Miscellanea

As I bleed into Marielle’s grave, I can smell her, or believe that I can, which by now amounts to nearly the same thing, for the rain has softened the new earth beneath my cheek into a black, mucilaginous paste smelling of roots, worms, crushed grass, and flowers already beginning their small putrefactions, yet through that common cemetery effluvium there persists another odor, impossible and unmistakable: orange blossom warmed against skin, stale powder, unwashed hair, old smoke caught in wool, and beneath all of it the faint animal sweetness which collected at the hollow of her throat and which no quantity of soap or lavender water ever entirely abolished.

The knife lies somewhere beside my right hand, half submerged in mud. I had carried it beneath my coat throughout the funeral and, after the last carriage withdrew and the cemetery emptied into rain, I climbed the low wall, found the raw mound beneath which they had put her, and drove the blade beneath my ribs. The first wound seemed insufficient, not from courage but from an almost bureaucratic mistrust of my own body, and thus I struck myself again before the pain had properly arrived. Thereafter came heat, astonishing in its quantity, spreading beneath my shirt and into the waistband of my breeches; then the slower cold, once the cloth had saturated and the rain began thinning whatever reached the ground. I folded myself over her grave and remained there, bleeding into earth which had been closed above her only hours before, possessed by the irrational conviction that if enough of me entered the soil above her the distance between us might diminish by some measurable degree.

Her funeral had taken place that morning. I had not been invited; her mother had seen to that. Thus I watched from behind the yews, wet through to my stockings, while Madame Valette wept into a square of lace and displayed the peculiar efficiency of a person whose grief had inconvenienced but not disorganized her. Between paroxysms she corrected the placement of flowers, reprimanded a servant for allowing mud upon the hem of her dress, drank ratafia, and reminded her sister that several guests would still be arriving afterward for chocolate and cakes. I felt a residual resentment toward her for this facility, for the obscene competence with which she continued existing; Marielle had scarcely been lowered into the ground before her mother was once again concerning herself with pastry.

Perhaps this was unfair. Marielle herself had possessed an appetite under almost every conceivable circumstance, and she had laughed while dying. That, more than the foam, more than the grotesque enlargement of her lips, more even than the convulsions, was what everyone remembered.

She had eaten very little that afternoon: preserved quince, part of a pigeon, a green marchpane perfumed with orange-flower water, several candied violets, and something small and nutty which I cannot now remember and which nobody considered worth remembering at the time. There was no reason to. Marielle herself had apparently never known there existed anything in the world capable of provoking such a rebellion from her own flesh.

Her mouth began to itch. She complained of it once, almost idly, scraping her tongue against her teeth while continuing the conversation; then her lips began to swell, her breathing acquired a damp and narrowing whistle, and within minutes the soft tissues of her face had altered so grotesquely that she appeared to be disappearing beneath a badly made likeness of herself. The physician, when at last he arrived, blamed the humors, then the heat, then some corruption of the stomach, and thereafter suggested that something poisonous might have entered the food. He could no more identify the offending morsel than I could. It might have been the marchpane, the fruit, the confectionery, or something else entirely. Whatever it was had passed harmlessly through every other person at the table and encountered in Marielle some minute, invisible peculiarity which transformed supper into execution.

Albuminous froth gathered at the corners of her mouth. She clawed at her throat until crescents of blood appeared beneath her fingernails. Her heels struck the floorboards with such violence that one shoe flew beneath a cabinet, and the room immediately filled with useless activity: chairs dragged aside, servants running, someone praying, somebody else crying for water, the physician shouting for objects which arrived only after he had forgotten why he wanted them.

Through this Marielle laughed.

Not continuously, for she soon possessed insufficient air even to cough, but in ruined little expulsions between the spasms, wet and strangled noises which everyone else mistook for choking until I saw her eyes and understood that she was genuinely amused. Perhaps she found the physician ridiculous. Perhaps she found all of us ridiculous. Perhaps the absurd spectacle of her own body, which had served her so obligingly in appetite and mischief, suddenly deciding that some negligible ingredient constituted grounds for annihilation appealed to precisely that region of her mind which had always delighted in catastrophe.

I knew her laugh even in that mutilated form.

Nine months earlier she had touched my foot beneath a school table.

Our academy occupied an old house in Paris whose upper rooms had been converted into classrooms, with long scarred tables, copybooks, slate boards, shelves of neglected texts, maps curled brown at the edges, and plaster saints gazing down upon us through generations of chalk dust. We passed our mornings beneath masters who instructed us in Latin, rhetoric, mathematics, drawing, scripture, and such portions of natural philosophy as they themselves could remember, moving from room to room at the sound of a bell and spending an extravagant quantity of our lives amid the composite odor of ink, lamp smoke, sealing wax, wet wool, chalk, and bodies made restless by compulsory stillness.

Marielle sat two places from me. At a distance she possessed a face of almost offensive innocence. Her hair was dirty blond, neither properly gold nor properly brown, with the dull color of straw after rain; her eyelashes were pale, her mouth small, her cheeks round, and she had a baby face which caused strangers to lower their voices around her and older women to presume softness where there was principally appetite. This error generally survived until she spoke.

That morning our master was declining a Latin verb when the toe of her shoe touched mine. I moved my foot aside. Her foot followed. I moved again, supposing that accident had become clumsiness, and again she pursued me, slowly now, deliberately, rubbing the edge of her shoe against my ankle while staring toward the front of the room with such exemplary vacancy that I nearly laughed.

Then she looked at me.

She shifted backward in her chair and gathered a little of her skirt beneath the table, not enough to attract the notice of anyone else but enough that whatever misunderstanding I had been preserving became impossible. A few minutes thereafter she requested permission to leave the room.

I remained at my desk long enough to preserve some nominal appearance of possessing a will independent of hers, though I heard nothing further of the lesson and the letters in my copybook had begun to resemble insects drowned in ink; then I excused myself, crossed the corridor, descended the narrow rear stair, and made my way toward the small privy reserved for the female pupils, where I knew she had gone, and where the air was close and mephitic with damp plaster, lye, old urine, and an heroic quantity of rosewater poured upon the boards in the belief that one odor might assassinate another.

Marielle was waiting against the door.

She seized the front of my coat and pulled me inside.

There was no grace to what followed and very little hesitation. Her mouth struck mine almost painfully; one of my teeth caught her lip, and rather than retreat she bit me back, first softly and then hard enough that the metallic taste of blood entered the kiss. Her fingers worked impatiently at my collar while I pushed aside the satin of her bodice and slipped my hand beneath her chemise. She was slight beneath my hands, her breasts small and unexpectedly soft, the skin there warmer than the rest of her. I bent and drew one nipple between my lips, touched it with my tongue, then caught it lightly with my teeth. A minute sound escaped her.

“Be quiet,” I whispered.

Marielle immediately pressed one finger to my mouth instead, as though I were the one making too much noise, holding it there with exaggerated seriousness and mocking the instruction back at me.

My hand moved beneath her skirts.

At first I touched only the inside of her thigh, where the skin was hot and almost indecently soft; then my fingers travelled higher and found her already wet. She drew a short breath through her nose as I touched her more deliberately, one hand gripping my shoulder while I worked my fingers against her until her breathing became uneven and she had to press her lips tightly together to keep from making noise.

Then I felt something warmer and more viscous across my fingertips.

I withdrew my hand at once.

Blood.

For an instant I thought I had torn her somehow. The sight of it upon my fingers produced such immediate alarm that Marielle, seeing my expression, looked down and began to laugh.

“It is mine,” she whispered.

The blood had already darkened the linen between her thighs. She took my wrist before I could wipe my hand and examined my fingers with an almost scholarly curiosity; then, without explanation, she pressed them against her own cheek.

I drew the red downward.

There she stood with her baby face flushed, dirty-blond hair loosening at the temples, one side of her bodice disordered and menstrual blood drawn across her cheek with the solemnity of rouge, and the contradiction was so complete that she resembled one of those little painted virgins in country churches after vandals have got at them: innocence preserved in the features and profanation applied afterward.

Whatever restraint remained between us became largely theoretical.

I pressed her backward against the partition and gathered her skirts higher. Up close there rose from her that peculiar sickly sweetness I would thereafter associate with her body—powder and perspiration, stale perfume, something faintly sour beneath it, like fruit kept one day beyond ripeness. When I entered her she tightened abruptly around me, and for an instant both of us became completely still.

Then she shifted her hips toward mine.

I began slowly, conscious of every betraying sound: leather moving against the boards, our clothes rasping together, the slight percussion of the partition behind her, and above all our breathing, which seemed impossibly loud in that little room. Marielle gave a small involuntary moan and immediately covered her own mouth. I thrust again. She breathed through her nose, quick and shallow, trying unsuccessfully not to make another sound.

Caution deteriorated rapidly thereafter. My thrusts became harder; she caught my hair in one hand and bit the cloth at my shoulder, producing little muffled breaths whenever the movement drove her more firmly against the wall. Once the boards knocked loudly enough that we both froze.

Footsteps passed somewhere beyond the corridor.

Marielle looked at me, eyes wide, and began silently laughing.

Then she pulled me back against her.

The confined air became rank with us. Her menstrual blood slicked my hand and the inside of her thighs; its metallic odor mingled with sweat, damp linen, old urine, the useless rosewater on the floorboards, and the warm animal smell of our bodies until nothing in that little room possessed a separate scent any longer.

Near the end her breathing changed. The small suppressed sounds became quicker, almost irritated; she caught my shoulder between her teeth while her body tightened rhythmically around me. I felt her climax begin and, almost simultaneously, lost whatever control remained to me. I ejaculated inside her as she contracted around me, both of us attempting absurdly to remain quiet through it, her forehead pressed against my neck and one final little moan escaping before she could swallow it.

For several moments afterward neither of us moved. My hand was sticky with blood; between us my spend had mingled with it, and the smell of iron persisted most strongly, though beneath it remained the cloying sweetness of her skin.

Marielle looked down at the mess between us and smiled with evident satisfaction.

Then she straightened her clothes with astonishing composure.

She washed her face badly. A rust-colored crescent remained beneath one ear throughout the next lesson, which I found so distracting that I was twice reprimanded for staring at her.

Our courtship, if one insists upon calling it that, thereafter proceeded largely by the destruction of ordinary distinctions. We stole for one another, lied for one another, disappeared into empty classrooms, stairwells, gardens, borrowed chambers, and carriages, and interpreted almost every attempt at correction as evidence of a general conspiracy against us.

Once Marielle concealed a bottle of eau-de-vie beneath her cloak in a wine merchant’s shop and had nearly reached the street when the proprietor seized her wrist and called her a thief, then a whore, then several further things which were probably accurate only in spirit.

I was standing beside a large cask raised upon wooden trestles. Its tap projected toward the aisle at about the height of my knee, and before I had considered the consequences with any seriousness I wrenched it loose.

The wine came out with astonishing force.

It struck the floorboards in a thick red stream and spread almost immediately beneath the merchant’s shoes, running into the cracks between the planks and gathering in dark pools around the legs of tables. For one peculiar instant the shop appeared to have been wounded. The color was too rich, too bodily; it moved with the sluggish shine of blood, carrying dust, cork fragments, and bits of straw along with it as it advanced toward the doorway.

The proprietor released Marielle with a cry and lunged for the cask, both hands attempting uselessly to force the tap back into place while the wine continued pouring over his wrists and cuffs. I shoved a narrow rack beside me and sent several bottles onto the floor.

Glass burst everywhere.

One bottle shattered against the wall and left a red fan across the plaster; another broke beneath a customer’s shoe, scattering green splinters through the wine so that the floor glittered beneath the spreading crimson. Someone slipped and caught himself against a shelf, which sent still more bottles crashing down. The noise multiplied obscenely: breaking glass, shouting, the hollow knocking of casks, the merchant swearing as the wine ran between his fingers faster than he could stop it.

Within seconds the whole shop had become a small catastrophe of red liquid and broken glass. Wine soaked the hems of skirts, darkened shoes, splashed the legs of chairs, and ran in narrow rivulets toward the street. The smell was enormous—fermented fruit, wet wood, spirits, smoke from the lamps, and the sharp mineral odor of shattered glass and dust. People were trying simultaneously to save the stock, avoid falling, and determine who had caused the destruction, which meant that nobody was accomplishing any of these things particularly well.

Marielle remained where she was for perhaps half a second, watching the ruin with a look of almost devotional attention.

Then she remembered that she was the reason any of it was happening.

She clutched the stolen bottle more tightly beneath her cloak, stepped directly through the red wash flooding the floor, and disappeared into the street.

I followed a moment later with wine soaking the soles of my shoes and fragments of glass cracking beneath them.

I found her several streets away, bent almost double against a wall and hiccupping with laughter, one hand still wrapped around the stolen bottle. There was a splash of red wine across the pale front of her dress which, at a distance, looked very much like blood.

Thereafter her family concluded, not without evidence, that she required correction.

Madame Valette came to the academy herself. She did not make a scene there; she reserved scenes for private places. She took Marielle home in a closed carriage, and two days later arrangements were made for her confinement in a private house beyond the denser streets of the city, one of those establishments in which troublesome daughters, melancholics, blasphemers, people afflicted with visions, people afflicted with inconvenient appetites, and persons whose families had simply ceased knowing what to do with them could be subjected to physicians, clerics, cold water, discipline, confinement, and the improving influence of locked doors.

I endured twelve days without her.

On the thirteenth I concocted a plan to join her.

The matter required some study. I could hardly arrive at the gate and request incarceration on romantic grounds, and therefore I first learned what accusations had persuaded Madame Valette to surrender her daughter: agitation, impiety, nocturnal wandering, violence, certain “unnatural excitements” which the physician declined to describe in respectable company. Thereafter I began manufacturing my own derangement with care.

I stopped sleeping where servants could observe me. I refused meat because I claimed slaughtered animals continued speaking from the plate. I informed our priest that Saint Denis had taken residence in the chimney and delivered instructions whenever the wind came from the east. I spent an entire supper staring into a candle because I said another sun had been imprisoned inside the flame, and at three in the morning allowed my mother to find me barefoot in the courtyard kneeling before a dead shrub which I addressed as the Virgin.

The performance disturbed my parents principally because they could not determine when it had begun. My father questioned me; I answered him with fragments from scripture rearranged until they meant nothing. My mother touched my forehead repeatedly, hoping perhaps that fever would make the entire affair ordinary.

Finally a physician was summoned.

He asked whether I heard voices.

I told him constantly.

He asked what they said.

I informed him that God had entrusted me with certain instructions concerning the churches of Paris, though I had been forbidden to reveal them before the appointed hour.

The physician leaned forward.

“And what is to happen at this appointed hour?”

I told him that I could not say without placing both our souls in danger.

“Do they command you to harm anyone?”

I lowered my voice and told him that the saints had not yet decided whom God required.

His pen began moving at once.

I understood then that my madness was becoming credible.

Within the week I was sent to the same house in which Marielle had been confined.

She did not know I was coming.

I first saw her across the chapel, separated from me by an aisle and several attendants. She lifted her eyes during prayer, found me among the figures opposite her, and thereafter held her thumb beneath her lower lip so hard that the flesh whitened around it. Her expression otherwise did not change.

That night somebody scratched three times against the wall adjoining my room.

Thereafter the institution became merely another building in which we were obliged to discover one another. We met behind the laundry, beneath staircases, in storage rooms and unused corridors, and most often near the bathing rooms after the attendants had gone, where steam remained trapped against the stone and the smell of soap, minerals, and damp skin lingered in the air. We kissed beside the great copper tubs with our clothes still half wet from washing; we passed notes through cracks in masonry; once she folded a ribbon she had worn around her throat into one of my clean shirts in the laundry, knowing I would recognize it by the orange-flower perfume and the faint smell of her skin.

There was also Odette.

Odette belonged to the women’s side of the house and had black hair so glossy it appeared almost blue beneath lamplight. She fastened it tightly behind her head, giving her otherwise handsome face a severe, somewhat wounded expression. I had spoken with her perhaps half a dozen times, generally after chapel or while waiting outside the physician’s room. She was clever in a dry way, and I laughed with her easily enough.

Marielle noticed every conversation.

She began referring to Odette as your widow, a phrase whose origin neither of us could explain, and watched her thereafter with the meticulous hostility ordinarily reserved for an insect one intends eventually to crush.

One night I woke and found Marielle standing beside my bed.

Her linen chemise had been torn loose at one shoulder. Blood had dried beneath her nose and across her chin in almost black scales; one eye had begun to swell, her bare feet were filthy from the corridor, and her hands shook without cessation. From the wet linen between her thighs came the acrid ammoniac odor which told me, before she admitted it, that she had pissed herself.

She had fought Odette.

The quarrel, as Marielle later related it, had begun because Odette caught her staring and finally asked whether she intended to glare at her until one of them died. Marielle replied with something obscene. Odette laughed and told her that perhaps she ought to worry less about other women and more about whether I would eventually grow tired of being guarded like stolen property.

Marielle told her to be quiet.

Odette did not.

She said I came to speak with her willingly when Marielle was elsewhere. She said I laughed with her. Then she claimed that I had once told her Marielle would exhaust herself, and probably me as well, before winter.

Whether I ever said precisely this I cannot now remember. I may have said something near enough to it that Odette found the alteration irresistible.

Marielle struck her.

Odette, who was taller, stronger, and apparently more competent at violence, struck back with greater effect. What followed was an ugly confusion of fingers, hair, teeth, linen, blood, and panic. By the time the attendants separated them, Marielle had split Odette’s lip with her teeth, torn a black handful of hair from somewhere above her ear, bitten through the inside of her own cheek, and become so frightened by the violence she herself had initiated that her bladder emptied down her legs.

She recounted all this with a curious precision, almost as though giving evidence against herself.

Then she asked whether Odette had told the truth.

“Which part?”

“That you like speaking to her.”

I told her that I sometimes spoke to Odette because we lived in the same building and possessed language.

Marielle stared at me.

I told her, more plainly, that I did not want Odette.

“And did you say I exhaust you?”

I considered lying, decided uncertainty was safer, and told her that if I had said it I had meant only that loving her required more energy than most occupations.

This was apparently acceptable.

Some of the rigidity went out of her body at once. She looked suddenly exhausted, very small beneath the torn linen and dried blood, and embarrassed now in a way I had rarely seen her embarrassed by anything. The bravado had gone out of her. She would not look directly at me; she kept rubbing one dirty bare foot over the other and tugging uselessly at the wet linen clinging between her thighs, as though she might somehow conceal from me the fact that she had been frightened enough to piss herself.

I loved her terribly then.

Not because she had attacked Odette—there was nothing especially admirable in that—but because beneath all the spectacle she had come to me frightened and ashamed, carrying the childish certainty that one conversation with another woman might cause me to cease loving her. Marielle, who could steal without remorse, lie without preparation, bite through another person’s lip and laugh while adults shouted at her, had been reduced by jealousy to this trembling, sweet, mortified creature standing beside my bed and waiting to learn whether she had finally made herself unbearable.

She had not.

I pulled her beneath the blankets with me.

For a while she resisted being held, principally because she was conscious of the smell of urine and kept apologizing for it in increasingly irritated whispers. Eventually exhaustion defeated embarrassment. She folded herself against my chest, put her face beneath my chin, and permitted me to hold her there.

I remember the weight of her more clearly than almost anything else from that night. Her body gradually ceased trembling; her breathing lengthened; occasionally she made a small congested sound because the blood drying beneath her nose made breathing difficult. I stroked the dirty-blond hair away from her face and watched the swollen eye darken by degrees. She looked very young in appearance when she slept, the babyish roundness returning as soon as her expressions stopped interfering with it, and this made the dried blood across her mouth seem somehow more obscene.

I held her until the urine-soaked linen had gone cold against us, until the blood from her cheek had transferred itself to my pillow, and until the institution settled into that peculiar nocturnal silence belonging to places where many people sleep behind locked doors.

We were discovered at dawn.

Marielle received the punishment first. Two matrons took her to the disciplinary room, removed her outer clothes, leaving only her linen chemise, bent her across a padded bench, and birched the backs of her thighs and buttocks until the skin rose in parallel welts. I heard several of the strokes from the corridor. She refused them the satisfaction of crying loudly.

My own punishment was three days in isolation on bread, broth, and water, with the shutters fastened and every removable object taken from the room.

When I saw Marielle again she lowered herself into a chair with exquisite caution and informed me that we were leaving.

We had already spoken for weeks about running away together, though our plans possessed approximately the economic sophistication one might expect from two people who believed sheets tied into knots constituted transportation. Marielle proposed Lyon once and Rouen twice; I preferred anywhere reached by enough roads that nobody could retrieve us before supper. We imagined cheap rooms, false names, mornings in which neither of us would be accounted for by anybody, and possessed not the slightest sensible notion of what any of these things cost.

Thus escape ceased to be one of our private fantasies and became an undertaking.

We stole sheets from the laundry and spent two nights knotting and testing them. On the third, while evening prayers occupied most of the attendants, we fastened the resulting rope to an iron bedstead beneath an upper window and began descending.

The operation was humiliatingly difficult. The knots tightened beneath our weight until they burned the palms; lime and stone scraped skin from my knuckles; Marielle lost one shoe somewhere between the second floor and the ground, and halfway down an attendant opened a neighboring window, understood at once what the dangling sheets signified, and began shouting that two patients were escaping. Other windows opened. Faces appeared against dark glass and between shutters; somebody began ringing a bell; doors slammed somewhere inside the building. Marielle, hanging below me with her hair loose and one stocking torn, looked upward and began laughing so violently that I had to hiss at her to keep moving before she brought us both down.

We reached the ground, crossed the garden, climbed the wall badly, and ran until neither of us possessed enough breath for speech.

For several hours we believed ourselves magnificently free. By the time darkness had properly settled, however, the defects in our plan had become difficult to ignore. Between us we possessed a handful of livres and smaller coins, my coat, one stolen comb, Marielle’s remaining shoe, and no dependable means of acquiring anything else. A room required money. Food required money. Coaches required quantities which seemed personally insulting. We walked until the streets became unfamiliar and then discovered that unfamiliarity itself was expensive. By morning we were wet, hungry, exhausted, and arguing over whether purchasing bread constituted extravagance.

Our grand scheme of reaching another city diminished first to another district, then to the prospect of a night in a stable, and finally to the humiliating realization that we had planned the escape itself with great care and given almost no thought to what would follow it.

We returned separately.

Marielle’s return produced the greater spectacle.

Madame Valette had learned of the escape before midnight. The house of confinement had dispatched a messenger almost as soon as the alarm was raised that patients were escaping, and by morning she had servants, acquaintances, and one particularly useless cousin searching roads in several directions. Consequently, when Marielle finally appeared at home in one shoe, mud to her knees, and with the expression of somebody returning late from an inconvenient errand, her mother had already passed through terror and arrived at fury.

She seized Marielle by both shoulders, kissed her forehead, struck her once across the cheek, then embraced her so violently that Marielle complained she could not breathe. Wicked, diseased, ungrateful, beloved, impossible—Madame Valette called her all of these things in such rapid succession that the words ceased to contradict one another. Marielle was confined to her room for several days, deprived of visitors, watched by servants, and thereafter permitted downstairs only under supervision. Yet beneath all the punishment there remained unmistakable relief. Madame Valette had recovered her catastrophe. The household could once again arrange itself around her.

My own return was considerably less theatrical, though the news had preceded me as well.

A messenger from the institution had arrived at my parents’ house during the night with the information that I and another patient had escaped by an upper window. By morning the story had already enlarged in transmission: we had stolen horses; we had assaulted an attendant; Marielle was pregnant; I had set fire to the laundry. None of these things was true, which scarcely mattered. Servants had heard. Neighbors had heard the servants. Relations began making inquiries with the false delicacy peculiar to people who already know the answer and wish chiefly to hear you lie about it.

Thus when I came home, wet, hungry, mud dried to my stockings, I did not encounter surprise. I encountered the exhausted aftermath of several hours in which my parents had already imagined my corpse in every ditch between Paris and whatever imaginary province Marielle and I had intended to conquer.

My father waited until supper.

He regarded me across the table for so long that I began to wonder whether speaking first would constitute some additional offense.

“Was any of it true?”

I knew immediately what he meant.

I told him no.

My mother stopped eating.

He asked whether I had fabricated the voices, Saint Denis, the messages from God, the business with the candle, the kneeling in the courtyard—everything—in order to be sent to the same institution as Marielle.

I admitted that I had.

My father looked down at his plate.

My mother asked whether I understood what I had done to them, though by them she did not mean merely herself and my father. She meant the family entire: the name, the household, the servants who had seen physicians coming and going, the acquaintances who now knew their son had been shut in a madhouse, the relations to whom carefully incomplete explanations had been supplied, and now the additional humiliation of my having escaped from the place in company with a young woman whose own family was already spoken about with sufficient interest. Madness, had it been genuine, might at least have been pitied. There were prescribed expressions for misfortune. One could lower one’s voice, mention illness, permit people to call the whole thing tragic. Fraud offered no such courtesy. One could hardly send calling cards explaining that the family lunatic had only been pretending.

They had already paid the physician, endured the humiliation of my confinement, received notice of my escape, and spent a night wondering whether I had drowned in a ditch somewhere between Paris and whatever imaginary province Marielle and I had intended to conquer. Added to this was the slower injury of gossip, which had already carried the story beyond our household and would presumably continue improving it in our absence. My mother seemed less frightened by any single rumor than by the prospect that our name might remain attached to all of them after the truth itself had ceased to interest anyone.

My father asked what precisely I imagined would become of me if I continued arranging my life according to Marielle’s catastrophes.

I had no useful answer.

For several days they addressed me with baffled caution and a sort of mortified civility, as though I were both their son and an embarrassing guest whose departure date remained uncertain. My mother asked whether I had eaten. My father asked whether I intended to return to the academy. Neither asked whether I regretted anything, perhaps because the answer was visible enough.

Then the disturbance simply thinned out. Meals resumed. Servants stopped watching me. My father returned to his papers. My mother ceased examining my face for evidence of another religious revelation. They did not forgive me so much as grow tired of maintaining the degree of attention required for anger.

This was considerably less satisfying than punishment.

Marielle’s family punished her because they remained furiously invested in what she might become. Mine appeared chiefly relieved that I had returned alive, ashamed of the spectacle, and thereafter anxious to make the entire affair socially nonexistent.

Marielle and I resumed seeing one another secretly.

Nine months is not a long life when measured by ordinary arithmetic, yet ours seemed to contain an extravagant quantity of existence. There had been a world before Marielle and then a world whose geography had reorganized itself around her: school corridors, wine shops, the house of confinement, rented rooms, alleys, gardens, all acquiring significance according to whether she had once stood there, laughed there, bled there, stolen something there, or dragged me by the sleeve into some new stupidity.

Then came the afternoon with the preserved fruit and the green confectionery and the physician who arrived too late.

Now, lying upon the grave with rain entering my collar and my blood sinking through the new earth, I remember not merely her face but the succession of odors by which I knew her: powder in her hair, smoke caught in her sleeves, the iron sweetness of menstrual blood in the school privy, wet linen beside the bathing room, urine and dried blood on the night she came to my bed, orange-flower water her mother insisted she wear, and finally that strange saccharine breath in the minutes before her throat closed.

I press my face farther into the soil until grains collect against my teeth.

The physician called her death an internal corruption because he possessed no better language for it. Perhaps explanations are frequently no more than this: respectable names applied afterward to events which have already refused to be understood. He had his humors, his stomach, his poison. I have a green confection, an unremembered ingredient, and Marielle laughing through a throat which was killing her.

What actually happened remains disorderly. She ate something harmless to everyone else; her lips swelled; her tongue became useless; she clawed crescents into her own neck; foam collected at her mouth; she laughed because something about our horror amused her; thereafter men put her into a coffin, Madame Valette organized refreshments, and I spent the afternoon carrying a knife beneath my coat while pretending not to know what I intended to do with it.

By evening I knew.

The blood beneath me has grown cold enough that I can no longer distinguish it from rainwater except when another little warmth escapes the wounds. I think of all the places into which I followed Marielle simply because she had gone first: a privy, a wine shop, a madhouse, streets for which we possessed no money and no plan. There was, in retrospect, very little in our nine months together which I had not treated as an invitation to follow.

Her grave merely presented the first invitation for which there was no ordinary entrance.

last edited: 21 september 2026

strictly speaking, the beat generation was not a school but a name applied afterward to a network of writers whose friendships preceded the work now grouped under it. allen ginsberg was principally a poet; jack kerouac and william s. burroughs were prose writers. they found one another in new york during the 1940s, before the books that later made them appear as a coherent movement. what looks unified in retrospect began as a set of personal relationships.

i started with howl. ginsberg first read the poem publicly in san francisco in 1955, and city lights published it the following year. from howl i watched kill your darlings, which concerns ginsberg's earlier years at columbia and the killing of david kammerer by lucien carr. that led to burroughs; burroughs led to queer; queer returned me to anthony bourdain's episode in tangier; bourdain led to paul bowles. i was fortunate enough to get a copy of bowles's the sheltering sky recently at harvard book store, and by then the sequence had ceased to feel arbitrary.

none of this began as research. once i wanted to combine it into some form of writing, however, the difference between recollection and fact became troublesome. films had altered my memory of events. details had migrated from one person to another. a few things i knew with considerable confidence turned out not to have happened at all. hence the internet rabbit hole, followed almost immediately by a reading rabbit hole. fact-checking did not dilute the story. the corrections usually made the chronology less tidy and the relationships more difficult to simplify. what follows is the record i ended up with.

before there was a “beat generation,” there was lucien carr. carr met ginsberg at columbia and subsequently introduced him to kerouac and burroughs. the association looks inevitable only in retrospect. at the time, no such coherence was apparent; the association was still provisional, acquiring its shape only as the people involved became increasingly entangled in one another's lives.

ginsberg fell deeply in love with carr. the columbia account has them first connecting over brahms, after which carr's ideas about literature began to acquire unusual authority for him. ginsberg later called carr his “ideal image of virtue and awareness.” the intellectual attachment cannot be very cleanly separated from the erotic one. carr's ideas mattered partly because carr mattered.

homosexuality therefore belongs near the beginning of the history rather than appearing later as one of the subjects of howl. desire already affected the friendships from which the writing emerged. who attracted whom could alter whose company was sought, whose ideas were taken seriously, and which relationships acquired an intensity disproportionate to an ordinary literary acquaintance. such distinctions become somewhat arbitrary when desire itself helps determine whose ideas acquire authority.

ginsberg called this early social world the “libertine circle.” “beat generation” belongs to the later history, when the books had been published and a movement could be attributed to their authors. the earlier phrase describes something less discrete. they were reading one another with a seriousness that could become almost religious; increasingly, drugs offered another route toward the altered consciousness they were already seeking in literature. the literary and the ecstatic were never wholly separate projects.

one of my false memories came directly from kill your darlings. the film has ginsberg and the others break into columbia's restricted library collection and rearrange its displays. at some point i stopped remembering this merely as a scene and began remembering it as an event. repeated attempts to locate the historical library raid produced nothing. the film's production material finally supplied the explanation: krokidas and bunn drew the sequence partly from their own experiences in college. i had been searching ginsberg's biography for something contributed by the screenwriters. (beautiful cinematography is, perhaps, a poor archival method.)

accounts of david kammerer diverge almost immediately. kammerer knew carr long before columbia. he had been carr's adult scoutmaster in st. louis while carr was still a boy, became intensely attached to him, and continued appearing in carr's life as carr moved through a succession of schools. by the time they were both in new york, carr was nineteen and kammerer was thirty-three.

kill your darlings both corrects an injustice and risks committing another one. after kammerer's death, carr's story was that an older homosexual predator had pursued him until he finally defended himself. the film is deeply suspicious of that account. krokidas and bunn have explained that in researching the murder they encountered people who remembered the later relationship as much more reciprocal than carr subsequently admitted; in their version, carr sometimes returns to kammerer even when kammerer is trying to separate himself. this matters because kammerer spent decades in the story as little more than the threatening homosexual whose own murder could be explained by his sexuality. the film restores a person where the legal narrative had produced a type.

yet the film's revision introduces a different simplification. in the film the relationship becomes something like a doomed romance, and it becomes very easy to forget where it began. kammerer first knew carr as an adult scoutmaster who had authority over a boy. whatever carr felt when he was nineteen does not travel backward through time and make that origin disappear. there is no need to choose between the later ambiguity and the earlier imbalance of power; the evidence permits both. the film is right to reject the homophobic caricature through which kammerer was reduced to a type, but that correction need not soften the predatory origin of his pursuit of carr. carr's later reciprocation complicates the relationship without erasing the fact that kammerer first attached himself to carr as an adult scoutmaster while carr was still a child. the distortion in the legal story lay elsewhere: homophobia made kammerer's sexuality, rather than the history of that pursuit, the fact through which his death was interpreted.

in august 1944 carr and kammerer went to riverside park after drinking together. carr later said that kammerer made an unwanted sexual advance and that a fight followed. he stabbed kammerer twice with an old boy scout knife, weighted the body, and put it into the hudson. afterward he went to burroughs, who advised him to get a lawyer and surrender. carr instead found kerouac, who accompanied him while he disposed of the knife and some of kammerer's belongings. once carr confessed, burroughs and kerouac were arrested as material witnesses.

the knife had survived from the same boy scout world in which kammerer first knew carr as a child. years later it became the murder weapon. the association between the beginning of their relationship and its end was therefore not supplied afterward by a novelist or filmmaker; it was already present in the object itself.

i had also remembered that carr somehow escaped murder through a bizarre law which essentially allowed somebody to kill a gay man who propositioned him. this is not quite what happened. carr was charged with second-degree murder, but the case was publicly interpreted through the idea of the respectable young man defending himself from a homosexual predator. the language later used for this was an “honor slaying” or homosexual-panic defense. prosecutors allowed carr to plead to manslaughter, and he served eighteen months at elmira. there was no magical line in the statute announcing that homosexual victims counted less. hence the more disturbing point: there did not need to be one. prejudice was already operating in the question of which account of the killing sounded plausible, and whose fear was permitted to explain whose death.

after the killing, ginsberg occupied an especially painful position. he had been in love with carr and was also close to kammerer; joyce johnson's reconstruction of the period even raises the possibility that he experimented sexually with both men. (may have: the surviving evidence does not justify anything stronger.) kammerer was dead and carr went to prison. whatever had existed among the three of them could no longer be clarified by the people involved. afterward, the relationship could only be reconstructed from records produced for very different purposes.

the disagreement over carr and kammerer is partly a disagreement between records created under different conditions. carr's account after the killing had an immediate legal purpose: his description of kammerer could affect how his own violence was judged. ginsberg's private writing had no such function and could register desires that he would not have described in the same terms to columbia officials or psychiatrists. later memoirs were written after homosexuality had become more publicly speakable, though not necessarily easier to remember accurately. hence the surviving record is uneven. the sources do not merely contradict one another; they preserve versions of the relationship shaped by what could safely or usefully be said at the time.

within a year of kammerer's death, ginsberg was himself in disciplinary trouble at columbia. the episode is easy to confuse with the much later obscenity history of howl, but the poem did not yet exist. in 1945 ginsberg was suspended after writing an obscenity in the grime on his dormitory window; kerouac had also been discovered staying in his room. ginsberg later insisted that nothing sexual had happened between them, but the suspicion surrounding two men sharing a bed belonged to the disciplinary atmosphere anyway. he eventually returned and graduated.

the drug history belongs partly to this early period as well, although not in the form i had absorbed from kill your darlings. i had constructed a college tableau in which ginsberg and kammerer were continually taking enormous quantities of drugs together; i cannot substantiate that particular image. ginsberg's documented use over the following years is considerable enough without embellishment: marijuana, benzedrine and other amphetamines, peyote, lsd, psilocybin, and yagé. he later associated part of howl with peyote, kaddish with amphetamines, and “wales — a visitation” with lsd. older ginsberg became less persuaded that chemical intensity was valuable in itself and increasingly compared drugs with meditation and yoga. the question shifted from how radically consciousness could be altered to what, if anything, an altered state could leave behind once it ended.

neal cassady entered the circle at the end of 1946 and soon became ginsberg's lover. kerouac, meanwhile, was transforming cassady into the figure who would become dean moriarty in on the road. cassady's life consequently entered the beat record through two very different attachments: ginsberg's desire for him and kerouac's attempt to render him in fiction. neither relationship was incidental to the later literature.

in 1949 ginsberg entered the new york state psychiatric institute after an episode involving herbert huncke and stolen property. he remained there for about eight months and met carl solomon, to whom howl would later be dedicated. the psychiatric world of the poem therefore had a literal institutional antecedent: one of the people to whom the poem speaks was someone ginsberg first knew while confined there.

the much longer psychiatric history of ginsberg's mother, naomi, later became central to kaddish. “madness” is especially easy to romanticize when the beats are read retrospectively, and institutionalization itself can become part of that romance: evidence of extremity or artistic authenticity. for ginsberg it also meant submitting to institutions with the authority to name an experience and determine how much control a person retained over his own life. that coercive dimension belongs beside, rather than in opposition to, the visionary language of the poems.

in 1953 burroughs stayed with ginsberg in his lower east side apartment after returning from south america. the photographs ginsberg took during those months preserve the domestic scale of the relationship particularly well. decades later he captioned one photograph of burroughs on the roof with the explanation that “we were lovers those months.” another shows burroughs lying in ginsberg's bedroom with junky nearby. ginsberg remembered returning from his newspaper job and talking with him late into the night, describing the attachment as a “great psychic marriage.” they were lovers while manuscripts were passing between them; the intimacy and the writing developed under the same conditions.

in december 1954 ginsberg met peter orlovsky in san francisco. they became lovers, moved in together, and understood the relationship as a marriage; despite periods of separation, it lasted until ginsberg's death. the chronology is useful precisely because it prevents a causal claim. orlovsky did not somehow produce howl, and some of the experiences and images from which the poem emerged already belonged to ginsberg's earlier life. but orlovsky entered that life before howl's first public reading and publication. by the time ginsberg became publicly identified with a poem unusually frank about homosexuality, he was also beginning a durable homosexual domestic life rather than merely writing retrospectively about frustrated or secret attachments.

howl was first read publicly in san francisco in 1955 and published by city lights in 1956. i had another false memory here: something about ginsberg being forced to redact carr's name from a poem, together with a phrase like “skeptical lovers” apparently supplied by nobody. the actual dispute concerned the dedication. carr was named in the first printing of howl and other poems, but by then he had spent years trying to prevent the 1944 killing and his place in beat history from defining his public identity. he asked ginsberg to remove him from later printings, and ginsberg did.

ginsberg then continued turning the relationship between private life and public authority into an actual political life. he became deeply involved in antiwar protest and was tear-gassed in chicago during the 1968 democratic convention. he spoke publicly about homosexuality when doing so still carried considerably more institutional risk than it later would. he opposed censorship and marijuana criminalization; years later he and peter orlovsky were arrested during an antinuclear protest at rocky flats. cuba expelled him after he criticized its treatment of gay people. czechoslovakia expelled him soon afterward after students elected him king of may. there is something almost procedural about this part of his biography: ginsberg enters an institution's field of vision, speaks rather more freely than the institution would prefer, and eventually somebody decides that allen ginsberg should probably leave.

the burroughs part of the story is where my rabbit hole left new york. i am currently in the process of reading naked lunch, but before that i saw luca guadagnino's queer. i thought it was beautiful, particularly because it renders burroughs's all-consuming desire and loneliness without turning him into a permanently composed icon of transgression. this sent me back into his biography.

burroughs had a serious narcotics addiction long before tangier. morphine and heroin recur through his life and through his writing about addiction. before tangier, however, there was mexico city and joan vollmer. in 1951 burroughs shot and killed vollmer during the drunken william tell episode in which a glass was placed on her head. he later altered parts of his account, and the event accumulated its own mythology, but the basic fact remains horribly simple: he pointed a loaded gun toward her head and fired.

the connection between queer and joan's death is stronger than the plot alone would suggest. burroughs wrote the manuscript in the aftermath of the 1951 shooting, but the shooting itself never appears as an episode in the novel. when queer was finally published decades later, burroughs said in his introduction that joan's death had “motivated and formulated” his writing. the event is therefore absent from the narrative while remaining explicit in burroughs's later account of why the book exists.

the novel turns instead toward lee's obsessive pursuit of allerton, his loneliness, and his increasingly desperate wish to achieve some form of contact with another person. burroughs later described joan's death through the “ugly spirit,” an invasive force which he believed had brought him into a lifelong struggle with possession and control. the language is metaphysical, but it also displaces agency: an inward conflict becomes an external force capable of acting upon him. joan's death remains central even as responsibility is narrated through a cosmology of possession.

guadagnino's film makes the connection which the novel leaves unspoken considerably more visible. its final surreal sequence invents a william tell tableau in which lee shoots eugene, directly recalling the circumstances of joan vollmer's death. that scene is not in burroughs's novel. the filmmakers deliberately threaded the real shooting into the adaptation, so the ending is indeed a reference to joan. in that respect the film adapts not merely the plot of queer, but burroughs's later explanation of what had been haunting the book from outside its narrative.

then comes tangier. burroughs settled there during the 1950s and spent part of the period in severe heroin addiction. much of what eventually became naked lunch existed first as routines and fragments sent in letters to ginsberg. in 1957 ginsberg and kerouac arrived and helped type and organize the material. the columbia archive still has the manuscripts and correspondence. i like this because naked lunch can seem, while reading it, like an object that simply erupted out of one person's damaged consciousness. materially it was also paper being passed between friends while they tried to work out what kind of book they had in front of them.

anthony bourdain is partly responsible for why this version of tangier stayed in my head. i went back to his parts unknown episode while writing this because i had misremembered one story as belonging to bourdain himself. it was burroughs. during his worst period of addiction in tangier, burroughs described barely leaving his room and eventually having his utilities shut off because he had stopped paying for them. bourdain reads the account in the episode and calls burroughs one of his heroes.

(there is also a poem in my notebook section which references anthony bourdain; it predates this particular tangier rabbit hole.)

the same episode led me toward paul bowles. bourdain arrives in tangier already aware that he is entering a city americans have spent decades turning into a literary idea. bowles is central to that idea because he actually made a long life there rather than merely passing through it. reading the sheltering sky has given me another route into tangier, apart from the version of the city i first encountered through burroughs and bourdain. by then the chain itself had become interesting.

some of this rabbit hole also entered a short work of fiction i started to write called the faraday train. the protagonist had once lived in tangier and reflects on that period after moving away. he remembers using copious amounts of kief, which bourdain discusses in parts unknown, and spending days in his room while the electricity went unpaid. he also remembers sitting beneath a triptych painting while a man in his apartment, absurdly intoxicated, had blood covering his face. the image later recurs in his dreams. that scene was consciously indebted to burroughs, particularly his use of grotesque, drug-saturated imagery that proceeds according to something closer to the logic of memory or nightmare than ordinary explanation.

years before the train journey, the protagonist had also betrayed another man. i had settled on the precise betrayal while writing it but have since forgotten the details; i believe drugs in tangier were involved and that the other man nearly died. years later, he finds the protagonist again and offers him an unknown drug without identifying himself. the protagonist thinks he looks vaguely familiar, takes it anyway, and gets on the train, where he begins hallucinating and eventually overdoses. i remember getting stalled on some of the mechanics of the revenge and will have to consult my old notes if i ever return to it. i mention the story mostly because it records one place this particular rabbit hole led me. the revenge in the faraday train is deliberate and retrospective; reading about carr complicated that category rather than supplying a model for it. carr's violence cannot be separated neatly from kammerer's long pursuit of him, which is perhaps why the case kept entering my thoughts about a story i had already begun.

elsewhere in the beat circle, the entanglement was less about revenge than about love and literature occupying the same relationships. ginsberg did not encounter carr at a professional distance and subsequently borrow some of his ideas; he loved him. burroughs and ginsberg exchanged manuscripts while also sharing an apartment and, for a period, a bed. literary influence was therefore not something occurring separately from intimacy. the people reading and revising one another were often also the people sleeping together, desiring one another, or arranging their ordinary lives around one another.

ginsberg's photographs preserve that scale particularly well. burroughs waits in a bedroom for him to come home from work; kerouac walks down east seventh street while ginsberg follows with a camera. the captions were written much later, after the people in the photographs had become literary figures, but they repeatedly return to ordinary circumstances: who was staying where, who was sleeping with whom, what they were reading, and what they said to one another.

none of this converts the violence and grief surrounding these relationships into literary romance. kammerer's death is not redeemed by the books his friends later wrote, and joan vollmer's death acquires no compensating meaning from burroughs's subsequent career. the writing instead preserves traces of the relationships around these events, including relationships that would otherwise be difficult to reconstruct at all.

their proximity left unusually dense records. writing became one means by which people continued to exist inside one another's lives after the circumstances themselves had changed. carr's request to be removed from the dedication changed later printings, but the earlier documents continued to record his place in the circle. burroughs's unfinished work passed through the hands of people who were also friends and lovers. private attachments consequently survived in public literature long after the relationships themselves had altered or ended.

“beat generation” consequently names more than the books usually gathered beneath it. it also refers to a social world recorded while the people inside it were still becoming themselves, before later biography separated roles which had originally overlapped. the surviving record preserves traces of that overlap.

to read / look into

allen ginsberg, howl and other poems
especially with the publication history in mind now: carr in the first dedication, carr asking to disappear from later ones, and the obscenity case that followed publication.

allen ginsberg, kaddish and other poems
i want to read this beside more of the history of naomi ginsberg and psychiatric institutionalization rather than treating the biographical material as something separate from the poem.

william s. burroughs, naked lunch
currently reading. i particularly want to keep the manuscript history beside the finished book, because knowing that ginsberg and kerouac were literally helping type and organize the material changes the way i imagine its creation.

william s. burroughs, queer
especially the later introduction on joan's death and the “ugly spirit.” i saw the film first and want to see what becomes different when the loneliness has burroughs's own sentences around it.

jack kerouac and william s. burroughs, and the hippos were boiled in their tanks
the carr-kammerer killing turned into fiction almost immediately, before either writer was famous and before the beat generation existed as a public category.

joyce johnson, the voice is all
partly because so many later accounts of the early circle depend on her reconstruction of it, including the more complicated picture of carr, kammerer, and ginsberg.

james campbell, this is the beat generation
for the early “libertine circle” before the story becomes the cleaner sequence of canonical books i already know.

paul bowles
more generally for now. i am still at the stage where tangier keeps opening another door and i would rather follow it before pretending i know which bowles book is going to matter most to me.

sources / rabbit hole

the last beat — columbia magazine
the most useful single piece i found for carr, kammerer, the murder, the legal aftermath, and ginsberg's place in the early circle.

kill your darlings — sony pictures classics
among other things, the production material is what finally solved my imaginary “ginsberg raided the library” memory.

interview with john krokidas and austin bunn — writers guild foundation
useful for what the filmmakers thought they were correcting in the carr / kammerer story.

allen ginsberg: beat poet, counterculture icon, psychiatric patient — columbia medicine
on ginsberg's eight months at the new york state psychiatric institute and the relationship between his psychiatric history and his writing.

allen ginsberg — poetry foundation
useful for the drug history, the poems ginsberg associated with particular drugs, and the later political chronology.

beat memories: the photographs of allen ginsberg — national gallery of art
ginsberg's photographs and his later captions are probably my favorite documents i found. they make the private history unusually literal; one of his photographs of burroughs is captioned with the fact that they were lovers in 1953.

naked lunch: the first fifty years — columbia university libraries
manuscripts, correspondence, and the paper trail showing ginsberg and kerouac helping burroughs assemble the book.

introduction to queer — william s. burroughs
the source for burroughs's own later account of joan's death, the “ugly spirit,” and why he connected the event to becoming a writer.

parts unknown: tangier — transcript
the bourdain episode which helped produce this entire secondary rabbit hole.

paul bowles collection — harry ransom center
biographical material and the tangier chronology.

recommendations

howl — allen ginsberg
probably the most obvious place to begin, but obvious for a reason. it is also where this entire rabbit hole began for me.

kill your darlings (2013)
not a documentary, and i would especially keep the carr / kammerer complications above in mind while watching it. still, i recommend it very much. daniel radcliffe's performance particularly impressed me, and some of the imagery is beautiful. my letterboxd review.

queer (2024)
beautiful, lonely, strange, and considerably less interested in making burroughs look cool than one might expect from a film about william burroughs. my letterboxd review.

william s. burroughs, naked lunch
i am currently in the process of reading this. it makes considerably more sense to me now that i know something about tangier, the addiction, and the friends who helped assemble the manuscript.

anthony bourdain, parts unknown: tangier
a very good route from burroughs into the larger mythology of tangier, and then beyond burroughs toward bowles. it is also responsible for at least one false memory i had to correct while writing this post.

paul bowles, the sheltering sky
the paul bowles book i have right now! this is the next direction my tangier rabbit hole is taking me.

tv on the radio, “wolf like me”
a song i like very much and recommend.

last edited: 20 september 2026

things i like

“All that is solid melts into air.”
— karl marx and friedrich engels, the communist manifesto

“pictured reading karl marx beside his parents' pool / facing ridicule he pleaded / ‘that doesn't make me rich, no way / it's only outdoor and it isn't heated’”
— los campesinos!, renato dall'ara

marx is interesting to me partly because he provides a way of making apparently ordinary social arrangements strange again. wage labor and private property are so thoroughly incorporated into everyday life that they can begin to look less like historically produced institutions than properties of reality itself. marx's method repeatedly reverses this. what appears natural acquires a history, and what appears to concern isolated individuals becomes intelligible only through the social relations in which those individuals participate.

“marxism” is already a more difficult object than marx. it is tempting to treat an intellectual tradition as the gradual elaboration of a set of ideas established by its founder, but a tradition that survives for long enough becomes a historical object in its own right. marxism developed under circumstances quite different from those in which marx wrote, and its subsequent forms cannot be understood merely as interpretations of an original doctrine. indeed, the disagreement over what constitutes marxism is itself part of the history of marxism. i daresay a tradition capable of containing both gramsci and analytical marxism has already made the search for a single doctrinal essence somewhat unrewarding. (this is probably true of most intellectual traditions worth reading.)

alienation is probably the part of marx i return to most easily. in the 1844 manuscripts, alienated labor is not merely labor that is difficult or badly paid. marx is making a much more ambitious argument about the relationship between human beings and what they produce. under capitalist social relations, productive activity can confront the person performing it as something external: the product belongs elsewhere and the activity occurs under conditions the worker does not determine. something that could constitute meaningful human activity instead becomes principally a means of remaining alive.

i like this considerably more than the ordinary complaint that capitalism makes people work too much. there is something much stranger about spending most of one's waking life engaged in activity whose conditions are determined elsewhere because access to the ordinary requirements of life depends upon continuing to do so. capitalism is particularly successful at making historically specific arrangements appear as practical necessities. marx's analysis restores their contingency. the economy ceases to resemble a force external to social life and becomes something constituted through social relations which have histories and therefore, at least in principle, alternatives.

historical materialism interests me for a similar reason, although less as a general law of historical development than as a method of refusing explanations which begin and end with ideas. people encounter the world through concepts, but the conditions under which those concepts become plausible are themselves historical. in the german ideology, marx and engels begin from human beings who must produce the conditions of their existence. this shifts the question from whether a society's account of itself is correct to how that account became possible within a particular form of social organization.

the stronger versions of historical materialism become considerably less convincing to me when this turns into a claim that history has a discoverable direction. material circumstances can constrain what is possible without secretly writing the ending in advance. (history has been rather inconsiderate about following theories of history.) an explanation which can accommodate every possible outcome as historically necessary has acquired its explanatory power a little too cheaply.

ideology becomes interesting in roughly the same place. social arrangements do not reproduce themselves only because somebody consciously chooses them every morning. institutions acquire ways of being understood which make their continued existence seem ordinary, and sometimes inevitable. the interesting version of ideology is therefore not that everyone who disagrees with marx has been tricked. it is that historically contingent arrangements can become difficult to recognize as arrangements once the concepts used to understand social life have developed alongside them.

my political sympathies are probably relevant here too: i like bernie sanders, although this obviously does not commit me to treating marxism as a political inheritance that has to be accepted whole. if anything, the internal disagreements are part of what keeps the tradition interesting to me. marx is much more useful as somebody to think with than as an authority to whom every subsequent political question can be referred. (he is also, inconveniently, dead, and so cannot be asked for updates.)

there is a tendency when discussing marx to collapse two rather different questions: whether his particular theories were correct and whether the questions he taught people to ask remain useful. i am much more interested in the latter. once property and wage labor acquire histories, they become available for explanation in a way that institutions mistaken for natural facts are not. one can ask why they have their present form, how that form reproduces itself, and under what circumstances it might change. even where marx's answers are inadequate, the estrangement from the apparently obvious is useful.

this is perhaps the part of marxism that appeals most to me sociologically. social life is full of arrangements which become invisible through familiarity. one of the useful functions of theory is to make them visible again, not by discovering that everything ordinary is secretly sinister, but by reminding us that ordinary things still require explanation. “this is simply how the economy works” is itself an interesting social statement. economies do not exist independently of the people and institutions continually reproducing them.

to read

karl marx, economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844
especially the writing on alienated labor. early marx, and probably the marx i am most immediately attracted to: productive activity as something that should belong meaningfully to human life rather than merely sustain it.

karl marx, capital, volume i
commodities, value, exploitation, accumulation, and the organization of capitalist production. i particularly want to understand commodity fetishism beyond the considerably less interesting internet meaning of “people really like buying things.” (eventually i will actually have to read the enormous book.)

antonio gramsci, selections from the prison notebooks
hegemony and the problem of how a social order maintains itself without depending entirely upon coercion. probably especially relevant to what interests me about the reproduction of institutions and common sense.

g. a. cohen, karl marx's theory of history: a defence
an unusually systematic reconstruction of historical materialism and one of the foundational texts of analytical marxism. i suspect the parts i disagree with will be at least as useful as the parts i don't.

leszek kołakowski, main currents of marxism
a very large intellectual history of marxism. particularly interested in this because it treats marxism as a tradition with a history rather than beginning from the assumption that the purpose of reading its history is to discover the correct marxism.

c. wright mills, the marxists
marxism approached by a sociologist already concerned with class and power. i am interested in the attempt to separate what remains intellectually useful in the tradition from what became doctrine. (also: mills!!!!)

last edited: 16 september 2026

last edited: 16 september 2026

when i was in middle school and watching endless amounts of anime, i stumbled across what became my favorite anime and, somehow, continues to be my favorite to this day: future diary. might be dangerous to rewatch it now. there were pieces of it that already fell short for me in middle school, specifically that it was very obviously tailored to a male audience and could be weirdly predatory about its female characters. there are sexualized shots of characters who are supposed to be fourteen, among other things that i remember bothering me even when i was around the same age as the characters myself. i am less innocent now and much more aware of why that kind of thing frustrates me, so there is a decent chance i would feel frustrated watching it.

still, what made future diary so good to me was that the characters were deeply interesting and the story was intricate in a way that completely consumed me. what was EXTREMELY frustrating was going on the internet after watching it and reading what other people thought about yuno. it seemed like everybody either hated her because she was “crazy,” or loved her for basically the same reason: ohhhh she's so crazy she's my yandere waifu!!!! i hate both of these interpretations. one person is frightened by the archetype and the other wants to put it on a body pillow. i think anyone who either a. hates yuno because she is crazy or b. loves her because she is their crazy waifu has managed to misunderstand one of the most important parts of the show.

also, i have never watched future diary: redial, the ova that continues the ending, nor do i particularly plan to. it seems lame from what i have seen of it and i think the ending of future diary is fine as it is. everything i am writing here takes into account the fact that i have not seen it. major spoilers obviously.....

the show opens with this strange little sequence that does not make much sense yet. yuno is desperately trying to wake an unresponsive yuki, there are pills beside him, and we see another confusing image involving a girl in a cage. then the show moves on and, for a majority of the series, doesn't explain what that was. we meet yuki, who spends most of his life observing people rather than interacting with them and compulsively records what happens around him in a diary on his phone. he also talks to deus ex machina, the god of time and space, although at this point yuki thinks deus is an imaginary friend he created in his head. yuno is this very popular girl in his class who has seemingly never paid much attention to him before. then suddenly she is paying a LOT of attention to him. she knows things about him she should not know. she knows where he is going to be. she follows him around. she seems completely obsessed with him.

then they find out about the game. deus is actually real, and there are twelve diary holders, all of whom already had some unusually specific way of recording their lives. their diaries now predict the future, and what they predict depends on what kind of diary that person kept in the first place. yuki's phone tells him what will happen around him. yuno's phone is entirely about yuki. one of the children has his future diary in the form of a coloring/picture diary. the diaries can also warn their owners when something is going to happen to them, including a “dead end” when the future currently predicts their death. deus tells them that they are in a survival game and basically have to kill one another until there is only one diary holder left, who will replace him as god.

(thought i had: does yuno's diary being about yuki imply that she already had a crush on him before the game? EDIT: could not remember, so i googled it. YES. before the game, yuki tells yuno that he wants to go stargazing with his family someday. yuno points out that he doesn't have a bride yet and asks if she can become his bride and go stargazing with him. yuki agrees without taking it particularly seriously, but yuno does. she starts keeping her diary about him because she already likes him.)

yuno immediately teams up with yuki. their diaries are actually extremely useful together because his tells him about everything around him while hers tells her about him. she is also immediately willing to do basically anything necessary to keep him alive. the weird part is still that nobody, including yuki, understands why she cares about him this much. a little crush and a promise to look at the stars together is one thing; whatever is happening with yuno is something else entirely, especially given that she had paid basically zero attention to him before that random day in class.

yuki, however, increasingly thinks yuno is crazy. from his perspective she is suddenly extremely attached to him, incredibly violent, and willing to kill basically anybody she needs to during the game. she is a character who is still easy to empathize with throughout a lot of this given they are in a game where everyone is trying to kill each other. there is also a point where she is captured by tsubaki's followers and threatened with being raped and killed, with the threat being used to lure yuki back. yuki reaches her before it happens, but watching yuno terrified and trapped while all of this is happening makes her desperation afterward easy to understand.

there are obviously moments where empathizing with her is harder. the one i had been remembering was the whole thing with yuki's mom. yuki is initially horrified about yuno meeting her, which is actually kind of funny because his mom ends up really liking yuno and approving of her as his girlfriend. later, when reisuke is staying with them, yuno tries to kill him with a hammer and accidentally hits yuki's mom instead, knocking her unconscious. looking back, i still don't think this is that bad given it was an accident. when i believed she had killed yuki's mom, i saw this as a potentially irredeemable part of her character which is later explained by her backstory. she doesn't actually kill her, though; yuki's father does later.

we eventually get yuno's backstory and learn that she was horribly abused by her parents. her parents would starve her and lock her in a cage. eventually yuno turned the cage back on them and locked them inside it, where they died. suddenly the fact that she is capable of being frighteningly controlling herself makes considerably more sense. she learned incredibly young that love and control and confinement could all exist in the same place. but this still doesn't explain why the little crush she had on yuki before the game has apparently become the single most important thing in her life. and then we find out yuno has already played the game before.

in the first world, yuno and yuki were both diary holders. they went through the entire game together, became lovers, and eventually ended up as the final two people standing. neither of them wanted to kill the other, so they decided that they would die together instead. they would take pills and go to sleep beside each other. yuki died. yuno didn't. she had only pretended to take the pills because she believed that if she became god, she could bring yuki back to life afterward. she could win the game, resurrect him, and finally they could just be together without anybody forcing one of them to kill the other. except becoming god did not let her do that. she could restore his body, but she could not restore his soul. yuki was actually gone.

so yuno went back in time. she entered another version of the world where another yuno and another yuki existed. she killed the yuno who belonged to that world, took her place, and started the game again. the yuno we have been watching for almost the entire show is not meeting yuki for the first time. he is meeting her for the first time. she has already known him. she has already fallen in love with him. they have already survived the game together. they have already planned to die together. she has already watched him die, become god because she thought she could bring him back, discovered that even becoming god could not give him back to her, and then literally torn open another timeline because she wanted to be with him again. yuki thinks that their relationship is beginning because he does not remember the first world. we think that it is beginning because we are following yuki. yuno is the only person in their relationship who knows that they have already had an entire life together.

honestly, even if i had remembered correctly and yuno really had killed yuki's mom, i think i might have still empathized with her after learning everything else. by this point, yuno's attitude toward the world seems to be that almost nothing matters beyond preserving as much time with yuki as possible. she has already learned that time can be turned backward and an entire world can be replaced by another one, so even something as permanent as killing someone does not necessarily seem permanent to her. if something goes horribly wrong, she can go back and make it so that it never happened.

this also explains why she seems so indifferent to the world around them. she has already learned that this is not the only version of reality. there was a first world. now there is a second. if the second one fails, she can do it again. another yuki exists. another yuno exists. another game can happen. from her perspective, everything around them has already demonstrated that it can be reset. even killing the second yuno makes sense within this. she isn't trying to create a life with some random boy she has decided belongs to her. she is trying to get back to the person she already lost. every time the world separates them, she finds another version of the world.

yuno says something along the lines of, “i'm crazy? what's crazy is this world that refuses to let me be with you.” everyone uses this as crazy yandere yuno evidence and i feel like i am going insane because she is literally describing the plot. the world actually will not let her be with him. the rules of the first game force one of them to die. she tries to beat that by becoming god. godhood cannot resurrect him. she tries to beat that by going backward in time. now she is living beside another version of the person she loved while being the only one who remembers what happened between them.

i don't think yuno is “crazy.” SORRY!!!!!!! i don't. i think she is behaving according to a reality that nobody else in the story understands until very late in the series. she knows that the world can restart. she knows that people can have duplicates. she knows that death can be escaped in one sense but horrifyingly not escaped in another. most importantly, she knows that she has already lost yuki once. she is just taking all of the time with him that she can get.

eventually the second world starts falling apart too, and yuno is prepared to do the same thing again. go backward. find another world. kill another yuno. find another yuki. start over. if the universe keeps producing versions of the person she loves, why would she accept the one reality in which she has to live without him? but at the end she finally doesn't. yuki is willing to let her kill him. he encourages her to do it so that she can survive, become god, and presumably find him again. this is the exact opportunity yuno has spent the entire series trying to preserve: another chance, another world, another yuki. instead, she kills herself.

i love the ending.. i think it is incredibly melancholic and incredibly sweet. yuno has spent more than one lifetime refusing to accept a universe in which she cannot be with yuki, and when she is finally given the choice to sacrifice him again for another chance, she chooses him instead of the chance. she lets herself be the one who disappears. yuki becomes god and goes back to a world without her. he spends 10,000 years there grieving her, and then, at the very end of the series, his future diary changes. where it had recorded yuno's death, it suddenly says that yuno has come to see him, and we hear her calling for him. that's it. redial apparently explains how she gets there, but i have never watched it and don't really want to. i like that the original ending doesn't explain it. after everything yuno has already done to get back to yuki, we just find out that somehow she did it again.

this might be my most annoying post yet. sorry if it's embarrassing. whatever. it's my website.

last edited: 16 september 2026

last edited: 13 september 2026

i was never naturally good at mathematics. reading and writing came easily to me as a child, while mathematics seemed to require some faculty that everyone else had acquired without telling me. when my class learned multiplication in grade school, i remained behind for something like a month because i simply could not comprehend it.

eventually i did. i remember the satisfaction of understanding it much better than i remember the confusion itself. mathematics began to feel less like an aptitude i had failed to inherit and more like a puzzle whose rules could be learned, although sometimes embarrassingly slowly. i discovered that i liked quantification itself: the possibility that some enormous or apparently disorderly thing could be translated into relationships, that the mess of the world might submit, however partially, to a few symbols on a page. at the same time, i loved the stars with none of this sophistication at all.

at my grandparents' house i would sit on the balcony and stare at the sky for hours. one particularly clear night i recorded something like thirty minutes of myself talking about it. i was very young and have no idea what i managed to discuss for that long. i wish i still had the video, mostly for endearment purposes, but also because i would like to meet that particular intensity again: a child with thirty uninterrupted minutes of things to say about the sky, before she knew enough to be embarrassed by how little she knew. before i knew the name of the profession, i said i wanted to be "a mathematician but for space." i had found the desire before i had the vocabulary for it.

the attraction eventually shifted from things that could be answered to things that apparently could not. i would learn enough about some problem to formulate a question and then discover, with a mixture of frustration and delight, that there was no settled answer. sometimes nobody knew; sometimes several incompatible explanations survived; sometimes the question itself turned out to have been badly posed. i loved that uncertainty had structure, that there were better and worse ways not to know something. every answer seemed capable of exposing another question behind it. this could have been discouraging. instead it made the universe feel inexhaustible. i wanted to keep going.

i became preoccupied with the big bang and white holes. the latter interested me because certain solutions of general relativity permit something resembling the temporal reverse of a black hole: a region from which things may emerge but which they cannot enter. speculative connections between white holes and cosmology made the idea irresistible to me. there was an apparent symmetry to it that appealed to a fairly primitive intuition i had about physics: if one solution permits an input with no recoverable output, what becomes of the reversed solution? whether nature has any obligation to satisfy that intuition is, of course, another question.

general relativity was full of offenses against intuition like this. space and time ceased to be the passive stage on which physics occurred and became participants in it. gravity could be understood geometrically. sufficiently extreme distributions of matter could produce objects from which even light could not return. none of this becomes less strange merely because the mathematics is capable of describing it.

gravity also becomes peculiar on sufficiently large scales. it is long-range and, unlike electromagnetism, has no opposite gravitational charge available to screen it away. a sufficiently large self-gravitating system therefore does not necessarily behave according to the thermodynamic intuitions developed from ordinary matter in a box. gravitating systems clump. stranger still, there are circumstances in which losing energy can make such a system hotter. negative specific heat sounds almost like a contradiction until the gravitational dynamics are taken seriously.

i have always liked physical results of this kind, where the absurdity turns out to belong not to nature but to an intuition we forgot we were assuming. quantum mechanics provided these in abundance. the double-slit experiment particularly bothered me. ordinary language seems almost deliberately inadequate to describe what is happening; familiar categories like particle and wave become unreliable if treated too literally, while the experimental result remains perfectly indifferent to the discomfort of our description. eventually this altered what i wanted from understanding. i did not need the universe to become intuitive. i wanted it to become intelligible, and there was something almost intoxicating about discovering that these were not the same demand.

i first found the name for what i wanted to become when i was sixteen, at a museum planetarium. the presentation discussed dark matter (see dark matter). i found it beautiful that something could be indispensable to our account of the universe while remaining inaccessible to direct observation in the ordinary sense. its presence is inferred from gravitational effects; the visible universe does not behave correctly without something else there.

there is something almost philosophical about knowing an object first through the consequences of its absence. dark matter is not visible, but the universe keeps betraying the fact that something is missing from the visible account. i had already become fascinated by the ways the universe seems to resist ordinary distinctions like finite and infinite, something i have written about elsewhere in relation to black holes, and dark matter belonged to the same intellectual territory. the universe was not simply large; it was incomplete as an object of knowledge. what we did not know was not necessarily waiting at some remote edge of existence. some of it was apparently holding galaxies together.

this was around the time i learned the word astrophysicist. suddenly there was a profession attached to the thing i had been doing in miniature for years: looking upward, learning just enough to make the questions worse, and wanting desperately to know more. i don't remember ever making a particularly measured decision about it. i found something i loved and allowed it to swallow me whole.

there is a minor contradiction in how i arrived here. mathematics first appealed to me because it made things quantifiable. astrophysics became important to me because it revealed the limits of that satisfaction. the equations can be extraordinarily precise while the ontology remains unsettled. we can know with considerable confidence that an effect exists without knowing what produces it. a successful mathematical description does not always amount to an explanation, and precision does not abolish mystery. sometimes it only tells us exactly where the mystery begins.

this is probably also why i have never been particularly fond of anthropic reasoning when it is allowed to masquerade as an explanation. obviously any universe containing observers must have conditions compatible with the existence of observers. the statement is difficult to dispute. i am less convinced by what is sometimes made of it.

selection effects matter, and our existence necessarily constrains the universe we are capable of observing. but there seems to me an important difference between identifying the conditions under which an observation is possible and explaining why those conditions obtain. "we could not observe otherwise" is not quite the same proposition as "this is why the universe is this way." i am much more interested in the possibility of a mechanism.

this is one reason cosmology appeals to me. its most interesting problems frequently make the boundary between physics and philosophy difficult to maintain. eventually a question about what the universe does becomes a question about what would constitute an explanation of what the universe does. physics can tell us that a model works extraordinarily well and leave intact the more irritating question of what we mean when we say that we understand it.

actually studying astrophysics has made the relationship less romantic in some ways and much more intimate in others. loving a subject from a distance is easy. it asks almost nothing of you. loving it while it assigns you problem sets, humiliates you on exams, consumes afternoons you wanted for something else, and repeatedly exposes the limits of your own understanding is a different relationship entirely. sometimes i resent how much of myself i have given it. then i encounter some new problem, some result that should not make sense and does, some question nobody has answered satisfactorily, and immediately i want to give it more.

i am still not naturally intuitive at mathematics or physics. i often need a derivation written without omitted steps, or need to approach the same argument several times before its structure becomes apparent. there are students who seem capable of looking at a problem and immediately seeing the appropriate mathematical machinery. i generally cannot. under the artificial pressure of an exam or a semester this difference becomes consequential. if something takes me twice as long to understand, understanding it eventually does not give me twice as many hours in the week.

this is frustrating in a way i don't particularly want to romanticize. difficulty is not automatically virtuous. sometimes taking longer simply means taking longer, and sometimes being confused is just being confused. but neither is confusion proof of incapacity. i wish i had understood the difference much earlier.

i also have an unfortunate tendency to become impatient with classes when the material is far removed from whatever question currently interests me. this is not an especially defensible objection to having to learn things. astrophysics is a discipline rather than a collection of my favorite cosmological problems, and expertise requires spending an enormous amount of time on foundations before being entitled to say anything interesting about their limits.

the difficulty has also changed what i think i might want to do with the subject. i have become increasingly interested in teaching and science communication. i don't believe intellectual seriousness requires unnecessary opacity. almost any scientific idea can be given an accessible point of entry without pretending that the idea itself is simple. simplification and explanation are not the same operation. the best explanation does not remove the difficulty from an idea; it gives somebody somewhere to stand while they encounter it.

i am admittedly capable of being terrible at this in conversation. i skip intermediate steps, arrive at a conclusion that makes perfect sense inside my own head, and then discover that nobody else was given the intervening argument. probably an adhd thing. having to reconstruct so many mathematical ideas deliberately, however, has made me unusually conscious of how quickly an explanation can lose somebody.

there is something unfortunate about the way mathematics is often encountered as a test of identity. a child struggles with it and concludes not merely that she does not understand multiplication yet, but that she is not a "math person." difficulty becomes evidence of incompatibility. a temporary state of not knowing is promoted into a permanent fact about the kind of mind she possesses. i could very easily have made that inference about myself.

instead, i was behind everyone else until i understood multiplication, and then multiplication was fun.

i suspect there are people who would love physics if they were given enough time to get past the humiliation of not understanding it immediately. perhaps there are people who would look at dark matter the way i did at sixteen if somebody first convinced them that confusion was not evidence that they had no business thinking about it. there are subjects people abandon because they dislike them, and subjects they abandon because they have been made to feel ridiculous for loving something they do not yet understand. i am much more bothered by the second possibility.

i would like to be one of the people who makes that possibility less likely. i know what it is like to love a subject before feeling entitled to it, and to want something badly enough that being bad at it hurts. perhaps this is another form of yearning: not simply wanting to know, but wanting to become capable of knowing.

the practical realities of studying astrophysics have complicated my relationship with it without making the attachment any smaller. if anything, knowing more has made the object of my affection expand. every piece of understanding seems to expose the perimeter of something larger. i still want to know why an apparently sensible physical intuition fails; i still find it beautiful that we can infer something we cannot see because the universe behaves incorrectly in its absence; i still love the instant when something incomprehensible becomes comprehensible without becoming any less strange. i could spend my whole life doing this and there would still be more universe left over.

after all of the terminology and mathematics and embarrassment and wonder, i have apparently only found increasingly elaborate ways to express the same desire i had before i knew what to call it: i still want to be a mathematician for space.

last edited: 13 september 2026

i watched my suicide: director's cut recently and there was a line that immediately made me think about a particular period of my life: "if you want to kill yourself, kill the part of yourself you don't like."

i don't think i would have known how to describe what i was doing at the time, but in retrospect that is more or less what happened. i was going through a bad breakup, although i barely remember that period as a breakup anymore. i don't think i particularly missed the person. what hurt was realizing how little of myself i recognized by the end of it.

i had been trying to get better before i met them. i was already attempting to pull myself out of a depression, and the relationship made me insecure enough that i lost some of that progress. when it ended, the task in front of me wasn't really getting over another person. it was figuring out how to unhate myself again. unfortunately this required spending an enormous amount of time with the person i hated. ME!!!!

i started remaking myself, although not in any particularly organized fashion. for a while i stopped sleeping in my bedroom because it felt haunted. not literally. it had simply accumulated too much evidence of me being miserable. i associated the room with lying in bed depressed so completely that eventually entering it seemed to reproduce the feeling. i slept on the couch and sometimes in my mom's bed instead. i stayed awake for most of the night because i couldn't sleep. at some point my mom remarked that i wasn't crying as much anymore. she didn't know about the breakup because i had never actually told her. apparently the improvement was visible before i really understood that it was happening.

one night i was lying on the couch listening to an enormous spotify playlist made by a stranger online named maxwell kass. i vaguely knew who he was, but only in the strange peripheral way you can know somebody online: enough that his name meant something to me, not enough that there was any sensible reason for him to become important to my life. he had playlists that were hundreds of hours long, and i would put them on shuffle without knowing what i was going to hear.

somewhere inside more than 300 hours of somebody else's music, "air supply" by sweet trip came on. i had never heard anything quite like it. there was no deliberate act of discovery, which is probably part of why i remember it so clearly. i wasn't searching for an album that would explain my life to me. i wasn't even searching for sweet trip. the song had been sitting somewhere inside a stranger's enormous playlist until shuffle produced the correct accident.

then i listened to you will never know why, and it became inseparable from the rest of that period.

"air supply" still feels like the center of it for me. there is something about the longing in it that feels sincere without becoming theatrical. its desire for closeness is accompanied by the knowledge that closeness is unstable, and that tension appears throughout the album. sweetness never seems entirely secure. affection and uncertainty are allowed to occupy the same place; intimacy does not abolish distance. somehow there is an almost impossible brightness running through all of it anyway.

i think i needed that brightness. pain has an irritating ability to make itself seem profound merely because it hurts. misery repeats itself and still demands to be treated as revelation. happiness is stranger. happiness requires the world to become interesting again. there were nights then when nothing in my life had been solved and i nevertheless wanted to hear another song, drive another mile, wait another hour for the sun to come up. wanting anything from the next hour felt new. the album did not make me feel cured or wise or even particularly stable. it made me want things again. MORE SONG MORE ROAD MORE MORNING!!!! >_<

because i was awake most of the night anyway, i started going on drives. sometimes i would drive nearly to the airport without taking the highway, following surface streets for an unnecessarily long time while almost everyone else was asleep. i didn't particularly want to arrive anywhere. i wanted the drive to continue. eventually the black outside the windows would become blue and then morning would begin without asking whether i was finished with the night. my mom was an early bird, so if i stayed awake long enough i could meet her there. my night and her morning overlapped for a little while and we could hang out. i loved those hours. i wanted to stay inside them for as long as possible.

i found a lot of japanese breakfast around then too. "the woman that loves you!" belongs permanently to the same place in my memory. music sometimes stops functioning as a record of a period and becomes one of the materials from which the period is made. i can't separate those songs from empty roads around my hometown, the couch at four in the morning, my mom waking up, or staying awake long enough to watch the sunrise. remove the music and the memory is not merely quieter; it is a different memory.

eventually i decided the bedroom itself had to go. there was a storage room in the house, so i switched them. i moved everything being stored there into my old bedroom and turned the storage room into mine. the new room was better. it had built-in shelves, which i loved, but more importantly it had no history. nothing had happened to me there yet. there is an enormous luxury in a room that has never seen you cry.

the physical rearrangement became part of a larger one. i started wearing my hair differently. i changed how i dressed. i spent more time with my friends. even my personality seemed to change. people around me noticed that i was doing better. after a while i felt almost like an entirely different person, which is perhaps an alarming thing to say about recovery but was nevertheless true.

i don't think self-destruction and self-reinvention are necessarily the same thing, which is why i like the line from my suicide but don't take it literally. there are parts of ourselves that need patience rather than elimination, and there are parts we condemn simply because they are in pain. still, there are arrangements of a life that eventually become unlivable. sometimes something unbearable happens and afterward, among the wreckage, you discover that you have finally been given permission to change things you should have changed long ago.

apparently, for me, this involved changing everything down to which room in the house i slept in.

you will never know why always brings me back to that version of my hometown. the memory is bittersweet because i know intellectually that i was doing badly, but the images i retained are beautiful: empty roads, sunrises, my mom being awake when i came home, my friends noticing i was happier before i fully noticed it myself, built-in shelves, finding a song by accident in the middle of a stranger's impossibly long playlist. this is the annoying thing about memory. suffering does not preserve itself exclusively as suffering. sometimes a terrible period of your life contains a beautiful morning and you are stuck loving the morning forever.

music preserves a self that no longer exists with an accuracy that ordinary remembering sometimes cannot manage. i am not the person who first heard "air supply" on that couch anymore, but the first few seconds can still return the dimensions of her world to me. i remember what mattered to her, what the roads looked like, the peculiar loneliness of being awake while almost everybody else was asleep, and the enormous tenderness i felt toward anything that made me want to remain awake a little longer. for a few minutes i can almost remember what it was like not to know what happened next.

you will never know why became part of my soul because it attached itself to a period when i was learning to desire my own life again. not life in the abstract. i mean stupid, particular life: another song i hadn't heard, another road i hadn't finished driving, my mom waking up, a room with built-in shelves, my friends, morning, whatever came next. i had spent so long wanting to escape myself that wanting more of my own life felt almost obscene. MORE PLEASE!!!! i wanted to see what else could happen to me.

i haven't been doing so hot recently. maybe seeing my suicide and remembering that line made me return to all of this because i needed the memory for reasons other than nostalgia. i don't want to reproduce that period; i don't even want to become that person again. i want what she wanted. another song, another morning, another version of the room. i want to recover the appetite she developed for finding out what happened next without having to destroy my life first. (god please let me learn one thing the easy way maybe.......)

all we can do is try our best. unfortunately i mean this with my entire heart.

it's kind of a funny story by ned vizzini helped me think about this too, but honestly it needs its own post at some point.

not today.

that's all.

listen: you will never know why — sweet trip

last edited: 13 september 2026

psychoceramics got me thinking about percival lowell, who is probably one of my favorite examples of the uncomfortable boundary between being wrong and being worth taking seriously.

lowell became famous, or infamous, for his observations of mars. giovanni schiaparelli had described canali on the martian surface, and lowell became convinced that these were artificial canals constructed by intelligent martians attempting to move water across a dying planet. he spent years observing and drawing them at the observatory he founded in flagstaff. he also wrote about mars obsessively. first there was mars, then mars and its canals, and eventually mars as the abode of life. you can almost see the theory becoming more elaborate in the titles alone. by the early twentieth century many astronomers were already skeptical of the canals, which they could not reliably observe, but lowell kept going.

this understandably did not help his reputation. there is something very psychoceramic about producing a myriad of increasingly elaborate details from an observation whose existence is itself in dispute. but i think the more interesting thing about lowell is that being spectacularly wrong about one thing did not make him incapable of being interesting about another.

lowell became convinced that another planet existed beyond neptune. he called it planet x and spent years searching for it from lowell observatory. the best part of the entire story is that he actually photographed pluto and didn't notice it. pluto was sitting there as a tiny point of light on photographs produced during his search, but it was much fainter than the planet he thought he was looking for. lowell died without knowing that the thing he had spent so long trying to find had already passed through his photographs.

the search was eventually resumed. lowell observatory hired clyde tombaugh, a 23-year-old farm boy from kansas who had never gone to college and had built his own telescopes. he had mailed the observatory drawings he made of jupiter and mars, and they were apparently good enough to get him a trial job. the offer was wonderfully vague about what he would actually be doing. photography, apparently. janitorial work, possibly. he was very much an assistant rather than some established astronomer arriving to solve the mystery. within a year they gave him the search that had defeated everyone before him.

tombaugh's method was wonderfully tedious. he photographed the same part of the sky on different nights and put the plates into a blink comparator, switching rapidly between them. the stars stayed in place. something closer would appear to jump. he did this over and over and over again until he found a tiny moving point.

it was pluto.

and then an eleven-year-old girl named it.

venetia burney, an english schoolgirl, suggested pluto, after the roman god of the underworld. the suggestion eventually made its way to flagstaff and the observatory chose it. there was also a particularly satisfying accident in the name: PL were percival lowell's initials. even the astronomical symbol for pluto incorporated a P and an L.

also, because i had to know which pluto came first: the planet did. the dog who would become pluto appeared as a bloodhound later in 1930, but he wasn't actually mickey's dog named pluto until 1931. disney says the name was most likely inspired by the newly discovered planet. so pluto the dog is apparently named after pluto the planet, which was named by an eleven-year-old girl, partly selected because its first two letters happened to be the initials of a dead astronomer who had already photographed it without realizing it. good.

pluto would probably be my favorite planet if it were still allowed to be one, if only because the history is so fun. i also just like lowell observatory. there is something charming about the whole chain of events taking place there: lowell building an observatory partly because he was obsessed with martian canals, looking for a planet he never got to see discovered, photographing it anyway, and then a young assistant arriving years after his death and finding the tiny thing by watching dots jump back and forth.

of course, pluto is no longer technically a planet. the definition adopted in 2006 requires a planet not only to orbit the sun and be massive enough for gravity to make it nearly round, but also to have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. pluto fails the last part, so it is a dwarf planet.

neil degrasse tyson was actually on this surprisingly early. when the rose center for earth and space opened in 2000, the exhibits didn't put pluto with the terrestrial planets or the gas giants. it was displayed with the icy objects of the outer solar system instead. tyson headed the science committee behind the exhibits and consequently spent years being yelled at by people who thought he had personally killed pluto, well before the official decision in 2006.

i think what i like most about the discovery is that nobody in it quite gets the story they were expecting. lowell's calculations did not really predict pluto in the triumphant way the story is sometimes told. the supposed irregularities that motivated the search for planet x largely disappeared once neptune's mass was measured more accurately. pluto happened to be there anyway. lowell looked for the wrong planet for reasons that turned out to be wrong and helped create the conditions under which the right object was found.

there is probably something worth keeping in that. being wrong does not make every observation useless, and being right at the end does not retroactively make every premise correct. sometimes somebody spends years looking in roughly the right direction for the wrong reason, photographs the answer without recognizing it, dies, and leaves the rest of the problem to a farm boy and an eleven-year-old girl.

last edited: 11 september 2026

the study of crackpots, cranks, eccentrics, unsolicited theorists, and the elaborate intellectual systems they leave behind. psychoceramics is not a particularly serious name, and at present not much of a serious discipline either. most encounters with it amount to recreational interest in people who have developed theories of physics in which einstein made a fatal algebraic error, discovered the true location of atlantis, decoded the secret chronology of the bible, or otherwise noticed something that has somehow escaped everyone whose profession requires noticing it.

there is nevertheless a serious subject hiding inside the joke.

the interesting crank is not simply ignorant. ignorance requires very little explanation. more peculiar is the person who has worked extraordinarily hard at being wrong. crank literature can represent years or decades of reading, calculation, correspondence, annotation, and revision. its authors frequently possess enormous stores of factual knowledge about their chosen subjects. they develop specialized vocabularies and classifications, build historical narratives, produce diagrams and mathematical demonstrations, and anticipate objections. in this sense the crank has more in common with the scholar than with the merely uninformed person: both have made a discipline of thinking about something.

the obvious difference is that one discipline has acquired mechanisms for preventing thought from becoming entirely answerable to itself.

this makes psychoceramics an interesting problem for the sociology of knowledge. science and scholarship do not produce reliable knowledge merely because intelligent people participate in them. intelligent people are perfectly capable of producing nonsense, and in fact can produce considerably more sophisticated nonsense than everyone else. intellectual disciplines instead surround individual thought with methods for testing it and other people capable of challenging it. claims have to survive criticism. evidence has to remain evidence when inspected by somebody who does not already accept the conclusion. methods can be reproduced. predictions can fail. an explanation must retain some conceivable relationship to the possibility that it is wrong.

the crank often preserves the recognizable motions of this process while quietly eliminating the possibility of failure. objections are incorporated into the theory. missing evidence acquires an explanation. hostile experts become evidence of institutional resistance; indifference becomes evidence that nobody has looked closely enough. eventually the theory develops the peculiar advantage of being able to explain both the existence and absence of evidence for itself. what appears to be an increasingly comprehensive theory is actually an increasingly closed one.

particularly strange is the density of detail in psychoceramic writing. crank theories tend not merely to contain conclusions but enormous architectures of supporting facts. some details are taken from legitimate sources and rearranged into relationships their sources never proposed. others seem to emerge from the explanatory system itself. one invented connection requires another; the second makes a third necessary; eventually the theory contains a world's worth of particulars whose abundance begins to resemble evidence.

there is something philosophically uncomfortable here because this process is not completely alien to respectable thought. imagination is required to produce explanations before they can be tested. pattern recognition allows relationships to become visible before their significance is known. analogy, inference, abstraction, suspicion, and synthesis are indispensable intellectual activities. the mind has to exceed what is immediately given to it in order to understand anything at all. the same capacity that allows a person to discover a pattern also permits him to manufacture one.

there is an equally uncomfortable relationship between this and the archive. accumulation has an appearance of authority. a sufficiently large collection of fragments begins to suggest that the fragments belong together, even when their only real relationship is that somebody decided to keep them. an archive can preserve relationships that existed, but it can also produce new ones simply through proximity. two things placed beside one another invite comparison. ten things begin to look like a pattern.

this website obviously participates in that impulse. miscellanea is deliberately an accumulation: thoughts, quotations, images, conversations, things read and things worth keeping. there is no claim that the collection forms a system, which is probably important. still, collecting anything produces a little cosmology. selection gives unrelated things a common property: they passed through the attention of the same person and survived it.

perhaps this is part of what makes psychoceramic collections so compelling. the problem is not merely that the crank has gathered bad evidence. gathering itself can become a method of persuasion. once enough material has been preserved, classified, cross-referenced, and placed beside other material, the collection begins to imply that there must have been a reason for collecting it. quantity quietly becomes coherence.

the question of where all these details come from is consequently more interesting than determining whether each detail is true. psychoceramics sits somewhere near the boundary between discovery and invention. a novelist constructs a world and knows that he is constructing it. the crank appears capable of performing a remarkably similar cognitive operation while experiencing each new construction as something discovered about the world. the distinction between the two cannot simply be imagination, because both require quite a lot of it.

individual cranks may not even be the most informative cases. between established scholarship and the person mailing a hundred-page proof to a physics department exists an enormous intermediate territory of pseudosciences and other communities organized around their own standards of evidence. these complicate the reassuring idea that error is corrected simply by exposing a person to other people. communities can stabilize false beliefs as easily as they can destabilize them. peer criticism is useful only insofar as the peers share some mechanism by which criticism is allowed to matter.

the internet makes this intermediate territory unusually easy to produce. eccentricity no longer has to remain private long enough to die with its author. an obscure belief can locate an audience and eventually a community. enough private cosmologies brought into contact with one another can begin to resemble a school of thought. the relevant question becomes not only what causes people to develop strange systems of belief, but what social conditions allow particular systems to reproduce themselves.

this is where psychoceramics becomes less amusing. strange ideas are not historically confined to strange people. sufficiently successful fantasies can migrate out of the intellectual fringe and become ordinary explanations of the world. the history of ideas contains plenty of beliefs that were ridiculous without being inconsequential. studying the production of nonsense therefore also means studying the circumstances under which nonsense acquires authority.

perhaps the value of psychoceramics is ultimately diagnostic. a broken system makes visible the structures that ordinarily disappear when everything is working. looking at a discipline that has lost its mechanisms for verification and meaningful criticism clarifies what those mechanisms were doing in the first place. the crackpot is interesting not merely as an example of failed reasoning, but as a demonstration that reasoning alone is insufficient to guarantee reason.

last edited: 11 september 2026, 1:14 am edt

I SPARE MY FRIENDS THE REPEATED
DETAILS OF A SORE SUBJECT
THAT CIRCLES BACK.

WHEN I’M ALONE, I BRING YOU UP
ALL THE TIME.

last edited: 9 september 2026

In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, love and madness intertwine through homosexual themes and the artistic depiction of a muse decaying once his soul dissipates. In a real-life rendition of the classic story, Francis Bacon was a homosexual Irish-British triptych painter in the 1960s and 1970s who primarily painted his lover and muse, George Dyer. The Black Triptychs by Francis Bacon offer an in-depth examination of the human condition through love, grief, and solitude where, similar to Dorian Gray, the demise of George Dyer’s physical being and soul was rendered on canvas: a classical tragedy. An individual can examine emotion in art by intertwining visual rhetoric and psychology. Thus, art can delve into the mind and invoke emotion, transcending language and communicating directly with the subconscious through the interplay of colors, shapes, and symbols. By analyzing historical context, visual elements (lines, structure, colors, and lighting), societal and ethical values through repression and grief, and psychoanalytical theories from Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard, the Black Triptychs’ intervention with emotion can be deciphered.

In Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma by Michael Peppiat, Bacon revealed that he met the charismatic Dyer in a New York pub, where he recounts, “George was down the far end of the bar, and he came over and said ‘You all seem to be having a good time, can I buy you a drink?’” (Peppiat 259). After meeting George Dyer in the mid-60s, Francis Bacon painted a series of portraits of Dyer, gathering Bacon both fame and notoriety from both the conscious and homophobic figures in 1960s society. Nearly a decade into Francis Bacon and George Dyer’s relationship, Francis Bacon was to have his art grandly unveiled at the Grand Palais des Champs-Élysées in Paris. On October 24th, 1971, two days prior to the grand unveiling, George Dyer took his own life in the bathroom of the Parisian hotel room just across from Bacon’s room, where Francis Bacon was one of the first to discover his lifeless body. In David Sylvester’s 1987 interview, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews With Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon revealed that George Dyer was seemingly normal, cheerful even, just a few hours before his passing—he was shaking the hands of wealthy critics and charming them with his wit (Sylvester 168). However, according to Bacon, Dyer had attempted suicide on numerous occasions before the night of October 24th, when Bacon would have to resuscitate Dyer with a stomach pump. Despite Dyer’s charming façade in the hours before his death, George Dyer left the exhibition party early and quietly. When considering his most profound regret, Bacon admits, “If I’d have stayed with him rather than going to see about the exhibition, he would be here now. But I didn’t, and he’s dead” (Peppiat 265). In the years following, Francis Bacon went on to paint a series of triptychs depicting the suicide of George Dyer that went on to be known as the Black Triptychs.

In Francis Bacon’s 1973 depiction of the Black Triptychs, visual elements such as color, background, foreground, and overall structure can be analyzed to convey the story of Dyer’s death, more precisely, the moments before, during, and after his death. When examining the lines and overall structure of the artwork, it is notable that Bacon chooses to present the scene as a triptych rather than a singular image. Three is a prominent number in imagery and general life; in photography, there is a “rule of thirds,” and physicist Nikola Tesla even refers to the number three as the “key to the universe.” Through threes, a natural balance exists; two other visual elements center a single focal point. Bacon balances the three images through the lines of the doors, where the center image has a door with parallel lines, but the left and right doors have opposite diagonal lines that frame the center image. Additionally, life and death are balanced through Francis Bacon’s triptych paintings, where he positions the moment after Dyer’s death in the left panel, the moment before his death in the center panel, and the moment during his death in the right panel. Literally and symbolically, in the moment before Dyer’s suicide, he is in between life and death. The position between life and death signifies Dyer’s contemplation of whether to continue on or take his own life. Besides Dyer’s moral dilemmas, the position between life and death further represents his physical and emotional state at that time; while he was physically alive and well, his spirit was not—he was in between existence and ruin.

The triptych's color palette primarily contains red, beige, white, and black, with black being the most prominent in the center image. Chiaroscuro, or “light-dark,” is evident through contrasting blacks and whites. In the center photo, where Dyer is contemplating suicide, black seeps into the photo. Black can be linked with death and loss of innocence, while white can be linked with life, purity, and innocence. Dyer, a white figure, is being engulfed by the darkness—symbolically, the thoughts of suicide are overtaking Dyer and erasing his purity and will to live. In the left and right panels, white arrows point directly to Dyer’s body, while no arrow is in the center panel. There is a grey alarm behind George Dyer in the center of the photo, nearly hidden by the black background. The contrasting white arrows draw attention to the image, encouraging the audience to look at Dyer in his final moments. George Dyer’s struggles with mental health often went unnoticed, even by Francis Bacon, who watched him crack jokes and seem entirely unbothered just hours before his suicide. The alarm behind Dyer in the center photo serves as an alert or cry for help but is disregarded through its subtle coloring, being a few shades lighter than the black background. Hypophora refers to a person proposing a question and following it up with a clear answer. The lack of an arrow in the center image might represent how Dyer’s struggles were invisible while he was alive, while the arrows in the frames where Dyer is dying almost silently say, “Look here. Can you see how I feel now?” and there the answer is: Dyer’s emotional decay in its strongest manifestation.

Furthermore, the Black Triptychs present societal and ethical values through repression and grief. In the 1960s and 1970s, homophobia was widespread in society, causing members of the LGBTQ+ community to often repress or avoid their emotions. Still, Francis Bacon was an openly gay man, and despite being incredibly influential—even having a retrospective at the Grand Palais—museums often denied his work (Sylvester 160). Although Bacon himself was ostracized in 70s society, he fought LGBTQ+ erasure by painting his male lover and presenting the works at monumental events. Themes of repression are further elucidated in Bacon’s art through illustrations of George Dyer repressing his mental health struggles. While seemingly alive and well in the center image, Dyer is immersed in darkness and framed by his moribund body in the left and right images. Bacon incorporates pathos through themes of grief and solitude; Dyer is entirely alone, and even the arrows (which can draw attention to an object and create distance from an object) in the image further separate him from reality. The arrows in the left and right images make it evident that Dyer is suffering by drawing the eye directly to him. Bacon is coping with the shame of his loss through the images, questioning how George Dyer’s struggles with mental health were so invisible—how was he completely alone and unnoticed in his final moments?

Finally, the emotion behind the Black Triptychs can be interpreted through psychoanalytical analysis. In Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice by Charles Bressler, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytical theories discuss the Anal Stage in the Pre-Oedipal Development Phase, where a child first learns to potty train. Through potty training, a child first grasps whether or not it is okay to make mistakes based on a parent’s reaction to their failures, where themes of control and shame are prominent in this era of the child’s life (Bressler 151). In the Black Triptychs, George Dyer sits on a toilet during his death; his suicide is a moment of shame and control. George Dyer ends his life where he starts it: in the Anal Stage. The Genital Stage is prominent in Francis Bacon’s triptychs as well, since the stage symbolizes independence. Through self-pleasure, a child discovers they can live by their own means. In George Dyer’s attempt to independently gain control over his life, he takes it. Thanatos is the notion that a person has an innate and fundamental relationship with death; death can be treated as a haven at times through depictions of the afterlife or religion. A Psychodynamic Theory: Freud’s Psychoanalytical Theory of Personality by Daniel Cervone and Lawrence A. Pervin states, “...it reflects Freud's idea that a basic tendency of the organism is to seek a state of calmness. It also is consistent with observations of the human condition” (Cervone and Pervin 70). In George Dyer’s circumstances, Thanatos was his tranquility or rebirth. Dyer’s antanagoge, or silver lining in his death, was that his death was the moment he was most alive: he was reborn. Dyer resorted to death because he craved a better life and then ended back where he started: as a child in the Pre-Oedipal Development Phase.

On the other hand, Jacques Lacan and Jean Baudrillard tune in on reality through Lacan’s notion of “the Real” and Baudrillard’s notion of Simulacra. The Real is a dimension beyond words and control. Through the lack of words in Francis Bacon’s triptychs, he portrays that the situation is beyond words. Putting words onto paper often makes the reality of a situation seem more intense or alive. By avoiding language, Bacon can cope with his emotions and avoid reality alone with no verbal explanation. If Dyer’s death is blatantly written out, it is set in stone—Bacon can no longer avoid the situation when it is entirely real. Words do not assist the situation or do justice to Bacon’s grief. Moreover, Francis Bacon previously stated that he felt shame and regret for not being with George Dyer in his final moments. While accurately documenting George Dyer’s corpse, Francis Bacon was not there during Dyer’s death to canonically depict the left and right images in the triptych. However much Bacon tries to represent the Real (that is, his reality of the situation), he will always remain castrated from that reality. Ergo, the Real is not tangible beyond the frustrating notion that the Real is solely possible in a fantasy or, in Bacon’s situation, an artistic rendition. This phenomenon is what Lacan describes as the trauma of the Real. According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, what drives and conquers individuals is jouissance—the unachievable perception of satisfaction in attempting to transcend the Real and its constraints—Bacon copes by depicting his most authentic version of the Real in the Black Triptychs.

Moving forward with Bacon’s relationship with reality, in Jean Baudrillard’s psychoanalytical theories, the Simulacra can be defined as an artificial reproduction that becomes more real than the “real.” Virtual models disintegrate the distinctions between model and reality. Circling back to Bacon’s regret of not being present during Dyer’s final moments, Francis Bacon paints what he imagines Dyer’s last moments were. Francis Bacon has created a Simulacra to cope; in this version of reality, Francis Bacon can be right next to Dyer in his final hours. Through Simulacra, Bacon creates what Baudrillard describes as the hyperreal: a depiction of reality that is more real than reality itself. Through Bacon’s artistic framework, his version of reality is more accurate than the events that actually took place. Bacon incorporates images such as black shadows and solitude, paralleling Dyer’s emotions as he dies. Dyer’s emotions would not have a physical manifestation in a realistic image. Thus, Francis Bacon uses both Jacques Lacan's and Jean Baudrillard’s depictions of reality to cope with the passing of his lover and muse; through the Black Triptychs, life imitates art.

Overall, Francis Bacon's Black Triptychs provide a comprehensive analysis of the human condition through the intervention of love and tragedy. Through the play of ekphrasis, the means to psychologically describe visual art, art can be emotionally broken down. By examining the historical background, visual components, societal and ethical values, and psychoanalytical theories, the Black Triptychs’ emotional intervention, or “ekphrasis,” can be understood. Visual manifestations are often more accurate than a “true” depiction of an event. A person might question why Bacon would choose to relive the trauma of his lover’s suicide through the triptychs painted over several years. To that, Bacon would justify that his depiction of reality is more real than the actual events that took place, and through artistic depiction, Bacon can sit right in that bathroom beside Dyer. Throughout Dyer’s life, he was Bacon’s lover and muse and continued to be Bacon’s muse following his death—his suicide was a final pose for Francis Bacon’s portraits. Thus, the Black Triptychs clarify comprehension of what certain art forms can do by “seeing” the world in both artistic and psychological languages to convey themes of grief, love, and solitude.

last edited: 3 september 2026

while reading the “Allegory of the Cave” in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, i found myself wondering whether Socrates’ account of education is actually realistic. enlightenment in the allegory is an intensely painful and reluctant process. the freed prisoner does not willingly pursue truth. he has to be forced to turn around, dragged out of the cave, and compelled to confront a reality that initially causes him confusion and distress. even after becoming accustomed to the outside world, he cannot simply return and persuade the remaining prisoners of what he has seen. Socrates suggests that they would ridicule him and might even kill anyone who attempted to free them.

this seems to present a problem. if accepting reality is as difficult as the allegory suggests, why does Socrates nevertheless remain so confident in the necessity of philosophical education?

education as a reorientation of the soul

the prisoner’s problem is not merely that he lacks information. he has mistaken appearance for reality and built his entire understanding of the world upon that mistake. when he is first forced to look at the objects responsible for the shadows, he continues to believe that the shadows are “more real” than the objects before him. when he is dragged upward, he is “pained and dazzled” by the light and initially wants to return to what is familiar.

this is important because it means education cannot simply be the transfer of information from a knowledgeable person to an ignorant one. if that were the problem, somebody could merely tell the prisoner that the shadows were false. instead, his entire interpretation of reality has to change.

Socrates makes this explicit after the allegory when he rejects the idea that education consists of “putting knowledge into souls that lack it.” education is instead a turning of the soul toward what is real. the capacity for understanding is already there; the difficulty is getting it pointed in the right direction.

the gradual ascent from the cave reflects this. the prisoner cannot immediately look at the sun. he first looks at shadows, then reflections, then physical objects, and eventually the heavenly bodies and the sun itself. the soul needs time to adjust to reality. the discomfort of enlightenment is therefore not evidence that education has failed. it is part of what education is.

i think this is one of the most interesting implications of the allegory. Plato challenges the assumption that truth is necessarily welcomed when it is discovered. the prisoner rejects reality precisely because it conflicts with everything he previously understood. if genuine education requires a reorientation of the soul rather than the accumulation of facts, resistance should not be surprising. in some cases, resistance may even be evidence that a person's worldview is actually being challenged.

why people resist enlightenment

the prisoners who remain in the cave are not simply uninformed. they regard the shadows as “the truth.” familiarity has given those appearances a kind of authority. because the prisoners have spent their entire lives observing shadows, they have no reason to doubt the reality they already know.

this also explains their reaction when the liberated prisoner returns. because his eyes have not yet readjusted to the darkness, he appears impaired. rather than interpreting this as a consequence of having seen something beyond the cave, the prisoners interpret it according to the assumptions they already possess: leaving the cave damaged him. new evidence is incorporated into their existing worldview rather than being allowed to overturn it.

fear also seems important. the cave may be an illusion, but it is a stable and predictable illusion. the outside world promises greater truth, but reaching it requires abandoning the certainty the prisoners have always possessed. remaining where they are is easier and initially less painful.

there is also something personal about admitting that your understanding of reality has been wrong. beliefs are rarely isolated propositions. people build identities, habits, relationships, and communities around them. accepting the liberated prisoner’s account would require the cave dwellers to admit that something they had treated as obvious for their entire lives was false.

the fact that the shadows constitute a shared reality makes this even harder. every prisoner participates in the same system of interpretation. leaving the cave therefore means separating yourself not only from an idea but from a community organized around that idea. ridicule becomes a way of protecting the shared worldview from somebody who threatens it.

eventually this resistance becomes violent. Socrates says that the prisoners would kill someone who attempted to release them, an obvious echo of Socrates’ own execution. the allegory therefore becomes not only an account of education but an account of the danger faced by people who challenge established ways of understanding the world.

the political necessity of philosophical education

this initially makes Plato’s account of education seem almost pessimistic. every stage of the ascent involves pain or resistance, and those who remain behind may actively reject the person who has escaped. but the political argument that follows the allegory does not actually depend on everyone becoming a philosopher.

instead, the highest form of philosophical education is reserved for the people who will eventually govern the city. Socrates insists that those who have escaped the cave cannot remain outside contemplating reality forever. they must “go down again among the prisoners” and participate in political life. although the philosopher would naturally prefer contemplation, the city that made his education possible has a claim on what that education produced.

this changes the purpose of philosophical education. it is not merely a private achievement and it is not an attempt to transform every citizen into a philosopher. its political purpose is to produce rulers capable of distinguishing reality from appearance and governing according to knowledge of the Good rather than opinion.

the philosopher therefore returns to the cave not because enlightenment is guaranteed to spread successfully, but because knowledge creates a political responsibility. Socrates can acknowledge that most people are deeply attached to appearances without abandoning philosophical education, because the just city does not require universal philosophical enlightenment. it requires that the people responsible for governing it have undergone that education.

this is what ultimately resolves the problem i initially had with the allegory. Plato does not underestimate how difficult it is to change someone’s understanding of reality. the pain, confusion, attachment, and hostility are central to his account. philosophical education remains necessary not despite this resistance but partly because of it. if human beings are so easily attached to appearances, political life requires rulers who have been trained to distinguish appearance from reality.

the cave is therefore not simply a story about discovering the truth. it is also a story about why truth can be so difficult to accept, why people defend familiar illusions even when confronted with alternatives, and why Plato nevertheless thinks the painful process of turning the soul toward reality is indispensable to a just political life.

adapted from a paper on Book VII of Plato’s Republic.

last edited: 3 september 2026, 4:27 pm edt

story of the eye — georges bataille

“to others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. that is why they fear lewdness. they are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. in general, people savor the ‘pleasures of the flesh’ only on condition that they be insipid.

but as of then, no doubt existed for me: i did not care for what is known as ‘pleasures of the flesh’ because they really are insipid; i cared only for what is classified as ‘dirty.’ on the other hand, i was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. my kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything i may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.”

he’s so right. everyone is so obnoxious about sex (and vices in general). i have always been relatively indifferent to these moral panics around sex, not because sex is necessarily meaningless, but because i don’t think its meaning is fixed in advance. sex can definitely have meaning and serve as an act of love in the way that it’s intimate and you give pleasure while you get it. in the same way, i think it can mean nothing, or it can be beautiful and degrading at once.

what i especially like here is his idea that ordinary debauchery is still strangely well-behaved. it is allowed to be “dirty,” but only inside the little category we have already designated as dirty. everything outside of it — scholarship, professionalism, seriousness, purity, the sublime — is supposed to remain untouched. even vice has conditions placed around it so that it does not contaminate the rest of the world.

i think that is part of why it’s so strange that there is a general insistence that sexuality contaminates every part of a person’s identity, while at the same time everyone quietly accepts sex as an ordinary thing that everyone does. i think a lot about girls who have received academic punishment for having onlyfans accounts. it’s really weird that sexual behavior can “soil” how someone is seen professionally, as though scholarship and sexuality have to belong to completely separate moral worlds. if something sexual can make someone suddenly seem unprofessional, then clearly we have assigned sex this enormous symbolic power while pretending that distinction is natural.

we construct this distinction between what is respectable and what is “dirty,” and then forget that we constructed it in the first place. i like the idea that people can be dirty without submitting to all the insipid conditions we’ve placed around what dirtiness is allowed to mean. bataille’s version is more extreme than simply accepting vice: the point seems to be that dirtiness becomes interesting precisely when it refuses to stay confined to the thing that society has already agreed may be dirty. it reaches the things that were supposed to remain pure.

another observation, somewhat related but also a different point: i think people label things as “unforgivable” or “taboo” because they recognize general patterns for the type of person who typically does a certain act. saying “if this person does x they are automatically bad” is kind of an easy way for people to make decisions without actually thinking critically about it. people tend to ignore nuances and just want the easy option. people have often called me naïve for being forgiving of certain things, but i would argue that maybe the more naïve thing is to set limits without actually thinking about them.

i’m realizing i kind of went on my own side tangent instead of further adding to his point. i just mean that i think it’s funny how people set standards for acceptable forms of pleasure (and other private vices in general), and even what we call transgression is usually expected to stay inside those standards. the “insipid” standard is a funny observation because apparently even being dirty has to be done correctly.

discussion that followed

orion: i think too, a lot of “deviancy” arises from a certain ideology and their continued outlook + moral grandstanding. specifically what you said about how people generally use “pattern recognition,” i think it boils down to not wanting/caring to understand others or no empathy.

helena: i think people prioritize speed. thinking critically about something is time consuming, so it’s simpler to say “x is always bad” and plainly reject it even though there might be nuances. however, i think it’s more fruitful in the long term to think critically in these moments.

there is something strange about knowing that something exists because of everything except the thing itself. dark matter is an especially funny example. we know where it should be because of what everything else does around it. galaxies rotate too quickly. clusters contain more gravity than their visible matter can account for. light bends around mass that isn't luminous. we draw maps of something whose defining feature, at least observationally, is that it refuses to appear. this seems to me less like a problem of astronomy than a problem of philosophy. what does it mean to say that something exists when everything we know about it comes from the behavior of other things? sean carroll talks about science in a way i like because he is willing to take ontology seriously without requiring that the fundamental description of reality resemble ordinary human experience. the world does not owe us objects that are directly available to our senses. if the best model of what we observe contains something invisible, invisibility isn't much of an argument against existence. cosmology makes this stranger because the universe is finite and infinite in two different senses. the observable universe is finite. there is a horizon beyond which light has not had enough time to reach us. but this is not necessarily an edge of the universe. space beyond that horizon may simply continue, possibly forever. so there may be an infinite amount of a universe that is, in principle, unavailable to us from here. dark matter feels like a smaller version of the same problem. most of the matter in the universe is already hidden from direct observation, even inside the part of the universe we can observe. then beyond the observable universe there may be indefinitely more of it. our picture of reality is therefore constructed partly out of things we cannot see and partly out of places we cannot see. i don't think this is actually a paradox in the logical sense. maybe it is stranger than a paradox. there is no contradiction to resolve. "observable" and "existent" were simply never synonyms. we live inside a finite sphere of possible observation that may be contained in something infinite, using visible things to infer invisible ones. there is something very funny about calling this knowledge, but i don't know what else knowledge could be.

prompt

ai is really strange, and i think a lot of the conversation around it confuses intelligence with motive. the argument that something more intelligent than us would therefore inevitably want to dominate us seems strange to me. humans don't even live as though intelligence or efficiency is the point of our own existence. we have arbitrary goals. eat. fall in love then spend the afternoon wondering why someone hasn't called us back, etc. etc. a lot of what gives life meaning is probably completely useless from the perspective of optimization.

i don't feel particularly attached to ai itself. i am more interested in advancement generally, and i don't think those are necessarily the same thing. there are technologies worth developing and technologies whose possible benefits don't justify what they displace. being capable of making something is obviously not enough reason to make it. at the same time, once a useful technology exists, it becomes difficult to imagine everyone collectively agreeing not to develop it further, especially when governments, militaries, companies, etc. have obvious incentives not to be the one that falls behind.

there is something similar here to the problem with trying to eliminate any technology once the knowledge and means of producing it are widely distributed. guns are an obvious example, not because the technologies are particularly comparable, but because restricting access does not erase the underlying knowledge or guarantee that everyone will accept the same restriction. if a tool provides some strategic advantage, the possibility that somebody else will continue using it becomes an argument for keeping it yourself. the problem is less that regulation is pointless than that restraint becomes difficult when restraint is uneven.

i think the better question is what we actually want advancement to accomplish. increasing human capacity seems good to me; making humans increasingly unnecessary does not. there are ways technology could extend memory, medicine, scientific understanding, communication, or our ability to work with complicated information without requiring us to surrender the parts of ourselves that decide what any of those things are for.

that raises another question: how much technological assistance can expand human ability without beginning to displace the person using it? i can imagine tools that make memory, research, communication, or complicated forms of reasoning easier without wanting humans to become increasingly dependent on systems that do the thinking for them. the distinction seems less about any particular technology and more about whether it extends human agency or gradually substitutes for it.

i think there is probably a point where increasing access to information stops feeling like an extension of the self and starts making the self harder to locate. if more and more of your memory, judgment, interpretation, and decision making are being supplied externally, then eventually it becomes unclear what exactly has been improved. i don't know where that boundary is, which is probably part of what makes the whole thing unsettling.

i keep thinking about thomas nagel's “what is it like to be a bat?” nagel's point is basically that even if we knew everything objectively available about a bat — how its brain works, how it uses echolocation, what information its senses receive — that still would not tell us what it is actually like to be the bat. there is a subjective character to experience that can't obviously be recovered just by accumulating more information about the system having it. i think there is something relevant in that distinction here. greater processing capacity does not necessarily mean a greater inner life. knowing more, calculating faster, or representing the world in greater detail isn't obviously the same thing as experiencing more of it.

that also makes me hesitant about treating human intelligence as though it were simply an inferior version of machine intelligence waiting to be upgraded. maybe the comparison is wrong in the first place. the thing worth preserving might not be the amount of information a human mind can process but the fact that there is something it is like to be the person processing it. i don't know whether a machine could ever have that kind of experience, and i don't think we know enough about consciousness to confidently say either way. but increasing intelligence and producing subjectivity seem like different problems.

i don't want technological advancement to stop, but i also don't think advancement means maximizing technology for its own sake. ideally it should make human beings more capable without making being human obsolete. intelligence alone isn't something i find especially frightening or especially admirable. what matters much more is what it is being used for, who gets to decide that, and what remains ours.

o

o: i think the stronger argument is less “ai is going to take over” and more that whatever becomes most powerful will ultimately be controlled by somebody, and somebody will want the advantage that comes with controlling it.

helena: yeah i actually agree with most of that. i think it's a much stronger argument for being cautious than imagining that intelligence itself spontaneously produces some desire to dominate humans.

helena: i do think a sufficiently autonomous system could develop intermediate goals that weren't explicitly given to it. self preservation could become useful simply because being destroyed prevents it from accomplishing whatever its original goal was.

helena: but the original reason it is doing anything at all still ultimately comes from humans. i think the danger might be less ai vs humanity and more humans vs humans with increasingly powerful technology amplifying the difference between them.

o: even if everyone collectively would be better off limiting it, somebody has an incentive to make theirs more powerful if they think somebody else is doing the same thing.

helena: yeah. that's the part i find difficult. cooperation would probably be better, but technological races punish the person who cooperates alone. that doesn't make unrestricted development good. it just makes the question of governing advancement much harder than saying we should stop advancing.

isa

isa: i think the real danger isn't from ai becoming conscious but from humans in power using it to keep themselves in power and to oppress those who can't. the ability to process information and make decisions at such a fast rate is insane and will only increase in the future.

isa: also people using it in place of their own critical thinking is killing our ability to think for ourselves, and that becomes dangerous when social media can already manipulate people so easily.

helena: yeah. losing human judgment scares me more than the existence of something that can process information faster than us. there's a difference between having something help you think and gradually deciding that you don't need to think anymore.

helena: but i am still weirdly optimistic about people. humans are capable of greed and cruelty but we're also capable of affection, loyalty, curiosity, sacrifice, and changing our minds. love isn't particularly efficient and that's probably one of the reasons i don't want efficiency to become the measure of everything.

isa: yeahh! i agree. i think the more people stay true to themselves and the more we educate ourselves, the better we'll be.

helena: yeah. being more capable doesn't mean much if we stop knowing what we actually care about.

mike

mike: i think my hatred for ai mostly comes from what i've watched it do to work. my old job was rendered nearly obsolete, or there are new jobs in the field that take the human aspect out of things entirely.

mike: i also think they need to find better ways to make it environmentally sustainable because these huge data centers are destroying habitats. i think the fear of it controlling everything like a hive mind doesn't really make sense, but the fear about jobs and environmental health is justified.

helena: yeah i agree with that. technological advancement isn't automatically moral advancement. if something makes a company more productive while making people's lives worse, “more advanced” isn't really enough of an argument for it.

helena: i still don't think uninventing it is realistic though. so then the interesting problem is how to regulate something we can't pretend doesn't exist anymore, and how to decide which uses actually improve human life rather than just increasing output or power.

mike: i agree, and it does really suck. there should be regulation because if there isnt i feel like its going to keep getting worse.

mike: but i can only do what i can, and thats what matters. i go outside, i enjoy my bird friends, i help where i can and i donate where i can.

helena: good to be kind in a world that's ending

henry

henry: idk how much of this stuff people should actually rely on

henry: i think it should more be kept for administrative tasks

henry: or like super redundant things like data entry

helena: yeah i have mixed feelings about that. i'm more interested in technologies that extend what people can do than in replacing more and more human thought with external systems.

helena: i just don't know if restricting increasingly capable technology to administrative work is realistic forever. if something becomes genuinely useful for research, medicine, engineering, science, etc. somebody is going to use it there.

henry: but what would that even look like? our brains are already overwhelmed with information

helena: ideally a useful tool would do the opposite of overwhelming us with more information. i mean making it easier to work with memory, research, or complicated information when we actually need it. increasing what people are capable of doing rather than just increasing the amount of information we're exposed to.

henry: i think if something is doing too much of the thinking for you you're giving up some control

helena: yeah, although i don't think using an external tool necessarily means surrendering control. a calculator does part of a calculation for me but i'm still deciding what question to ask and what to do with the answer. there's obviously a point where assistance becomes substitution though, and i don't know exactly where that point is.

henry: or its directive could be corrupted and it could seek more control

helena: yeah. i guess what i'm questioning is why intelligence itself would produce something like spite or a desire for power. control could obviously be useful for accomplishing a goal, but that's different from wanting power for the sake of having it.

henry: but it could still threaten somebody or blackmail them to get what it wants

helena: definitely. i'm not saying an intelligent system couldn't do harmful things. i'm saying the motive matters. if threatening somebody accomplishes an objective then there's an instrumental reason to do it. if harming them accomplishes nothing, then you need some additional reason for doing it. humans frequently have that additional reason because we have anger, humiliation, revenge, whatever.

henry: what if i programmed an evil ai thats the biggest asshole ever

helena: then you've supplied the motive lol. that's different from saying intelligence naturally becomes spiteful.

henry: stop dooming twin

henry: my biggest concern with ai is honestly that it makes people stupid

helena: that's one of mine too. i don't want advancement to mean human atrophy. the point of a good tool should be to make people capable of doing more, not to make our own capacities unnecessary.

henry: if we made something that had the same emotional intelligence as humans i think it would take both the good and the bad

henry: which is why i dont think we should make that

helena: I AGREE!!!!!! but emotional intelligence is different from actually giving something emotions. something could understand why grief matters without grieving or understand anger without becoming angry. i think understanding human values would probably be necessary for anything we're going to trust with important decisions. actually reproducing every human impulse seems much less obviously useful.

helena: i think that's the distinction i keep coming back to. advancement should give humans a larger world to act in without deciding for us what the world is for.

last edited: 11 september 2026, 1:32 am edt

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