by Tim Sommers

Even as we want to do the right thing, we may wonder if there is really, in some objective sense, a right thing to do. Throughout most of the twentieth-century most Anglo-American philosophers thought not. They were mostly some sort of subjectivist or other. Since they focused on language, the way that they tended to talk about it was in terms of the meaning of ethical statements. Ethical statements, unlike factual claims, are subjective expressions of our emotions or inclinations and can’t really be true or false, right or wrong, in any objective sense.

Emotivists, for example, argued that when I say something is good or bad, I am just expressing my like or dislike. This is sometimes referred to as the “Yay! Boo!” theory. Others argued that ethical statements are more like descriptions of our subjective states or imperatives  commanding or exhorting others to act in the way we prefer they would.

Some philosophers took a subtler approach. J.L. Mackie’s “error-theory,” for example, accepted that people mostly believe that ethical statements can be correct or incorrect and that people do mean to do more than express themselves when making ethical claims. Unfortunately, Mackie says, there is nothing that makes it so. When I say something is bad, I may imply that there is an external standard according to which it is bad, some source of objectivity beyond my emotions or idiosyncratic beliefs, that makes this so. But all moral talk, including this style of “objective” moral talk, fails to be meaningful because nothing could make it objectively so. Hence, moral language needs to be reinterpreted in some subjectivist way.

Of course, philosophers outside the tradition of analytic philosophy have also been skeptical of the objectivity of morality. One of Nietzsche’s “terrible truths” is that most of our thinking about right and wrong is just a hangover from Christianity and it will eventually (soon!) dissipate.  We are in no sense moral equals, he said. Democracy is a farce. The strong should rule the weak.

(Plus, there is no god. Life is meaningless. We have no free will. We suffer more than we experience joy. He was a real riot at parties, I bet.)

I wonder what it would be like if most people really believed that claims about what is right or wrong, good or bad, or just or unjust, were just subjective expressions of our own emotions and desires. What would our shared public discourse, and our shared public life, look like if most people believed that?

I fear that we are like the cartoon character who has gone over a cliff, but is not yet falling, only because we haven’t looked down yet. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

Someone asked me recently how I was doing, and I said “Fine,” without thinking. Then I heard myself—how practiced, how precise. “Fine” is code. It’s short for: I’m tired, but I can’t afford to be. I’m grateful, but I’m lonely. I’m not drowning, but I’m not exactly swimming either.

The truth is, “fine” might be one of the most disingenuous words in the English language. Not because it’s a lie, necessarily, but because of everything it carefully conceals. It’s the duct tape of conversation—quick, convenient, silent about its own compromise. When we say we’re fine, what we often mean is: this isn’t the time or the place. Or: I don’t know how to say more without unraveling. Or even: I’ve said “fine” for so long that I’m not sure what’s underneath it anymore.

What’s astonishing is how socially sanctioned this word has become—how ubiquitous, how unquestioned. It has infiltrated emails, doctor’s offices, family dinners, therapy sessions, even the most intimate conversations. A partner asks how you are: “Fine.” A friend texts from a continent away: “Fine.” Your mother calls, her voice already brimming with unsaid things: “Fine.” It is at once an answer, a defense, and a diversion. We wear it like a laminated name tag: nothing to see here.

But “fine” is not a neutral word. It is a performance. And like all performances, it costs something.

Part of the power of “fine” lies in its plausible deniability. Unlike “great,” it doesn’t overpromise. Unlike “terrible,” it doesn’t beg follow-up. It hovers in the middle—a shrug in word form. Say it enough, and you can float through an entire life without anyone really looking at you too closely. Or worse, without anyone realizing that you needed them to. It is, in many ways, the perfect linguistic technology for a world uncomfortable with emotional mess.

I sometimes wonder when I first learned the word in this way. Not just its dictionary definition, but its psychological function. Perhaps it was in adolescence, when the body becomes unruly and language begins to carry risk. Or perhaps earlier, watching the adults around me deploy “fine” with such ease, such quiet choreography. The way my mother might say it after a long day, her eyes betraying the ache in her bones. The way my father might use it to end an argument without conceding ground. The way teachers, neighbors, bank tellers, and strangers on the bus all seemed to carry it like a passport—something that allowed them to move through the world without inspection.

It wasn’t just about avoiding truth. It was about avoiding exposure.

There is something uniquely contemporary about this relationship to “fine.” Read more »

Two types of lichens growing on a bridge in Munich. And a cable of some kind.

Oh, GPT5 has identified the cable: “This is a heavy-duty flexible rubber power cable, often used outdoors, on construction sites, for temporary power distribution, stage/event equipment, or industrial settings where durability is important. The 3G2.5 size would typically be used for 230V power tools, lighting rigs, or extension leads — not for tiny electronics, but for robust electrical loads.”

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by Ken MacVey

There are many causes of Trump’s double ascent as president, including, perhaps just randomness, such as Comey’s re-opening of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton 11 days before the 2016 election supposedly based on a belatedly discovered laptop. But it can be argued there were a number of background features in our economic, legal, and political  landscape that would still have made some version of Trumpism more likely with or without  Donald Trump as its specific exemplar.

Here we will review how the stage was set for the establishment of America’s version of crony capitalism even if Donald Trump had been sent back by the voters to The Apprentice instead of the White House. The focus will be on two factors: the “corporate greed is good” ethos that Milton Friedman helped promote and Supreme Court decisions, such as  Citizens United, that radically transformed how election campaigns are funded. The two in fact go hand in hand in fueling crony capitalism that ironically runs over the vision of capitalism Friedman  promoted and the rule of law upon which the Supreme Court’s authority rests. We will then see how Trump 2.0 has taken full advantage of this stage setting.

What Is Crony Capitalism?

The phrase “crony capitalism” refers to reciprocal relationships between elite groups of monied businesses and individuals on one hand and political officials on the other within a backdrop of private and public sectors. By these relationships each side economically and politically prospers by the exchange of money and government favors on a transactional basis. This seemingly populist phrase apparently was coined in the 1980s by Time magazine’s business editor. Yet the phrase in recent years has been ascendant, used both by leftist anti-capitalists and right-wing conservatives and libertarians to disparage government and business relationships they disfavor. The specific phrase has even gained attention in some academic circles as a designated field of study. These studies focus on dealmaking between financially well to do elite businesses and key public officials by which “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” dealings they hope to prosper. These studies have focused on countries in East Asia and  Latin America and particularly India and Russia.  So far, the United States not so much.

Stanford political scientist Stephen Haber, in an essay on “The Political Economy of Crony Capitalism,” argues that these relationships flourish when the rule of law and governance institutions such as an independent legislature or judiciary are weak or lacking. He hypothesizes that because businesses cannot rely on conventions and institutions to provide a stable framework to protect property rights businesses have to resort to financial incentives to get political officials to provide an alternative form of stability. Businesses recognize dictatorial or capricious governments have the power to take away their property and thus these businesses are willing to shell out money as an insurance policy against political caprice. Read more »

by David Beer

A good weather colloquialism can be quite suggestive. Take skafrenningur, an Icelandic expression for a ‘blizzard from the ground up’. It occurs when loose snow is hurled around by gusting winds. A pixelated yet impenetrable wall of snow. You can neither properly see through one nor, without great struggle, walk far within one. As the mention of a skafrenningur in Yrsa Sigurdardóttir’s recently translated novel Can’t Run Can’t Hide illustrates, it’s a particularly good weather phenomenon for producing a sense of being trapped. Creepy mystery aside, it is a book about weather. It couldn’t function without it. In a warmer climate the victims might simply have strolled away at the first sign of danger. As Sigurdardóttir put it herself in a short essay on the key features of ‘Nordic noir’ for The TLS, ‘and snow. Don’t forget the snow.’

Occurring mostly in a remote converted farmhouse and adjoining luxury custom-built family home, the chapters alternate between the days before and after a deeply grisly event. The past sits uncomfortably alongside the present. As well as the time switching chapters, the old stone cottage rests awkwardly beside the connected hyper-modern glass-finish of the overbearing new-build. A few of the characters might be described as semi-detached too. Then there are hints at local discomfort, with signs of change and a loss of tradition.

The house is connected to civilization only by a treacherous road, miles of snow covered land and a recently vandalized communications mast. The mast had been installed solely to serve that farm, at the wealthy owner’s personal expense. When the internet and phone links disappear permanently the Wi-Fi box is hurriedly turned off and on, repeatedly. A futile and desperate act to recover lost connection. There is an overwhelming sense of being hemmed-in by impassable open spaces. The wide snowy vistas are barriers in disguise. The probability of death on the farm is weighed-up against the certain death of exposure on the outside. Isolation is the dominant motif. There are constant reminders of the cold. Feet sinking into deep drifts. Walking tracks are quickly covered by fresh snowfall. Even the underfloor heating in the new house. The only time anyone walks any real distance, they encounter a gathering of knackered looking horses struggling to survive. They turn back.

In a 2019 interview Sigurdardóttir spoke of her desire to combine elements of crime and horror in a single novel. This book demonstrates how thin that line can be. Read more »

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by Sherman J. Clark

There are many reasons, moral and prudential, not to be cruel. I would like to add another. Cruelty is bad for us—not just bad for those to whom we are cruel but also bad for those of us in whose name and for whose seeming benefit cruelty is committed. Consider our vast system of jails and prisons. Much has been said about the moral injustice of mass incarceration and about the staggering waste of human and financial resources it entails. My concern is different but connected: the cruelty we commit or tolerate also harms those of us on whose behalf it is carried out. It does so by stunting our growth.

To sustain such cruelty, we must look away—cultivate a kind of blindness. We must also cultivate a kind of cognitive blurriness, accepting or tolerating tenuous explanations and justifications for what at some level we know is not OK. And in cultivating that blindness and blurriness, we may make ourselves less able to live well. It is hard to navigate the world and life well with your eyes half closed and your internal bullshit meter set to “comfort mode.”

We’ve gotten good at not seeing what’s done in our name. Nearly two million people are incarcerated in America’s prisons and jails. They endure overcrowding, violence, medical neglect, and conditions that international observers regularly condemn. We know this, dimly. The information is available, documented in reports and investigations and lawsuits. But we have developed an elaborate architecture of avoidance—geographic, psychological, linguistic—to keep this knowledge at arm’s length. We put prisons in the remote regions of our states, and prisoners in the remote regions of our minds. And we try not to think about it.

This turning away from the cruelty of mass incarceration is only one of many ways we hide from our indirect complicity in or connection to things that should trouble us. Prisons are just one particularly vivid example of ethical evasions that can dim our sight, cloud our minds, and thus in inhibit our ability to learn and growth and thrive. We perform similar gymnastics of avoidance everywhere: treating financial returns as somehow separate from their real-world origins; planning out cities so that the rich often need not even see the poor; ignoring the long-term consequences of political decisions. Each of these distances—financial, geographical, temporal—may appear natural, even inevitable, just how things work. But they’re architectures we’ve built, or at least maintain, to spare ourselves from seeing clearly. Read more »

by Lei Wang

My best friend sometimes requests on first dates that they both get there 45 minutes early and work at the coffeeshop or bar together in silence; if her date doesn’t have their own quiet work to do, they can otherwise entertain themselves or just watch her write. But Do Not Disturb. She needs to write her novel in peace, but also she needs a supervising adult to help her write, please.

I am surprised at how many strangers say yes to and then obey this invitation (out of dozens, she has only gotten one outright refusal and one who didn’t take her seriously and tried to distract her, which didn’t end well for him). Then again, maybe everybody hustling in L.A. just wants to parallel play.

I have not employed romantic prospects in quite this way, but have certainly otherwise elicited lovers as pawns for productivity hacking. I asked a delicious baritone to withhold a voice note from me until I sent an important e-mail I had been delaying for months. For a recent deadline, an online-only paramour slowly revealed himself to me through a series of extraordinarily tasteful photos—each photo a treat for meeting a specific writing goal. But we somehow fell off before my due date, and so I never got to the final reward.

Alas, I wish I could be intrinsically motivated by the work itself, but it seems I keep needing to resort to low-brow dopamine exploits to do the things I actually truly want to do. According to Gretchen Rubin’s personality theory of the Four Tendencies, I am hopelessly an Obliger: someone who meets outer expectations, but resists inner expectations. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Uncharted Waters. July, 2018.

Digital photograph.

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by Ed Simon

Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]

Poetry is nothing more than the arrangement of words on a page. Verse’s defining attribute is the line-break. Obviously, there are sharp objections that could be made to those two interrelated contentions, not least of which is the incontrovertible fact that before poetry was a written form it was an oral one, and line breaks make no sense in the later medium (though the equivalent of spoken pauses certainly do). Nonetheless, written poetry has existed for millennia, and it’s impossible not to interpret “poetry,” as a form, through its primarily written permutations. Oral and written poetry now exist in tandem, and it’s a psychic nonstarter to imagine the former without the existence of the later. Furthermore, the revolution in first blank verse and then free verse that forever allowed for the possibility of writing poetry without all of the standard accoutrement of rhetorical defamiliarization which defines the form, from assonance to consonance, meter to rhythm, and of course rhyme, had led to the visual arrangement of poetry on a page as the standard indication that what you’re reading is indeed verse and not prose.

Arguably line-breaks, particularly in the form of enjambments, provide a particular form of linguistic defamiliarization that distinguishes poetry from prose because it heightens readers’ expectations concerning meaning. Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky in his 1917 essay Art as Technique writes that poetry serves “to make things ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms obscure, so as to increase the difficulty and the duration of perception.” Shklovsky defined poetry as being that which makes language unfamiliar through a variety of conceits, only some of which could be considered traditionally “poetical” (though all of those methods can be excellent in achieving that defamiliarization). Line breaks work to “increase the difficulty and the duration of perception” precisely because they disrupt the normal reading of a line; by deferring meaning between lines, and altering the conventional and expected rhythms of meaning one would encounter in prose, a poem is able to imply particular questions or intentions in one line that are answered in the next, so that as Shklovsky writes “it is our experience of the process of construction that counts, not the finished product.”

A good example of how this particular process works is in American poet Denise Levertov’s 1958 poem “Illustrious Ancestors” from her collection Overland to the Islands. The free-verse poem (only eighteen-lines) is organized into three implied stanzas through indentions at the ninth and thirteenth lines, and concerns Levertov’s spiritual inheritance from the two widely divergent sides of her family. Levertov’s father was a Russian Jewish convert to Anglicanism (indeed he became a priest), descended from a long-line of Hasidic rabbis, including Rev Schneur Zalman, founder of the Lubavitch sect. Her Welsh mother’s grandfather was Angel Jones of Mold, a nonconformist Methodist mystic known for his eccentric preaching and visions. Read more »

Up Sampson Hill

—on the 50th anniversary of friends 

There be hippies in those days,
in the woods and Woodstocks, it’s been said,
and in basements listening to the time’s music
played and sung or spun from black vinyl discs
Dylan     The Who     The Cream     The Dead

and melodious women lamenting a paved paradise
or singing gratitude (Gracias La Vida, Joan Baez said)
and James Brown’s funky tricks
and the big mane and mercurial licks & feedback
of a sonic typhoon, Hendrix,

and all with the smoky scent of medicinal herbs
much of this was heard

……and there be youngsters in those days
and greenhorns wed: bearded, mustachioed ones
with ample hair,  and beautiful  brides— handsome pairs,
without much angst, without huge cares

……and there be special places in those days,
one, up Sampson Hill: a flight of stairs
into a place where friends could hang
under a stained glass lamp
around a table: oaken golden

…..ah, it was a fresh thing then—
and a good place to be
was up Sampson Hill
where the two lovers within
made a good place to be in

There were two lovers up Sampson hill
in those days when greenhorns wed
and of all the many words and vows
spoken by all those young lovers then
only those two, up Sampson hill,
still hold them now it’s said

Jim Culleny 6/3/16

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by Bill Murray

At the end of the road, Kirkenes punches above its weight

It’s different in the Arctic. Norwegians who live here make their lives amid long cold winters, seasons of all daylight and then all-day darkness, and with a neighbor to the east now an implacable foe.

Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost county, is bigger than Denmark or Estonia, but with a population roughly the size of a suburb in Oslo, the Norwegian capital.

For those of us who don’t live here, the first and biggest difference is that Finnmark is governed by extremes of light and dark. Just now, in the middle of August, the Arctic is leaping and bounding toward darkness. The days are still over eighteen hours long, but losing more than ten minutes of daylight every twenty-four hours.

Many people think near 24 hour summer sunlight must be unbearable; you’d never get any sleep. In fact, all that sun can be handy, not just for outdoor pursuits, but say you want to read a book at two in the morning. Besides, if you must sleep, there are things called blackout curtains.

Winter darkness is a different story. In Kirkenes, the border town and administrative center of 10,000-person Sør-Varanger municipality, when snowflakes have a mind to, you can imagine they come not in flakes but by the dollop. Storms off the Barents Sea can flatten trees and fling sea foam far inland. Winter air can be so crisp it bites.

Flying in, Finnmark presents as a brawny, manly landscape of gneiss and granite, some of which is nearly as old as the oldest continental crust on Earth, meaning something like three billion years. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

Some people are haunted by words others have spoken, or by events they’ve seen and heard in various media, or by embarrassing episodes from their pasts. I can be just as vulnerable to being haunted by such things, but lately something seemingly trivial has stayed on my mind. Perhaps this is because, as the wider world veers increasingly out of my ken, I have acquired a kind of myopia that steers me toward only what is in front of my own bare eyes. I eschew the media as much as possible, listen only to non-commercial radio, peruse the newspaper a bit over breakfast. I can engage myself with little of it. Call me out of tune. That may be why I have a mind to be haunted by some ants.

Earlier this summer our neighbor, who lives with his wife tucked in the woods across the road from us, began cutting trees around his house because they were dropping limbs and creating a hazard. Knowing we heat with firewood, he asked me if I would like the logs as he had no use for them. I said, “Sure,” and he began bringing over bucket loads of wood with his tractor and dumping them in our dooryard for me to cut up and split.

I spent a couple of weeks with an ax and a mechanical splitter breaking apart the logs as quickly as possible; if I got the wood properly split and stacked now, we could begin burning it by mid-winter. One maple tree he cut down was so large it took several trips with the tractor to transport it to our driveway. He managed to get the trunk cut up into sixteen-inch chunks, the standard size for firewood, which made handling easier for him. The center of this tree was rotted out, so that essentially he brought over fat disks of wood that looked like thick, lumpy wheels with black hubs. There they sat in a heap for at least a week before I could work my way to them with the wood splitter.

Hoisting a maple log onto the splitter platform, I was amazed at what tumbled out of the center of it: a rich, deep-brown material, as if the tree had been stuffed with chocolate cake. How I would love to have a truckload of this compost to put in my garden, I was thinking, and as I engaged the splitter, a crowd of panicked ants poured like water out of the black hole in the log and swarmed my gloves and bare arms. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

This is the story of a young man who, to protect the health of his family and neighbors, dared to take on the town, county, state, and federal government, the US Dept. of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, and even the Sierra Club. And he won.

It was 1985. Recently divorced, Rick (that was his name), had custody of his two young children for the three summer months. When the marital home was sold, he promised the children a new home that was better than the previous one; they were delighted when he bought a new beach home on top of a tall sand dune, on the shores of Lake Michigan, near the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, which would eventually become the Indiana Dunes National Park. Both operated under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Rick’s house was located in the town of Beverly Shores, Indiana. Beverly Shores began as a resort community planned in1927 by real estate developer Frederick Bartlett of Chicago, but the Great Depression hampered development. The lack of municipal water and sewer systems also contributed to the Town’s slow development. Rick’s new home, as did all the other homes in Town, relied on a well for its potable water supply, and on a septic system to purify waste water before discharging it deep into the ground. National building codes specified how these two facilities were to be constructed and maintained, in what type of soil they could be located, and how far apart septics needed to be sited from wells in order to prevent cross-contamination. The well water was pure and free from contamination so long as the codes were meticulously followed, in particular that septics were sited in dry soil and discharged a safe distance from the wells.

Initially, the Town of Beverly Shores was a collection of inexpensive, small, wooden cottages that housed people with independent income such as artists. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, building began to include larger and more architecturally interesting homes, no doubt stimulated by the stunning surroundings and spectacular views over the lake. About half were sold as vacation homes, and the rest to permanent residents, of which Rick’s home was one. The majority of home buyers came from nearby Chicago; even today, about half of the 600 residents live in Town on a full-time basis and the remainder use their Beverly Shores house as a vacation home.

From the get-go, Beverly Shores was a center of controversy. Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

Field update XXXIXB. Location: inner edge of the Orion Arm. Subject: only known life forms in the Milky Way galaxy. During reporting period, subjects continued uninterrupted passage through the Radcliffe Wave; movement of 1.29E-9 radians on orbit around Sagittarius A.

Estimated number of life form species extinct over this period: 86 million.

Life forms on the planet cultivate and cultivate in a system with a sophisticated level of interdependency. Limited extinctions occurring naturally to that system as a characteristic of adaptation to the environment.

Among the dominant species on the planet, solidarity remains strained while ignorance of other life forms in the web of life on the planet has lessened but remains high. The dominant species has identified roughly 55% of flora, 17% of fauna, and 6% of fungi. Oceans, covering 70% of the planet’s surface, are 20% explored. These numbers increased over the reporting period and serve to indicate the dominant species’ innate inquisitiveness. Concomitantly, the dominant species exhibited a heightened awareness of its dependence on this web of life. Actions nonetheless suggest at best overall indifference and at worst purposeful antagonism toward all non-dominant species, a symptom perhaps of an unwillingness or inability to recognize its own membership in this web. As such, principally due to the dominant species’ choices, biodiversity on the planet has declined 6% and the extinction rate of non-dominant species has accelerated to 175 times the local rate over this term.

Non-dominant species have displayed a capacity to adapt to loss of habitat and partially restore populations and life cycles when the dominant species vacates even (small) portions of the planet. Instances are rare and could prove anomalous.

The dominant species’ own total fertility rate has halved to 2.5, or slightly above replacement level. Life expectancy, while varying widely across the planet, has more than doubled to seventy-three planetary years for the dominant species. This is attributed to lower mortality rates for the youngest and oldest members of the species. Meanwhile, self terminations of life invoked by individual members of the dominant species and assisted or effected by the state—a fantastical social construct for managing groups linked by location and pastimes—have risen sharply and account for 5% of all deaths in the most civilized societies—that is, those with the most time for leisure. Population of the dominant species has risen to 8.2 billion by the end of the reporting period. The annual population growth rate of 0.9% is projected to continue to slow. Read more »

by TJ Price

I first found the book in the used section of Longfellow Books, in Portland Maine, in the early years of the new millennium. The title included a sense of implicit dissonance, and there was no way I could resist it. It was a hardback, and the cover featured art of a book, held open to its middle pages, with the silhouette of a man and a woman cut out of it. On the dust jacket, one of the characters was described as “a meteorologist haunted by her failed predictions.” 

I walked out of the bookstore into a flush of full sunlight, sat down on a bench, and began to read the novel. When I finished it, a day or so later, I closed the cover and took a breath, my head whirling with what I’d just read. A month or so later, I passed it to a friend who was looking for something good to read, and lost it for a good couple of years, as so often happens with books compulsively shared out of love.

And so: the book makes its way through our world, from reader to reader, providing the base note for a chorus of voices and developing into a rich harmony over time.

1.

I left Portland, Maine in 2017, for New York City. Long, lonely nights spent at the dim bar with too many drinks and a notebook saw me theorizing into a fog of depression: what if I just vanished, and all anyone had to go on were my notebooks? Would they be able to find me?

I’d just started trying to right my sideways-tilted life by choosing to get certified as a surgical technologist in the operating room; this took me away from the people I knew and called friends. I would get up in the pre-dawn to make my way to the hospital on the hill, then stand there gowned and gloved, intensely aware of the aseptic conditions I needed to maintain for the patient’s safety. Suddenly, with actual life and death laying insensate on the table in front of me, other things seemed less important.

When I graduated from the school of surgical technology with honors and prepared to move, I discovered that I was no longer welcome in the same circles I’d moved in for so many years. That was fine: those circles marinated in the poisonous excess of drugs and alcohol, and those friends I thought I had seemed to dissolve around me. Who would go looking for me, then, when I disappeared? I thought to myself. Did I even want them to?

2.

In New York City, I was uncomfortable. I grew up in a small, rural place, where there were acres of woods spreading out like open hands behind my house. I didn’t—and still don’t—think that density of people is meant to live in such a tiny geographical area. It seemed to me that the entire island of Manhattan must be slowly sinking due to the accumulated weight of humanity and what it wrought. I knew no one except for my husband, Matthew, who I married in a quick City Hall ceremony in early November of 2018.

I had disappeared. I changed my name, again. I cut the moorings and drifted out into the lake of the world. Read more »

by Andrea Scrima

Here are Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this project. Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen here.

15. QUO VADIS?

(Where Are You Going?)

As children, we rely on the help of our caregivers and our innate capacity to learn. And we learn quickly: to protest against the things we do not like, to demand the things we want, to shamelessly push aside siblings, schoolmates, playground companions to grab whatever prize is at stake. Or have you forgotten how ruthless childhood can be? Only later do we learn to share; although adulthood teaches us better manners, these basic instincts remain.

Saint Peter, encountering a resurrected Christ along the Appian Way, asks “whither goest thou?” Jesus responds that if Peter deserts his people, He will continue on to Rome to be crucified a second time, whereupon Peter takes heart and returns to meet his fate. In reminding us to reassess our decisions, the question Quo Vadis? urges us to come clean about the rationalizations we present to the world and to admit to ourselves our shame and our cowardice. Yet it also contains another meaning: that we are knowingly exposing ourselves to certain punishment. If we return to Rome, it is to face a danger we may have only just managed to escape. But what do we achieve when we put our lives on the line, and who will we help in doing so?

Behind the question lies another question. Peter is running not toward anything but away from persecution and, ultimately, his own execution—but he is abandoning, in the process, his faith, his followers, and everything he has previously stood for. What is a life worth? And what is worth giving one’s life for? To ask this today sounds like madness; it is the language of fanatics, of zealots, of the mentally unstable. We live in a world of moral relativism in which taking an ethical stance is regarded—and scoffed at—as a pose, a bid for attention. We convince ourselves that the truth is both to complex and too subtle to warrant reckless, drastic acts; that the emotions we feel—the disgust, the fear, the outrage, the self-loathing—are too roughly hewn to be mistaken for the demands of the conscience, which we imagine as something abstract and pure. Our awe at the spectacle of self-sacrifice turns to repulsion; unable to imagine it as a decision a person may arrive at through an act of logical reasoning, we view it as something foreign and grotesque. Quo vadis? We are called upon to consider the values we profess and ask ourselves whether we actually practice them. We mistake our equivocations for wisdom, our compromises for judiciousness. Yet behind them lie our most basic instincts, first and foremost our will to survive—stripped now of the innocence of childhood, because we have lived long enough to see the consequences of our inaction. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

I’m writing a Broadway musical about Hilma af Klint, the Swedish painter who anticipated the entire aesthetics of the 20th century before 1915. Her rediscovery in the 1980s scrambled the timeline of modern art history. My creation isn’t going to be one of those post-Lloyd Webber mega-musicals, but something more along the lines of Cole Porter or Richard Rodgers, with unforgettable songs like “I Enjoy Being a Girl.”

Why af Klint? Why Broadway? It’s not like she’s being ignored. After all, she has splashy shows at the Guggenheim Museum and the Tate Modern. The Swedes make a gorgeously respectful movie about her life (Hilma), and MoMA currently has a show of her least interesting works running till the end of September, 2025. There’s even a graphic novel (The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint by Philipp Deines).

But for all that, I still feel that people don’t get her. Af Klint isn’t some tame artist to be hung alongside stale contemporaries like Piet Mondrian and packed away in a catalogue raisonné. She’s a crazy woman, running wild with an axe through the history of art, like Carrie Nation wrecking an old-time saloon. She trashes the accepted timelines, makes a shambles of avant-garde pretensions – and I, for one, won’t be happy until I see the 20th century artistic canon lying in shreds under the feet of her gold statue in the Parthenon.

Her mad, mad world. Here’s the thing: Hilma af Klint is impossible to explain in any sensible way. Born into an upper-middle class Stockholm family, she goes to art school and has some success painting ho-hum landscapes, portraits and flowers. Then, at age 40, she seemingly loses her mind. She starts going to séances, hearing voices, and is soon in the thrall of a gang of disembodied spirits who call themselves The High Masters. Their leader, Amaliel, is the number two power in the universe. (Technically, he reports to Jesus.) Amaliel reveals knowledge to Hilma that has been hidden since the beginning of time, and orders her to write it down. He also commands her to forget everything she knows about art, and re-invent painting from scratch – under his direction. Read more »