, we, humanity—that we spend tens of thousands of dollars, the billable hours of at least three named appellate counsel, and the expertise of four federal judges sitting at three levels of Court, on this?

1. Allegorically Applicable Law

What concerns me, I think, is a question of scale: quarks versus cosmology, the created versus the described. It’s also about the way that the unknown—the dark matter, if you will—and our attempts to understand it changes what is. If you muddle the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Schrodinger’s cat, if you use your humanities-oriented-education to approach theoretical physics, [14] you end up tangled in similes and cfs. and far, far from the facts on the ground. [15]

Let me try again: what is at issue, for me, in the Abdin case is the perverse narrowness, on one end, and the agoraphobic expanse—the wormholes—on the other. “Fragmented literal similarity” and “comprehensive nonliteral similarity,” two tests accepted in the Second Circuit to examine the “substantial similarity” prong of copyright infringement, will frame this discussion.  

A. Fragmented literal similarity

Fragmented literal similarity refers to exact copying of a portion of a work. [17] For example, when The Joy of Trek, a fan guide to Star Trek Properties, included the phrases “make it so” and “live long and prosper,” the court found fragmented literal similarity. [18] If I wrote “The recombinant is manifest as forms as diverse as . . . genre-warping fan fiction from the universes of Star Trek and Buffy” and later included the insight that “To ‘tell a story well’ is to make what one writes resemble the schemes people are used to—in other words, their ready-made idea of reality,” this essay would have fragmented literal similarity to David Shields’s Reality Hunger. 

To me, metaphorically, at least, [19] there’s fragmented literal similarity between the Abdin case and the planting of an American flag on the moon. What are we claiming, exactly, but a sliver of what exists, whether it be rocks in a distant orbit or blue versions of gray creatures? What are we leaving but debris? The founders imagined a system that would “promote the progress of science and useful arts” and secure, for a time, the rights of “authors and inventors.” [20] And here we are, arguing whether an unfinished game’s application of a standard science fiction trope to a real creature actually shot into space is substantially similar to a predecessor to an “original series” of a once-progressive show’s depiction of that same creature. This case is a shard that exposes fissures in the mighty engines of human enterprise.

I may have overstated my position. [21] Honestly, the Abdin case was funny to me until I read an article about tardigrades who crash landed on the moon. [22] Something about imagining beings that were already in a tun state—limbs retracted, dehydrated—scattered, withering, unstudied and unaccompanied, wrecked me. We (we being humanity) could have left them on the floor of terrestrial lakes. We could have attempted a rescue mission. Rather than making them into bitmoji, we could have thought about the Jurassic Park question. [23] Rather than writing this essay, I could have thought through the ethics of experimentation. I could have developed an argument for jurisdiction. I could have searched for someone with standing. [24]

B. Comprehensive nonliteral similarity 

Comprehensive nonliteral similarity is peripherally referenced, [25] but not actually discussed, in the Star Trek opinions Judge Chin dutifully recites. Here’s my educated guess about what it means: the story has the same arc. [26] It’s the Clueless to the Emma, maybe. Here’s what the hornbooks say it means: it’s a form of infringement when one work appropriates “the fundamental structure or pattern” of another. [27] Of course, because a general idea—the sequence of the hero’s journey, the science fiction trope of “but what if this small thing is huge?”—is not copyrightable, the question of comprehensive literal similarity is a question of scale as well. To draw these distinctions, and to really understand what “comprehensive literal similarity” [28] means to the Second Circuit (Judge Chin’s court), I need to read Arica v. Palmer, 970 F.2d 1026 (2d. Cir. 1992).

The Arica case is a delight. It involves a plaintiff claiming that defendant’s book copied “the sequence or arrangement of the ego fixations within [third party’s] system.” [29] It discusses Enneagrams. And it includes this nugget here: [30]

Arica has stated elsewhere that the series of fixations is a “natural declension” comparable to “the spectrum of colors,” and that “the sequence of the series cannot be changed at will by subjective preference.” Ichazo, Letters to the School 74 (1988). Thus, for the purposes of this lawsuit we take Arica at its word and assume that the sequence of the fixations, like the fixations themselves, is an unalterable fact, the product of discovery and not creativity. 

So, according to this court, ego fixations occur in a natural, unalterable order because Plaintiff says they do. This is a masterful sidestep, and also a means of accepting the universe both plaintiff and defendant’s works inhabit. So, according to this court, the allegedly infringed material is “the product of discovery and not creativity.” [31] This distinction between discovery and creation brings me exactly to where I was hoping to end up: back at the Abdin case, back at tardigrades, and back at joy. 

What so pleases me about tardigrades, and Judge Chin’s opinion in Abdin, and maybe the law, is that they are products of discovery, rather than pure creativity. Instead of developing fictional worlds whose inconsistencies can be glossed over with a timeloop or a dilithium shortage, we (we being lawyers, we being essayists, we being humans limited by the laws of physics and space and time) dig up facts and draw distinctions between “fictionalized history” and sequences that can and cannot “be changed at will by subjective preference.” [32] We apply microscopes and see a being that can survive in space, a creature born for science-fiction, a marvel beyond human engineering. Nonfictional scientists study the tardigrade’s physical properties. Its narrative possibility—its meaning—is approached by multiple layers in our cultural imagination. 

And even when one variable is ascertained, one narrow issue decided, the tardigrade—our discovery of it—has a propulsive, exponential force. Does the tardigrades’ crash-landing violate the Outer Space Treaty, and, if so, should such treaty be amended? [33] Is the Abdin opinion a text worth of a course in Legal Science Fiction? What sort of meaning, what sort of art, could we make if we were rehydrated and released from our artificially-imposed tun state?

CONCLUSION

For the foregoing reasons, the mission continues.

2020 Advent Calendar: Dec 17, Kyoko Mori, Conflict and Compassion: reading Natalia Ginzburg in 2020

There has been a war and people have seen so many houses reduced to rubble that they no longer feel safe in their own homes which once seemed so quiet and secure. This is something that is incurable and will never be cured no matter how many years go by.

This opening sentence of “The Son of Man” by Natalia Ginzburg could have been describing Kobe, my hometown, instead of Turin in 1946, the year the essay was written. Although I was born 12 years after the war ended, the bombs that had destroyed half the city were far from forgotten. On summer nights in our backyards in the 1960s, my friends and I were allowed to light bottle rockets on our own because none of our mothers could go near the noise and the flash that reminded them of the nights they’d hidden in their houses with the windows covered with black paper. The last time I saw my grandmother, in 1992, she still talked about how she had sold all her best kimonos on the black market to buy bags of rice to feed her family in the last years of the war. “Everything turned into rice,” she kept saying. She would have understood Ginzburg’s deliberate use of redundancy. Their generation’s fear about having no food, shelter, or clothing was “something that is incurable and will never be cured no matter how many years go by.”

     Little Virtues, published in Italian in 1962, features 11 essays Natalia Ginzburg wrote between 1946 and 1962. The book has been available in English since 1985. One of the essays, “He and I,” has been a favorite of mine since the 1990s when I first encountered it in Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay. Still, for reasons I can’t remember or justify, I didn’t read the book until the summer of 2020, when the second paragraph of “The Son of Man” seemed to be presaging the present moment in the United States:

A ring at the door-bell in the middle of the night can only mean the word police to us. And it is useless for us to tell ourselves over and over again that behind the word “police” there are now friendly faces from whom we can ask for help and protection. This word always fills us with fear and suspicion. 

Natalia Ginzburg feared the police because several members of her family had been jailed or exiled by the Fascist government and her first husband, Leone Ginzburg, who edited an anti-Fascist newspaper, was tortured to death in prison in 1944. On March 13, 2020, the police broke down the door to Breonna Taylor’s home in Louisville, Kentucky, in the middle of the night and shot her dead. According to CBS news, 164 Black Americans were killed by police in the first eight months of 2020. 

     In May and June, following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, groups of protestors gathered daily in front of the White House. By then I never went anywhere without a mask and only shopped for groceries at a small neighborhood market where I seldom encountered more than one or two other customers. Living three miles north of the White House, I wondered what Natalia Ginzburg would have thought of me staying away from the daily protests. Politically active her entire life, Ginzburg served on the Italian Parliament starting in 1983 when she was 67.

In “My Vocation” (1949; Turin), Ginzburg claims that her vocation is simply to write stories, “invented things or things which I can remember from my own life, but in any case stories, things that are concerned only with memory and imagination and have nothing to do with erudition.” She confesses, “When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn’t matter much to me.” 

     In “England: Eulogy and Lament” and “La Maison Volpe,” her two essays about living in London in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Ginzburg calls attention to the small details of everyday life that disappoint and sadden her: a beautiful blooming tree that “is there according to some precise plan and not by chance,” the thousands of young people who naively believe they are expressing their originality through their identically unconventional attire, the English shop assistants who are “the stupidest shop assistants in the world,” and (my favorite), the little cakes that are “so prettily covered in chocolate and dotted with almonds [but] are, when you eat them, like a paste made of coal-dust or sand.” She is not “erudite” in the sense that she doesn’t offer any scientific rating system or researched proof of the shop assistant’s stupidity or the cakes’ inedibility. Instead she compares the English cakes to the cakes she imagines “placed next to the mummies in the tombs of the Pharaohs.” She assures us that the cakes are “perfectly harmless. They are only horrible, innocuous but horrible, with the staleness of hundreds of years, but innocuous.” She is unapologetically subjective and opinionated. 

     Like “He and I,” her portrait of her comically contentious second marriage to Gabriele Baldini, a professor of English literature, these essays about England, placed in the first half of the book (Part One), criticize false civility. “Nothing is sadder than an English conversation,” she declares, “in which everyone is careful to keep to superficialities and never touch on anything essential.” She longs for “vulgarity” which “springs from coarseness and bullying. It also springs from fantasy and imagination.” Both in private conversations and in public discourse, Ginzburg prefers “vulgar” arguments to polite silence. Many of the essays in Part One begin with seemingly small or “innocuous” details, but they are fundamentally as serious as the essays in the latter half that engage in ambitious moral explorations.

     Part Two opens with the description of the houses reduced to rubble in “The Son of Man.” In this short essay, Ginzburg concludes, “We have been driven to look for an inward peace which is not the product of carpets and little vases of flowers” and that “we are tied to our suffering, and at heart we are glad of our destiny as man.” She has no time for little rituals of civility, little objects of beautification, or little virtues.

     In “Human Relationships,” the penultimate essay, Ginzburg traces the course of her life from childhood to adulthood through a series of attachments she formed with family, friends, husbands, children. Though the details are specific and clearly personal, she uses the plural singular pronoun, we, which lends the narrative the expansive feeling of an epic or an allegory. She presents the all-absorbing childhood attachment to the parents, the rejection of them in adolescence, the shifting alliances of friendships (through which we learn that “we too are capable of making someone suffer”), courtship, marriage and parenthood; through her careful scrutiny, every phase feels at once inevitable and surprising. Ultimately, “we” realize we are “really adult,” not because we’ve gained self-confidence but because “we have behind us the silent presence of the dead, whom we ask to judge our current actions and from whom we ask forgiveness for past offences.”

     Even when we finally attain our full adulthood, she warns, we will continue to blunder because “human relationships have to be rediscovered and reinvented every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin.” Ginzburg portrays life as a “long necessary parabola” through which “we know all the long road we have to travel down in order to arrive at the point where we have a little compassion.”

     In leading us to this conclusion—the need for compassion—Ginzburg employs its opposite: utter ruthlessness. Not only in this essay but throughout the book, she challenges and destroys our naive expectations for hope or wisdom. She tells us that her vocation, the one thing that gives her life meaning, “has always rejected me, it does not want to know about me. Because this vocation is never a consolation or a way of passing the time.” She points out that if we are writing seriously, “it is a bad sign if it doesn’t make you tired.” Most of the things we jot down in our notebooks, hoping to use them in a story, will be useless by the time we come up with the story in which they might have fit. She doesn’t believe in teaching children “little virtues” such as thrift, frugality, and moderation. Children should be encouraged to spend money carelessly on small insignificant toys that give them temporary happiness so that later in life, they may be recklessly generous toward others.

     Reading “He and I” in the 1990s, shortly after my divorce, was a revelation. After a long catalogue of disagreements and incompatibility, the essay pivots in time and mood to suggest—through the couple’s first meeting which did not result in falling in love—that love has nothing to do with compatibility. As described also in “Human Relationships,” an ideal marriage is one in which the couple disagrees and argues: “Every now and then violent differences between us and this person erupt into the open; and yet they are unable to destroy the infinite peace we have within us. After many years, only after many years, after a thick web of habits, memories and violent differences has been woven between us, we at last realize that he is, in truth, the right person for us, that we could not have put up with anyone else, that it is only from him that we can ask everything that our heart needs.”

     My marriage to a man from a small town in the Midwest was nothing like this. Both of us believed we had rebelled against our conventional upbringing, but we were only fooling ourselves. The insipid English politeness that Ginzburg criticized was at the core of the cultures that had formed us: if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all; if the conversation makes you uncomfortable, politely change the subject. We both grew up under what another friend—another Midwesterner—called “the dogma of polite denial.” My version of the mummified cakes was the beautifully sculpted sweets (hard lumps of sugar, really) served at Japanese tea ceremonies; my husband’s was the multi-layered, color-coordinated Jello salads that were the mainstays of backyard potlucks. We only argued about things that didn’t really matter—music, movies, and books we’d listened to, watched, or read recently, not the ones we’d encountered in high school and, forever after, aspired to live by or up to. When one of us got upset, we politely excused ourselves and went for a run or a drive. In the 13 years we spent together, we never learned how to combine disagreement with empathy.

     Now, reading Little Virtues in 2020 in the capital of a polarized country, I am particularly interested in the paradox at the core of Ginzburg’s essays: the simultaneous need for conflict and compassion. In her foreword to the book, Ginzburg reveals that her essays were inspired by the conversations she had with a friend to whom they are “secretly addressed.” She characterizes their friendship as one, “like all friendships, that has passed through the fire of violent disagreements.” 

     Ginzburg doesn’t give any advice about how we can stay passionately, even violently, committed to our beliefs while cultivating our compassion for those who oppose them with their own passion and commitment. Nowhere in the book does she suggest that we should modify our views and meet our opponents in the middle. If I could ask her how much or what kind of political engagement is required of a writer—me—in 2020 who also considers “telling stories” to be her vocation, she would consider me insufferably stupid. She wouldn’t order me to go march in the street, or give me a pass for not doing so. She is not inclined to give out little pieces of advice about how to live a life of authentic moral engagement. The only hope she offers, in the very last sentence of the book, is that we can set examples for our children—or for future generations—through our own commitment to our vocation: “to know it, to love it and serve it passionately; because love of life begets a love of life.” She may be the most pessimistic and optimistic writer I’ve ever read. 

     But after all, at the heart of every essay is a divided self, an internal schism that is essential to an essayist’s being. “The mind works by contradiction,” Phillip Lopate pointed out in the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay, the book that introduced me—and many others, I’m sure—to Ginzburg’s work: “Personal essayists converse with the reader because they are already having dialogues and disputes with themselves.” 

     Ginzburg interrogates her own internal conflict in a voice that is at once compassionate and critical, optimistic and pessimistic, logical and passionate. She teaches us that the only way to write in any society, but especially a polarized society, is to accept the irreconcilable divisions within ourselves: between the fear that will never be “cured” and the hope we should never give up; between the commitment to our own truths and the willingness to imagine their opposite; between the devotion to our vocation and the desire to engage with the world.

*

(Aside from the Lopate quote, the other quotes are all from Natalia Ginzburg, Little Virtues, translated from the Italian by Dick Davis: 1985, Arcade Publishing.)

*

Kyoko Mori is the author of 3 nonfiction books (The Dream of Water; Polite Lies; Yarn) and 4 novels (Shizuko’s Daughter; One Bird; Stone Field, True Arrow; Barn Cat).  Her essays and stories have appeared in The Best American Essays, Harvard Review, The American Scholar, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, and others. She teaches nonfiction-writing in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at George Mason University and the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University.  Kyoko lives in Washington, DC with her cats, Miles and Jackson.

2020 Advent Calendar: Dec 16, Susan Neville, Celluloid

It is raining DNA outside. The (seeds from the willow tree ) are mostly made of cellulose, and it dwarfs the tiny capsule that contains the DNA…. It’s the DNA that matters. It is raining instructions out there, it’s raining programs; it’s raining tree-growing, fluff spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plainer if it were raining floppy disks. 

—Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

I was standing in line at Target watching the checkout person scan what seemed like completely unnecessary items from the cart of the person in front of me when I realized the checkout person and the person she was helping and everyone else I saw when I looked around reminded me of someone I knew from somewhere else. All of them: the cashiers, the customers, the crying toddlers, the babies in the carts with the soon-to-be-purchased towels and lamps and stuffed toys and pureed food. But I couldn’t remember, in a single case, who the doppelganger’s double was. 

     It occurred to me as I placed $100 worth of my own (to me) quite necessary items (prescriptions, ridged makeup remover pads, a blue plastic bowl, a mint-green mixer, a faux eucalyptus wreath designed by Chip and Joana Gaines, whom I feel I know) that this generalized ‘you remind me of’ experience had been going on for several weeks. This has happened only rarely to me in the past, usually when I moved to someplace new or was spending time in a foreign country, someplace where I felt very much alone and everyone I saw reminded me of someone back home. I had always understood the phenomenon as the psyche attempting to soothe itself with familiarity. 

     But this was something else. Before the pandemic, I came to this Target several times a month and saw unfamiliar individuals, but every person that morning and every morning since then has seemed much closer to me than they actually are, like a forgotten brother/sister/cousin/friend. Or even child. I feel the familiarity and also a strange affection. This seems very wrong to me. Strangers should stay behind the gate of strangerism until you cautiously and individually let one or two in and they come into focus for you. They shouldn’t seem so familiar that you want to weep.

     And if this experience was my new normal, how soon would it be until the scenario had flipped, when everyone I thought I knew wouldn’t remind me of anyone at all and I hated everyone and everything I saw? Things tend to work this way, flipping between opposites. A neutron star becomes a black hole, for instance, and not a daylily. So I would only recognize my children, possibly, if I ran into them disguised as strangers, or rather, I would recognize their strangeness but not their familiarity and perhaps would even loathe them, and that I couldn’t bear contemplating.

     But why borrow trouble, as my mother would have said, back when she was among the living. 

     Yet I feel as though the world has become an image etched on film and the projector is running but the film has snapped and is flapping around and around in the air.

*

Celluloid. The word popped into my head immediately, right there in Target. They keep some DVDs near the gum and mints as possible impulse purchases. Perhaps this has to do with images, I thought, and the doppelgangers are the result of my consumption of film. I’ve been watching too much television lately, too many old movies. That’s why Chip and Joanna feel like family to me. Photos of my dear mother look like a forties movie star with her black waved hair and large eyes, like Vivien Leigh. My father looks like Steve McQueen. My husband, who is still alive (though lately I worry about his mortality and the mortality of everyone I love through all hours of every day, and this is also so new for me that I’ve taken to the ‘God bless so and so’ kind of daily prayer that I remember from childhood because the possibility of his death, or my children’s or friends’, strikes me with such impossible dread that perhaps I am looking for their doubles and a kind of permanent object permanence, a belief that things I see will always be there even when I don’t see them) used to look like the film version of Superman and now like one of the bearded men on television, selling bourbon or fine cigars. I myself have been told I looked like Meryl Streep but primarily (I seem to have an average blandly northern European face) like many Midwestern women you would run into at, say, a Target looking for a eucalyptus wreath. You look familiar, people often say to me, but they can’t say why.

     I personally know doppelgangers for Jean Seberg and George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. My nephew looks like Andrew Luck. The photographer Lee Miller looked like Grace Kelly. Brad Pitt’s doppelgangers are rare, but even he is slowly turning into Robert Redford. Directors seem to love doppelgangers. Get me another icy blonde, Hitchcock said when Grace Kelly married a live prince in a fairy tale country and became unavailable. The icy blondes look most like victims, he is said to have said. And so he found a Kim Novak, a Janet Leigh, an Eva Marie Saint, a Tippi Hedren. They could have been sisters. Marilyn was not one of Hitchcock’s interchangeable women, though her films were made at the same time: a lamb that escaped the fold. At any rate, the doppelgangers began to multiply in the streets and in the offices of America. Corporations are always looking for the next new thing that reminds them of the old thing. Even publishers, especially perhaps publishers. The new Stephen King, the new Joan Didion, the new Kafka, the new Salinger, the new Lennon and McCartney, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell. We can’t recognize something unless we’ve seen it before.

*

Still, what does it mean when every person you see reminds you of someone you’ve already seen? Does it mean that, unlike snowflakes, human crystals are not that varied?

     Does it mean that I have come to the end of my career as one amazed by the infinite variety of faces and gestures or even soon perhaps by the variety of leaves and eyelashes and stones which aren’t all that varied, are they? Is everything always on repeat? Have I seen it all? 

     Perhaps death appears at the point when God realizes you’ve figured out there are limits to His or Her imagination. You there, you insignificant human, the one who’s noticed that I’ve run out of ideas and am repeating myself, that I have always repeated myself, have you finally eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge? Have you discovered the templates? Do I no longer entertain you? 

     In fact it is the opposite. I don’t feel bored or jaded by the sameness. I feel instead at the brink of some revelation if I could only break through and find the connection between the perceived faces and the remembered ones. 

*

Last month I read The Three Body Problem, a sci-fi trilogy by by Cixun Lui that describes the universe as a dark forest where civilizations light years away are on the hunt both for planets to colonize and resources to plunder and, as well, for civilizations that may be on the attack because the universe, like earth, is built on the two principles of survival of the fittest and scarcity—the foundation of conflict. And so, the novelist argues, we should not be sending our bits of celluloid, our clips of I Love Lucy and Perry Mason into space (as we have done) as messages to benevolent civilizations because (as Stephen Hawking and this novelist believe) they cannot possibly be benevolent even if they wanted to, not like the bribable God or gods we have always put our faith in. 

     We have a beautiful green and blue planet, prime real estate with fresh water and temperatures that so far has sustained us and that others will covet. And if that is not the case, they might want to destroy us in an act of self-protection because, like us, others will assume that any strange creature in the dark forest (where we all must fight to survive amid limited resources) is out to destroy them first. And so begins what Lui calls the “chains of suspicion.” We can’t wait to discover benevolence. We have to assume the opposite. We owe our existence so far, the novel argues, to the fact we live in a corner of an insignificant solar system and so are hidden and our only enemies are ourselves. 

     And if the fact that our worst evolutionary traits are multiplied in civilizations spread throughout all of everything that is, that the law of existence is survival of the fittest and love and self-sacrifice are chosen rarely, and only by saints, if that isn’t frightening enough, the novel ends like this:

     A minor functionary in an advanced civilization hears one of our signals and, fearing an attack, activates a weapon that travels light years by wrinkles in time (the only way to say it) and at the end our protagonist watches from a rocket outside of Pluto as each planet in our solar system is flattened into two dimensions. And from above she can see the beautiful transparent renderings of what is left as something like a transparent stained glass painting designed by an artist like Bosch, with flattened buildings and living beings and objects with all the shades of blues and reds and oranges, of every color, and you think that ah, this is how it will be rendered eternally, as a whole, as art, all of everything we are and have done on film, like of course, celluloid. (And in fact the Mona Lisa and Starry Night and the Sistine Chapel and all of the motion pictures are part of this complex painting or perhaps film that the earth becomes. Is this Liu’s vision?) And while it’s the end of the world, it is also extremely beautiful in the book, you have to read it. It’s hard to feel sad about it. I can picture the movie that will be made of it. 

     And then the sun itself is flattened, a beautiful translucent sunflower, a pinwheel, until it falls in upon itself and the black hole it becomes is like a whirlpool and one by one each of the beautiful paintings that had been floating (Saturn with its rings is particularly awe-inspiring) curves like the edge of a soap bubble and all the flattened planets fall into the whirlpool and everything else in this solar system and even this galaxy suffers the same fate, and everything disappears and at the end there is only darkness.

     But it doesn’t matter. There are doppelgangers for this galaxy. Our protagonist with wrinkle-in-time-hopping capabilities heads toward one of them. When a tire flattens, it seems, someplace there is a spare.

*

 

Celluloid, like the printing press, changed our world. It could mimic ivory, horn, tortoiseshell, and the finest linen. Until Bakelite replaced it as the plastic of choice, there were celluloid hair combs, hairbrushes, nail buffers, collars, cuffs, toothbrushes with celluloid handles, celluloid dolls, mirrors, buttons, fake leather, and celluloid false teeth. Gamblers threw celluloid dice and dealt celluloid cards and hit pearlescent celluloid billiard balls. It could be transparent, translucent, dead white or tinted; it could be stratified and veined and it could be opaque. You can magnify a celluloid ivory piano key twelve times and it will still be indistinguishable from a real ivory piano key.

     Cellulose nitrate was the substance used to fix and replicate fleeting moments, initiating the era of product repetition, of eternal returns. It was the grandparent of the rows of objects in Target. the era of the inexpensive surrogate that gave “a pure and remorseless joy to anyone unable to provide herself with ivory and agate, tortoiseshell and coral,” Anatole France wrote. It soothed “the pain caused by losing a comb.” The middle class would not exist without it.

     Of course there was the tiny issue of flammability.

     Imagine a picnic: comb in your hair, a card in your hand, dice on the table in front of you, direct sunlight and whoosh your hair, your nails! Your daughter’s beloved doll’s body cracking in the sunlight. All goes up in flame. Perhaps? I imagine a resurrection that looks like this. Everywhere on earth, at once, from particles and cells and flakes of skin and dust and rot, this sudden sparkly cloning of beings. Sequins in the air, bodies reconstructed. Our lives beginning again. Run the reel and let’s see what happens this time!

*

 

The night after my trip to Target, I watched a minor modern western on tv, and a very minor character within the western (a Native woman with powerful medicine who, at the end of the episode, changed a young woman who had been gang-raped by two oil company men into a hawk so she could fly away) seized me with her resemblance to someone from my past. Of course she did. 

     Everything: the character’s voice, facial expressions, her eyes, the things she said. But once again, who was it? It felt so necessary to make the connection, as though my life couldn’t go on unless the connection was made. Which box of memories would I search? Work history, education, neighbors, the retail workers I interact with, relatives and friends of relatives? At this point in my life, there are simply too many people populating the folds of my brain. 

     But since the Native woman was only a minor character, and my husband was interested in the plot, which was speeding in a forward direction only (and the girl’s transformation into a hawk wasn’t the only plot point that would be resolved) and in questions like who had jurisdiction on the reservation and could offer justice, questions that kept the plot (or plots, there are always three) moving, when the woman came on screen for her few seconds I couldn’t ask my husband to pause and rewind so I could look at the once-living face again. 

     And realistically, despite the urgency of my feeling, I knew that I would never find the thread that tied the on-screen character to a person who had obviously, at one time, been so very real to me that I’d retained memories of the way the person held her lips across her teeth and raised her eyebrows when she was asking a question.

     And also, if I asked my husband to do something that was so obviously silly and evidence of the deterioration of the film that stored my memories as to stop and analyze facial gestures during the forward momentum of a story, particularly a story so filled with rape and murder and car chases and gun slingers and bad guys and good-guys-who-were-sometimes-bad and a strong silent gray-haired sheriff who was on the side of justice except when he flipped suddenly and decided to be on the side of mercy and broke the law himself; not to mention the beautiful blonde female deputy whose uniform seemed made gratuitously of Lycra so the partially unbuttoned shirt was so tight around her breasts that she was forced to wear her badge on her belt—if I asked my husband to stop the story, even if the story in my own head seemed to be coming unraveled, it would both confuse him and spoil his enjoyment of the show. He is a man who jumps on the horse of a story and rides it with glee until it rises on its hind legs at the end and whinnies, and my odd request might make me unrecognizable to him or him to me. And that was the last thing I needed. 

*

 

Celluloid is made from cotton (or other plant fibers) and camphor. Before the camphor is added, the fiber is dissolved in nitric acid, and at this point it can be, and was, used for blasting rocks in mines.

While a celluloid comb will not, realistically, explode, a celluloid collar or celluloid mirror will catch fire if stored improperly and celluloid film, pressed thin and translucent, is highly flammable. 

     All the silent movies and many of the color films, until the 1950s, were printed on celluloid nitrate. In the heat of the vaults where they were stored, as the film decayed, many of the oldest ones went up in flame, have been lost to us, both the original copy and the copies of the copies. There were so many film vault fires that entire careers were lost in the process, actors who have been erased as though they never existed. I would list them except of course we’ve never heard of them. They’ve joined the majority of humanity and all the things we’ve made, unremembered.

     There’s nothing much you can do once the process of erasure begins. Cut off the film’s oxygen? A celluloid fire makes its own oxygen as it burns. Douse it with water? Celluloid can continue burning under water. Celluloid is a monster, almost alive, a virus. A metaphor for self-erasure.

*

My husband is watching reruns of Wagon Train. I’m in a separate room, but I can tell by the music what part of the episode he’s watching, and often what’s happening on the screen. In almost every episode there’s one young woman among all the men, and one thread that’s a love story, and because my experience of the show is entirely aural, I’m aware of the women’s voices. 

     Wagon Train was filmed between 1957 and 1965 and coincided with John F. Kennedy’s years as a political figure. I know this because I looked it up one day when I realized that every single one of the ingenues on Wagon Train sounds like Jackie Kennedy. Every last one. 

     Each young woman has that wispy, soft voice. How much it must have cost Jackie and all her doppelgangers on fifties television to whisper like that. How much it must have cost my mother, whose years as a wife and mother were those very years. Jackie’s voice is all breath, seems to bypass the vocal cords entirely.

     When did this whisper voice begin? Not in the 30s. Eleanor Roosevelt’s voice is deep, with an accent that’s almost British to my Midwestern ears. Her voice is strong. She has opinions. But after the second world war, American women’s voices seemed to change, perhaps in deference to the perceived sacrifices of the men in the air and on the ground in Europe. I watch an interview from the late fifties with Jackie that’s preserved, for now, on Youtube. When asked if she’s interested in politics, she says of course because she’s married to a senator. When the interviewer asks if she has causes or opinions of her own, Jackie’s voice almost escapes its cage, is supported by more than air before she draws it back in and whispers that she’s very busy as it is. And the interviewer says for her (because Jackie seems reticent to talk at this point) that it has to be a full-time job taking care of a senator husband. And Jackie smiles and whispers that yes, it is a full-time job.

     She’s boxed up in a pillbox hat, wearing a Chanel suit. My mother and all her friends had hats like that. All over the world, replications of that hat and voice.

     I can see the appeal of whispering. Whispering is intimate. We lean toward the whisperer in an attempt to hear.

And now, it occurs to me, we put on our headphones and listen to whispering again. Whisperpop: Lana del Rey, Selena Gomez, Billie Eilish. So intimate you can hear the sound of an Invisalign being removed from the singer’s mouth. It’s meant to come over the wire into the intimate folds of your ear, like a secret, the voices a response to earpods. 

     Oddly, I can hear the young women on Wagon Train much better than I can hear the men, better in some ways than I can hear the gunshots and fistfights. So maybe that was the point after all? Listen to the quiet voice amid the flames and the explosions. Is it really a problem that the women are indistinguishable from one another?

*

 

I wonder if the doppelgangers I’m experiencing are attempts to remember all the people I’ve loved, like life flashing before my eyes now, in the last part of my life, or if they’re all part of the same person, the spirit floating from one body to another. Our bodies are so fragile. The fire can be gone—snap--just like that. 

In 1897, 126 people were killed at a film screening in Paris, caused by the bright light and heat of a projector lingering too long on one frame. 

     Thomas Edison’s factory burned when a fire started in a film vault.

     In 1927 there were 125 deaths in a Cleveland hospital, caused by a fire that began in a storage room of 8500 pounds of celluloid X rays. In Pittsburgh, in 1926, a film explosion blew out the back wall of a three-story building made of concrete and bricks. 

     All the films produced by both sides during the Spanish Civil War have been lost to fire, as have all the pre-1951 holdings of Egypt’s film industry, among others, as well as 12.5 million feet of Universal Studios films. 

     A fire at the 20th Century Fox film vault in New Jersey, 1937, destroyed twenty tons of film. When the fire was finally extinguished, fifty truck-loads of melted film were removed from the site to be mined for its five cents per reel worth of silver (which had to be done quickly before the film degraded more and burst, once again, into flame.) 

     The 20th Century fire caused neighboring telegraph wires to melt and set a car parked a block away ablaze, all from radiant heat. In a detail that seems pulled from John Hersey’s Hiroshima, an insurance underwriter at the time describes shoes that weren’t even scorched but contained sheets of skin burned off the bottom of workers’ feet. 

     Eighty-five Tom Mix films were destroyed, as were all the films directed by Blake Edward’s grandfather, J. Gordon Edwards. 

     Tom Mix was the first cowboy actor. He was killed in a car wreck, like James Dean. Hardly anyone now remembers him, but he was the template for those that followed.

*

I walk by my husband and watch as flames fly through the dark night on the television screen. It’s the third act of an episode of Wagon Train. Are those flaming arrows? I ask. Yes, he says. How cool, I say. Not if it’s setting fire to your wagon, he says. And I say but if you’re watching this in the fifties, and you’re used to low contrast and suddenly the screen is all black and then this white flame appears and the wagon seems to be on fire, you’d think about the loss of life and property. But if you’re watching it now and you know there isn’t really a wagon on fire, you think about how the people watching it might have experienced the contrast and it just seems cool. 

*

Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane—all filmed on celluloid nitrate. Though less flammable celluloid acetate was invented in 1910, filmmakers still preferred the nitrate. For its luminosity, the silvery glitter. Filmmakers talk about the warmth and depth of the images, the connection of those images to the human.

     During the switch to digital, many old films were destroyed as the transfer was made from film. Transfer and destroy, it was called. Digital is easy to store, we think. It will last forever, we think. Its quality is better or at least as good, we somehow believe. 

     But two things:

     Film critic Wendell Dixon speaks of digital as “ultra clear, almost supernaturally perfect.” Too perfect, he explains. I get that. I do. When I first saw a football game on a super high definition screen, it looked less real than football looked the year before, less real than it ever looked in real life. The players looked like video game players, the astroturf too vivid. 

     Why is this? Bear with me. Instead of the vibration between frames that we’re used to from film (shot at 24 frames per second) the television receives images between 30 and 60 frames per second or, in order for a fast moving game like football to be accurate, 120 frames. But the television does something called “motion smoothing,” removes the vibration or “judder” and inserts fake images where the vibration would be. When you watch an old movie on television, HD makes it look like it was filmed by a camcorder but when you watch a football game or play a video game, it makes it look more than real, which is because a lot of what you’re seeing is the tv guessing at the images that would occur in between the images on film. Much of what you see is literally fake. 

     Apparently some of what we think we see in real life is similar, our brain guessing where a moving image will go and substituting made-up images to get us there. But it’s slower, like celluloid. And the images vibrate. At least that’s how I understand it. Our brains work more like film than high definition digital imagery.

     What you lose in digital imagery is the texture and the sensation of one image following another in time. “There is the flicker,” Dixon writes, “the sensation of light being punched through colored plastic as it hits the screen, the warmth and depth of the image unmatched by the cold perfection of the digital realm.” When Kodak stopped making certain film stocks, we lost some greens, golds, and blues, he explained. Quentin Tarantino still prefers celluloid in fact, calling digital filmmaking simply “television in public.”

     “Why an established filmmaker would shoot on digital,” Tarantino said, “I have no fucking idea.”

     And the second thing? Oh, the second thing. 

     We want to believe that things last. That we ourselves last. That our art will last. We want records that we existed, that we once lived, had things to say. In books, on film, on the internet. And so with each new way of preservation we forget the lessons of the last one. Libraries and archives begin culling books and papers because film, because tape, because digital. As it turns out, everything decays, including the internet. New platforms emerge and you can’t read old documents. What was the web address I used to upload all those videos once I digitized them? you ask yourself. Buried in someone’s email or worse, purposely erased, the videos copied and then destroyed. Because who has room for all this stuff? 

     But a piece of celluloid, if archived properly, can last 500 to 600 years without significant damage, while a digital master will last ten or fifteen before it has to be migrated to another platform. 

“Film is not an obsolete medium,” according to Dixon. “It is simply a more expensive one, much like staging an opera with real singers and actors in a live theater, versus the same televised to another location. The opera on the stage, with actual participants, is real. The other, composed of 1’s and 0’s is something else altogether.” 

     500 years. Is that too much? Would that I have that many years with the ones I love. Would that we would last forever, all of us. Would that at the very least we would be seen and remembered as our individual once-only in this universe, recorded in this essay or this photograph selves. Would that I remember you, all of you, that you will remember me.

*

 

Memory of the before times, when we used to gather. It’s the summer of 2019, and my brother and his wife and my husband and I meet some friends at an outside amphitheatre connected to an historical reenactment park. We are here for an outdoor concert. It’s my brother’s birthday. The shell-shaped stage is at the base of a gentle hill and hundreds of people sit in lawn chairs on the grass. We’ve brought picnic food and wine and it is a sweet night in late summer. There are oaks and maple trees around the perimeter, and a breeze that makes the leaves shift from emerald green to khaki and back to emerald. 

     Behind the stage a prairie stretches, hay rolled in silver bales. The sun takes its time setting, the clouds orange and pink in the blue, the light turning every face and raised glass golden, and the shadows and some of lawn chairs are washed in purple light, all of it like a watercolor, and I click my cellphone camera over and over, hoping I can capture the beauty of it, but there is some disconnect between the digital image and my eye. 

     There are hundreds of people around us, all on lawnchairs or sitting at tables, and in the gloaming every face is radiant, every one familiar. I have become used to this. There are children near the edges of the crowd, dancing and turning cartwheels. There are a few young adults. 

     But since this is a tribute band of musicians in their 50s imitating the voices and the look (uncannily so) of a band of musicians from decades earlier, most of us are the age of my brother and my husband and me, which is to say that we are old. And when I capture them on my cell, I can see that we are old but when I look at their faces they are young and filled with the animation of the living. And so is everyone around me, my people, those of us who are alive on this earth at the same time and in the same place which is so lovely in the setting sun, all of it glazed by the fading light. 

     And as the sun finally sets and darkness comes, giant silver screens seem to drop from the sky, carrying the image of the musicians to those of us sitting in the back so we are all seeing the same thing and singing the same songs and there are three of every musician—one on a screen to each side of the stage and the one on the stage, and it doesn’t matter which one you watch. And I remember feeling both wonder and a kind of youthful arrogance when I watched my parents at the age I am now as they laughed so unguarded with groups of friends and played dominoes and euchre and other silly games late into the night. I thought they had stepped outside of life, become children again, that their lives had become insignificant at the same time that I envied them those friendships. I had no time for them, I thought. I had important things to do: books to write, children to raise, a mark to make. 

     And now, there I was, one of them, all our earnest children at home, exhausted by their jobs and by their own children, their lives stretching so infinitely in front of them, thinking their parents are sad unhappy aging creatures when in fact they have never been so happy in their lives except for those moments when, like me, they stop and contemplate what is waiting in their own dark forests. 

     Is that one dead? We ask about the musician with the leather vest, meaning of course the original member of the band.

     He is, it seems. 

     And that one?

     Of course.

     Are any of them still alive?

     One is still alive, but he is much older and more feeble than the guitarist who is dressed like him.

     We try to remember who else is dead and who is still alive. One of us missed the day Tom Petty died. One of us didn’t know that Leonard Cohen was gone. Several of us aren’t sure about David Bowie, not really. I have to show my brother the obituary on my cellphone. If he’s dead, my brother asks, how did he die? 

     Liver cancer, my husband says after checking his own cell, and I stop myself from filling up my wineglass.

     The children wave neon glow sticks and some people dance and at one point we all turn on the flashlights on our phones and wave them in the air like teenagers and the field of humans looks like stars and the cameraman turns from the band and toward the sea of individual yet identical stars we have become.

And of course the tribute band is mediocre and a bit ridiculous and sad but also lovely and at the end of the concert we feel melancholy when the lights go out and the screens roll back up and we use our flashlights not as candles but as a way to light our steps as we move through the dark night to our cars. 

*

 

Every essay I’ve ever written has echoes of voices I’ve read at some time in my life. I can go back through this piece and find echoes of a James Agee sentence, of things I’ve learned from Annie Dillard, James Baldwin, of William Gass and Virginia Woolf, of Michael Martone, Nanci Griffith. My thoughts combine with others thoughts and fall into the rhythms of those who’ve come before me. A template of sorts, a natural replication, an homage, eternity, the way things work.

*

How long will this planet last? This galaxy? 

     For some reason I can believe in clips of celluloid-like material flattening all of us together, all of human history and our precious artifacts: all the faux wreaths and other Target (with its bullseye on every plastic sack) knick knacks side by side with the Grand Canyon and all the books in the world and the Pyramids and the Great Wall of China and the Louvre and the hills of Tuscany with all its grapes and, too, all the Great Lakes and my great aunt Charlotte’s remains, and my remains when they’re ready and (I will not imagine it) my children and my husband’s into a chip of film in a universe that doesn’t seem to care two whits for it. 

     But there is in fact love, and it’s love that makes me believe that something lasts, that somewhere on film or in a vast Borgesian library or something unimaginable to me now, there’s a record of all this beauty, even the beauty of its imagined end. 

     And so while I believe the universe could be this nihilistic, in a complex sort of way that involves only patterns and algorithms and not evil or will, I still nurture this hope that on the other side of the black hole, there is something waiting, something that collects these bits of film, hardened by the whirlpool into a thing that’s permanent, jewel-like, that will hang in some cosmic museum or become a part of some mosaic or even that some cosmic doctor with gloved hands waits to gently catch the celluloid and splice the pieces back together, to watch the film with his or her own children some night, spouse in the kitchen making cookies with a mint green handmixer, popcorn on the coffee table in a blue plastic bowl, all of them looking for something that reminds them of someone, somewhere, that they have always known.

*

Susan Neville’s most recent book is The Town of Whispering Dolls, winner of the Catherine Doctorow Prize from fc2. Her nonfiction books include Fabrication, Iconography, and Sailing the Inland Sea. She lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with her husband who, during the pandemic, has started re-watching Westerns. 

2020 Advent Calendar: Dec 15, Nicole Sheets on Joanna Eleftheriou's This Way Back

In my youth, December was an escalating series of carols until—boom—we hit Christmas Eve and its candlelit choruses of “Silent Night.” When I discovered the season of Advent as an adult, it made so much more sense to me. I can’t possibly be jolly from Thanksgiving until Christmas. That’s too much to ask of anyone. 

     I love Advent’s dirgelike hymns, such as the plaintive “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Advent is somber, reflective, quiet—all of the things that the holiday soundtrack at Walgreens is not. Advent affirms that yes, the days are very dark, especially here in the inland Northwest, and we don’t have to pretend otherwise. 

     The play of light and dark is one of the most compelling features of Joanna Eleftheriou’s This Way Back. If 2020 has been a landlocked year for you, as it has been for me, I would read this book for the scenes of Cyprus alone. Eleftheriou lived in New York until her father moved the family back to his native Cyprus when she was 10, “so that the children will know who they are” (125), a refrain that echoes through these linked essays. Eleftheriou is tethered to both countries and pulled between them, a tension that animates the book. 

     Eleftheriou opens up Cyprus to us, her Cyprus, which she describes with exuberance: “[E]ven as I spend winter after winter in America,” she writes, “the Cyprus of carob, terebinth, and cyclamen pulls me. I feel that I know who I am through this yearning—for the churning of seas, the light of the sun, the slope of a rock, the lift of a wave” (80-1). Cyprus is also a place that held its first pride parade in 2014, which Eleftheriou watches online from the U.S. Cyprus is a place where Eleftheriou hides the pride pin on her backpack while browsing a shop owned by the Orthodox Church.

     “[H]uman desire is a rope, one braided with thickly conflicting wants,” Eleftheriou warns from the first essay (12). Knowing who she is means unwinding that rope to study the strands. Perhaps no wants are more thickly conflicted than God and sex. The book chronicles, among other things, Eleftheriou’s slow process and high stakes of recognizing herself as a lesbian. It means that she angles her laptop so that her mother won’t see its rainbow sticker. It means nurturing secret crushes. It means visiting Lesbos in her late 30s, hoping the trip would “work sort of like training wheels for my baby gay self” (217). Identifying as a lesbian means that an Orthodox priest labels her as not sinful exactly, but deformed. “I still go to church,” Eleftheriou explains. “It is hard to walk in there every week and be thought of as incurable or unwilling to be cured. But if I disappear from the church, what good is done? I lose my God, and my church loses its one gay woman” (183). What does it mean, she asks, to be gay and Orthodox? Eleftheriou’s is a voice that speaks from the Venn diagram’s tiny ellipse.

     Even as Eleftheriou unwinds the strands of desire’s rope, she also entwines what’s been separated: the mind, the soul, and the body. In her unforgettable essay “Cyprus Pride,” Eleftheriou claims “that there isn’t love without body, that there isn’t person without body, that this soul I used to associate with love isn’t real without the reality of bodies, of desire. I wasn’t just scared of being gay—I was scared of the body that responded to women’s beauty in ways my mind could not control” (195-6). 

     For all its pain and hard truths, This Way Back is a book of great tenderness. I fear that I’m making it sound like a downer, when the impression that stays with me is one of unshakable joy. In these essays, Eleftheriou runs, dances, sings, swims, harvests carobs. In one of my favorite essays, “The Temple of Zeus,” Eleftheriou serves sandwiches to professors and fellow students at Cornell. It is the most poetic, upbeat description of a work-study job I have ever read. She celebrates the manual labor of the café, the “give-and-take of food” as a place of safety, of confidence, an expected entrance into the “insides of the intellectual labor, and to the secret rooms of thought” (97). Now a professor herself, Eleftheriou telegraphs to students in her office that “we are lucky. We can masquerade as people slogging away to get three credits…We don’t have to tell anyone quite how much pleasure we taste when together we read poetry” (101). Some secrets are sweet.

     This Way Back would be a nourishing book to read at any time, but especially now, as we live through the longest nights, waiting for light. If we’re lucky, we’re holed up at home, sick of Zoom, missing many of the people we love. Eleftheriou is an erudite, down-to-earth, witty, and earnest guide through terrain that manages to be both familiar and fascinating to her. Come, let us walk the road together. 

*

You can find Nicole Sheets in Spokane, Washington, and on Twitter (@heynicolesheets). She sporadically edits an online anthology of creative nonfiction called How to Pack for Church Camp.

2020 Advent Calendar: Dec 14, Bethany Maile, Exceptional Upbringings

 

The New York Times review of Tara Westover’s Educated begins with a comparison. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, another rural-rags-to-cultural-riches story, had already blitzed through bestseller lists. But “Westover’s new tale of escape,” they said, “makes Vance’s seem tame.” If Vance, educated in struggling schools, made it to Yale, Westover got to college (and then Cambridge and Harvard) with no formal education at all. Where Vance rose from a family stymied in substance abuse, Westover fled an ideological maniac as pious as he was paranoid. “If Vance’s memoir offered street-heroin-grade drama,” the Times said, “Westover’s is carfentanil, the stuff that tranquilizes elephants.” 

     Put another way: you ain’t never seen something like this. In the tidal wave of shock and awe, Educated is the foaming, raging crest. The very tippy top. The most extreme. 

For me, the book’s action was secondary. Westover—raised by Mormon fanatics wary of the government, public schools, and most medicine—bootstraps it to the highest towers of education. But I was in it for Idaho, a place from which Westover and I both come. And when Educated came out, I was in the process of publishing my first book, an essay collection concerned with what it means to be from that place and how place and identity are inextricably woven. To find another woman writer from here, what a delight.

     Everyone was reading that book. My neighbor. My parents. Friends from high school. A colleague who grew up Mormon not so far from Westover. One by one we finished, and each conversation became an echo of the others. What was shocking to The New York Times was familiar to us. We turned the last page and failed to fully get what all the fuss was about.

     The New York Times continued: “The extremity of Westover’s upbringing emerges gradually through her telling, which only makes the telling more alluring.” Yes, the book’s pacing is crazy good. But the more apt point is that the book’s currency is its extremity. Educated relies on one family’s recklessness, survivalism, and isolationism to captivate the reader. What does it mean, though, if the book’s currency is its oddity, but that oddity isn’t, actually, so odd?

 

When I was fourteen, I took driver’s ed in a dank garage on the outskirts of Boise. In a sea of camo-ed farm boys, there was just one other girl. At first, I only saw her hair—bluntly cut at the shoulders and black as a wet stone. I bee-lined to her.

     Eva and I passed notes and at the end of class traded phone numbers. That weekend, her mother dropped her for a sleepover. “Thanks for having her,” she said, her mouth a hard line. As she walked away, I noticed her hair, piled high as a mountain, on top of her head. 

     I don’t remember much about that first sleepover, but I know it was a Saturday because when I told Eva that in the morning we would go to church where her mother could pick her up—cutting the drive from forty minutes to twenty—Eva got nervous.  

     “I don’t think so,” she said. 

     Maybe it was a weird offer, but in Idaho, church was a common language. I was attending a Christian school where once a week I walked into a sanctuary and students rolled on the floor, slain in the Spirit. Teachers convulsed on the stage. Once, a girl clucked like a chicken. Always the soft call of tongues mixed around me.

     “Jesus is moving,” the worship singer would say, and I’d sit, waiting to be dismissed. 

     In the public elementary I’d attended, all the Mormon girls wore Choose the Right rings and covered their shoulders. Once a friend’s father changed his shirt and for a lightning bolt moment I saw the flash of his holy underwear. A tank top the color of wet Saltines, it turned my stomach. 

     But even the secretive Mormons, who would not let you attend their weddings or enter their temples, would have waited in another church’s parking lot. And in the church my family attended I never heard politics from the pulpit or saw the Holy Spirit tear through its chapel. It seemed—to me then, at least—relatively benign. 

     “It’s not, like, weird,” I backpedaled. “It’ll just be closer for your parents.” 

     “I’ll wait here.” 

     Eva was adamant. More than adamant, she was scared. 

Eva’s family, I later learned, did attend church, but not like any I’d encountered. Hers was a place that believed in being neither in this world or of it.

     I do not remember the first time she used the word cult, but, having spent more time with her, I wasn’t surprised. When I met her sister we were at the county fair. Ruth stood by a fountain and hair the color of a field mouse fell past her rear, all wisp at the tips. For the first time I saw their mother’s hair released from its clip. Thick and black like Eva’s, but even longer than Ruth’s. A curtain. A weight.

     “We’re not allowed to cut it—ever,” Eva said later as we waited for the Ferris Wheel.

     “But yours is short.”

     “I did it right before driver’s ed. My dad still hasn’t talked to me.”  

     There were no doctors. No medicine. “Not so much as a Tylenol,” she said.

     “What about babies?” I asked. We were high in the sky now, Boise a carpet beneath us.

     When a baby came, women hopped in coughing station wagons and rushed to each other. Eva watched as infants slid into faded towels and women sewed up other women, speedy as darning a sock. 

     Once, painting her toes in my bedroom, she cried because her cousin, a girl our age, had died. I didn’t ask how, but I knew that whatever had happened no one called a doctor or 9-1-1, and Eva’s parents wouldn’t have done any differently. Across her ankle ran a white stripe thick as my finger.

     “I was on the back of my brother’s bike and my foot caught in the spokes. My mom thought it was going to fall off,” she said, shrugging. These were people who, in Westover’s words, put “faith before safety.”

     There were other things. Her grandfather had been a snake handler, baiting rattlers to show the power of the Holy Spirit’s protection. At an early age, Eva suspected the church of inbreeding. 

     “Sometimes we’d drive out to Picabo because there was another church there,” Eva said. “Once I said the Simpson boys out there were pretty cute.” 

     “Oh, honey,” her aunt said. “Those are your cousins. And we need some chlorine in this gene pool.”

Eva thought of her father’s arms, how they lumped with fatty tissue, warped and wavy as old glass. How her grandmother’s arms looked the same. And all of her father’s fifteen siblings. 

     But what struck me most was the wariness that fogged her house when I entered it. The way her mother went quiet and her father left the room. I, who met Eva at driver’s ed and invited her to church, set them on edge. I was all outside threat. All otherworld danger. 

     But it was an isolation and paranoia I’d seen before.

Our neighbor had an old cow shed that hugged our property. Mrs. Meyer lived in a tiny, pale blue farmhouse, and when her daughter and son-in-law and four grandkids hit hard times, she did not have room in the cottage. But she did have the shed. 

     Every night, I rode bikes with the new kids, each carrying deep-cut Bible names: Nehemiah. Ezekiel, Elisha, Rebekah. They did not go to school. They hardly ever left the road. But I’d climb trees with the two oldest and put the toddlers in a wheelbarrow and zoom them through cheatgrass. Sometimes we fought because somebody cheated at a bike race or gave a party-foul dead leg, which is to say we chased and climbed and stomped home like all neighbor kids do. 

     I only went in their house once. Light fell through cracks. Rusted nails poked through planks. Barnwood grayed with age and rot. Bare mattresses crowded what had been the hay loft. An extension cord made a TV glow. On the floor, one hot plate. As for a bathroom, they must have used their grandmother’s.  

     I never asked questions. Maybe I sensed there was a tenderness here. Or, more likely, I did not need to be told their family—like Westover’s—distrusted the government and believed the Bible was the only book worth reading. I could already tell. 

     Three fields over lived my father’s hunting buddy. He had four kids, another set of homeschoolers we only saw at 4-H. 

     “Jim’s got a whole bunker,” my father said once. “Never seen that many guns. I think he’s burying money, too.” There was no alarm in my father’s voice. No shock of novelty. He might have been saying The Robinsons planted more hydrangeas. 

     One night at the dinner table, I asked my parents how we could help Mrs. Meyer’s grandkids. They looked at each other. My father cleared his throat. It was a conversation they had already had. 

     “A lot of times you get the government involved, it just gets worse.”

     And then we were quiet, save the sound of pie being spooned into bowls.  

On the page, Westover seems the odd girl in town. Once, she asked the gas station owner if she could put up a babysitting flyer. When Westover explained she was available during the day, the woman cocked her head in alarm. 

Another woman, also worried by her homeschooling, asked, “Do you meet other people? Do you have friends?” 

These interactions work to establish that she is a rare and unnerving breed, even in rural Idaho. But I could’ve pointed any direction and found a family who homeschooled—often as minimally as Westover’s. Never did folks ask follow-up questions. It wasn’t even a speed bump in conversations.  

     And if I, who grew up just outside Boise, knew countless families like Westover’s (even saw occasional traces of my own family in hers), then I suspect that she—living in the shadow of a mountain—maybe also knew other kids whose fathers stockpiled ammo and prayed instead of medicated (although when injuries were bad enough the Westovers at least went to the ER, unlike Eva’s family). If this extremism felt rampant in the most mainstream part of the state, I can only imagine how prevalent it was in the far reaches. 

But so what if I watched other kids grow up in similarly dangerous settings, with parents who feared federal invasion and mistrusted medicine and public education, who delivered babies on tarps? Maybe none of that makes Westover’s accounting less powerful. 

     There’s a lot to praise in Educated. All through it I underlined sentences for their loveliness (“I sat wordless as a brick,” for one). There’s an insightfulness at work, too (“He had defined me to myself,” she says of her abusive brother, “And there’s no greater power than that”). And in handling her family, she tried to write it fair. But this is not what people discuss when they discuss Educated. They mention the essential oils. The gasoline kegs buried underground. The minimal education. The physical danger. 

     The National Review said this: “There is much to be shocked by…Truth is often stranger than fiction, and Westover’s book proves it.” For these critics, it’s the seemingly singular extremism of Westover’s youth that reaches them. And I’m first to note she is telling her story. Educated is not a piece of longform journalism about survivalism and religious extremism in Idaho. She cannot be faulted for writing her life. That reviewers focus more on action than craft might say more about who we are as an audience than who she is as a writer. 

     But how does the writer reach you if the action doesn’t strike you as particularly superlative? I wanted Westover to broaden, even in tiny measure, her scope. To speak, if only briefly, to the way experiences like hers have been lived out by many around her. Because even memoir must zoom out. Even memoir must situate itself in its broader context. Or maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe that’s just something I want.

     Commonality can be just as, if not more, powerful than exceptionalism. In plumbing a shared experience, the memoirist can ask larger questions about what it is to live inside an entire culture—not just a family—that reveres individualism, liberty, and faith over community, regulation, and science. She can acknowledge how hardship can be an echo, a thing that happens elsewhere—maybe even in alarming proportions. When the memoirist zooms out, the stakes get higher, the takeaways broader. And aren’t stories stronger for that acknowledgement? By using the personal to interrogate something larger than the self, don’t our stories become dynamic, accessible?

     There’s nothing wrong with a familiar story, to find inside of it yourself or the people you love. We want to be seen. We want our experiences recognized. Story is often a means of connection, identification, validation. But—as evidenced in these reviews—Westover’s book can read like the wild exception. It eschews any overture to the cultural trends that surround it. It never acknowledges that Idaho, for a long time, has been a place littered with Westovers. 

     Did Westover have to branch out in this way? No. (Clearly. Her book is an incredible commercial and critical success.) But when I imagine Educated calling out the troubling trends Westover’s childhood mirrored, I see all gain, no loss.

     The fact that childhoods like Westover’s happen all over Idaho does not make them less disturbing, and it doesn’t make Westover’s account less essential. In fact, it makes stories like hers dire. But maybe with broader awareness comes broader change. And maybe for a single story to do that large-scale work, it needs to acknowledge its universality. It cannot present itself as an exception because if it is exceptional, then readers believe it is singular. And if it is singular, there is no more work to be done. Once the girl forges her way, the crisis is over. We are in full denouement. Believing all is resolved, we let the curtain fall. 

I’m sure there are Idahoans—perhaps in the suburbs or downtown Boise or maybe even in rural stretches—who found Educated otherworldly. But even though my childhood—lacquered in privilege (see my parents’ insistence on higher education, their affection for modern medicine)— varied from Westover’s, I still saw her world around me. When I read Educated, I was asked to understand her experience not as a microcosm but as an anomaly. That zeroing-in created a stage upon which only the Westovers could stand.

     The New York Times described Westover’s youth as an “unsurpassably exceptional upbringing.” There is a risk in staking a book’s claim on the extremity of its action. On positioning itself as “unsurpassably exceptional.” It invites readers to one-up. To think, “Well, I’ve seen worse, heard worse, lived worse.” And what a disservice. Because Westover wrote a book that is, without argument, well paced and laced with fresh language. And hers is a story that matters, in the way all of ours do. But in its choice to not push outside of itself and broaden its circle, it might have excluded the people who needed it most.

Eva is still one of my dearest friends. Part of this might have to do with coming from a place we never belonged in. Like Westover, we were girls who needed to leave. Mine was the easiest trajectory. College was expected. But Eva cut her hair and drove herself to a pediatrician and a dentist and then moved out of Idaho and stayed gone. She became a lawyer and moved to New York. She flies herself to Turkey and Portugal and Greece. She sends me photos of her toes buried in hot sand. She hardly looks back. 

     When I bought Educated, I asked if she wanted to read it with me.

     “Girl grows up with religious extremists in Idaho? I think I’m good.” 

     “It might be therapeutic,” I said. 

     “Maybe. Tell me when you’re done.”

     By the time I finished, I did not say a thing.

Sometimes I imagine that Westover grew up in the same dry patch of desert as Eva and me. That we all ran in the fields until a late summer sun dropped. That we sat on porches together pulling cheatgrass from our socks. It is easy for me to imagine all of us today, riding the deep groove of our Idaho youths, talking about where we’re from and where we’ve gone. I read Educated and I felt the same pride in watching Westover break free as I did watching Eva print college applications in my father’s office. The same awe I felt sleeping on the floor of her tiny back East apartment, law school books piled everywhere. When I read Educated, I was not dissatisfied, but unsatisfied. I felt it still had more to give. I only wanted more.  

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Bethany Maile is the author of Anything Will Be Easy After This: A Western Identity Crisis. Three times her essays have been notable selections in The Best American Essays series and once in The Best American Nonrequired Reading series. She teaches and lives in Boise, Idaho with her husband and daughters.