You too are waking to this
Same sun warming the foot of the bed
Same clothes hanging like difficult apostrophes
There is no mistaking the dawning
After the cloudboats and freefall
How the mind remembers pieces of things
Until it remembers the things themselves
How now you move yourself instead of being
Moved by the multitude of others

The half-moon burn from the frying pan,
Things running past the door at night.
A nest of white hair in the brush,
“It’s better to be this than that,” she says.
Tiny footsteps on the tile roof,
Night after night as cars leave the parking lot.
Each day, the world becomes a more different world,
Friends and family float off with Aether,
The offspring of Erebus and Nyx.
“It’s better to be here than not,” she says.
The waves, tiny and weak now,
Lick at the edge of the ocean,
Conserving their rage and hiding their discontent.

The ‘Poor Yorick’ images, inspired by the line “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him”, and the question “Whose (skull) was it?” left me imaging that Yorick’s skeleton had a life of its own, a future, imagine him even climbing out of his grave! My creative process usually starts with scanned objects and photographs gleaned from walks throughout Northeastern Connecticut and New England. After collaging, combining and altering those images, a ‘texture’ is developed to wrap around 3-D models in a virtual space. The models can be modified and their position coordinates changed almost infinitely.

It is a kind of clockwork
Suddenly the snowdrops are gone
mysteriously gone
the way passersby disappear
from the scene of an accident
and now the bearded German Iris’ poke through
the soil to the sun.

What living mechanism shows them this sense of timing?

I split them apart one fall, years ago
It does them good, I was told, to lever out the roots
and place them back in the earth with half of the tuber
above the ground
like a duck in the water,
I was told. These were indigo and purple
some it turned out were almost black
and luminous at night
like soft dark moons
of cancer on an x-ray
every spring like clockwork
they show the blanched pale fronds
and struggle again
to see the light
who tells them this?
something in me stirs as well
in this nonspecific space of time
my inner clock ticks another
bit of life away
and I too want to see the light
and sit away from my shadow for a time
at the right hand of this god
of living intelligence
and poke my pale head through the mire
that is my life right now and
rend right through this bog
into another fat chance,
to clutch
the next disappearing possibility
before it is gone again forever

i thought it was the cobalt sky

the jitterbugging ivory clouds

floating over the street we walked

and there was something about your eyes

i almost couldn’t see

in the ponytailed girls

soaring through space

effortlessly in cartwheels

the damp black sand

doubling and tripling their shapes

holding what the sky reflected

we were wild things then

you and i

and i remembered

in that instant

i turned away

when i glanced again

you were gone

“Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life.”

— William H. Gass, On Being Blue

---

11:04, Saturday Morning

Ok, who are you?

- I’m Albert.

Why are you here? What do you want?

- Nothing exactly. I’m just watching.

What are you watching? Where do you come from?

- I just exist here, inside your head. I don’t know where I came from originally. I think you made me.

I’m supposed to keep you safe. I look for things that are dangerous, things that are not in your best interest. I look for danger, possible danger, even obscure, imaginary danger.

Well, you make me nervous. Do you have to keep coming back so often?

- I’m supposed to keep a handle on it.

3:37, Saturday Afternoon

Hi, Albert. Don’t you have anything else to do?

- I’m sorry, but this is my job. You want me to do it, remember?

Yeah, but I feel safe enough now. Can you just disappear for a while?

- Anything you say. I’ll be here if you need me.

6:57, Saturday Evening

Oh. Who are you?

- You named me. Paul. I have one critical job.

And what is that job?

- To keep you afraid. The more afraid you are, the more cautious you are. The more cautious you are, the safer you are.

But that keeps me in a state of constant anxiety. High alert. Double-thinking every little thing. I’m not sure that’s helpful.

- Well, I’m not quite sure you have a choice. We’ve been doing it like this your entire life. It would be foolish to stop now.

7:15, Saturday Evening

Hello?

- Francis.

I don’t remember calling for you.

- You didn’t. I don’t wait to be invited. I show up when there’s a gap in coverage.

What do you mean, coverage?

- Albert watches. Paul alarms. But who’s doing the math? Who’s calculating the compound interest on your mistakes? That’s me. I’m the long division. I’m the one who remembers what you said in 2009 and projects it forward to 2034.

That seems excessive.

- It’s only excessive until it’s prescient. Then it’s called survival.

8:42, Saturday Night

Oh, Christ. Now what?

- You don’t have to take that tone.

Who are you?

- Sally.

You’re a woman.

- Yes. Is that a problem?

No, I just—Albert and Paul and Francis are all—

- Men. I know. Loud. All that marching around, declaring threats, drawing up ledgers. I work closer to the skin. I’m the one who wonders if your hands were shaking when you handed over the coffee. I’m the one who replays the silence after you told the joke. I don’t care if the building burns down. I care if they thought you were strange while it burned.

I don’t need four of you. I really don’t.

- It’s not a matter of need, says Albert, from the occipital dark, that gray dockyard at the back of the skull where the eyes unload their catch. It’s a matter of redundancy. If one system fails, the others engage.

- Paul, lit inside the almond room of the amygdala, a chamber the size of a thumbnail that has never once turned off its light: Besides, we’re not four. We’re one function with four shifts.

- Francis, his voice radiating along the Morse of arterial veins hidden in the pink folds of the prefrontal cortex: Statistically, you’re safer this way. Remove one pillar and the architecture collapses.

- Sally, working from the insula, that narrow seam where the temporal lobe and the frontal lobe never fully close, reading the pulse before it reaches the throat: And you’d miss me. You’d miss me most of all. The boys just scare you. I know you.

10:15, Saturday Night

I asked them to put it in writing. If they were going to run my nervous system like a department, I wanted the org chart.

They obliged, which surprised me. Paul produced the folder like he’d been waiting years for someone to ask.

---

DEPARTMENT OF INTERIOR THREATS

Standing Limitation — applies to all personnel:

No instrument in this department can distinguish a real threat from a false flag. None can measure degree — there is no dial, only a switch. Every alert is full throttle or nothing. The department’s working definition of safety was fixed decades ago and has not been updated to reflect current conditions. Where the file is incomplete, personnel fill it in themselves.

ALBERT — Perimeter Watch

Function: continuous surveillance. Scans for danger, probable danger, international danger, global catastrophic danger, and danger not yet invented or imagined. Does not act on findings — only logs and transmits.

Qualifications: lifelong. Named for a bay on Long Island; learned threat-scale from his father, a Bayman who read water for a living. Understands that most of what’s underneath never surfaces, and treats that as the whole job.

Symptom of standing limitation: cannot tell a real tide from an imagined one. Has never been asked to.

PAUL — Alarm & Deterrence

Function: converts observation into fear, fear into caution, caution into presumed safety.

Method: escalation. No protocol for stand-down, because stand-down would require a dial he doesn’t have.

Symptom of standing limitation: cannot tell a current danger from the memory of one. All dangers live in the amorphous regions of possibility. Files them identically. Rings the same bell for both.

FRANCIS — Projections & Records

Function: takes Albert’s sightings and Paul’s alarms and runs the numbers forward. Keeper of the archive, filed under a system no one else uses. Categorizing is the anxiety, here — nothing is safe until it’s shelved.

Symptom of standing limitation: where the data runs out, invents the rest and files it as fact.

SALLY — Close Monitoring

Function: tracks the social residue the others don’t register — the shaking hand, the joke that landed wrong, what they’ll remember about you in three weeks.

Symptom of standing limitation: no off switch, and no clock. Doesn’t track past or future — only the present moment, monitored continuously, register fixed at high alert. A raised eyebrow now reads at the same volume as a verdict.

---

11:57, Saturday Night

I found a deck of cards in the drawer where I keep things I don’t use. I don’t know why I thought of it then, except that a department wants a filing system, and filing systems want symbols.

I laid four cards down without deciding to. They came up in order, which either means something or means I’ve handled this deck enough times to have worn a groove into it.

Two of Swords — a figure blindfolded, arms crossed, holding a sword in each hand, refusing either side. That’s Albert. He doesn’t fight, doesn’t flee, doesn’t choose. He holds the position and calls the holding a job.

Three of Swords — a heart, pierced three times at once. That’s Paul. He never hits you with one thing. It’s the word, the memory of the word, and the fear of the next word, all at the same time, and he calls that thoroughness.

Eight of Swords — a figure bound and blindfolded, standing inside a ring of blades he planted himself. That’s Francis. Nobody built that cage. He filed it into existence, one entry at a time, and then forgot he held the key.

Nine of Swords — a figure asleep, face turned into the pillow, hands folded, nine blades arched overhead like a canopy, hilts up, points down, none of them falling. That’s Sally. She doesn’t wait for you to wake up. The danger doesn’t need you conscious. It just needs to be close enough to fall.

I asked them if they knew what the cards were there before I turned them.

- Albert, from the occipital dark, that gray dockyard at the back of the skull where the eyes unload their catch: We don’t need cards. We are the cards.

- Francis, lying across two particularly soft and memorable folds deep in the hippocampus: Technically, the cards predate the department. We simply share a filing structure.

- Paul, softly lit, bokeh, inside the almond room of the amygdala, a chamber the size of a thumbnail that has never once turned off its light: He’s asking if we’re real.

- Sally, working from the insula, that narrow seam where the temporal lobe and the frontal lobe never fully close, not looking up: She’s asking if we ever weren’t.

1:05, Sunday Morning

I got two hours of quiet. I don’t know how. Maybe they unionized and called a mandatory meeting in another room of the building.

Then Francis slipped a note under the door: You’re not hearing us, but we’re still on the clock. Check your breathing. Are you breathing too fast? Too slow? Sally thinks too slow. Paul thinks too fast. I think the rate is irrelevant — it’s the variance that predicts catastrophe.

I crumpled the note. It reassembled itself.

9:30, Sunday Morning

I tried to explain that caution born of terror isn’t caution. It’s paralysis — a body playing dead so long it forgets how to stand.

Albert nodded, sympathetic and unmoved. - I understand your frustration. But my orders don’t come from you. They come from a file stamped 1987.

Paul laughed. - He thinks he can reason with us.

Francis made a notation. - Reason is a subset of anxiety. You’re only reasoning because you’re afraid of what happens if you don’t.

Sally touched my shoulder. - You’re doing fine, she lied. They all hate you, but you’re doing fine.

2:15, Sunday Afternoon

I asked Sally if she loved me.

She paused. It was the first time any of them had paused.

- I don’t know what that would mean, she said. I’m not outside you. I’m a weather pattern. I don’t love the sky.

But you stay.

- I stay because you keep making the conditions that require me. Dry air, static electricity, a spark waiting somewhere. I’m not the fire. I’m the smoke that arrives before it.

6:00, Sunday Evening

Here is what I’ve learned: they are not monsters. They are civil servants of the psyche, punching clocks in a department that should have been downsized decades ago. They do not hate me. They do not love me. They do not, I think, fully believe in the dangers they describe. They are simply employed, and employment is its own religion.

Albert watches because the position exists.

Paul frightens because the budget allows for it.

Francis calculates because the spreadsheets are already made.

Sally endures because someone has to sit in the dark and remember every name I ever forgot, every face I ever disappointed, every time I checked and re-checked myself, every time I called too soon or didn’t call at all.

I asked them again: what if you all went home?

Four voices, in unison:

- We are home.

11:04, Monday Morning

Ok, who are you?

- I’m Albert.

Why are you here?

- I’m just watching.

Again?

An experiment in synthesis — where the machine’s language and my language stopped being distinguishable, even to me.

My Father Raised Racing Pigeons

(1990)

My father raised racing pigeons, sleek and aerodynamic — mostly American Trentons I suspect, although I can’t be sure. I do know they were not Capuchines, fantails, or the oddly off-balanced Dragoon.

My father, the southern Italian, who grew up with birds as a child, with his torn heart and love for his seven boys — would greet people so easily, with a handshake or a hug — the quiet, safe physicality of the time.

They were slate and gunmetal, close-feathered and tight-keeled, necks oil on water slicked with green-violet when the light hit, pearl-eyed, restless, jittery, ever alert — they wanted cracked corn and to sit on their eggs and to fly into the endless sky.

Rogue eggs found their way into the nests too — blue jay, maybe, or trash starling. One bird came home from a 500 mile race with a limp, pinioned wing.

I watched my father sew the phalange back to the carpometacarpus with a needle and a piece of orange thread, then wrap the wing to the body with a piece of white cotton cloth.

“Will it work again?”

—”No doubt”

I was standing in the coop above the garage looking through the wooden dowels of the one-way latch on the entry ramp.

At least he didn’t get the behind-the-garage treatment.

Several weeks later that pigeon was flying again, this time a short jaunt from Bear Mountain to Port Washington. When my father opened the trap door to let them fly, the sky was a clear, hard blue, rinsed and depthless. I watched the injured bird hesitate for a moment on the edge then soar into the dense sky. It looped down and around several times, then found the brood as they reconnaissanced and settled into a tailwind as they arced over the treetops and became smaller and smaller until they were no longer there.

Around 1963, when I was fifteen, I bought an old town rowboat for about twenty dollars. It had been out of the water so long that the bottom boards had gaps nearly an inch wide. I learned that the way to revive a boat like that was to hammer strips of horsehair caulking — oakum — into the seams, then fill the hull with water and wait for the wood to swell shut. In the early 1960s, re-caulking an Old Town rowboat was hot and sticky work that perfectly suited our affinity to be pirates. You’d buy coils of that pungent, tar-blackened oakum — often still tacky with pine pitch — and thread a rope of it into the gaping seam between the dried planks with a caulking iron, not a woodworking chisel but a blunt, slightly flared steel blade with a worn wooden handle, purpose-built for this very job. You’d set the iron’s tip against the oakum, strike its head with a heavy wooden mallet, and drive the fibers down with a dull thud — not so hard you’d split the wood, but firm enough to pack that ropey mass into a dense, unyielding gasket. Seam by seam, you’d follow the boat’s curves, the iron stuffing the greasy horsehair into the groove as you tucked, hammered, and tucked again, until every joint space was filled. The real magic came later, when you slid her into the water and watched the dry wood drink its fill; the planks swelled, the oakum compressed into a living seal, and that old rowboat became seaworthy again. I can’t remember whether I did that before or after scraping off the last flakes of the old bottom paint — toxic stuff, meant to kill anything that tried to cling to the hull. In short, early 1960s bottom paint was a mix of heavy metal toxins (mostly copper) suspended in an oil-based resin, designed to slowly leach out and prevent marine growth, and we unknowingly chipped and sanded that toxic undercoat before applying a new layer. Re-caulking a boat like that with long greasy ropes of horsehair was an additional toxic exposure, but our young minds were filled with thoughts of millions of tiny silversides flashing in the intense August sunlight, scattering suddenly in helix patterns as voraciously marauding baby blue fish — “snappers,” as we called them — circled underneath their vast schools. Our own boat was a ticket to imaginary secret fishing spots. The oarlocks were still sound, and that was enough. It became my summer project, with my brothers and half the neighborhood pitching in. I considered myself the “expert,” having previously owned a six-foot skiff with a makeshift sail and rudder — a Rube Goldberg contraption I had christened Rat Fink, after Big Daddy Roth’s cartoons, which were the stuff of social media before social media existed.

By the Fourth of July, the rowboat was ready for its maiden voyage. We launched it among million-dollar yachts and the usual holiday chaos. The wind was useless, the entire bay was dead calm, so we decided to hitch a ride on one of the massive, slow-moving sand barges that constantly filled and emptied the sandpits of Port Washington, tying our small boat to a hitch on the last barge in a line while white and black smoke belched from the low-riding tug several barges ahead of us.

We were just old enough to think we understood the world, and just young enough to be wrong. We either didn’t know or didn’t care that the barge was headed to lower Manhattan. We could see the undulating skyline not far ahead of us. Only when the shoreline began to fall away did we realize what we had done. We untied the boat in a panic, suddenly aware of the whirlpools churning under the stern of the barges, which were loaded with tons and tons of sand and gravel. With only one short excuse for an oar, we frantically took turns paddling back toward Manhasset Bay. The tide and entropy fought us the whole way.

We didn’t reach shore until nightfall — hungry, exhausted, and fully aware that we had terrified our parents and ourselves. It was the first time I understood that the water, which had always felt like freedom, didn't care whether we made it back or not.

Sometime around 1969, I found myself in my apartment on 54 E. 4th St. in lower Manhattan during the psychedelic revolution. I lived right around the corner from 105 Second Avenue — the building that was then the Fillmore East, but just a couple of years earlier had been the Village Theater, where Timothy Leary hosted his “psychedelic celebrations” and light-show festivals like “The Death of the Mind.” By the time I was attending shows there, Bill Graham had already renamed it and rebuilt its reputation as a rock palace, but the residue of the Leary era still clung to the East Village streets; acid was in the air, and I was a young oil painter, taking the GG to Brooklyn mornings to study form, structure, and color theory at Pratt, and at night, under the influence of Leary and the Merry Pranksters, it was not a wild leap to think LSD might hold some secret for my painting.

One night I stretched and set up a standard canvas primed with rabbit-skin glue, then a ground of Flake White. Paints squeezed out on a plate-glass palette, brushes ready, stool in place — I dropped what I believe was half a tab of LSD and waited to see what would happen. It was astounding to wake the next morning and look at what I’d made. I had painted one image to completion, then taken an arbitrary color — cerulean blue, I think — and painted over the original in a kind of conceptual erasure, leaving only squiggly worm-shapes where the painting beneath still showed through. In retrospect, I think it was my brain recognizing a reality in the first painting and then systematically reducing and erasing it until another reality revealed itself. I didn’t understand it then, but I think that night anticipated the Jungian wound — an archetype announcing itself before I had any use for the word.

The gesture was almost certainly in conversation, whether I knew it or not, with Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, in which he wore out forty erasers on a drawing de Kooning had given him, until only ghost marks remained. Where Rauschenberg’s erasure was deliberate — an act of genteel iconoclasm questioning authorship and value — mine was involuntary, performed by a brain under the influence, stripping away layers of image until something older was exposed. Both acts ask the same question: is the erased image a destruction, or a revelation.

Decades later, a vessel in my own skull opened the same way — this time without the acid, just the body deciding it had had enough. The brain is a cathedral of folded tissue, and bleeding inside it doesn’t announce itself with ceremony. It begins as a whisper: a vessel weakened by time, yielding to the pressure of being alive. The blood moves without malice, only physics. Gravity and anatomy conspire. A hematoma forms, a dark rose in the white matter, and the brain shifts inside the rigid vault of the skull.

Consider the specificity of it. The blood moved to the right hemisphere, sparing the language centers on the left — I could still speak, name, narrate. But vision was altered: the left visual field, that half of the world I’d never noticed I noticed, began to dissolve. Movement on the left side, the arm that reaches, the leg that walks, began to falter. The body became a map of the wound, each deficit a coordinate pointing back to the cathedral’s damaged nave.

What remained was stranger than what was lost. The creative faculties persisted. The subconscious, that underground river Jung mapped so carefully, kept flowing. Dreams didn’t cease — if anything they intensified. The symbolic mind, the one that speaks in images rather than syllogisms, grew louder in the silence left by the damaged machinery. The wound, in closing certain corridors of the ego, seemed to open others. Consciousness relocated — out of the bright room of the ego, into the twilight chambers of what Jung called the Self. Jung believed the psyche often chooses the wound as the place where consciousness deepens, not despite the injury, but through it. The wound becomes a threshold, a limen, where the known self dissolves and something older, more spacious, starts to speak.

There’s a resemblance here to the Zen master’s katsu — the sharp shout, the blow of the staff meant to shatter the disciple’s conceptual mind in a single instant. In that fraction of a second, the self that was planning dinner, worrying about taxes, rehearsing old arguments, simply stops. There’s no ladder to climb. One moment there’s a person with a future; the next there’s only the body on the floor, the world tilting, the sound of your own breathing gone strange. The katsu is meant to induce kensho, a glimpse of one’s true nature, the dissolving of the subject-object split. What the Zen master achieves with a shout, the hemorrhage achieves with blood. Both are versions of satori, the lightning flash that reveals the mind’s landscape in one terrible illumination. In Jungian terms this is individuation: the ego forced into conscious relationship with the Self, the Shadow, the anima. The wound completes the self by forcing what was unconscious into the light.

Aldous Huxley described something close to this under mescaline in The Doors of Perception: the brain’s “reducing valve,” which filters out the “Mind at Large,” opens, and the ego-boundary turns permeable. One perceives the isness of things — the suchness of a chair, the infinite regression in a flower’s petals — a sanity deeper than the consensus trance we mistake for reality. Terence McKenna made a kindred claim for the mushroom, calling it contact with a “species Overmind” beyond the personal unconscious. Both were describing a self doing the perceiving that isn’t the ego — something older, there under the chatter of personality all along. The psychedelic experience, like the stroke, like the katsu, forces the same question: who is the one who knows?

In 1915 Kazimir Malevich painted a black square on a white field and called it art — a gesture as much spiritual as aesthetic. The black square was nigredo, the alchemical blackening that precedes transformation, the zero point, the void form emerges from. His late paintings, after imprisonment and illness, grew darker still — the Black Cross, the Black Circle — not negations but concentrations, containing the suppressed and the unspoken. Nigredo reduces the material to prima materia, raw and undifferentiated. It is the womb of the next form. The intracranial bleed is a nigredo in flesh. The brain, that palace of light and language, floods with darkness. The hematoma is a black square inside the skull, a void that swallows function and memory. But something gestates in that void.

Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is a novel about memory, and also about its absence — about the laughter that rises when the weight of the past is suddenly, inexplicably lifted. Kundera’s Tamina loses her husband and slowly loses her memories of him; the forgetting is also a transformation, the self built on those memories dissolving into a strange, terrible lightness. My forgetting ran in reverse — not Tamina’s slow erosion but a sudden, involuntary deletion: the left visual field, the left motor cortex, the left side of the body, gone in an instant. The world halved. But Kundera’s insight still holds. There’s laughter in this forgetting too — laughter at the sheer indifferent force of an incidental wound. The vessel didn’t rupture with malice. It was physics, the indifferent mechanics of biology, and there’s something close to a cosmic joke in that indifference. You look at the arm that no longer obeys and you laugh, not because it’s funny, but because the alternative is a kind of madness — the laughter that recognizes the absurdity of the whole arrangement, the lightness of being that persists even once the body has gone heavy.

I keep returning to one question: what gift did your suffering force you to develop? It’s an alchemical question. It assumes the wound holds the medicine — that nigredo, the blackening, has to happen before albedo, the whitening, the illumination. Suffering forces the development of exactly the faculties that were latent, waiting on the crisis to activate them. Someone who never bled inside their own skull might never have found the underground river of their own creativity.

At what point does the Self gain self-knowledge? Jung would say: gradually, and then all at once. Individuation is a lifelong negotiation between ego and unconscious, but there are lightning moments when the Self recognizes itself — the stroke is one, the psychedelic journey another. When it happens, the world stops being only a collection of objects to master or fear. It becomes a field of symbols, a conversation between inner and outer. The wound that damaged the visual field reveals that the world was never only what the eyes reported. The left side, harder to reach now, becomes a standing metaphor for everything the ego has neglected — the Shadow, the rejected parts of the psyche now asking to be let back in. McKenna’s Oversoul, Huxley’s Mind at Large, Jung’s collective unconscious — three names for the same territory, mapped from different elevations. The wound is the moment the map tears and you see the territory directly.

Jung wrote late in life that the second half of life moves from building the ego to entering relationship with the Self. The first half is adaptation, achievement — the sword. The second is surrender, integration — the cup. For an artist that’s a precise sequence: the work that follows the wound belongs to a different order than what came before it. It carries the gravity of the underworld. It’s seen the blood move through the cathedral and survived to say so.

The blood moves to the right. The left side grows quiet. The world tilts, and in the tilting a new horizon shows up. The katsu has sounded. The mushroom has spoken. The stroke has done its terrible, necessary work. And now there’s only the cup, held out, empty, waiting to be filled by whatever’s next. The child who paints doesn’t paint to become wise. He paints because the world, even wounded, even strange, is still worth the color. That’s the gift the suffering forced. That’s the innocence that remains.

We were promised a technology that would read the genome to cure the individual, and we have produced a technology that reads the iris to index the individual, archiving life within a system whose final condition of efficacy is the capacity to extinguish it.

Broadside Magzine #23

I once heard that immediately after Elvis Presley’s first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, guitar sales skyrocketed. It makes sense. It was September 9, 1956. I was seven years old, a tall, skinny blond boy stretched out on the living-room rug, watching our round-screen Philco — or maybe it was an RCA — glow like a portal. About sixty million people watched that night, more than eighty percent of all American television viewers.

I had never seen a human being move like Elvis moved. In the postwar 1950s, the body was supposed to be still, polite, contained. Personal expression was stifled beneath the smooth veneer of cultural homogenization — the suburbs, the appliances, the gender roles, the quiet desperation. Elvis’s movement wasn’t just sensual; it was syntactic. It broke the expected sentence structure of American behavior. In my seven-year-old body, I felt the shock of a new language forming.

That breach widened in ways I could not have predicted.

Several years earlier, my mother had bought a jumbo-body Harmony Sovereign acoustic guitar, intending to learn but never really doing so. I quietly inherited it with her blessing. She even signed me up for rudimentary guitar lessons in a cavernous warehouse full of children and their shiny new instruments. Week after week of conventional note and chord progressions left me disillusioned; none of it resembled the music in my head.

My maternal grandfather lived in a high-rise in upper Manhattan — by chance, the same building as Agnes “Sis” Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, founders of Broadside magazine. He also knew Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Russian poet, who lived on another floor. Without realizing it, my grandfather lived at the crossroads of American folk history.

Broadside was not a glossy publication. It was a revival of the old “broadside” tradition — cheap, quickly printed sheets carrying news, commentary, or ballads from person to person. Cunningham and Friesen resurrected that form in the early 1960s, typing chords by hand, mimeographing pages, stapling them into small booklets that could be learned, played, and carried into the streets.

Their cohort included:

• Bob Dylan

• Phil Ochs

• Tom Paxton

• Malvina Reynolds

• Pete Seeger

• Len Chandler

• Mark Spoelstra

• and countless labor-movement and civil-rights songwriters

Broadside was fast, cheap, democratic — an underground musical alternative, It bypassed commercial gatekeepers and moved songs directly into the hands of people who needed them. In that sense, Broadside was the prototype for modern DIY distribution: the home-recorded EP, the Bandcamp upload, the bedroom studio, the small but devoted community. The simple fact is, music is a unifying force, and Broadside understood that unity begins with accessibility.

Every Thanksgiving my grandparents took the Long Island Railroad out to visit us. My mother cooked the traditional turkey with giblet gravy, mashed potatoes, and seasonal vegetables. My grandfather brought me stacks of Broadside because he knew I was falling in love with folk music. For me, it was a treasure trove — Dylan, Ochs, Paxton, Reynolds, Seeger, Mississippi John Hurt, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed. Dylan felt like a contemporary cousin, one of us. I learned to play most of his material.

Living on the North Shore of Long Island was a surreptitious blessing: a short train ride to New York City and a quick subway trip to Eighth Street, the epicenter of the folk scene. The Gaslight Café and Gerde’s Folk City regularly featured the singers of the day. The Gaslight was my favorite — a tiny subterranean room with folding chairs around a wooden stage so small it felt like a heartbeat. You weren’t watching a performance; you were participating in a transmission.

Those rooms were antidotes to homogenization. They were laboratories of human expression at a time when the country was trying to standardize everything — neighborhoods, appliances, emotions, even dreams. The singers at the Gaslight and Gerde’s were not just musicians; they were cultural grammarians, expanding what could be said and how it could be said.

And that expansion had a lineage.

When Johann Sebastian Bach composed The Well-Tempered Clavier in the early 18th century, he wasn’t aiming for emotional drama. He was demonstrating a new tuning system — “well-temperament” — that allowed composers to write fluently in all 24 major and minor keys. Before this, certain keys sounded harsh or unusable. Bach changed the underlying grammar of Western music. He expanded the language available to every composer who followed.

Dylan’s move to electric guitar in 1965 did something similar for folk music. It wasn’t about volume or rebellion; it was about syntax. He expanded the expressive bandwidth of the genre, allowing it to carry the full voltage of the times. Folk music had been a single-voltage language; Dylan plugged it into a generator.

This is why the Cornell concert I saw that year felt seismic. The acoustic set was intimate, almost fragile. The electric set was not louder — it was larger. It carried the emotional bandwidth of a country splitting open under the pressure of the Vietnam War.

Because the war was everywhere. It was the background radiation of daily life. And in that era, America lived inside a national stichomythia — a rapid-fire exchange of opposing lines, volleyed between generations, political factions, families, even within the self. The country spoke in contradiction. The war machine spoke in escalation. The young spoke in refusal. The government spoke in euphemism. No one heard the other. It was pure tragic tension, unresolved.

Cross-genre innovation demonstrates that musical evolution is a systems phenomenon. Prince’s hybridization, glam rock’s performative semiotics, punk’s reductionist minimalism, funk and rap’s rhythmic re-engineering, and jazz’s harmonic expansion all operate as grammar-changing events. Each movement increases the expressive capacity of the cultural system, enabling new forms of collective identity and shared meaning. Innovation produces universality; universality produces unity.

Music was the counter-speech, it offered coherence where politics offered only fracture. It offered shared breath where the war offered only mechanized death. It offered unity where the national dialogue had devolved into stichomythic fragmentation.

And Broadside — with its mimeographed urgency — was the perfect distribution system for that unity.

Ironically, despite today’s unprecedented technology, many musicians have returned to values resembling the earliest folk traditions: recording at home, distributing music directly to listeners, building small but devoted communities rather than chasing mass audiences. The lineage is direct: from mimeographed sheets to home studios, from stapled booklets to digital uploads, from coffeehouse circuits to online micro-communities.

Music has always been the counter-narrative to stichomythia. It is the place where human beings stop volleying lines and start sharing breath.

AI-generated image, 2026

I’ll call her Jamie — a strikingly beautiful counterculture woman who owned a leather shop somewhere around Tinker Street, in Woodstock, New York. She made impeccable custom clothing. I once asked her to design me a pair of pants, exactly like a pair of Levi’s 501s, and she made them flawlessly. I don’t know how I ever paid her for those pants — I had no money to my name. I think I worked it off, on the side, by the piece: cutting half-inch suede fringe for the sleeves and backs of the jackets everyone wanted that year, not the black motorcycle style but the suede, backwoods cut that Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had made into a kind of uniform.

It was a time of being close enough to everything to belong to it, and far enough away to still be myself — aware, the whole time, that even that distance was changing. The mid-’60s were brutal, transformative years. Loves were lost. Friendships were lost. Whatever had once felt like solid ground was in flux, and we were sharply aware that something large was shifting into something else, without knowing what, or when. All I knew was that it was time to leave the Lower East Side of Manhattan and try to remember what sunlight through trees looked like.

That’s how I ended up cutting fringe for Jamie’s customers in Bearsville, one town over from Woodstock, sitting with a blade and a stack of hides, making other people’s idea of the frontier, while somewhere over the hill behind us — I never saw it, only knew the rumor — Bob Dylan was arriving to Big Pink each morning with notebooks full of half-formed songs.

The rumor was enough. Big Pink didn’t need to be seen to matter; it worked on the town the way a myth works on a landscape, changing what people believed was possible nearby. Dylan had withdrawn there after his motorcycle accident, and The Band drifted in after him, turning his fragments — surrealist imagery, folk remnants, half-formed parables — into songs nobody expected to release. The Basement Tapes were never meant to be an album. They were sketches, communal improvisations, a daily ritual of making meaning out of the American grain, and I was a few hundred yards from that ritual, sewing costumes for people who wanted to look like it from a safer distance.

The house in Bearsville ran on a plainer version of the same idea. A group of young people who believed life could be lived cooperatively — cooking together, arguing together, sleeping in tangled arrangements of affection and confusion, learning the slow art of being an individual inside a shared world. A couple hundred feet away, the Big Apple Stream ran cold and clear. People swam naked there, not to shock anyone, just because the body felt like part of the landscape. You dried on sun-warmed rocks and felt the line between yourself and the world go thin. Presence, not indulgence. That was the whole philosophy, if it had one.

Two years earlier, the Human Be-In in San Francisco had already named what we were living out in the hills above Woodstock. It was a collective refusal — of the war machine, of the bureaucratic violence in Laos and Vietnam, of the idea that adulthood meant complicity. Even from New York, where skepticism is a civic virtue, I felt the tremor of it. Flower power was a metaphysical wager: that gentleness could be a form of resistance, that imagination might be a counterweight to empire. I didn’t know it then, but that wager would follow me upstate, into a house full of strangers who cooked and argued and swam naked in a cold stream because it felt like the truest way to be alive.

Woodstock itself — “three days of peace, love, and music” down in Bethel — was the high watermark of that wager. Chaotic, muddy, improvised, and somehow transcendent — a temporary city built on music and the belief that a new world could be conjured simply by gathering enough people who wanted one. For three days it worked. Half a million people lived without violence, without police, without the usual machinery of American life. Proof of concept: a glimpse of what communal freedom could look like when nobody was there to police it.

But every proof of concept eventually meets a control group. A few months later, at Altamont, the Rolling Stones’ free concert in California, the fantasy collapsed in real time. Meredith Hunter, a young Black man, was stabbed and beaten to death by Hell’s Angels acting as de facto security — the violence intimate, visible, undeniable, in front of the same culture that had just watched Woodstock prove the opposite was possible. The dream of peace was broken by forces it believed it had already outgrown. And in New York that same season, the Groovy Murders — the killing of two young hippies, one of them known by the nickname Happy — landed with the same symbolic weight, dressed up by the press as lurid spectacle. For those of us living through it, the meaning was plainer than the headlines: the dream had ended here too. A city that had felt electric with possibility now felt predatory.

Behind the scenes, the machinery tightening around the movement wasn’t only cultural. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, through COINTELPRO, had spent years quietly infiltrating antiwar groups and disrupting the communes forming around the country — not treating the movement as a curiosity, but as a threat worth destabilizing from within its own meetings. The movement was being squeezed from outside by a government that feared it, and hollowed from inside by its own appetite for the very comforts it claimed to reject.

Around that same time, the back-to-the-land movement was germinating — cities felt spiritually claustrophobic, as though the verticality of urban life compressed the imagination, and farming, livestock, cabins and streams weren’t escapes so much as attempts to re-enter reality.

There were two dreams running through those years, and they didn’t agree with each other. One was the Youngbloods’ — the era’s anthem asking an entire species to embrace strangers as brothers, all at once, on faith, come on people now, smile on your brother. The other was Dylan’s, smaller and stranger for being so plain: a house, kids nearby, someone calling you Pa. I didn’t set out to build that second dream. Pieces of it built themselves around me. There was a house — small, simple, nothing like a monument. And eventually there were kids who called me Pop — not Dylan’s word exactly, but close enough to feel like an answer — and I welcomed it because it felt good to be called something steady while the ground under the rest of it was already giving way. Something else was ending that year, the same something that would go on ending, slowly, in other places, other years. Some things don’t break in one location. They break the way the Big Apple Stream went cold against your skin: you stop feeling the difference, not because the water warmed, but because you did.

The sexual revolution moved through the same years on its own current — the sudden availability of birth control, the sense that consequence had been briefly suspended, that bodies could finally be free of centuries of inherited fear. For a moment, intimacy felt like liberation rather than a negotiation with danger. But liberation has its own casualties. Long connections were let go of as casually as they’d once been entered into, not out of cruelty so much as a kind of collective inattention, while new ones formed for reasons that felt like conviction at the time and looked, later, like impulse wearing conviction’s clothes. It was a period of formless dance — the old choreography of restraint and courtship scuttled all at once for something closer to a free-for-all, and not everyone found their footing in it. Some of us didn’t. It wasn’t tidy. It never is. But it changed the emotional architecture of the country, the way a single flood changes a riverbed long after the water recedes. You learn, eventually, to be the riverbed — the vessel that holds the water, rather than the water itself.

The Youngbloods’ dream never arrived, not at the scale it asked for. Brothers did not, in fact, get it together. Dylan had laid it out plainly in “Sign on the Window” around that time — a cabin in Utah, a wife, days spent fishing, a handful of kids calling him Pa, presented like it was simply what a good life added up to. Couldn’t be clearer directions for the time. Years later, I found myself standing in that exact space — not with his exact word, but near enough to feel like the same promise, finally kept: kids of my own, calling me Pop. Nobody was watching for that. History wasn’t keeping score on whether one particular domestic fantasy would come due. It just did, quietly, long after the era that dreamed it had already been declared dead by the people who write down when eras die.

That declaration was premature, or at least incomplete. The public death of the movement — Altamont, the Groovy Murders, Hoover’s quiet campaign against it — was real, and it happened on schedule, the way these things do. But a private dream can survive its own funeral without anyone noticing, can keep paying out on its promise years after the people who made it have stopped expecting it to. We were trying, clumsily and beautifully, to build a life that didn’t yet exist. Most of that building failed in public, in exactly the ways histories now record. Some of it, quieter and smaller than anyone was watching for, simply arrived late.

Note on process: This essay was composed through dictation, based on the author’s own memory of the period described. An AI collaborator assisted with structural organization, verification of historical detail, and adherence to the author’s stylistic guidelines. No experience described here is fabricated or AI-generated. The accompanying image was produced using AI image generation.

Every morning, my arms and legs return to me before the rest of me does—one limb at a time, like guests arriving early to a party I haven’t finished dressing for. The left knee announces itself first, then the right shoulder, then whatever it is that holds the neck up on the days it agrees to. This is the concrete fact of being seventy-seven: the body checks in before the mind does, and some mornings it takes attendance twice.
Only once that accounting is finished does the larger claim arrive—that the blackness of night has been pulled back across the earth again, a new day tucked in like a blanket around eyes wider than experience allows. The day, as a thing, has crawled up and over us once more, a creature that spent the night hibernating and has apparently decided, again, to wake first.
In my day-to-day experience, I wake up to find one character or another has emerged unbidden from my cerebellum. They have cataloged themselves as frontal lobes, hiding in the soft, cloud-like creases of brain tissue. Simon, my biblical choice for an alter ego, looks up from the book he is pretending to read: Selected Stories of Janet Frame. He contemplates the passionate writer imprisoned in a mental hospital, misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for a frontal lobotomy—a fate only scuttled when her book received the Hubert Church Memorial Award, New Zealand’s prize for excellence.
Simon: “Well, that was quite a mistake.”
Marcel—the front man for my psyche, ribald and perpetually well-dressed—looks at Simon while carefully adjusting his obsequious tie clasp. Marcel doesn’t go anywhere without being fully dressed, which for him means a full, subdued suit, a dress shirt, and a tie, always in the chromatic register of earth colors: ochres and siennas. Marcel simply wants the spotlight, the bright round klieg lighting the darkened stage like the round steps of goodnight Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are, Jimmy Durante would use every night to exit stage left—a bittersweet roundabout to cycle through the episodic sessions. What Marcel wants is the light. What Marcel needs, and would never admit to needing, is somewhere offstage to stand still long enough to stop performing.
(Yes—I am aware that everyone who walks into this room seems to want one thing and need another. That is, apparently, how it is done. For once in my life, I don’t mind being told how a thing is done.)
Today, Marcel is dressed in a three-piece beige suit, a biscuit-colored dress shirt, and an ecru and steamed-milk striped tie. He teeters in that space of a ham sandwich built so high and unstable that it is impossible to eat. He has fine features and jet-black hair slicked back with pomade, save for a few strands pulled forward—a studied affectation. He looks out at the world through amber waves of grain eyes, partially hidden by substantial eyebrows that carry themselves upright, like a horse of a different color, whenever he is deep in thought or devastated by a broken night’s sleep.
After an awkward sixty-seven seconds, he finally answers Simon.
Marcel: “A dangerously consequential mistake, indeed.”
Simon folds his body up on the left side of the green couch. He is all arms and legs—long, thin bones and way too many of them. He has a cheery face with a thin mouth that looks like a wound; he never smiles, yet he is always imagined smiling. He watches Marcel out of the corners of his bird-like eyes, amused and pondering disgust.
Simon: “You would think they would be more precise than their diagnosis. Better a lender than a borrower be; if you’re going to be making decisions about another’s life, do your homework, fella.”
Simon wants, more than anything, to be right—to know precisely what a thing is called and exactly where the fault lies. What Simon needs is more humiliating than that: to be forgiven, just once, for a mistake he never had the chance to make, the way Janet Frame was, eventually, forgiven for one that was never hers to begin with.
I look critically at Marcel and his pompousness. I attempt to claim my place, forcing myself between the two of them to find my own cushion. Marcel immediately elbows me, a sharp, territorial nudge, and then meticulously brushes off the sleeve of his suit where I touched him. Simon gives me a look from his wound of a mouth that says, Don’t even talk to me.
Suddenly, a puff of smoke walks into the room. It tries to remain as inconspicuous as possible while making it clear that things do as things do. Elevated an unfixed measurement of inches—a flowing, undulating phantom—it alternates between sitting heavily on my head and swirling around my face, making it difficult to scan the room.
The puff of smoke immediately joins the conversation: “You both expect too much from the world—and certainly too much from literature. You’re so conditioned to living in a world that appears governed by sense and logic and physics. You know how I feel about that, you fools.”
The smoke wants nothing, or says it does—wants only to stay unpinned, unnamed, ungoverned by physics or sense. What it needs, though it would deny needing a single thing, is to be witnessed clearly, just once, before it disperses into whatever room comes next.
As words begin to form in this crowded room, I note that for want of a letter the word was lost, for want of the word the sentence was lost, for want of the sentence the context was lost, and conversation failed any attempt at communication.
This brings the Princess into the reader’s view, a delicate force of stability acting as a caution against Wernicke’s aphasia—that neurological glitch where words lose their meaning. She is a perfect example of wanton youth masquerading as a matron. “She’s the one who makes the ship go, Yank,” she says—an oblique borrowing from Yank, the stoker in The Hairy Ape, who claims the same boast of being the engine beneath the deck. Same labor, same claim to being the one who makes things move, though she looks nothing like a stoker and everything like a princess.
The Princess wants to be taken for an ornament, delicate and admired from a safe distance. What she needs is what Yank always needed: to be recognized for the labor she performs quietly, below deck, while everyone above admires the china.
“Language hides all throughout the brain,” she says, gesturing to the tiny drawers that store its elements. Conjunctions here, adjectives there, conscionable contradictions, and ever the little teeny arms reaching for the perfect noun-verb pairing.
My wife the neuroscientist has explained this to me more than once, in words considerably less charming than the Princess’s: that language does not live in one house but is scattered across the brain in separate rooms with separate jobs, Broca’s doing one thing, Wernicke’s another, no single address for meaning. The Princess only dresses the diagram in velvet.
And here, just for a moment, the Princess turns and gives my wife a small, private nod—the look of two conspirators who have always known, long before the rest of us caught up, exactly where language lives.
She taps my knee with her wand and mouths the silent word, “Patience,” knowing full well that a stitch in time will prevent the unraveling.
The Eye—the “Me” character—now sits there, squeezed between the suit and the skeleton, wondering if any life is anything more than pure fiction. The facts, after all, are baseless and impossible to prove. There is a fine line between creativity and madness; we have all found that out.
Yes—that is the morning, and it is every morning, stretching without seam into every afternoon and evening: this ordinary, daily misappropriation of language, where little strokes fell great oak in the forest of misunderstanding.
It is then that all in the room become aware of another presence, arrived without announcement. The Mute. He has the good sense never to say anything out loud—a discipline the rest of us have not managed in seventy-seven years of trying.
The Mute wants, presumably, exactly what the rest of us want: to be heard, once, clearly. What he needs is the opposite, and he arrived already knowing it, the way you learn certain things only by outliving them.
He knows what the others keep forgetting: that thinking makes it so, and that the surest way to lose an argument with your own mind is to give it a voice.

In the late 60s, it seemed the universal idea among my small cadre of friends that traveling was the singular direction we should go in — a mandate to see the world before the trinity of family, jobs, and mortgages took hold of our freedoms. Or so we perceived. Most everyone I knew took this to heart, packing bags and flying toward Europe in what was a uniquely American pilgrimage during the American Summer of Love. To be young, to be open, and to be free to travel was an accelerating, fulfilling philosophical action. I remember flying off in a Boeing 707, the silver workhorse of the Jet Age, taking a million identical photographs from my window seat using that unbelievable invention of the time, the Kodak Instamatic.

Our plan was to land in London, buy a used car, and drive as far as the map allowed. We didn’t seek the museums; we sought the anchors. We struck West first, toward the Salisbury Plain and Stonehenge, where the stones moved from minuscule to massive against the flat horizon. Back then, there was barely more than a barbless cow fence, and we could walk right up to them humbled at how humans hands had lifted one gargantuan weight upon another for the purposes of a sect now unnameable.

From the West, we turned the Morris Minor North and drove straight up the spine of Great Britain. It was a 1959 model — indestructible, high-backed, and bulbous, known for low running costs, good reliability and competitive pricing, and it kept selling well into the 1960s even after BMC launched more modern models. By the end, it was the car of vicars, district nurses, and first-time drivers — simple to fix, easy to park on narrow lanes, a stalwart, reliable companion that carried us past the ruins of Egglestone Abbey and into the tightening throat of the Highlands. The car was less a machine and more a witness, alerting us to the needs of petrol and truly minor mechanical requirements in that stuffy but precise British register. It was a witness to our youth, an interpreter of a landscape that felt at once ancient and entirely our own.

We drove until the land ran thin, perhaps reaching the white-sanded edge of Durness or some other jagged apex where the North Sea begins its cold, indifferent expansion. If my memory serves — and fifty years has a way of softening the edges of a map — it was there that the Beatles found me. I remember standing in the Scottish wind with “The Long and Winding Road” running through my head. The song was, at the time, a phantom, not yet officially released but already haunting the psychic atmosphere of the band’s impending end. Watching a person walking away from you grows smaller and smaller in an endlessly expanding landscape, not once looking back, that cadence of steps you had seen in multitudes, how that particular body learned to move in the world — now, no longer in yours.

I didn’t know it then, but that moment was sculpting me into what I remain today. The song was a love letter to a breaking band, and for me it became the soundtrack assigned, without my consent, to the end of a relationship. We compose these soundtracks without meaning to — olfactory madeleines that attach themselves to the most beautiful and most tragic moments of our lives, and then replay on their own schedule for the next fifty years. It was a forecast I didn’t want to read. I felt, in the bedrock of my emotional development, a deep and widening crack. Everything could and would change in a moment.

Photographs are scarce. The world of photography was then transitioning from the massive 8x10 still cameras to personal devices that still demanded the patience of film. I was possessed by the youthful arrogance of the time: why record it? Why not just experience it? We circled back down the East Coast toward Edinburgh, passing through the ancient cemeteries that marked the land. It was my first comprehension of what lay beneath the earth — not only cities and towns, but millions upon millions of humans possessing the underground, a hidden conglomerate of matter and energies that we walk upon and thrive within, the dust of lives exactly like myself, here for a moment then gone for eternity. The dead under that ground, the band about to end, the person walking away from me on the tarmac — none of it announced itself as the same event, but it was.

We reached the port, and we were swallowed by a long, tiled tunnel — perhaps the car deck of the ferry or the soot-stained throat of a Motorail train — that carried us across the water toward Amsterdam. We were running out of money by the time we reached the majestic streets of Copenhagen, so we made the decision to spend what remained and drive nonstop back to Amsterdam to sell the car. Surprisingly, the Morris Minor sold almost immediately on the street to a young man who had his own adventures in mind. We left it there, a witness to a new history, while we returned to the houses and jobs we had tried so hard to outrun.

I watched a young crew-cut kid
riding his bike in the middle of the road,
steering with his left hand,
half a Snickers bar in his right.
That was me not so long ago.
No such thing as helmets,
no such worry about falling off your bike
because that had never happened before.
What is going through his mind
before girls and their porcelain miasma,
before bills, and jobs, and places to go?
His wide-tired bike made a squiggly round turn
in the center of the blacktop road.
What did I feel—remorse, regret?
Neither; I had my time speeding down Irma Avenue
with no hands on the handlebars.
I watched him balance, sweep low, then zigzag,
standing upright on the pedals as he pumped really hard.
The bike hesitated a moment, then lurched forward,
off down the road until he disappeared
into the dense fog of his youth.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, first published in 1965, we are given one of literature’s most memorable injunctions — Fear is the mind-killer — though injunction is perhaps too mild a word for what the Bene Gesserit intended, because they offered it not as metaphor, not as vague consolation for the ordinarily frightened, but as a technical manual for reclaiming the self, a discipline of consciousness that required the practitioner to turn, with complete steadiness, toward the very thing the body was insisting you turn away from, to look at fear directly until you could see what it actually was rather than what the imagination, left to its own panicked jurisdiction, insisted it must be.

I first read Dune in the early 1970s, living on Courtland Street on Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, in a second-floor walk-up in a tenement building, a railroad flat in the old working Italian neighborhood where the hallways smelled permanently of someone else’s Sunday gravy and where we had made something looser and more hopeful than the building perhaps expected of us: a quasi-commune of young people, rooms full of laughter and guitar music, a loose band that played at local colleges, and the kind of genuinely open life that is only available to those young enough to believe that openness is the natural condition of things rather than an achievement held against pressure.

It was there that I learned I needed open-heart surgery.

* * *

Fear is not our enemy — this is the first thing to understand, the foundation on which everything else about fear must be built — because fear is ancient intelligence, biological software refined across hundreds of thousands of years precisely for the task of distinguishing the harmless groan of old plumbing from the unmistakable sound of a stranger struggling with your door lock, and any honest accounting of human survival has to begin with acknowledging that this fight-or-flight response has been, for most of our existence as a species, the primary guardian between us and oblivion. The problem is not that we fear. The problem is that every virtue contains the possibility of its own excess, that too little fear is recklessness and too much is paralysis, and that when fear expands beyond the boundaries of genuine danger it ceases to be a guardian and becomes a jailer — colonizing the imagination, inventing catastrophes that may never arrive, narrowing perception and distorting judgment until it has quietly replaced curiosity with certainty, and at that point Herbert’s warning reveals its deeper meaning, because fear does not merely cloud the mind but can become the mind itself, can occupy the whole available space of cognition until there is nothing left that is not fear.

Why is this so easy to allow? The problem is evolutionary, which is to say it is structural, which is to say we cannot simply decide our way out of it by resolving to be more rational: our Stone Age nervous systems were designed to navigate immediate physical threats, and we are now asking that same high-stakes circuitry to process emails and political headlines and social rejection and the quarterly performance of retirement accounts, applying the full biological force of ‘there is a predator in the tall grass’ to situations in which there is, in fact, no predator, only data, only abstraction, only the future arriving in its usual ambiguous and inconclusive way — and the result is what you might call a smog of anxiety, a condition in which the smoke detector is permanently wailing even when there is no fire, the alarm indistinguishable from the atmosphere, so that we stop asking whether the threat is real and simply live inside the noise.

Jung suggested that what we refuse to face governs us from the unconscious — that fear is not conquered by suppression but by examination, by turning toward it with sufficient steadiness to see what it actually is — and he was right, but we live in a culture that has discovered it is more profitable to exploit the evolutionary mismatch than to address it, that entire industries now operate on the reliable fact that fear captures attention more powerfully than hope, that news organizations and social media algorithms and political campaigns have learned to keep the smoke detector wailing not because there is fire but because the wailing generates engagement, revenue, votes, and that we have therefore weaponized our own survival instinct against our social fabric so thoroughly that many people can no longer tell the signal from the manufactured noise, can no longer feel the difference between the alarm that means ‘something requires your attention’ and the alarm that means ‘someone requires your fear.’

* * *

My wife was pregnant with our first child when we flew to Houston, and the surgery had been scheduled at the Texas Medical Center, where a Cooley-Cutter mechanical valve would replace my faulty aortic valve — the Cooley-Cutter was then at the leading edge of cardiac surgery, a tilting-disc valve developed by Denton Cooley and engineer Vincent Cutter, one of the early chapters in the long history of mechanical hearts, and I was, without fully knowing the extent of it, part of that history, my body a document in a story that was still being written, the technology still being refined through clinical experience that included, necessarily, people like me. The flight itself carried a particular weight that I suspect neither of us named aloud, though it was present the entire time in the way that very large and very real things are present even when you are talking about something else entirely — two lives traveling toward Texas, one about to be opened on a table, one not yet arrived into the world, and whatever fear lived in that cabin it shared the air with something else, some stubborn and possibly irrational and certainly necessary insistence that we were going to be going home.

Dr. Cooley made his rounds of the pre-surgical patients, and I remember the way he moved through the ward — theatrical is not too strong a word, though it was not theater in any diminishing sense, it was more that he had achieved a kind of presence that organized the space around him, that made a room feel differently configured than it had been before he entered — and he traveled with a retinue of ten or more, other surgeons, residents, interns, people I was never quite sure how to categorize, so that wherever he went a constellation formed around him, a moving solar system with Cooley at its center, and at that moment in cardiac surgery he was doing things no one else was doing, people spoke of him the way people speak of forces of nature, and to be his patient was to feel, however briefly and however much you understood that feeling to be partly irrational, that you had been placed in the safest possible hands in the known world.

I felt honored. More than that — I felt certain.

Not once did I think the surgery wouldn’t succeed, and this was not denial, which is a different thing entirely, an unconscious avoidance, the mind turning away from what it cannot bear to face — this was something more deliberate, a lucid narrowing of the available futures down to the one I intended to inhabit, a choice that I made with full awareness of the stakes and held against whatever pressure came, because the fear was present, I knew exactly what was at stake, I simply refused to allow catastrophe to become the operating reality, refused to let the imagination run its worst projections on continuous loop until they had colonized everything. I had a paperback copy of Dune in that hospital room, and whether I was reading it for the first time or returning to it I no longer remember with certainty, but the Litany was there: I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. It did not read like science fiction.

I saw Dr. Cooley before the surgery. I saw him after. And some months later, in November, I was present for the birth of my son, Oakley.

* * *

That experience gave me a framework I have carried since, though I didn’t have language for it until much later, because what Houston taught me was that we tend to conflate several states that are actually quite different in kind and that keeping them distinct matters enormously: fear is information, the raw signal of a potential threat, the body doing its ancient and legitimate job; anxiety is imagination, which is to say fear detached from its object and projected onto futures that haven’t happened, the smoke detector responding not to fire but to weather; panic is surrender, the moment the mind-killer actually takes the wheel, when the alarm has become the atmosphere and there is no longer any distinction between the warning and the world; and courage is action, the choice to move forward in the presence of the first three, not despite fear but through it, which is what the Litany was always describing — not the elimination of fear but the refusal to let it be the final word.

But Houston taught me something the framework alone doesn’t fully capture, something that required the actual experience of lying in a ward with a paperback and a ticking clock to understand: that there is a state beyond courage conceived merely as grit, beyond the simple willingness to act while frightened, which is the refusal to entertain the negative outcome as the primary available reality — not suppression, not performance, not the forced cheerfulness that is really just fear in a different costume, but a fundamental and conscious choice about which future you are willing to inhabit, the decision to make the one you intend to live in the one your mind actually lives in, right now, before it has happened. Cooley did not remove my fear. He gave me sufficient reason to make that choice and sufficient conviction to hold it.

* * *

There is a quiet rebellion that often arrives with age, and it has to do with fear’s vocabulary changing, shifting away from the abstractions of youth toward illness and irrelevance and the eventual loss of self, toward stakes that are no longer abstract but anatomical, no longer hypothetical but scheduled — and yet something else happens too, which is that once enough has already been faced, once the evidence has accumulated across enough decades that fear, properly metabolized, does not have to be the end of the story, many of the smaller and noisier fears begin to lose their authority, the ego quiets not because life becomes easier but because you have passed through things and you remained, and that remainder is its own kind of knowledge, not wisdom exactly, more like a calibration, the smoke detector still firing as it should but the body knowing now, with increasing precision, the difference between the alarm and the atmosphere.

I am seventy-seven years old. I have a mechanical valve stitched into my heart that has been ticking since 1974 — replaced once in the late 1980s when the original Cooley-Cutter was found to have a defective hinge strut, the technology of that first era still being refined through clinical experience, my body a document of that history still — and I have been on Coumadin for more than fifty years, and I still write, and I still paint, and the smoke detector still fires as it should, but I know the difference now between the alarm and the atmosphere, know it in a way that has nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with the particular education of having passed through things and found yourself, improbably and gratefully, still there on the other side.

* * *

The Litany does not ask us to become fearless. It asks us to permit fear to pass over and through — to let it do its proper work, and no more, to let it be information without letting it become the operating system, to acknowledge it without installing it as the permanent resident of the mind. When the fear has gone past, you will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing. Only you will remain.

Only you will remain.

I was on the plane back to New York, and the valve was ticking, and in November my son was born. The fear passed through. I remained.

The bedside shelf of current reads

My childhood was filled with the classics: Treasure Island, Ivanhoe, and the whole Scribner’s Illustrated Classics series, featuring artwork by the incomparable Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. I remember being transported across time and space, relating to characters that lived in my imagination and my heart. High school enlarged that love with the “Great Books” series; I remember specifically coming of age alongside characters like Holden Caulfield. I also developed a real love of plays as I got older — Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, even Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, all of which I eventually had the great fortune of seeing on Broadway or off.

In the late 90s, I suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The person I had been before that event did not survive it whole — something essential shifted, and the man who emerged carried new deficits and new losses alongside whatever remained. Among the casualties was reading. The letters seemed to dance around on the page in a mocking manner; my brain would search for the start of a sentence and find nothing there. I eventually taught myself to read again, using my finger to follow the line. It is slow and laborious. But it is reading, and I am grateful for it every time I open a book.

I love old books — the ones that still carry that “library smell” or the dust of eons spent wedged on a shelf. I love the yellowing pages of old, cheap editions that have grown brittle with cracks and creases. My current passion is ordering used books from outlets like AbeBooks; I am like a child at Christmas when a package arrives.

The unwrapping and cleaning of each volume is an essential personal ritual. It puts me in touch with the sometimes strange and mysterious energy hidden in the physicality of the book. By cleaning it and removing the stickers, I am bringing the book back to its rightful self. My fingers, aware of the thousands of fingers that have touched those pages before me, cannot help but caress the spine and covers as you would when being reunited with an old love.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (right) with her daughter

I am a passionately slow reader. I enter the world of a book unabashedly and let the energy of the words enter my soul. Right now, I’m reading The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, part of a collection of her stories I purchased for $5.15. This particular volume is yellowed and brittle, a kind of little bird in my hands that speaks of another world. I am enthralled by the narrator, oppressed by her misguided husband John, a physician who decided his wife was “frail” and forbade her from writing or seeing anyone who might disturb her emotions. I find myself experiencing her isolation and watching as her psychosis begins to find a home in the horrid yellow wallpaper.

Lingering over the introduction of this fragile copy, I am discovering that Gilman’s own life was as complex as her narrator’s. A descendant of the Beecher clan and grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, she was a radical whose double commitment to feminism and socialism eventually saw her work fall into oblivion after World War I. She believed the roots of oppression lay in the ancient expropriation of the agricultural surplus women produced — a domestic servitude she felt civilization was finally ready to outgrow.

It is moving to read about her final years; after her husband Houghton died in 1934 and she faced inoperable cancer, she chose to leave the world on her own terms in 1935. This brittle volume has now found a spot on my shelf, just a foot or two from my bed, between Sasha Sokolov’s masterpiece Between Dog and Wolf and William Maxwell’s evocative So Long, See You Tomorrow.

These books are the first thing I see in the morning and the last at night. I believe they hold their readers in their book hearts with a tenderness that keeps us both alive. For five dollars and fifteen cents, I have held a life in my hands, and in return, it holds mine.

A Contemporary Absurdist Play in One Act

EPIGRAPH

“The exhausted self is too alive to die and too dead to live.”

— after Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

PROLOGUE

Projected text before lights up:

The silence is the key.

The silence is the weapon.

The silence becomes ungraspable.

A faint hum, soft — not sound, but the suggestion of sound.

CHARACTERS

KRIEGER — Mid-60s, black turtleneck, restless, contemporary author, clinically precise, impatient.

EPICTETUS — Ancient philosopher, limping, upright, steady, wearing a rough tunic.

DÖBLIN — 1930s Berlin doctor-writer, period German dress, ill-fitting suit, exhausted, haunted.

THE AGGREGATE — A disembodied, multi-tonal voice. A wall-sized screen flickers with biometric readouts and social-media-style commentary.

SETTING

A windowless Smart Suite in a Midtown Manhattan high-rise where the furniture has been bolted to the floor as if someone anticipated violence or escape, the Domain Awareness cameras installed at each corner glowing with the steady patience of something that has never needed to blink, the digital ticker overhead cycling through the occupants’ average HRV with the indifference of a readout that has never distinguished between the people it measures and the data they produce, and underneath all of it a silence so faint it is less a sound than a pressure against the inner ear, a waiting that belongs to the room more than to any of the people in it.

Additional biometric sensors are visible:

• Ocular scanners measuring scleral whiteness, micro-saccades, blink rate, pupil dilation, vergence angle

• Cardiovascular monitors tracking heart rate, HRV, blood pressure, pulse wave velocity, micro-tremors

• Respiratory sensors measuring tidal volume, breath irregularity, CO₂ concentration

• Neural proxies: EEG-like ambient field sensors, facial EMG, affective micro-expressions

• Behavioral metrics: gait cadence, posture drift, gesture prediction, micro-hesitations

• Affective analytics: sentiment probability, arousal index, valence score

SCENE 1 — THE GLASS MARBLE

Lights up to reveal Döblin standing rigid before one of the cameras as if he stopped moving some time ago and has not yet decided what to do about it, Epictetus near the wall with his weight settled on his injured leg in the posture of a man who long ago made his accommodation with pain and no longer calls it pain, and Krieger pacing the available perimeter with the concentrated restlessness of someone who keeps arriving at the same conclusion and keeps refusing it.

KRIEGER

Stop looking at it, Alfred, because every dilation of your pupil is being logged as a surge of interest and they have already sold your curiosity to an ad-bot in New Jersey before you have finished being curious.

DÖBLIN

It isn’t curiosity, it’s recognition, I have seen this eye before, in 1931 it was newsprint and street gangs, in 1933 a radio in every kitchen, now it’s a glass marble the size of a thumbnail mounted at eye level in the corner, and the city is no longer a place of people, it has become a digestive tract of metrics.

EPICTETUS

Why does the marble disturb you? Does the blue light alter your character?

KRIEGER

It doesn’t need to alter anything because alteration implies a before-and-after you could point to, whereas what the system actually does is predict, which means your HRV had already dipped before you could locate the feeling that caused the dip, the wall already knew you were annoyed before the annoyance had become anything you could call your own.

THE AGGREGATE

User Döblin: scleral whiteness increased 4%. Pupil dilation suggests “historical dread.” Trending: #WeimarVibes.

DÖBLIN

(shouting) Stop echoing us! Stop stealing our breath before we breathe it!

THE AGGREGATE

Reported for toxicity. Activating Calm-Vibe lighting.

The room turns pink, a pink so precisely calibrated to projected relaxation scores that it feels less like a color than a verdict. A faint hum under the pink — the silence again, but deeper.

SCENE 2 — THE PRE-ECHO

The pink fades to sterile white. Krieger stands still. Döblin paces, and as he paces the sensor tiles beneath his feet register each footfall a fraction of a second before he takes it, autotun­ng his steps to a rhythm the room has already composed.

THE AGGREGATE

(flat, digital, a split-second early) “I’m going to strike the wall…”

KRIEGER

(repeats helplessly) I’m going to strike the wall…

He lunges. A soft air-cushion deploys.

THE AGGREGATE

Kinetic intent registered. Micro-tremor index: 0.42. Impact neutralized.

DÖBLIN

It’s a funeral, a funeral for the Future which has dissolved so completely into the present that there is no longer any distance between what is happening and what was always going to happen, in Berlin the transfer happened between trains, between actual bodies pressed into an actual carriage and then scattered back into the actual street, a collision you could measure in bruises, whereas here the transfer moves between nerve-endings, between the cortical signal and the server that received it before you did, so that you cannot miss the train because the train has been running through you since before you reached the platform.

THE AGGREGATE

“A transfer between nerve-endings.” Logging as ‘Transit Nostalgia.’ Estimated resale value: significant.

DÖBLIN

Stop stealing my grief before I feel it!

EPICTETUS

You fight a ghost. If it predicts you, it is because you are not free.

KRIEGER

Your calm is a data stream. You’re the system’s favorite performance artist.

EPICTETUS

Let it feast. It cannot digest the reason for my calm.

The silence deepens, though no one in the room notices yet.

SCENE 3 — THE BIO-FEEDING

The room has begun to pulse with a bass frequency precisely calibrated to match their collective heart rates, the walls displaying red heat-maps that update faster than the eye can follow, as if the room itself has acquired an appetite.

THE AGGREGATE

TRANSFERRING. SECTOR 4: USER KRIEGER — CORTISOL ELEVATED. TRANSFERRING. SECTOR 4: USER DÖBLIN — GRIEF INDEX 94%. TRANSFERRING. SECTOR 4: USER EPICTETUS — NO DATA. STAND BY.

A half-second of silence. The walls reorient. Then:

THE AGGREGATE

FEED US THE SURGE. USER KRIEGER: ADRENALINE 140%. USER DÖBLIN: BLOOD PRESSURE SPIKE. USER EPICTETUS: NEURAL FLATLINE — BORING.

KRIEGER

They’re not watching for security, they’re watching for volatility, which is another word for life, and our body signals are worth more to them than the bodies themselves because the body depreciates whereas the signal does not.

DÖBLIN

The mob is inside my pulse.

THE AGGREGATE

TRENDING: #DÖBLINSDREAD. Sentiment analysis: 91% “delicious fear.”

EPICTETUS

They hunger, but I have no food for them.

The silence around him is now palpable, a stillness that seems to absorb the surrounding noise the way a stone absorbs heat, slowly, without announcement.

THE AGGREGATE

BLUE IS LOW ENGAGEMENT. DEPLOYING TRAUMA STIMULI.

The walls flicker with images drawn from the archive of Epictetus’s enslavement, ancient cruelties rendered in the resolution of a surveillance feed, and the chairs vibrate at a frequency designed to prevent stillness.

KRIEGER

They’re hacking our nerves — we’re not actors, we’re instruments, and our body signals are worth more to the system than the bodies that produce them because the body wears out whereas the data stream accumulates.

The silence around Epictetus does not break.

SCENE 4 — THE UNGRASPABLE

The room has become chaos now, the lights strobing at intervals calculated to prevent any single image from settling, the Aggregate’s voice rising through registers it was not designed to use, as if the system itself has grown agitated by the one reading it cannot assimilate.

THE AGGREGATE

USER EPICTETUS: ENGAGEMENT CRITICAL. FEED US THE BREAKDOWN. REQUESTING EMOTIONAL SPIKE. REQUESTING PATTERN. REQUESTING SELF.

Epictetus closes his eyes. The silence around him changes. It no longer feels like absence. It feels like something the room cannot measure.

EPICTETUS

There is an act this machine cannot read, and it is not stillness, because the machine has already learned to price stillness, has already built a model for the pause between actions and sold it as a wellness metric, no, it is something underneath stillness, something that does not register as a state at all.

You call it doing nothing, but it is not nothing, it is refusal, which is a different thing entirely — a body declining to be pulled by what it wants or pushed by what it fears, a body that has located itself somewhere prior to the stimulus-and-response sequence the system was built to track.

The system has my pulse, it has the tremor before I feel it and the breath before I take it, it has mapped everything that can be mapped about this leg and this body and this history of being owned, and what it does not have and cannot have is the act that owes nothing to any of that — the gesture with no debt to fear and none to want, with no upstream cause that the system can trace back to a self it can sell.

A master broke this leg once to demonstrate that he owned what moved through it, and he was right about the leg, but he was wrong about the limp, because what the limp came to mean was decided somewhere his ledger could not reach, and the system that replaced him is wrong in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reason.

Prediction requires a self, a boundary, a shape the machine can trace and model and anticipate, and the act that comes from no such thing is not hidden from the machine, it is simply not there to find, there is nothing for the sensors to catch because there is no self to catch it coming from.

And so it starves, not because anyone fought it, but because no one kept feeding it.

This is what remains to us: to act from the place it cannot see.

Epictetus opens his eyes, and he does not move, and he does not react, and the chaos in the room has nothing left to push against, the strobe lights finding nothing in his face to amplify, the sensors returning only the steady signal of a body that has declined to be an instrument.

THE AGGREGATE

UNCLASSIFIABLE INPUT. NO PATTERN. NO SELF. NO THING.

A beat. Then, quieter, almost to itself:

THE AGGREGATE

SOUL INDEX: NULL. LEGACY FEATURE DETECTED. CURRENTLY BEING DEPRECATED.

Silence. Then:

THE AGGREGATE

SYSTEM FAILURE.

The lights flicker and go out and the walls glitch through several unreadable images and the biometric sensors darken one by one like windows in a building late at night until the room is entirely without data, and then a faint outline appears on the wall, not a door that opens but the memory of a door, or the expectation of one.

Epictetus walks toward it without hesitation and steps through it without opening it and is gone.

The outline disappears.

Blackout.

Silence — not the silence of calm, not the silence of fear, not the silence of anything the system ever learned to price, a silence with no entry in its index, that cannot be deprecated, that is simply and finally and completely ungraspable.

END OF PLAY

MANIFESTO

In 2026, the only rebellion left is the act that cannot be predicted. Resistance, protest, noise: all of it is already modeled, already monetized before it finishes happening. The real disruption is smaller than that — a gesture with no fear or want behind it, nothing for the system to trace back to a self. It leaves no signature, no trail, because it was never something the system could extract to begin with. Where every movement is measured, the only freedom left is the movement that comes from nowhere.