Cara Blue Adams: The Personality of a Translator

Have you seen the Drunk Uncle skit on Saturday Night Live? A Weekend Update visitor played—or perhaps truer to say inhabited—by Bobby Moynihan, Drunk Uncle is a cringe-inducing wonder. New Englandy Fair Isle sweater worn under a windbreaker, lowball glass in hand, hair askew, he steers an innocent reference to sports into racist territory—“Are you ready for some baseball? And eventually some hockey?” “I think it’s football.” “Someone’s gotta watch the white sports”—and moves seamlessly between mangled cultural references and sexual innuendo: “Is that Amazon Prime pumpkin-spiced? You know who’s got a couple of spicy pumpkins? That Sophia Viagra.” Drunk Uncle follows this up by singing “Blurred Lines” and commenting, “The only blurred line I know is our border with Me-hee-co” before beginning to weep.

“All you’re describing is the personality of a translator,” a chic Spanish poet says to the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station when he comments on her preternatural grace as she moves between worlds.

Drunk Uncle has the personality of a translator.

The wonders of Drunk Uncle remained unknown to me until I read “Say Uncle” by Mike Scalise on The Paris Review website. During my tenure as nonfiction editor at The Southern Review I did not have the chance to publish Mike, a major regret. I bring him up because his work is the kind of work I thrill to: funny, sharp, complex, critical but with a genuine warmth. His essays look outward and inward. They introduce me to the delights of things like Drunk Uncle and they introduce me to new parts of myself.

Mike wades into this messy, ridiculous world we live in—and into the messy, ridiculous business of being stuck within the confines of our human selves—and brings back the news. He moves easily between object and idea, humor and depth, immediacy and reflection. He has the personality of a translator, by which I don’t mean slurring and weeping into his bourbon, though if he did I would love his work no less. What I mean is “translator” in the sense suggested by Ben Lerner’s graceful Spanish poet, who in that scene, which takes place at a high-class party in a swanky house outside Madrid, sheds her clothes to reveal a bathing suit and dives gracefully (how else?) into a pool. A person who moves easily between modes.

A good example, which I hope will send you off to read the essay:

What makes Moynihan’s Drunk Uncle so brilliant isn’t just the inappropriateness or the one-liners (though they certainly help). It’s his ability to tap into something inherently lost within the poor guy. Moynihan’s Drunk Uncle, like so many real life uncles, is a man without a time, a symphony of confused identity, raging against his displacement from both parental and youth culture, a failed way station between the two.

My own drunk uncle, a slick LA-type, was married to my cool aunt (for a while, anyway). He inhaled whiskey, collected wind-up toys, and convinced me at age five that the best way to get rid of my loose front tooth was to let him punch the thing out of my mouth. I’m not saying I want to be that kind of uncle to Crosby. Not even close. What I’m saying is that the netherland of the uncle can yield useful things, such as a kid’s first real opportunity to flat-out dislike a grown-up. . . . This doesn’t apply to all uncles, of course. I’ve found in my adult years that a majority of mine are surprising, fascinating guys. But at even five years old, I was shocked at how unconflicted I felt as I watched my bloody front tooth hit my drunk uncle’s linoleum, thinking something not unlike Wow, this guy: grade-A dickface. Yet even if I didn’t realize it then, he proved himself in that moment a helpful primer; a durable example of the type of person I later knew to steer clear of.

See what I mean? That’s what I want as a reader: the news. The real news. The news I can’t get anywhere else. The news as brought to us by Drunk Uncle, singing Robin Thicke and crying into his bourbon.

In 2008 I joined the editorial staff of The Southern Review and spent close to five years there, first as managing editor, then as fiction and nonfiction editor, and ultimately as co-editor of the magazine. While publishing Mike Scalise will remain a dream, in those years I did have the pleasure of editing many other stellar essayists, including Bonnie Jo Campbell, Ted Sanders, Caitlin Horrocks, Abe Streep, Albert Goldbarth, and Aisha Sabatini Sloan. Their work is diverse, but to a person they, too, have the personality of a translator. The essays I chose at The Southern Review move easily between modes. 

The novel is capacious—of course, of course—but so is the essay. In a way it ranges more freely. I mean, sure, you have Moby Dick and War and Peace, but how many modern novels contain taxonomies and treatises?

But the essay: well, now we’re talking.

In the “The Playroom,” Ted Sanders maps his childhood playroom in a very local geographical memoir. Megan Snyder-Camp’s “The Skelleton of this Monster on the Sand” draws from Lewis and Clark’s journals, interspersing quotations and lines of her own poetry. Aisha Sabbatini Sloan’s “The Strong Man and the Clown” ranges widely in subject: Fellini, the Venice Biennale, whales, Pinocchio, the experience of growing up in an interracial family, intergenerational estrangement. I read her essay and want to go watch Fellini; I read the essay and begin to ask myself difficult questions:

In Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, Giulietta Masina’s character dreams that a man in a red robe is whispering to her. He asks her to help him drag a rope from the ocean. She looks up to see a boat full of people with strange markings. A black man with a beard stands in profile, holding a sword, and he looks back at the beach toward her. In another dream, a door opens to a room full of people frozen in time. There is a black man, dreadlocked hair held by sticks in what looks to be a Japanese bun, a white woman with white face paint, a short white man in his underwear with his mouth open, women in veils. I wonder how blackness lived in my grandfather’s subconscious. If one kind of blackness ever held the place of another.

Another great and capacious essay than I chose for The Southern Review is Albert Goldbarth’s “Annals of Absence,” later selected as Poetry Daily’s prose feature. The essay moves from Chauvet Cave’s thirty-two-thousand-year-old paintings to that grimly nutty German existentialist Werner Herzog to Wordsworth to the death of Albert’s colleague, Peggy Rabb. Take in the leap here, the translation from the hand visible to our eye to a hand as seen by physics: 

Absence. . . . I look at my hand, this hand that’s writing with a Bic pen in an everyday dime-store notebook, and was scraped along its outer edge when it tried to brace against a fall the other day (it looks like gray-tinged bacon), and was tended to by my wife, with soap and water, antiseptic cream, a Band-Aid, and a touch of spousal sympathy from her hand, just as light as a moth-wing's brush. However, I’ve read enough in lay texts on twentieth-century physics to know between the atoms, and in the atoms, this hand is mainly empty air: a tiny spritz of elements held in an overwhelming void.”

The hand reoccurs though the essay: Albert’s hand, Peggy’s hand waving goodbye, “palm out, her fingers extended, something like a star a child would draw,” the handprints in the cave. The final line encompasses them all: “The hand is here because it isn’t.”

These essayists make translation look easy. That’s one thing I like about them. Another: they also know where translation—of objects, of personal experience—fails. They send us back to the world to look again. They send us back to ourselves to look again. They translate with the knowledge that no translation is perfect.

Unless, of course, it’s done by Drunk Uncle.

*

Cara Blue Adams’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, The Missouri Review, Epoch, The Sun, The Kenyon Review, The Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. In addition, her nonfiction appears in The Little Magazine in America: A Contemporary Guide (University of Chicago Press, 2014) and Ploughshares. She has been named one of Narrative’s “15 Below 30” and awarded The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize and has received fellowship and scholarship support from the VCCA, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Until this year, she co-edited The Southern Review. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Coastal Carolina University.

“A little Key may open a Box, where lies a bunch of Keyes”: Roger Williams’s A Key into the Language of America, 1643

In 1636, Roger Williams fled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he was wanted for heretically preaching the separation of church and state and condemning the King’s charters, which allowed colonists to take land from the natives without paying for it. Under cover of a blizzard, he escaped capture and disappeared into the woods south of Salem, in modern day Rhode Island, where the local Indians gave him food and shelter. He would later write

                                                      Gods providence is rich to his,

                                                      Let none distrustfull be;

                                                   In wildernesse, in great distresse,

                                                      These Ravens have fed me. (17)

In gratitude to God, he named the city he founded there Providence, on land for which he paid the Narragansett chiefs in full. In gratitude to the Narragansett Indians, perhaps, or at least as a result of his time with them, he learned to speak their language, observed how they lived and died, and published his findings, not wanting to “lightly lose what [he] had so dearely bought in some few yeares hardship” (A3).

 

The result, A Key into the Language of America, is the first recorded attempt at an English-to-Native-American language phrasebook. Though more practically useful for the English colonists than the illiterate natives, Williams’s Key also stands as a salvo in his lifelong struggle to keep colonists’ dealings with natives above the belt; if the English settlers could talk to the Indians, at least, maybe they’d be less likely to swindle and slaughter them. “For want of this, I know what grosse mis-takes my selfe and others have run into” (A3), Williams writes, alluding to, even as he glosses over, the often grisly costs of miscommunication and distrust between the colonists and the Indians. What effect access to these translated phrases had or was intended to have on native-settler relations is an interesting question, but this isn’t Phrasebook Daily, and Williams purposely wrote something that wasn’t just “a Dictionary or Grammer,” judging those formats to be “not so accommodate to the Benefit of all, as I hope this Forme is” (A8). 

The form Key does take attests to his intent to hammer into his readers the humanity of these so-called barbarians (even as he calls them barbarians himself), beyond giving both parties a common language. By way of anecdote, ethnographic observation, moralizing doggerel, theology, tutorial, list, comparison, and translation, Williams systematically cobbles together a demonstration of a way of living, of approaching the world’s pleasures and challenges, of cohabitation. In A Key into the Language of America, language and the world it’s wielded on through reference and performance are intercut so as to make the Narragansett way of speaking inseparable from what it is to be a Narragansett. Williams calls this slippery form “Implicite Dialogue,” which he distinguishes from dialogue, a form which he uses elsewhere, but passes over here “for brevities sake” (A8). I’d call it an essay. “A little Key may open a Box, where lies a bunch of Keyes” (A3): Williams lays on the “key” metaphor pretty thick, but as a description of his structure—nested, shot-through with little insights—and as an articulation of one of the ways an essay can proceed, I think it fits perfectly.

The way Williams structures this book is enchanting and remarkable and central to his life’s work of shifting colonial perceptions of Indians, so that will be my chief focus here. A Key into the Language of America consists of 32 chapters, each of which has a handy title, from “Of Salutation” to “Of their Death and Buriall,” which he intends to be used like any phrasebook: “Whatever your occasion bee either of Travell, Discourse, Trading &c. turne to the Table which will direct you to the Proper Chapter” (A8). But where things get interesting is in the shape each chapter takes, at once formulaic and free-wheeling. First we get a straightforward list of words and phrases in Narragansett and their English translations, relevant to the subject at hand:

Of Salutation.
Askuttaaquompsin Hou doe you?

Asnpaumpmauntam I am very well. (2)

 

The translated words range from the obvious to the obscure, the pointless to the pointedly specific—sometimes so much so that a single phrase suggests a whole story, like the best micro flash fiction: “Mauchinaash nowepiteass. My teeth are naught” (15). “Cummachiteouwunash kuskeesuckquash. You spoile your Face” (192). At times, it’s the loaded juxtaposition of phrases on the list that suggests a narrative: “Nkeke Commeinsh. I will give you an Otter. Coanombuqusse. You have deceived me. ... Misquesu Kunukkeke. Your Otter is reddish” (162). When Williams feels the need to elaborate on any of the translations, wants to relate a relevant anecdote, or sees the opportunity to squeeze a sermon in, he inserts a prose block labeled “Observation” right between items on the phrase list:

Tuckowekin Where dwell you? 

Matnowetuomeno I have no house. 

Observation.

As commonly a single person hath no house, so after the death of a Husband or Wife, they often break up house, and live here and there a while with Friends, to allay their excessive Sorrowes.

Tocketussaweitch What is your name? 

Now annehick nowesuonck I have forgot my name.

Which is common amongst some of them, this being one Incivilitie amongst the more rusticall sort, not to call each other by their names but Keen, You, Ewo He, &c. (4)

Carson Vaughan: On Balance

I can still see his words scribbled in red ink across the margins, the chicken-scratch hieroglyphics of my favorite professor. Stop editorializing, he wrote. We’d spent the past six months researching and reporting on the traditional roles of women in Native American culture, and now, for the first time, our professor—a Pulitzer finalist in journalism—was delivering his verdict on our work. As he talked, I quickly scanned the room, pleased to see my draft wasn’t the only one bleeding, but still unable to quell the waves of dry heat pounding my temples and washing down my neck. In journalism school, that word—editorializing—coupled nicely with words like murder and treason.

I knew my professor was right. I worked hard to expunge any shred of editorial voice from later drafts, and the result was a story much more fitting for our objective: not to rebuke the evils perpetrated against Native peoples or to publicize my own beliefs, but to objectively report on the issues facing contemporary Native women. I graduated college believing in the power of a good story objectively told, a story crafted around its subjects, not its writer. I still do.

But at the same time, I craved the voices I read in my favorite novels, the manic energy of the evangelist on campus, a diversity of language and especially of structure that I hadn’t found even in my favorite feature articles. So I applied to MFA programs in creative nonfiction, and later, after enrolling at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, joined the staff of Ecotone, our award-winning literary magazine.

As nonfiction editor, I search for work that adroitly balances objective reporting and subjective discovery, essays and stories that show an equal respect for the internal and the external. I look for writers who aren’t afraid to probe the world around them while simultaneously mining the world within; who are eager to physically hunt for the story, but also know when to bring it home, to employ their own reasoning and their own bias and their own interiority to connect on a more human level.

In describing their purpose, most literary journals tend to eschew language that might be perceived as exclusionary; ultimately, most of us are looking to publish the best work, regardless of form or genre. Ecotone is no different. Our primary goal is to publish quality work, the type of work that makes us—as readers and writers—reevaluate the way we interpret and interact with our surroundings.

But Ecotone is distinct in that David Gessner, author most recently of The Tarball Chronicles and My Green Manifesto, founded the magazine with a focus on place and our relationship to it. Indeed, Ecotone’s motto is “Reimagining Place,” and inherent to that idea – and the definition of “ecotone” as “a transition zone between two communities” – is an emphasis on the world beyond the self. That emphasis has carried through the magazine’s eight years of publication and through two changes in editorship. As Ander Monson wrote in his Ecotone essay, “Facing The Monolith,” “I sees world through eye. And what we see and say about the world says a lot about ourselves.”

I often find that writers who submit to Ecotone forget this. In my two years as nonfiction editor, I’ve read hundreds of stories and essays that fall squarely on one side of this embrace. Because the magazine’s title implies an environmental theme, the majority of the submissions we receive deal in some way with the natural world, but too many forget that describing nature alone is not enough; topic does not negate the need for a deeper theme. A story about the Chinese elm (Ulmus parvifolia) must connect to something greater than the Chinese elm. Similarly, those who write of the internal landscape often forget to look up, to find the universal theme in their personal story.

One essay that exemplifies this balance is Jill Sisson Quinn’s most recent Ecotone story, “The Myth of Home,” from issue 15 of the magazine. Here, Sisson Quinn uses Lake Michigan as a bridge to dismantle our ecological bias, and in turn what it means to be at home in any one setting. In describing her surroundings—the ring-billed gulls, the hint of salt and decay in the air, the “sun-bleached cladophora, algae woven by waves into one giant page,” and of course the sheer size of the lake and the fact that one cannot scan it shore to shore—she soon recognizes her inability to meet the lake on its own terms:

I wish to be indigenous to every place I visit, to see it as earth entire. How nice it would be to shed the compulsion to compare one landscape to another, to analyze, evaluate. To simply hear what the land says. To no longer have to choose, or love or hate, to let down my guard and feel the power of the sea in this Great Lake.

Sisson Quinn’s focus on the external organically ushers in a focus on the internal, and in the process she avoids both navel-gazing and the didacticism of pure fact.

Paul Crenshaw’s essay, “Girl On The Third Floor,” from Ecotone’s Abnormal issue (14), strikes a much different note, but like “The Myth of Home,” it balances the I with the eye (to appropriate Monson’s words) and also with the imagination. As a child, Crenshaw lived with his family in a rented house on the grounds of a tuberculosis sanatorium. Returning to the facility twenty years later, Crenshaw grows fascinated with the story of a young girl said to haunt the upper floors of the hospital. In vivid prose, the author blends the history of the sanatorium with his return to the estate. Using the details he’s uncovered, he imagines the solitary life of the young girl:

It would have started with a cough, a dry rattle that shook her shoulders and made her parents exchange worried looks, until the day she began to cough blood. They lived on a dusty road in the middle of soy fields in the middle of the state in the middle of the country and one day a long black car pulled up in front of the house amid a cloud of dust that settled on the long rows of crops. A nurse got out.

Crenshaw delivers a fascinating meditation on history and childhood, “the notion that we are all trapped by … random forces beyond our control, forever looking back with the sad silly sense that if we could just understand the tragic world we survived as children we could somehow be better adults.”

To me, these two essays represent the range of Ecotone nonfiction, and the quality of work the magazine aims to publish. When I turn on the lamp in my study and dive into a stack of fresh submissions, I still hear the voice of that professor, still feel his words staring back at me. I ask myself if the author has let the subject breathe, if he or she has written the piece with an editorial hand, and if so, whether the story justifies it. I ask myself if the author’s presence informs and complements the subject, and I ask myself if that subject reaches beyond itself.

When the answer is yes, I read it again.

*

Carson Vaughan is a third-year MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where he teaches and serves as nonfiction editor of Ecotone. His work appears or is forthcoming in Salon, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Orion, Truthout, Bluestem, and other publications.

Mirror, not a Makeover: Oscar Wilde's Scornful Letter

In 1997, James W. Pennebaker, professor of psychology, asked his test subjects to “write [their] very deepest thoughts and feelings about the most traumatic experience of [their] life.”  Encouraged by the positive results, he then suggested a writing program in which participants write for 15-20 minutes between three and five times.  Oscar Wilde, writing a century earlier, had already discovered the therapeutic benefits of writing, though his 55,000-word manuscript, hand-written over three months and later named Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis, slightly exceeded Pennebaker’s recommendation.  Ostensibly a letter to Alfred Douglas, the man with whom Wilde was convicted of having ‘improper’ relations, the manuscript vacillates between addressing the reader and abandoning him altogether, between paternal magnanimity and lover’s scorn, between boastful arrogance and humble resignation.  In this regard, the letter reads as a memoir in the traditional sense.  If we excavate memoir’s distinguished etymology, past the French mémoire, past the Greek memeros, past the Latin memoria, we hit bottom at proto-Indo European’s monosyllabic mon -- to think or to worry.  As opposed to the sanitized retelling of the past that defines memoir today, the genre used to mean a re-experiencing, ‘worrying a scab.’  In the original sense, the memoir author searched for meaning, stumbling and bumbling along his path to understanding.  Seen through this lens, Wilde’s manuscript is less a letter and more a struggle to come to terms with the most traumatic experience of his life.

The choice to write a letter is peculiar because the threateningly public nature of correspondence was all too apparent to Wilde.  Before his arrest, blackmailers had obtained Wilde’s letters but failed to extract money from him.  During Wilde’s trial, the prosecution relied heavily on two letters written from Wilde to Douglas as evidence of the former’s ‘gross indecency.’  And the epistolary fallout didn’t end in prison, as Wilde learned that Douglas planned to write an article about Wilde with selections from his letters; Wilde was irate: “But that you should seriously propose to publish selections from the balance [of my letters] was almost incredible to me.”  Based on this track record of overexposure, Wilde had no reason to believe that this correspondence would remain private.  His decision to write a letter, therefore, makes more sense if we think of his intentions as introspective, not epistolary.  

The text's dramatic shifts in tone reveal an unsure narrator still working things out. At times, he’s congenial, offering almost paternal advice.  He opens the letter by acknowledging that he will say “much that will wound your vanity to the quick,” but he implores Douglas to accept the criticisms for his own benefit.  After deriding Douglas’ vacuous personality and intellectual failures, Wilde writes, “I am not saying this in bitterness at all, but simply as a fact of companionship.”  Although Wilde constantly emphasizes his magnanimity, the cracks begin to show.  Throughout the letter, Wilde’s mood shifts from the indicative aimed at Douglas to the imperative aimed inward:  “And the end of it all is that I have got to forgive you.  I must do so.  I don’t write this letter to put bitterness in your heart, but to pluck it out of mine.”  The line “I must do so” reveals a writer still struggling for closure, a scorned lover who remembers his ex being bad, but maybe not that bad.  And in periodic bursts, Wilde’s acridity is hardly even veiled: “But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place.”  These tonal inconsistencies belie Wilde’s claims that he’s moved on.  Moreover, the letter’s scrupulous style also reveals an author worrying his scab.  

Wilde’s meticulous -- borderline obsessive -- attention to detail further splinters his confident veneer.  Although historians argue over the conditions imposed on Wilde’s composition, many agree that the prison warden allowed him to write only a few pages a day, and that he couldn’t refer to previous pages.  Although Wilde had no notes to consult, no receipts to reference, he lists every minutiae of the ways that Douglas wronged him.  The price of a particularly lavish hotel stay, the itinerary of a quarrel five years past, the transcript of a damning letter: these details clung to Wilde’s memory and leaked into his manuscript.  By the end of the letter, Wilde is cataloguing the lavish “Savoy dinners” he bought Douglas: the “luscious ortolans wrapped in their crinkled Sicilian vine-leaves,” the “amber-scented Champagne--Dagonet, 1880, [that] I think, was your favorite wine.”   This obsession with the past, especially the trivial details therein, demonstrate that, as hard as Wilde may try to retell his story, he is still re-experiencing it.

Wilde concludes his letter with cautious optimism.  A dozen pages before the end, he describes his religious revelation and the profound wisdom that results from misery.  All references to Douglas, whether pronominal or tangential, disappear, and when the recipient returns to the text, it is for Wilde to lecture him on the mutability of the past: “If people tell you that [the past] is irrevocable, do not believe them. . . I have got to make myself look on [the past] with different eyes, to make the world look on it with different eyes, to make God look on it with different eyes. . . It is only to be done fully by accepting it as an inevitable part of the evolution of my life and character.”  Wilde admits the ‘uncertain moods’ of his letter, but the previous pages seem to indicate that Wilde’s come to terms with Douglas and the harm he’s caused.  So what are we to think that, after 55,000 words of condemnation and renunciation, Wilde ultimately reconciled with Douglas?  That Douglas, the man who seemed so incorrigible, so vacuous and vain, proved himself doubly so when he publicly repudiated Wilde a decade after the playwright’s death?  Unfortunately, this tragic outcome leaps from the pages of Wilde’s manuscript.  In his constant vacillations and painstaking details, Wilde shows us that writing is a mirror, not a makeover.  However therapeutic the craft may be, it’s powerless to change certain realities, no matter how eloquently we may try.  

Color Theory for The Essayist

“In my painting of the night café I’ve tried to express the idea that the café is a place where you can ruin yourself, go mad, commit crimes,” wrote Vincent van Gogh, in a letter to his younger brother Theo, on September 9th, 1888. Theo was in Paris, and Vincent, in Arles, where he has been making good use of the light of Provence since February, painting a masterpiece a day at the height of his love affair with color. This was his second letter in two days about the night café. He continued, “Anyway, I tried with contrasts of delicate pink and blood-red and wine-red. Soft Louis XV and Veronese green contrasting with yellow greens and hard blue greens.” Van Gogh has included a watercolor sketch of his painting, which Theo did not need in order to see the night café in reality or on the canvas or as a sentiment after reading the two letters.

The letters of September 8^th and 9^th form an essay in which Van Gogh explores, through the night café, the process of painting and the relationship between color and psychology, as his endeavor had always been to paint pictures that moved people because they “contained something straight from [his] own feelings.” His unremitting yearning to connect even with the lowliest of souls gives the essay direction, and the need to find salvation both for his fellow humans and for himself gives it hope.

“I’ve tried to express the terrible human passions with the red and the green,” he has written in the first letter, establishing emotion in contrasting colors from the very beginning. “Everywhere it’s a battle and an antithesis of the most different greens and reds.”

In Aix-en-Provence, not quite an hour east of Arles, I learned about contrasting colors. After a couple weeks of figure drawing at the Atelier Marchutz, Alan gave his traditional color theory talk, sitting on the long wooden bench with a large palette balanced on his knee. On it, he had squeezed each of the eight colors we were allowed to use at the studio, which included white, but excluded black. Alan started with the cadmium red, ultramarine blue, and lemon yellow, and explained to us that mixing two primary colors, say yellow and blue, would result in a secondary color, green, which would be the opposite of the one primary we did not use, red. The primary color and its contrast made a complementary couple, and if we were to mix equal parts of the two, we would end up with a dark grey.

The temptation was to use this grey in shadows as we painted, but if we did, and I had, John, who was co-teaching the class, would materialize behind us, and, very gently, tell us to look harder. The more I looked, the more I noticed the complimentary colors abounding in the shadows.

Van Gogh has written, “The white clothes of the owner, watching over things from a corner in this furnace, become lemon yellow, pale luminous green.” With this sentence the letters start to take shape as a personal essay, where the narrator is not only describing his surroundings but also reflecting on them. Van Gogh is speaking directly to his brother, but he also, always, has an ongoing conversation with himself. The owner’s clothes do not change color in reality, but they do on Van Gogh’s canvas, as he heard the unspoken dialogue between the owner and the customers. The once-white-now-green clothes set off the other colors at the café, the pinks and blood-reds. Van Gogh painted the owner standing next to the billiard table, surrounded with the regulars slumped at the tables as if they were extensions of the chairs they sat on. The lack of ownership in the lives of the customers, the hopeless fact that they have nowhere else they’d rather be, the heavy metaphor of their homelessness, became visible in Van Gogh’s painting. By establishing a contrasting relationship in color, he was able to convey what he really saw.

A few paragraphs later he wrote, “It’s a colour, then, that isn’t locally true from the realist point of view of tromple l’eoil, but a colour suggesting some emotions, an ardent temperament.” As he considered, in writing, the act of translating life into art without forswearing truth, Van Gogh was a narrator who was in full command not only of his brush but also of his philosophy.

Art historians have suggested that the colors in the Night Café shout at each other like drunks, a fitting simile. Just like the drunks need one another even if it is only to pick a fight, the contrasting colors need each other for their effect to find meaning. Over the years, Van Gogh has intently observed nature and knew that there was an inherent balance beneath all contrasts, that it meant hope and salvation, that it meant love, it meant homecoming.

It is not surprising, then, that in his letters in which he talks about painting an abstract homelessness, Van Gogh also talks about furnishing his own place, turning it into An Artist’s House, where “everything from the chair to the painting [has] character,” in other words, creating a space where he can belong and can have company. The meaning of homelessness can only be grasped fully when the idea of homecoming stands next to it, and even though it always does, we cannot see it, because our sight is crippled with our worries. One has to paint homelessness to find home. And you do not have to be Vincent van Gogh to do that. When I painted regularly, I was surprised again and again that I always ran out of yellow paint first. There was more light in life than I could see with my intellectually impaired eyes.

The company Van Gogh expected in Arles was Paul Gaugin, a fellow misfit. In his second letter, he wrote to Theo that he bought twelve chairs, a mirror, and two beds, one in walnut that would be Gaugin’s, and one in deal that he would paint for himself. He wrote, “From the start, I wanted to arrange the house not just for myself but in such a way as to be able to put somebody up.” Van Gogh, a lonely genius who understood the homelessness of the night café people, if not better, more eloquently then they themselves did, was going to do for himself in real life what he did for the café regulars in his painting.

I have often turned to art to understand writing better, and Van Gogh, with his hundreds of paintings, was always there to instruct me on color, on the infinite variations of gold in wheat fields, on the contrasts that spoke quietly of the meaning that I, as a product of the 21^st century urban life, had given up on. I had started reading Van Gogh’s letters in order to get to know him better, but ended up having a deeper understanding of my own psyche. As he wrote about color theory with a decisive casualness, I gained the courage to go deeper in my writing. It is as much in his paintings as in his letters that Vincent van Gogh taught me to trust the complexities of contrasting emotions, that even if hope was not readily present, balance was to be found, that all I had to do was to follow the creative urge to its limits, because the yellow light was complemented and made complete only with its purple shadow.


(All quotations are taken from Vincent van Gogh: The Letters: The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition (Vol. 1-6) Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker; available online at http://vangoghletters.org/vg/) 

Nazlı İnal is an MFA student at the University of Iowa. She blogs sporadically at The Ways of Black Ink.

Barry Grass on Christine Hume

I was watching a program on Discovery Channel one day about killer bees. The program was detailing their spread. How their migration, their invasion, of the United States has gone and will go in the future. I probably saw this some fifteen years ago or more. The models that the researchers used indicated that Africanized Honey Bees (the correct name for what is a hybrid species of bee—the European Honey Bee was bred with the much more aggressive African Honey Bee—but is rarely used because the association of violence and aggressiveness with Africa is tricky business in a country like the United States and would actually be more scandalous than just naming the bees after their propensity to murder, a propensity that doesn’t exist as these bees are defensive creatures) would reach all parts of the American southwest by the mid 2000s, and could reach into Missouri, my native Missouri, before 2020.


I’m extremely afraid of bees. Wasps too. Of course, hornets. Anything with a stinger. Irrational fear. The other day I shrieked in a parking lot and walked to an entirely different row of cars than the one mine was parked in and then made a large loop around back to where my car was. Why? Well, there was a wasp on the ground, walking. In the interest of punnery, I make beelines for safety whenever I see things with stingers. Either that or I stand still as death, biding my time til the lil monster grows tired of my scent, my sweat-slicked arms, and flies away. I pull up, muscles tightened, fight or flight responses about to activate, even when I see a carpenter bee, which I know to have no stinger nor any aggressive streak. That’s the problem: I know how silly this fear is. I understand it to be irrational, yet I don’t prevent myself from acting irrationally.


The map that the Discovery Channel used to project the spread of Killer Bees looked like a meteorological pattern. It looked like a warm front, or like a swirl of wind. A storm that was coming to change the barometric pressure, the whole climate even.



Christine Hume’s 2012 (chap)book-length essay, Ventifacts, is about the wind. A long meditation contained in brief lyric bursts of thought or research, separated like the sections in this review are: by whitespace, by air alone. Two lines of whitespace separating different sections and one line separating paragraphs of an individual section (though this technique is rarely used).

A ventifact is a marking or characteristic in an environment that was caused by the wind. Think about a rock face and its well-worn grooves and lines from years and years of air currents travelling over it. This book, then, is the record of how Hume’s life has been shaped and altered and grooved by the wind.


Which is to say, Ventifacts is about Christine Hume’s daughter, whose biggest fear is the wind. Writes Hume, “She stops, shudders, and runs back for the door. It’s finally spring and she refuses to go outside. I have no idea how to help her, she’s not yet three, gripping my leg…with large animals, she’s brave; in the dark, she’s unfazed. But wherever wind touches her, she grows raw nerve” (10). It is a problematic phobia for Hume. As a mother. Kids need to travel places, need to go outside, if only to get to the car. Kids ought to play outside.


The cover of Ventifacts depicts the swirl of winds over the Pacific Ocean:

I can tell because those brown specks towards the top right of the image are the Hawaiian Islands. A caption inside the book explains that the arrows are wind direction and the colors represent differing wind speeds. The image was taken by a NASA satellite in 1978. It’s interesting to think about how satellite images can change over time. How there might be some record over the years of killer bees and normal honeybees; perhaps the killer bees give off a different thermal signature or perhaps there are giant images charting in lines laid over a map their swirling invasion.


“Anticipation—dread—makes her cower at the merest stirrings, and I seize up knowing what comes next: her diva-level belting out against it. In this instant my face mirrors hers: her shriek echoes against the wind. We are analogies hoping to lead ourselves out of passivity. Yet in the land of troubles, every wind is the same. Wind makes us both too permeable and too solid” (32).


You see very quickly into Ventifacts that there is a mirroring going on between mother and daughter. Hume never becomes afraid of the wind, but learns to become uneasy with the knowledge that her daughter, upon exposure, will soon get into a mood. Weather patterns can shift dramatically with no warning, and we learn that so too can the days and plans of Hume and her family. Some of the book’s most intimate moments come from Hume meditating on this mirroring, or simply on the relationship of mother to daughter. Hume will spend entire sections charting the progress of her daughter’s phobia. She will interject her own thinking about the history of wind studies or research into wind in literature with sharp questions, questions that each seem to be a permutation of How can I expose my child to what she fears and still be a good mother? In one of the essay’s most searing sections, she writes, “Is it sadistic not to shelter my daughter? Not to validate the experience of her own feelings? Am I squelching the power of her interior life by rejecting its vivid manifestations? Am I enabling her to develop the wisdom of not believing everything she thinks?” (30). Hume brings us on board with her narrator through these deeply human questions:

Coming at her from every direction, wind is her private terrorist threatening body, home, and family with a huff and a puff. She looks for a place to hide. Wind exposes and inflates instabilities. When she’s in it, she thinks the world makes her flinch. What will it blow away today? What has been accounted for? All things are equal exchange for wind, and we have lost her to the bargain (17).

I feel silly for beginning this review with a mention of my fear of stinging insects. It’s quite easy to avoid them. I can’t think of a single instance where we had to leave a place, where my mom had to bring me to the car and go home, because I saw a bee. Wherefore this fear of mine? Was there some formative experience that I can point to? Not really, no. The earliest memory I have of stinging insects (which because it is the earliest means it is closer to genesis) is of being in my own backyard. Our driveway reached around to the back of the house, where our garage doors were. My dad’s bass boat was too long to be parked in the concrete out back, lest it block the driveway from other cars. So we had a sort of extension built onto the driveway. It was basically a pit of gravel, fenced in with treated wood. Up through the gravel sometimes grew some especially hardy weeds. In this memory, there was clover shooting up through the rocks. The three-leaved kind, though I was searching for that elusive lucky one. Not only did I not find a four-leaf clover, but I got stung in the shoulder by a wasp. There would be no swelling. I am not allergic. But I remember being in considerable pain. I ran inside the house, where my mom treated the wound, which inevitably made it hurt worse for a few seconds that seemed to last for minutes. Maybe that wasn’t the first experience. Maybe I was afraid before then. But whatever the case, I have it easy compared to Christine Hume’s daughter. You can’t very well escape the wind unless you’re inside of a building. Hume and daughter are contained. They are contained inside their home, or they are contained in a larger cell: movements restricted because the wind never stops for good.


I’m thankful that I’ve never been afraid of the wind. Annoyed? Sure. I have long, very fine hair. If I’m in the car and the windows are down, the wind doesn’t blow my hair back. It blows my hair every possible direction, especially the directions that go right into my face. It gets tangled. Ugh. Close the windows, please. Turn on the AC.


That was a lie, of course. I’ve always been afraid of the destructive possibilities of the wind. There was a stretch of time in my life were I would pray each night to Jesus Christ and His Father. When that time had ended, there was one thing that could get me to pray once again, as if no lapse of faith had ever occurred. That thing was the wind. Tornadoes, specifically. I have always been more afraid of tornadoes than bees or wasps or my father or anything in the world. They were the one natural disaster that I always had to be worried about growing up in Missouri. You learn to read all of the signs, you learn when to be cautious and when to understand the normalcy of storm. Be worried when the skies tinge green. Be worried not when there is rain but when there is hail, be worried about updrafts. Learn to look on the news channel’s Doppler radar for hooks or tails on the southwest corner of a storm cell. Don’t be worried at a tornado watch; you’re always under a tornado watch in a west Missouri summer. Be worried about a tornado warning. With a warning comes the sirens. With the sirens always came prayer. My freshman year of college: I was driving back to campus from my hometown. I was in the car of this girl, Stephanie, who I wasn’t close with but we graduated high school together and attended the same college. The storm was so bad that we had literally zero visibility. Everyone on I-29 near St. Joseph, Missouri, was driving about five miles per hour, hoping not to collide with anything. The radio broadcaster said that just beyond the sheets of rain, so thick as to be opaque, was tornadic activity. Stephanie had an aunt in St. Joe not too far from a highway exit. When the rain began to let up we were able to exit off and find her aunt’s house. Call it instinct or Spidey Sense or chalk it up to the vermillion sky, but you could sense the danger. We went to her aunt’s basement and watched the news until the power went out. Maybe I felt a small comfort in that dark basement: no one could really see me as I prayed to God for safety for the first time in years.


What Hume is after in Ventifacts is not immediately clear. She’s not after making readers feel what it’s like to fear the wind, at least not in full. She’s not really after making readers sympathize with her difficulty in raising this child, either. She doesn’t treat these experiences like I just did in the preceding section. This is not memoir. This is not narrative. Only sixteen of Ventifacts’ fifty pages make explicit mention of Hume’s daughter. Only thirty-two percent of the essay is directly about the inspiration and occasion for it. Some of the book of course is lyric writing meant to convey an experience of wind that isn’t that of her daughters. As we all know, a good breeze can be the most welcome thing in the world. There is a beauty in wind, and Hume does well to capture that. She writes, “Wind arouses amorphously, omnisciently. It excites water, skims the skin in little slanting waves. Whatever the sun intensifies, whenever it boils, the wind comes along as its ecstatic relief. Wind is sun cum. Spewing seeds, debris and rays. It is all tentacles, all jellyfish experience; a weathervane theater with hooks and stays” (16).


What makes up much of the remaining pages are facts. Facts conveyed and research done, about wind. Hume uses these facts to different effects. Allow me to quote from page thirty:

I’m in line at the grocery store about ten days after Japan’s massive earthquake-induced nuclear reactor leakage. I have heard Yukio Edano, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary’s words, “With evacuation in place and the ocean-bound wind, we can ensure safety,” but I can’t say I put any stock in them. The woman in front of me puts a white bottle on the conveyor belt: “Potassium iodide,” she volunteers, “protects the thyroid from radiation.” We are both staring at the bottle as she adds, “I heard it on the radio; a recent ocean wind brought it here. The radiation is just now hitting Michigan.”

Now I know I said this book’s chief aim wasn’t narrative, and that what I just quoted from was narrative. A scene. Still, it’s useful to see how Hume can drop knowledge or facts into a scene in order to create a sense of uneasiness or even fear. A narrative section such as this one, even if the narrative is secondary to the strange feeling caused by nouns like “thyroid” and “nuclear reactor” and “potassium iodide,” feels important because so much of the book is non-narrative. Narrative shines in this book through Hume’s careful use of juxtaposition.


For all of my years of being afraid of tornados, even laying eyes on them approaching from a distance, there had never been one that actually hit my town or my neighborhood. That post-Thanksgiving basement shelter my freshman year of college? A tornado never ended up touching down in St. Joseph that night. Through all of the tornado warnings I heard I remained safe. This was perhaps the most convincing argument for God’s existence to a selfish little boy: the causation fallacy that my prayers worked, that God kept me safe. On April 27th, 2011, a fierce EF4 tornado devastated a large part of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where I currently live. Millions of dollars in property damage. Dozens of people were killed, more than sixty in all, with perhaps many dozens more deaths of undocumented persons in the Alberta City neighborhood that were never officially counted. My house? Safe. Myself? Safe.


It will interest you to realize that a section of text that I quoted earlier in this review—“Is it sadistic not to shelter my daughter?”—immediately precedes the section I quoted about wind-swept radiation set in a grocery store. There is no smooth segue from penetrating questions about how to be a mother to a scene exposing wind’s unreliability and the paranoia that can come from it. There’s only white space separating these two sections. The white space also connects them: it is Hume’s mind that jumps from meditation to memory.


What comes after the grocery store scene is also revealing as to how Hume’s book works. She follows up the self-probing and the brief scene with the following passage: “Take the shape of music: chimes, bells, Aeolian harp, the natural minor key. All the rushes whisper at once when the wind blows through. Wind is the first music, a soundscape for an ecosystem…” (31). When Hume isn’t straightforward with personal reflection, she’s waxing poetic. So much of this book is lyric-driven examinations of how wind has operated in the minds of people throughout history. Thrown into the lyric meditations are diverse sources such as Laura Riding, painters Jeff Wall and Katsushika Hokusai, sound artist Stephen Vitiello, a Webster’s dictionary from the 1800s, the way that the National Weather Service used to name all tropical storms and hurricanes after women, Virginia Woolf, Pliny the Elder, and many more. Each new fact or thinker or artist exploring the notion of wind enhances and complicates the reader’s understanding of everything in the book. Wind is rendered peaceful, confusing, scary. I was most struck by how Hume could carve a fear of wind into me that works purely on an adult/intellectual level. She writes, with equal use of lyricism and fact, that:

We breathe a military climatology, it’s the leitmotif of terrorism. Instead of traditional body-to-body combat, we re-design, re-assign, resign the air. Designing killer environments for our enemies consolidates the most salient givens of our world: terrorism, design consciousness, and environmental thinking…imagine the U.S. fighting a powerful drug cartel in South America by controlling the target area meteorologically. By engineering wind flow patterns—an air theater, a perfectly orchestrated wind opera – we can engineer vulnerability. (11)

Hume is writing about HAARP, or the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, and she writes about this “military climatology” so effectively that I forget that I had previously known talk of HAARP-driven warfare to be the stuff of kooks and conspiracy theorists.


On conspiracy theory forums (and, increasingly, on YouTube videos that your weird uncle links to on Facebook), there’s many people who, for an area hit by a strong tornado, look back at Doppler radar of the day before the tornado. They show in their posts evidence of “chemtrails” that show up over a city about a day or so prior to a massive storm. These look like abnormal rings on the radar. It is the contention of conspiracy theorists that the HAARP satellites affect the climate in the ionosphere over these cities, causing these chemtrails. That the tornado that leveled Tuscaloosa was a test by the U.S. government, or an act of weather war by China or Russia.


I’m reminded a bit of John McPhee’s Oranges when I read Ventifacts. What seems to always be said about McPhee’s book is something like “Wow! An entire book about oranges!” Hume has written this entire book/essay on wind. Both books are full to the brim with facts and research about their subjects that widen our understanding, that broaden our entire conception of the thing. But there are key differences. McPhee uses his facts and research to establish a cultural history of thinking about the orange. He wants to know everything there is to know about the orange. For Hume, the research seems more personal. There’s more at stake here. Or at least it is personal for Ventifacts’ narrator. Narrator-Hume needs to understand the wind to better understand her daughter, but the more she learns about wind the harder it is to concretize her ideas about it. You don’t walk away from Ventifacts an expert on wind, though you certainly will know a lot more about it than any non-meteorologist or climatologist around you. You walk away from Ventifacts feeling confused and awed by the wind. Whatever inroads Narrator-Hume makes towards understanding are crafted by Author-Hume to bewilder us, to translate to us the feeling of being lost in the depths. This is lyric writing; you feel its impact. Wind as a character and as a subject in this book constantly swirls and shifts from one thing to another. Hume’s brief, lyric sections swirl around too in a highly associative manner and order. This is nonfiction with a poet’s eye for how content and form can bolster each other.


Another lie: I don’t have long hair anymore. I shaved it off two months ago after 13 years. I like my tight buzzcut. I like being able to roll the windows down, being blasted by wind. Each little hair though is extremely sensitive to touch, like hundreds of antennae. If a bee flies near my head, I may not be able to stand still anymore. Or maybe I’ll get over it: the bees, the fear.

I didn’t pray on April 27th, 2011. I did call my mom to tell her I loved her. I was in Gorgas Library, on the campus of the University of Alabama. I was with some classmates and friends and some total strangers, all of us huddled in a side hallway near the music stacks. I don’t remember if I made a deliberate effort not to pray. It’s possible; a test of my anti-faith. I do remember that some of my friends were more scared than I was. While I had grown up with tornadoes as a constant threat and knew exactly the kind of damage that they do, it occurred to me that some of my friends didn’t know precisely how damaging tornadoes could be. Which meant that, in their minds, tornados were even scarier than they actually are. When the movie Twister came out, it put up middling box office numbers in the states where tornadoes are common. But along the coastal cities of the U.S. the film did extraordinarily well. It was an early-summer blockbuster because those Americans didn’t know what tornados could really do. It was plausible to them, the exaggerated breakout of EF5 tornadoes in that flick. I’m not saying my friends in the library had Twister on their minds that April day. I am saying that there’s a phenomenon; that we fear more greatly the things which we are told to fear and that we haven’t been exposed to before ourselves. I didn’t pray that day. Instead, I tried to keep my friends calm. I tried to explain what would be going on outside the thick library walls, how we were surely safe behind them. In the coming weeks—and in the coming years really, when some friends would begin to show signs of post-traumatic stress when the weather forecast mentions the possibility of tornadic activity—I would try to be a figure of experience. I would remind people that where I’m from, towns and families do pick up the pieces, scattered by wind though they may be. People do move on. I tried to be an emotional rock. The thing about rocks, though, is that they don’t hide anything. When the wind carves into them over the years they can’t help but show it.

*

Barry Grass is originally from Kansas City, and now lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he has served as Nonfiction Editor for Black Warrior Review. Recent work appears in The Normal School, Hobart, Sonora Review, and Annalemma, among others. Send your cures for bee-fear to barrygrass@gmail.com.