On Pnin, Isaiah Berlin, and Alexander Gerasimchuk

Alexander Gerasimchuk
November 13, 2024

On the pages of witty Nabokov the following unfolds: Professor Timofey Pavlich Pnin goes about the delightful task of Pninizing his new quarters (the tenth in ten Falls). He stacks the collected works of Lermontov on the rickety bookshelf in the corner, places down the ancestrally held heavy gold lamp with green shade, which every Russian must possess, and ceremoniously installs on the bedside table, as a kind of guardian of his sleep, his copy of Anna Karenina holding much Pninian wisdom in his hieroglyphic annotations. Less than six months after this “house heating” effort he is asked to leave by his landlords for their daughter returned home and demands her room back. This is the story of the Russian émigré, and it yet persists. We live in an age of liberal democracy, of the United Nations, and yet, the stateless Russian emigre, disenfranchised and oppressed on the intellectual plane more than on the physical continues to roam the West. In my own boarding school room, the green lampshade; Pnin on my bedside table, and a friend reciting Brodsky in the original carry the spirit of the emigre into our modern community and, painfully, into my heart. What does it mean to be in exile? Physically, it means to be unwillfully removed from one’s country and unable to return. Bolshevik troops marched all over Isaiah Berlin’s1 ancestral home; war and radicalism prevent me from visiting my childhood dacha. But to be an émigré is more. It is to encapsulate one’s culture in one’s being. In the case of Pnin it is to do disctictly Russian things which have become Pnininisms: to read Lermontov, to use the, outdated, patrimonial as a means of address (of course dorogoy Timofey Pavlich; pogalysta podayte mne eto Alekasdr Mechalich), to sit underneath the green lampshade and drink chai. To be an émigré is a long Slavic tradition: Isaiah Berlin fled in an orange crate; Alexandre Kojeve, the Hegelian Scholar, although born in Ryazan, lived in Paris all his life; and Vladimir Nabokov, who taught at Cornell not his native Moscow, wrote Pnin about himself; Alexander Gerasimchuk. These people were eternally stateless without the protection of a commonwealth. They always faced and continue to face prejudice, xenophobia, and exclusion. Not fully Russian—for they, through opting in or being co-opted, became members of their adoptive societies—but not seen as fellow citizens of those either. Nabokov did not achieve tenure; Berlin (while working for the Foreign Office) was accused of being a spy. Eternally stateless, they form an intellectual state of their own. How does this state-building exercise manifest? Milan Kundera’s Ignorance explores the construction of the city on a hill which occurs in an émigré’s mind. If my country has moved so far away from my own principles that I scarcely recognise it, if it implemented systems of political and economic organisation that do not recognize me as an individual, I can no longer be a part of the country on an intellectual level. My thinking has been deterritorialized and made stateless. I must therefore build my own country on the plains of my imagination. This country often amplifies the things that I, as the émigré, consider important and which I no longer have. The concept of a dacha, a rickety wooden summer home perpetually occupied by one’s grandma, is one such thing. From Pnin to me,dacha activities remain unchanged: a ‘summer shower’( a vat of cold water left in the sun) after swimming in sea; drinking strong black chai and playing durak on a summer evening; listening to stories of neighbourliness and good-natured simple mindedness of the soviet union in the stories of my grandparents and movies like Brilliantovaya Ruka. I have never experienced the soviet lightness of being they talk about; or Pnin’s summer evenings in Tsarist Russia, yet these moments make me feel with a memory as though I have . Kundera aptly makes it clear that while I convince myself in my state of emigration, that the empirical experience of the home country is indeed what it was and what it could be, it is simply not the case. When Irena returns, she finds Prague to be dreary, the women to be fat. She finds Slivovitz to burn the throat. The state of emigration is a state of fiction. It is also a dual state of absurdism and the attached melancholy that goes with it. There is a shadow behind the heart ( title for a bad novel?) in the shape of Odessa, and it shall forever be there. Whenever the civilised world feels unwelcoming and unwelcomed, I recollect an imaginary experience of some dignified elder Odessans sitting around a table, telling each other anecdotes, and speaking in a rather charming slang—which includes words of rather unknown provenance such as friar (not a religious official but a person who shows off) and tudoy (both a geographical and a moral direction)—and a visceral melancholy of loss, also both geographical and moral, descends upon me. A realisation that one is alone in space, culture, and time, however, is also quintessentially absurdist. Each émigré creates an ontologically different culture, for they evoke and construe different parts of their memory to create a unique city on a hill. The beacon of that city then drives them in their new life as a member of their adoptive society but not of its world; a memory of their old life but not how it looks like now were they to stay. To be an émigré is to rebel against circumstances which prescribe loss and poverty; it is to mobilize space rather than be neutralized by it. Is an absurdist attitude to being an émigré (which smacks of optimism) justified? Pnin gets driven out from his department and gets hit by a bus. Russian literature in exile has the trope of death, defeat, and humour; Pninism and Pninian English are absurd to the American reader and Pnin “a pathetic savant.” as per Mrs. Clements (wife of American academia incarnate), and that is Nabakov’s point. Yes, this man is charming and he is defeated—be sad about it or don’t be but that is what it is. But it mustn’t be. Pnin is unique in his mannerisms and episteme that he occupies. Pnin/ Nabakov or indeed Berlin or even myself must be seen not as victims of circumstance but as rebels against cultural narrow mindedness. As I walk down College Hill, the city on the Hill of my Odessan past; Grecian upbringing and British education behind me blend with the present context of the new world; excitement; opportunity. This brief moment of confluence between the heavy past and the heavy future, paradoxically,produces an Empowering Lightness of Being. This moment is what I strive for.

On Friendship and Forgetting

Elsa Eastwood
November 9, 2024

She was the best friend of my dreams. The guaranteed birthday party invite, the future bridesmaid and godparent to imaginary children. We wore unicorn shirts on every Twin Day. We played a duet at every piano recital and ran barefoot between our neighboring houses every summer, whispering about the boys in our class that we loved and intended to marry. I never doubted that it was forever. Our magnetic friendship necklaces deemed that inevitable. She transferred to the girls' school far away; I went to public school. A uniform replaced her Justice leggings, and she didn’t want to be silly anymore. We still saw each other, but stories grew littered with irrelevant names, and the minimal overlap between our interests and circles made it hard to keep things the way I wanted them to be. Her talk of parties and mine of marching band competitions drew only blank stares between us. By the end of high school, we could not have been more different—a fact that made the over-brunch realization that we had committed to the same college even more shocking. We visited for a weekend together. We met for a few meals and introduced our reluctant roommates. Yet somehow, courseloads and travel and changing seasons accompanied the further fading of our friendship, and in a world of 3,000 people, I still ask myself how we became strangers, how a longstanding bond could be reduced to a smile in passing. I think the true tragedy lies in how our evolved relationship blinds us from what it once was. My lens is perpetually clouded. I look for clues in recital footage and our covers of early 2000s pop songs, wondering whether relics of the past can reveal what I seem to have missed, whether we reconstruct the memories of friendships once they’re lost. I try to recognize us in old photos, histories preserved on glossy paper. Had the loose thread been there all along, hiding behind these small faces? Can retrospection ever help explain a dissolution? Perhaps she holds the answer I’m looking for. The mysterious moment in which we lost all ability to relate, a sentence or a sense of self that escapes my recollection. Perhaps her memory is the other half-heart necklace whose absence renders my phrase incomplete. Her boyfriend walks by me now. I don’t know what she sees in him.

Simulacrum

Anna Zulueta
November 4, 2024

The year is 1925. The war is over. The depression is yet to come. Cauliflower and broccoli are aboard a ship to America, like two hopeful lovers. My grandma is nine years old with golden hair. She’s living in Wisconsin with Uncle Doc, Auntie Dee, Aunt Patty, Oma Olga, and Opa Raymond. My father’s family is in the Philippines, where the country is still under American rule. In Wisconsin, it is important to have bread and butter at every meal. Homemade, of course. It is dairy country, and my grandpa wakes up at 5 a.m. to milk the cows before he goes to school. My grandma lives in town, so this is not one of her chores. In the Philippines, it is important to have rice at every meal. My dad is the youngest of eight, and has to eat quickly, or else there will be no rice left for him. Heart disease runs on both sides of my family: my Opa passed from leukemia when I was a baby, and there is diabetes and high blood pressure on my dad’s side. Enter: cauliflower. Cauliflower is lower in carbohydrates than rice, and, critically, it can be sliced into small cubes to resemble the staple. It’s also pretty bland and absorbs flavor well, just like white rice. This method of preparing cauliflower is called “ricing,” and the dish itself is “riced cauliflower.” Because it looks and, to some extent, tastes like rice. I think my mom was the first to find it, in the frozen vegetable section of the grocery store nestled next to the broccoli (looks like they stayed together after all these years). Five minutes in the microwave, and out comes a low-calorie, low-carb rice substitute. This is what I would eat growing up, and now when I go home: not rice from a pot-bellied rice cooker, but riced cauliflower. Actual rice is reserved for special occasions: holidays, restaurants, particularly strong cravings. For when my dad makes vegetable pancit and chicken adobo. For birthdays, and maybe Easter or Christmas. I was talking about this with a good friend of mine, who, like me, is Asian and white. She asked me, “Why not eat brown rice?” I was stumped at first, because we did eat brown rice sometimes, just not as often as riced cauliflower. And I think the answer is the calorie count: brown rice may be higher in fiber, but cauliflower is lower in calories. And then there is the quality of simulacrum. Simulacrum: to be the same but not the same. And that is where riced cauliflower’s strength turns into its weakness. It is not rice, it only looks that way. I, of course, do not have the advantage of cauliflower: I do not look Asian. Neither do I look particularly German. I did not inherit my grandmother’s blonde hair and sky-blue eyes. This is something that my sister, who is adopted, and I have in common: neither of us looks like our parents. So I’ve searched over the years, starting in my own body, looking for something to tell me who I am. It’s the same search that drives people to take genealogy tests, and those companies know it—they lean into the rhetoric to suck people in. Those percentages won’t tell you who you are, I think. But still I examine my hands. See those wrinkles? I get them from my mom’s side. Look at the width of my fingers. They’re narrow like my dad’s. My hair is something of a conundrum: for years I thought I got my waves from my dad’s side. Its color is like that of my skin—somewhere between my parents’. But the waves, where are they from? My dad, whose hair is straight and black, claimed that he had wavy hair as a child. But visiting my Tita Aida, my dad’s oldest sister, a few summers ago proved otherwise: rare baby pictures show him with straight hair. My mom usually straightens her strawberry blonde hair, but one day after she let it air dry, I realized that her wave pattern is the same as mine. I’ve become more at peace with it over the years. But there are still things that nag me: When the first question people ask me after I tell them I’m Filipino is whether I’ve been to the Philippines. When their next question is whether I speak Tagalog (like this is the only language in the Philippines). Or when their reaction is “Well, you don’t look Filipino.” This last comment usually comes from other, older Filipinos, followed by an explanation from me of my German heritage, followed by a slightly colorist remark from them complimenting my complexion. Feeling like a simulacrum is part of what it’s like being in a diaspora and part of what it’s like being multiracial. Whether you claim multiple heritages or live in a culture that’s different from your family’s, you have to navigate multiple cultural contexts. You might feel like an impostor, like you’re not enough, or not authentic. Simulacrum. Is it a coincidence that the friend I mentioned earlier, who is white and Japanese American, was the only one who didn’t bat an eyelash when I mentioned riced cauliflower? That when I told her about this essay in her apartment kitchen, she just said, “Oh yeah, I eat that, too”? Perhaps it is just that: coincidence. She did, after all, have a rice cooker chugging merrily away on the countertop. 🍚 Simulacrum: to be the same but not the same. To want to be the same? To be forced to be the same? Simulacrum carries notes of assimilation, too obvious not to mention. The classic lunchbox example: immigrant children begging their parents not to make “ethnic” lunches because they are “too smelly.” Because it will make them stand out. Because America can accept your money but not your identity. During the days of FDR, accessing social welfare programs required one to be American, that is to say, to show that they have mastered white American culture. Societal messages exhorted Asian Americans to join the melting pot by erasing their heritage. Throw in your sisig, your balut, your Bratwurst, and out comes the perfect American chicken noodle soup. Affirmative action programs opened public schools to minorities, where students were taught to be American in a certain way, a white way. And not just any white, but a specific American white: in those days after the World Wars, my mother’s family started hiding their German language for fear of being taken as the enemy. This is one type of assimilation. Yet just forty years later, Reagan tax cuts discouraged this melting pot kind of assimilation: the state wouldn’t care for you anyway, so no need to perform. People kept their culture now because they could. The distinction between assimilation under Roosevelt and Reagan is not my idea; I came across it when I was reading Anna Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World, which describes the journey of the matsutake mushroom, from forest to plate. Tsing shows how coercive assimilation (FDR) and neoliberal multiculturalism (Reagan) shape the Asian American experience, explaining the difference in culture between Japanese American Nisei and Southeast Asian American mushroom pickers. The Nisei belonged to the older generation of FDR assimilation, and their lifestyle was similar to what Tsing herself grew up with: striving towards the “model minority” myth. The Mien mushroom camps, however, were full of more recent immigrants and reminded Tsing of China and Borneo rather than Asian America—the food and languages recreated home rather than recreating a “poster” America. Seeing Tsing’s explanation of something I had long wondered about—how the Asian American experience is different for different generations—helped me understand some phenomena in my own life. For example, why so many of my Chinese American friends went to Chinese school, and why there was a Japanese school that used my high school over the weekends. But it didn’t quite explain why there was no Filipino school. That has another history: American colonization. America doesn’t like to admit that it is an empire. Not only is it on stolen lands, but it also has overseas imperial holdings. While the Philippines received its independence in 1946, Guam and Puerto Rico, the other islands the U.S. took after the Spanish-American War, remain territories today. In the 1940s, when my mother’s family was hiding their German under FDR, my father’s family was learning English under American rule. This, too, affects my cultural upbringing. In today’s world, I feel that there is pressure to show your heritage, prove your membership. Let me see you eat rice. I am not entirely sure where this comes from. Many places, I suspect, but likely the racial reckoning of the last few years plays a key role. Is this something people are using to avoid facing their guilt? Some flavor of “If I am a minority, I cannot be racist.” Then there is moral policing of another kind: If you assimilated, you are bad, you gave in to your oppressors. Other voices say: Don’t you know that was how we had to survive? Or: Don’t you know that was my choice? Why do only some people have the luxury of choosing when they make their personal political? Let it be known: these barely scratch the surface of assimilation stories. 🍚 I eat more rice now than I ever have before. I still don’t eat a lot, just more than I have in the past. In part, this is because it is easy for me to acquire East and South Asian food through Brown’s meal plan. In part, this is because my partner is Chinese. If we continue building our lives together, I suppose rice will take on new meaning through our cultural fusion. I spent the summer of 2022 traveling around the U.S. visiting family. After losing my Oma and great aunt the previous fall, I realized how important family was and how you never know how long you have with someone. Concurrently, I realized how little I was connected to my Filipino side compared to my German side. While I don’t blame my parents, these facts were results of how they chose to engage with their families, heritages, and their children. Parenting is hard. Part of growing up is realizing how you are different from your parents. And also how you are similar. During my first semester at Brown, I felt like I was floating, untethered. A first-year college student away from home with no living grandparents, my feet barely scraping the ground. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but it was as if everyone had been airlifted from their previous life and dropped onto Brown’s campus, like the rest of the world didn’t exist. As the semesters went on, I started to feel my new life becoming more integrated with my past. College is a crucible of identity formation, and just because many people go through it doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. Simulacrum: to be the same but not the same. Isn’t this just how life works? As each moment passes, you are the same but not the same. You are a tiny bit older. You are a tiny bit changed. We are all ships of Theseus, sailing the seas of our lives. We can’t eat the same cauliflower twice. Maybe, then, we are all simulacra.

True Blue

Riley Stevenson
October 28, 2024

I am so in love. I thought it loudly, letting the words play through my fingers as they danced in the icy wind streaming through my window, numbing my hands, chilling my teeth, cooling my body until I felt immersed, like in cold water, sinking deeper into this feeling, these words, this moment. Friday evening, 8:30pm, I-95 heading South just to turn North again. Driving for the exact length of “Not Strong Enough” before hitting an exit and turning around. After talking about the state of the world, head in hands on Brown Street, parked car, lights not yet clicked off, sitting in the afterglow of ice cream and a long drive, considering the balance of things, shaking our heads, letting it lie in that easy silence we’ve cultivated in the last year and a half. And it feels good to be known so well. “We’re like siblings now… like I love you guys but I’m also like grrrrr,” E said from the backseat while I licked ice cream off the back of my hand, A DJ-ing next to me. I think of this line often when I’m with them, how good and raw it feels to have two people who know me better than maybe anyone ever. I remember turning to them at the concert a few months ago, always anticipating the next line, turning with emphasis, “Now, now, this one, it’s us!!!” and grabbing their shoulders, swaying on the concrete steps, avoiding the cold, sticky metal bench beneath us. Always too soon, always trying to force the point, to make sure everyone knows that the metaphor is there and that what we have is special. I can never just let it hang in the warm silence, the post-ice cream car ride, the way I know what they’re thinking before they even say anything. I always have to force it anyway. I can't hide from you like I hide from myself. I think I love boygenius so much because they’re singing about friendship. Who else does that these days? They’re singing about love, too, in a way that's gut-punching and heart-wrenching, but they’re also singing about what it means to be known so well, to be driving so fast you think you might explode in a hurricane of love and wind and desert air. On one of our drives, we recently considered the authenticity of boygenius, how real they really are or if it’s just an act, given that their brand is their friendship, their unabashed authenticity and love and gratitude for one another. When we saw them live, the eve of Julien’s birthday, they ended the show by smashing cake into each other’s faces, flinging it on the audience. Covering us all in the sticky sweet frosting of their platonic love. Not letting us leave the stadium without the knowledge that everything we see is real. And telling us that it’s easy, see? Opening up the soft, warm parts of yourself to another person or two. It just takes a little trust. A little willingness to be your unabashed self, to fuck around and find out. You can do it, too. Do you hear it? Do you feel it? I like to think that boygenius is just like me and my friends, but much better at writing it down. Their songs feel like the creations of late-night musings, the same kind of conversations we're having about love and lust, belonging, fear, abandonment. The same things we muse about on dorm room floors and fire escapes, in parked cars and over late-night drunken grilled cheeses. Even when singing about their individual selves, about failed romance and mistakes, boygenius has the unmistakable tenor of kinship, of the type of tight-knit female friendship every young woman aspires to have. Their music video for “Not Strong Enough,” a montage of a perfect-seeming day interspersed with goofy faces, heel-clicking, weird zooming, and enough personality to keep fans from afar satiated, feels real. It doesn’t feel like an act, because it’s not. I remember who I am when I'm with you. I’ve never thought about being in love with my friends, in an utterly non-romantic but nearly-codependent way. I want to take back the idea that we can only love one person at a time and in such a specific way. I love my friends, and I love to tell them that, always have, but this feels different. When I look back at this time in my life, I believe it will be marked by how infatuated, how adoring I feel about the two people I spend the most time with. It feels like being in love, that tickle in your throat, that pounding in your chest, the passion, the fierceness. It feels like loving the jagged edges, loving completely, without expectation or aspiration. I used to fear the idea that you only get to fall in love so many times, what it means to have one partner to love forever. I didn’t know about this kind of love, I didn’t know I had enough to share outside a clenched fist. It feels like that stereotypical old-person kind of love—the next day, after the car ride, E said, “It feels like we’re old and married.” It feels like knowing someone so well you know what will happen next, and also know that it doesn’t matter what does. It feels like loving without fear of being ostracized or being in the wrong. It feels like knowing how to say I’m sorry. How to say I know. How to say I don’t know. How to say I love you. Maybe it just feels like growing up. Who won the fight? I don't know / We're not keeping score. Often we say I love you through music. Through the hollering into the cold night on the highway, screaming our biggest fears as we pass beneath billboards and street lights. I tell my parents I’m glad to have my car at school because I can go home, but really it’s for nights like this. We love boygenius the most, the three of us taking on their personalities as an electrifying Halloween costume. Our friendship was born into a “$20” landscape, and those chords never fail to kick us all into glorious cavorting. boygenius makes music for driving fast in unfamiliar places. When I can’t fathom doing a minute more of schoolwork, this is what we do–drop everything to get in the car and drive to the beach, skinny dip in the chilled Rhode Island water, the words to the songs we love the most and drive fast fast fast on the highway. I find myself daydreaming about taking off, heading west, until we hit those wide open roads Phoebe and Lucy and Julien promise us, the high canyon walls holding us close, like an orange-hued pinky promise. Most of all, I fear when these moments end. I fear returning to campus. Parking the car. Taking a hot shower to melt off the salt and sweat and erase the chill that’s starting to steep. I fear moving out of my last dorm room, our first and last shared apartment, when we all head off to our own stages, a constellation across this country or maybe hemisphere. What about the beach? The car? What about the music? What about this love? Maybe we’ll skip the exit to our old street and go home. Or maybe this is the moment, singular and alive, breathing in us long after we leave. Hold onto it, but don’t force it. Your love is tough / Your love is tried and true blue.

How Much Are You Willing to Lose? Risk Culture and Elite Athletics

Annika Coleman
August 2, 2024

“You can only really appreciate life if you're putting yourself into places that risk it.” – Richard "Milky" Quayle Imagine a bullet. In the Isle of Man, a sleepy island in the Irish sea studded with rocky coastlines and medieval castles, a speeding bullet dares to rip through the warm May breeze at 195 miles per hour. Its path is clean, determined, graceful, powerful. As if immune to the forces of drag or gravity, it flies without apprehension. The bullet is invincible. The bullet is free. Yet, one feature mars its perfection: the bullet has shoulders. “I just caught the rock face with my shoulder. I just snagged it, pulled me into the wall on the right. And then I flew over and hit that [wall] on the left.” Richard “Milky” Quayle is a human bullet with shoulders who dares to race motorcycles at 185-200 miles per hour in the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy (TT) races. Growing up on the Isle watching races since he was a “wee boy,” TT has been a central part of Milky’s life for as long as he can remember. Starting his racing career at 22, he soon became a champion, winning the 1994 Supersport, 1996 250cc Manx Championships, and the Isle of Man TT in 2002. Yet, in the 2003 TT race, he came to learn that bullets aren’t invincible: entering a corner too early, Milky crashed spectacularly into the rocky barrier beside the track, flesh and rocky foundation flying radially in all directions. The crash left Milky with a ruptured spleen and punctured lungs. Milky isn’t the first to be injured in the TT. To the contrary, Milky is lucky not to be dead. Since the event began in 1907, 250 racers have been killed, with six dying in 2022 alone. “The only way of making this event safe is to not do it,” says Paul Phillips, the TT Business Development Manager and Director for the last 15 years. Yet, despite the risk, the flashy collision, and the ruptured spleen, when asked by a reporter in the hospital if he planned to stop racing, Milky responded with clarity: “It's the best thing in the world anyone could ever wanna do. Why would I want to stop it just because it hurt me?” Asta-Sollilja Farrell’s career as a gymnast began at the age of 2 with “mommy and me” tumbling classes. Her career as an injured gymnast began six years later: at eight, she chipped a bone on the side of her foot, resulting in soft tissue damage and a mossy tinge that still taints the skin thirteen years later. At age ten, walking became a challenge: “I started having hip issues. Both of my hips were dislocated and the tendons were messed up. I was in so much pain all the time,” Asta said. “I was in fifth grade.” Since then, Asta has suffered from at least one or two major injuries a year without fail, including an ACL tear, multiple torn ligaments in her left ankle, and six concussions, totalling to approximately 24 major injuries. At the age of twenty-one, Asta has made it, proudly representing the senior class on Brown’s Varsity gymnastics team. 19 years later, the spunky toddler with bouncy brown curls who always dreamed of being a D1 athlete can finally say she is “living the dream. ” Yet, for Asta, dreams have never come without pain. “I have been in constant pain, every day, from the second I wake up to the moment I go to sleep, since I was eight years old. I still have nightmares about retearing my ACL two years post injury because of how much that feeling of crunching replays in my head,” Asta said, her eyes glazed over with resignation. “Multiple doctors have told me that I have to get my foot fused post-gymnastics. I probably won’t be able to walk past the age of forty. That’s my cut off.” However, Asta is not worried about her body post-gymnastics: “I don’t care what happens to my body as long as I can get through this season. In my mind, this is so much more important to me than whatever happens next. I don’t need things to be amazing afterwards, I just need them to be amazing now.” “This is nuts. You know that right?” says journalist Bill Whitaker during his 60 Minutes interview with Milky. The racer giggles at the comment, his perfectly slicked blonde mohawk leaning in towards the camera, exuding a mixture of agreement and pride. “Well, it’s fun though. It’s fun, Bill.” “Let’s unpack that a bit.” My next-door-neighbor Jasper’s favorite line — usually used comically to reference low-stakes gossip — slowly flickers to the front of my mind. I identify as a high-level gymnast turned broken gymnast turned diver turned concussed diver turned medically retired, dazed and confused, permanently-in-pain athlete no longer. I have lived teetering on the border between “within” and “without” elite sports for over thirteen years. As a dual citizen to two distinct worlds, living and listening to athletes’ stories — of success, injury, loss, redemption, pain, guilt, in a multitude of different orders and permutations — I have long viewed elite sports with a critical eye. Hearing the experiences of the human bullet and the gymnast have led to several of my lingering questions beginning to crystalize: How does risk, pain, and injury become normalized in sports? What assumptions lie behind the expression that athletes are “insane” or “nuts”? Is participation in elite athletics justified? “Let’s unpack that a bit” says Jasper. Ok, Jasper. I am scared, yet I am ready. Let’s unpack: what lies within the complex relationship between risk, sports, and glory? Watch the Hero Go Past The practice jumps of Mikhail Baryshnikov, the preeminent male classical dancer of the 1970s and ’80s and principal dancer of the New York City Ballet, spark but one word in my mind: defiance. His pointed toes flying feet off the ground, his kneecaps locked to straightened perfection, it appears as though the laws of gravity apply differently to his slender body. The power in his quads and seemingly effortless coordination of his limbs is almost unnatural, almost not human, or rather, superhuman. The “superhuman” complex is instilled early and regularly reinforced in athletes by both their athletic community and by larger society. Julia Grace-Sanders, former collegiate swimmer at Texas Christian University, recounts that “from a young age, I was told that I was special.” She continues, “My peers stared wide-eyed when I told them how many times I practiced a week. I secretly enjoyed their surprise, and felt affirmed by the astonished reaction.” As a former high level competitive gymnast, I lived a parallel experience: a deep pride grew within me as my middle school teacher’s face flashed with astonishment after learning I spend 24 hours a week in the gym. I reveled in the wild applause of my classmates when I did cartwheels or back flips in PE. I distinctly remember feeling I had a double identity like Kent Clark or Hannah Montana: civilian-student by day, superhero ninja in a bedazzled leotard by night. By the time they reach the collegiate or professional level, athletes have become accustomed to the deep-seated rhetoric that designates athletes as “beyond human” and often propagate this message themselves. As a freshman on the Brown Varsity Swimming and Diving team, I was stunned when our coach read the final line of our team contract aloud: “You must decide whether you want to be an elite athlete, or just another student who goes to Brown.” While the seeming paradox of placing the words “just” and “Brown student” in the same sentence left me dizzy, the fact that not a single girl in the room batted an eye before signing made it clear how commonplace this “glory rhetoric” is within the athletic community. Beyond the pool or the court, Varsity athletes at Brown also openly refer to students who do not partake in Varsity sports as “NARPs”: non-athletic regular people. Slurs for non-athletes are not unique to Brown, with terms such as “muggles” (Stanford), “normies” (Utah State University), or “civilians” (Eastern Illinois University) floating freely across many college campuses. These derogatory terms function to create division between athletes and non-athletes, who are deemed as the inferior “other.” These divisions are publicly visible in Brown dining halls: it is common campus knowledge that the long-table in the center of the V-Dub is off limits to non-swimmers from the hours of 5:30-7pm, that no NARP flesh shall touch the men’s wrestling team’s headquarters by the exit at the Ratty, and that football can formally reserve an entire dining hall quadrant that will be (literally) roped off with red tape. Parties are similarly segregated, with athletes commonly organizing “mixers” with other Varsity teams in which, as recounted by Brown athletes Michelle Guo (swimmer) and Tevah Gevelber (cross-country runner), team members are explicitly told “don’t bring NARPs.” The subconscious assimilation of the “superhuman” complex may also surface unintentionally. For instance, Milky casually glides over the phrase “watch the hero go past” when describing where fans can sit to watch the TT racers, seemingly unaware of the fact that he explicitly refers to himself and his competitors as “heroes.” In a similar vein, Bill Whitticker’s comment “you’re nuts” indirectly validates this notion of the racer as a superhuman “hero” able to push their body beyond the limits of “normal” human ability. The pride that fills Milky’s smile and bobbing mohawk makes clear that, among athletes, being “nuts” is considered a title of high honor. The Sacrifice of Being Superhuman “Guts. Grace. Glory.” is the mantra of USA Diving, the governing body of the sport of springboard and platform diving in the United States as recognized by the Olympic Committee. These words, stamped on a white cloth flag next to a blue and red stick figure flying through the air in a pike position, are the first thing to greet me at dive practice everyday. Waving in the winds and rain of California winter, this catchy alliteration instills but one message in soggy, goose-bumped, exhausted children in swimsuits: their “glory” is the fruit of sacrifice. “Glory” is earned from taking repeated bodily risks until hurling yourself off of a 3 meter springboard appears effortless. “Glory” is earned from exuding courage and resilience in the face of fear, pain, and exhaustion. The high honor of transforming into the heroic athlete does not come without a price. This flag and the word “sacrifice” come to mind when I see a soggy, panting man in the gym donning a shirt with the following white block letters screaming off of the black fabric: “PAIN IS WEAKNESS LEAVING THE BODY.” Originating in the US Marine Corp, this phrase was historically used in recruiting propaganda to encourage youth to enter the US Armed Forces. Taken up by the fitness industry, this line is now found on sports shirts, appealing to the “no pain, no gain” mentality deeply embedded in sporting activities. The “three G’s of diving” alongside the screaming T-shirt serve to exemplify how the aforementioned establishment of a superhuman identity functions to glorify risk taking, normalize pain, and stigmatize weakness. As stated by Michael Atkinson, Professor of Kinesiology and Physical Education at the University of Toronto, in his book The Suffering Body in Sport, sport “socializes young athletes to nearly blindly accept the risk of pain and injury inherent in sport participation,” embracing “pain, injury, and risk as a ‘badge of honor’” that “serves as an important social indicator of one’s commitment to sport excellence.” This culture of risk in sports results in characteristic behaviors in athletes facing pain that include consenting to play while injured, concealing or refraining from reporting injury, and experiencing feelings of pride when training or competing through considerable pain. Asta recounts having done all three by age 14: “The week before nationals, I busted my ankle and could not walk. I was crutching around the house.” Yet, to Asta, raised from the age of two to be a “warrior girl” who perseveres in the face of pain, missing the competition due to injury was not an option. Instead, Asta’s reaction was instinctual: “I started taking six Advil a day on an empty stomach for three months. I had a lot of trouble eating. I did not care. I would take eight if I needed to just to get through the day.” At the competition, she “crunched” her ankle again on vault, twisted it on floor, and distinctly recalls thinking, “my ankle is going to fall the fuck off.” Walking between events, Asta pinned her eyes firmly to the ceiling to hide her tears from the college coaches in the audience looking to recruit their next freshman class. Yet, despite it all, Asta finished the meet, even placing on bars. After her final dismount on beam — which she landed on one foot — her emotions overwhelmed her: “I was so proud of myself. I had gotten through the whole meet and had done moderately well. Who cares if my ankle hurts? I just got eighth in the nation on bars.” To Asta, the immense glory of standing on the podium donning her medal justifies sacrificing the integrity of her soft tissue. To the superhuman-athlete, immersed in the rhetoric of “Guts. Grace. Glory” and “Pain is weakness leaving the body,” exerting your body to the point of near self-destruction is not “nuts”: It is a given. A Coach. An Enforcer. “Kick ‘em out. Curse ‘em out. Embarrass ‘em in front of the gym.” Asta’s tone is matter-of-fact as she describes her club coaches’ strategies for handling gymnasts who were afraid to go for a new skill. “Basically any bad thing you can think of,” she adds, summarizing with her accepting gaze the level of authority and power coaches hold over their athletes. Her words are reminiscent of my childhood: Armen’s screams piercing into Maya three inches from her face after a “sloppy” vault; Jing Jing Zhang’s Adidas sandals flying across the gym to wack 12-year-old Giuseppe for being too “chicken” to go for his dismount off rings; Coach Kelly’s tongue ring banishing my “chicken” limbs to laps around the gym parking lot after crying instead of doing back-handsprings on beam; Sam the literal rubber “shame chicken” being carted around by many 8-12 year old gymnast “chickens” as punishment for any and all expressions of fear. “I was more afraid of my coaches growing up than of any new skill,” Jing Jing always liked to remind us. “At least in this country, you can’t hit children’s knees with sticks.” As stated in Élise Marsollier and Denis Hauw’s paper Navigating in the Gray Area of Coach-Athlete Relationships in Sports, research has shown that “athlete maltreatment in training and competition is not rare, but instead seems to occur more frequently than expected.” Through commonly documented fear- and/or shame-based strategies such as yelling, intentional denial of attention or support, silent treatment, isolating, or belittling, coaches act as enforcers of cultural standards in sports: policing and propagating the importance of exemplifying bravery and suppressing pain. This so-called “tough love” does successfully teach athletes to perform high-risk acts with little hesitation, which may aid in athletic achievement. Nonetheless, even without beating with sticks, placing high moral value on bravery and stoicism while simultaneously creating a fear-based power hierarchy between coach and athlete also increases the risk of bodily harm: “You better suck it up, you better stop limping” were Asta’s coaches words at nationals as she “heavy limped” her way down the runway post ankle-crunch en-route to perform her second vault, her actions reminiscent of Olympian Kerri Strug. "I had to go see a doctor in private who told me my shin was going to split in half if I didn't stop training,” tells former San Jose State University gymnast Alison Falat, who was accused of lying and denied medical care by her coach Wayne Wright after suffering a stress fracture. “Despite the negative impact of these [coaching] behaviors…athletes negotiate maltreatment situations by mostly accepting them through their normalization,” report Marsollier and Hauw, bringing me back to Asta’s accepting gaze and matter-of-fact tone. While the normalization of what is now being labeled as abuse in sports has multifactorial consequences for the young athlete, one of the most salient impacts is the internalization of a destructive mentality: To the indoctrinated athlete, heeding to injury in any way — whether it be leaving a practice early, skipping a competition, or even limping – is considered synonymous with failure. From personal experience, I can say that, once engrained, this mindset is challenging to break. Love is Fraught with Risk Milky: “You can only really appreciate life if you're putting yourself into places that risk it.” Austa: “Gymnastics is more satisfying when you are fighting injuries or mental issues and you are still able to go to a meet and overcome.” “Can you describe to me what you love most about diving?” The writer of my high school newspaper notices how I flinch in response to her question. As a competitive diver, I had became accustomed to answering a certain list of common “normie” queries: → “What’s your favorite dive?” (to which I say 105B off three meter and proceed to get blank stares until I show a video) → “Can you do a flip?” (to which I say, in the most courteous way possible, “No, I actually just spend two hours a day walking around the pool.”) → “You must love it, don’t you?” (to which I always nod and smile, purposely avoiding further self-reflection) Yet, no one had ever asked me why I loved my sport. After embracing some long avoided self-reflection, here’s what I said: “What inspires me to return to the pool every day is the feeling of the perfect dive. When I rip the water beneath my hands, I am no longer controlled by gravity, I am gravity, accelerating at -9.8 m/s² towards the earth through the water, as if the water was simply air, until I finally ‘J-curve’ around, finishing right side up. The exhilaration is addictive.” Beyond the glory associated with superhuman status, according to Michael Atkinson, the act of participating in the sport itself can be “existentially rewarding” because it “provides many participants with a means of experiencing physical, emotional, and psychological sensations not provided in everyday life.” In my case, I delighted in the five seconds of momentary weightlessness followed by the sense of power derived from breaking surface tension with my bare hands. The “exhilaration” was enough to hook me into diving despite the objectively “high-risk” (more on this later). For some athletes, however, enjoyment is not derived in spite of the risk, but rather, as Atkinson outlines, “a significant part of the allure of extreme sports is the degree to which participants place themselves at risk (seemingly irrationally) for the sheer pleasure of being at risk.” Based on Milky’s comment, I would argue that, in the case of TT racing, the pleasure of speeding on a motorcycle at 200 miles per hour derives precisely from the adrenaline of “playing with death” in a way that would not be socially sanctioned outside of the athletic realm. Nonetheless, Asta’s comment highlights that yet a third dimension to the connection between love and risk in sport exists: rather than delighting in the immediate thrill of participation, athletic satisfaction may stem from the delayed pride of having boldly faced and overcome the risk that sport presents. Atkinson describes this phenomenon, saying “the degree to which the body is taxed to its limits (almost sadomasochistically) is meaningful.” Former Brown diver and elite gymnast Carmen Bebbington describes this bodily “taxation”— the post-eight hour practice wailing muscles, overwhelming exhaustion, and deep hunger that drives you to inhale steamed broccoli as if it was a rare delicacy — as “feeling empty.” While perhaps paradoxical, it is precisely this feeling of “emptiness” — the pleasure of endorphins surging through the bloodstream — that I miss most about gymnastics. Even after retiring from competitive athletics, I still consciously strive to push to the point of exhaustion in my daily workouts out of the sheer desire to once again experience the pleasure of “sadomasochistic” physical taxation. For athletes like Asta and myself, loving a sport cannot be separated from the challenge it presents. “Can you describe to me what you love most about gymnastics?” I pose this question to Asta during our interview. As a nostalgic retired gymnast, I biasedly expect her to paint some beautiful description of the joys of flying through the air or the satisfaction of feeling that your jello quads are going to collapse beneath you at the end of practice. Instead, her answer comes as a shock: “Honestly, I really don’t know. It just feels like who I am, and I’ve done it for literally as long as I can remember. I have no memories of pre-gymnastics. The sport kind of sucks: it hurts, it’s scary. But I don’t know, I just love doing it.” While the pleasure of doing the sport can be immense, based on Asta’s comment, I argue that the importance of maintaining the superhuman identity appears to be the most profound influence on decision-making in sports. Whether it be ripping yourself out of bed at 7AM on Saturday mornings to plunge sleepy goosebumps into a chlorinated pool or forcing yourself back up on the beam after an ACL tear, the powerful human need to “know who you are” motivates athletes to continually make sacrifices for their sport. My question remains: can you truly love something that destroys you? The Risk Unseen “I call it the rescue distance.” Amanda is a loving mother. In Samanta Shweblin’s psychological eco-horror novel Fever Dream, Amanda and her young daughter Nina travel out of the city to the Argentine countryside for a summer vacation. Amidst the slow-sultry days spent frolicking through open fields and bathing sunburns in backyard pools, Amanda remains constantly alert: “Right now, I’m calculating how long it would take me to jump out of the car and reach Nina if she suddenly ran and leapt into the pool. I call it the ‘rescue distance’: the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it.” Amanda’s calculations have long kept Nina’s chocolatey bangs and supple skin safe from the world’s many horrors. Yet, the horror ensues when risk cannot be calculated. Nina’s supple skin begins to itch and rash and writhe as leeched pesticides seep into her innocent flesh from the soybean field upon which she lays. Pulling her daughter’s poisoned body from the grassy-toxic embrace, Amanda has but one thought repeating over and over in her mind: “The rescue distance: it didn’t work, I didn’t see the danger.” Kendall Menard can’t see. After fifteen attempted 5231Ds turned fifteen forceful forehead-to-water smacks off the 1 meter springboard, Kendall stands on the pool deck with her eyes fixed eerily on her extended right hand. “My arm is gone. I only see black past my shoulder.” Us soggy, swim-suited children try to reassure her that we can see her arm, that it looks normal, that it is attached to the shoulder. She isn’t convinced. I reach out and join our soggy right hands. Suddenly her eyes well with terrified tears as she feels invisible sensations from a limb that she is convinced has vanished. I started diving because it seemed like gymnastics but safer. I started diving because water was marketed to me as soft and forgiving. Yet, horror ensued when I started having headaches. After fifteen attempted 203Bs turned fifteen forceful forehead smacks off the 3 meter springboard, I stood on the pool deck wondering why the sky seemed so hazy. Six months later, stumbling through daily life with invisible concussive symptoms, I had but one thought repeating in my mind: I didn’t see the danger. According to a 2016 study of Division I divers from Midwestern universities, 54.2% of participants report having sustained at least one diving-related concussion during their athletic careers. While concussion may result from a flashy skull-smack into the board – such as in the famous case of Olympian Greg Louganis – what is more concerning is that diving-related concussions more frequently result from the mundane crooked entry. As explained by study author Sarah Kemp, a diver’s body enters the water at around 30 mph. Thus, an incorrect entry can cause whiplash effects on the brain as the body decelerates. While the basic physics of diving-related concussions is easily comprehensible, what is more nebulous is why the extent of this risk goes greatly unseen. Risk miscalculation is not unique to diving. In a 2017 study conducted by Christine Baugh, Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Department of Medicine and Center for Bioethics and Humanities, analytical models suggest that 43% of collegiate football players underestimate their risk of injury and 42% underestimate their risk of concussion. Data out of the UK indicates that injury risk in professional soccer is 1,000 times higher than popularly understood high-risk occupations such as construction and mining. Taken together, these data points lead to a more stratified understanding of the risk unseen: athletes may (a) be simply unaware of the risks associated with their sport (b) be unaware of the likelihood of being affected by such risks or (c) may be unaware of the true extent of the physical harm such a risk may cause. This risk misinformation —combined with socio-cultural factors that normalize pain and injury and glorify the athletic identity — places athletes in a position to make decisions that are not in their best interest. “It didn’t work.” Amanda’s distress plays on repeat in my mind. Her voice calls me to question, how can we make it work? Step one: unblur the risk price tag that athletes read before making a life-changing purchase. Loss is Risky Terrain I don’t remember much about those first two weeks. All I remember is numbness — seeping into the quads, the hands, the mind. The soul. I had limped from injury to injury for two years straight — disc fissuring in the low back, fractured foot, strain in the left inner thigh, second back fracture — too broken to compete, barely mobile enough to train, yet incapable of giving up. My coaches, the preachers of pushing past limits, realized that sometimes breaking isn’t temporary. My coaches spoke the words I could not say: there was no path to comeback. I spent many hours staring blankly at the glossy photo hanging boldly in my kitchen: a blonde girl in a bedazzled leotard soaring over a four inch beam in a 180 degree split. Her focus seemed unbreakable. Her grace seemed infinite. The strength gushing from her muscles reminded me that I was once powerful. I didn’t know if I’d ever feel powerful like that again. Tears dwelled silently in the corners of my eyes, yet I was too numb to cry. As outlined by Atkinson, the risk associated with sports extends beyond physical injury: “Risk is a multidimensional construct of athletes’ minds, bodies, selves, beliefs, values, and identities.” Due to the all-encompassing nature of elite sports, athletes become vulnerable to “self-loss, social loss, [and] emotional loss” as a result of heavily basing not only their identity but their mental-wellbeing on their athletic success. Due to this dependence on their sport, athletes develop a vulnerability not often considered: “Being ‘outside of the game’ is risky terrain” (Atkinson). In other words, contrary to the common belief that leaving athletics eliminates the risk of future harm, career termination represents a significant risk to athletes in and of itself. A systematic review of psychological distress among retired elite athletes found that, depending on the study, up to 29% of the sample demonstrated depressive symptomatology post-retirement, with no study finding less than 20% to identify with diagnosable depression. 39% of retired soccer players were found to have depression and anxiety in a 2015 observational study. A 2017 study revealed that 34.5% of former rugby players who experienced “forced retirement” due to injury were classified as “adverse alcohol” drinkers. Finally, a survey of 644 retired NFL players reported 71% of the sample to misuse opioids and 93% to experience significant pain post-retirement. In combination with depression, chronic pain was associated with difficulties sleeping, managing finances, maintaining social relationships, and exercising. Fast forward eight years and the 12-year-old girl staring at glossy photos in her kitchen is three concussions in and just about to let her newest bodily trauma strip her of a rebound athletic career. Walking solemnly into the “NARP” gym for the first time post-diving, I am confronted with my friend’s gaze of bemusement followed by a phrase I’ll never forget: “you’re mortal.” From the combined experiences of retired athletes across sports, generations, and genders, it becomes clear that “falling back to earth” is a traumatic jolt for the “superhuman” athlete to process. The pain of reconciling with your mortality can become so intense that some athletes in Atkinson’s work define leaving the “total institution” of elite sport as “symbolic death.” Yet, sometimes death is literal. Trevor Labuda dies on November 3rd, 2023, at the age of 24 from suicide. A 2021 Brown graduate and Human Resources Associate at Capital One, Trevor was the captain of the Brown Varsity Dive team, the school record holder for the 1M and 3M events, and the energetic anchor of the Brown Swimming and Diving family. Sitting in a circle in the chaplain’s office, his close friends share memories of Trevor’s raspy voice cheering wildly over the buzz of competition and his bear hugs warming frightened goosebumps after a bad dive. Nick’s voice goes weak as he says, “No one had ever seen Trevor not in an awesome mood.” The tears once again start to dwell in the corners of my eyes, yet I’m too numb to cry. “While no one factor is believed to be the root cause of suicide ideation or attempt, losing one’s identity as an athlete through forced or voluntary retirement is noteworthy along sociological lines” says Atkinson. Trevor was in the process of transitioning out of a fruitful 14 year diving career, symbolically changing his instagram handle from “@trevthediver” to “@trevthedover.” He had a loving girlfriend, a stable job, and many die-hard fans (myself included). No one can define his suffering for him. No one can explain away his death. All I know is that Trevor joins the many revered athletes tragically lost to suicide: Junior Seau (NHL), Rick Rypien (NHL), Kenny McKinley (NFL), Wade Belak (NHL), and Ellie Soutter (Olympic snowboarder) among others. “Grief is the flip side of love,” says the chaplain at Trevor’s memorial, finally breaking our silence dotted with harmonized sniffles. “Love is a risk, but that doesn’t mean you should stop yourself from loving.” No matter the complex establishing factors or the frequently painful endings, one thing is clear: athletes love their sports ferociously. Despite the physical injuries they produce, the sacrifice they entail, and the grief that accompanies their loss, is it justified to prevent people from expressing this love? Should future generations be deprived of their chance to experience it? And Yet. “Last question: will you put your kids in gymnastics?” Asta does not hesitate: “Not a chance.” At the age of 21, my body is abnormally weathered and restricted: the bilateral tendon tears in my feet and lower leg spread numbness and burning into my toes as I stand at the sink to brush my teeth. The twisting required to roll out of bed must be carefully executed to prevent the electric surge of SI joint instability from shooting into my back and lower abdomen. Post-concussive migraines taint physics homework and roommate dinners with fog, fatigue, and sustained eye twitching. I often lie awake at night grappling with the unsettling reality that there is no escape from pain. My mom sat beside me on cold metal chairs as the orthopedist announced that the longitudinal tears in my feet tendons will eventually need to be surgically “tacoed” back together. When I asked him where exactly on a calendar “eventually” is, he replied with a daunting “you’ll know.” Every day I cautiously roll out of bed, awaiting the moment I will no longer be able to walk. Tears began to dwell in the corner of my mother’s eyes, but she was not afraid to cry. “I wish I had never put you in gymnastics,” she whimpered into my ear. Suddenly the metal chair felt like ice beneath my forearms. And yet shaking, cold, and terrified, all I can think is that I’d do it all again. I’d do it all again for the existential weightlessness of flying over a four inch beam in a perfect slip, I’d do it all again for the burst of pride and adrenaline that surges through the stomach after sticking the perfect vault at regionals, I’d do it all again for the beautiful exhaustion that filled every inch of my flesh after a four-hour Saturday practice, I’d do it all again to hear my teammates scream-cheering from across the gym, I’d do it all again because I can’t imagine who I’d be without ten years dressed in leotards and coated in chalk, I’d do it all again because to this day I still consider myself a warrior girl, and I’d do it all again because despite the burning and despite the aching and despite the twitching, what pains me most is knowing that I will never again do what I loved so ferociously that it destroyed me. “It's the best thing in the world anyone could ever wanna do. Why would I want to stop it just because it hurt me?” – Richard "Milky" Quayle Last question: Is participation in elite athletics justified? It depends how much you are willing to lose.

It started in March

Mizuki Kai
April 22, 2024

1. It was March: the inbetween. The month that brings that heart-drop feeling which in turn boomerangs into the sweet taste of honey. The devil was on my doorstep, the world blue, and I was left with a forever memory of how that song made me cry. Somewhere between its ides and luck, I found you. And maybe everything that spiraled before and since is an explanation of my being, because the sieve does not separate who I am from what you taught me. Because you asked me who I was, I stuck around for an answer myself. 2. I didn’t know something so strong could dissolve. I thought it would be like black oil paint and water. Instead, it fluttered away until I forgot what you sound like. I always said that I didn’t care anymore. And when the time came, I really didn’t, and that was what surprised me. I almost wished I cared; it’ll show that the I’ll always love you was never a lie. But now I know to be less generous with the words I pour. The mucus builds up and hardens around my tongue, and I can no longer love purely the way I loved you. 3. The world, once blue, is now free in my mind. In this world, you are next to me on the white slide of Komazawa Park with a cardboard sled in hand. I push you down, and next, you me, and we giggle under the whistling green of Japanese oak. In this world, you exist in a void that nothing else can penetrate. You are both shards of glass and stained glass mosaic. You are beautiful and transient; you slip through my touch. Your smile hides nothing but maybe because I’m not looking for other readings of your curled lips. 4. Instead I chase you through London’s puddles. I grasp at splashes of you, ones that evaporate into the air I breathe. I am imbued with a sense of guilt and satisfaction to know that I’m alive, miles away from you. Everything eventually washes away, but I’ve learned that some mud is thicker than others.

Anatomy

Stella Kleinman
April 18, 2024

In medical school, my father had to memorize every part of the body and its development process. Each time my mother was pregnant, he knew of every turn a developing bone could take, every lapse that could cause a blood cell to rupture. He knows of the ways an organ can fail, including the ones that don’t announce themselves before it is too late. He was the one to tell me that the first functional organ to develop in the human embryo is the heart. He simulated its development with his hands, twisting his palms into tubes and chambers before locking them into a teardrop shape. His fingers each formed a vein or artery, pumping imaginary blood into the living room. Back when we lived at the old house, the one with the sloping yard and crabapple tree, my mother used to come home with boxes of seeds. Some of them grew, like the sunflowers. Some of them didn’t, and now I don’t remember their names. One afternoon in early fall, she brought back a mesh bag of what looked like wild onions, oblate spheroids with pointed ends. The familiar teardrop shape, packed with life. Their light brown skin crinkled along the top, formed ridges down the sides, and peeled off at the base, exposing smooth, white flesh. My mother called them bulbs and planted them in the thin plot in the backyard, against the wooden fence. In the kitchen, we had a window overlooking the plot, usually opaque with heat from the oven. I used to glare through the panes, willing something to happen in that little patch of soil, thinking maybe I could coax out a stem or something. I stared at the earth so hard I could have sworn I saw it pulse at least once. My mother told me that the bulbs were making roots, growing away from us. Nutrients from the soil were circulating through the thin, white strands. During the winter, the bulbs quietly rested under frost. My mother knew they might not grow but still checked on them, even before their due dates. That spring, thin green leaves pushed out of the soil and flowered soon after. We had a full row of tulips, pastel pinks and sunset oranges and reds that matched the cardinals who nested in the shed. Petals folded out, like palms opening up to catch a drop of sun. As my mother and I stood together in front of the plot, I could feel the blood pour out of my heart and stream into the capillaries behind my cheeks. Maybe this was what it felt like to bloom, to contract and swell. … When I went to ballet class, the studio was always cold. The other girls and I would gather on the floor to tie our satin slippers, shivering at the contact between our tights and the wooden floor panels. Our instructor led us in stretches, telling us to lay our knees open like butterfly wings and point our toes to form a crescent moon. “Imagine a string is tied to your spine, and someone is pulling upwards on it,” she would say. I think of her words every time I notice myself slouching. According to my father, the spinal cord sends commands from the brain to the body, and vice versa. The spine enacts every pirouette and leap; it carries the pain of every fall. Some nights, when I am thinking about how easily the human body can be created and destroyed and questioning whether I am a whole person, I press my fingers to the ridges of my spine. I think about objects I know are solid and real, forms that have lasted for thousands of years. I feel entire landscapes along my back—summits and valleys of bone, lakes of spinal fluid, stalks of nerves ripe for harvest. If people try to see through me, they will have to crane their necks around my vertebrae. In elementary school, I learned about deciduous and evergreen trees. Deciduous trees lose their leaves in the fall, and my brothers and I used to compete over who could rake the biggest pile. Evergreens keep their needles year-round, providing shelter for deer, squirrels, and migrating birds. There is a giant pine tree outside my bedroom window, and I used to think it touched the stars. In the warmer months, I open my window and sleep in its scent. In the colder months, I watch snow lay safely on its branches, looking back up at the moon. I like the way pine needles jut out into the air like static hairs on end, forcing people to see them even when the tree becomes a silhouette. While the needles burn quickly in a forest fire, the trees themselves are insulated with thick bark. When everything else leaves, pine trees remain, feeling every motion and impulse of the night. I close the blinds thinking I might actually know something about strength, about pulling myself upwards––not by a thread but with my own nerves and tendons. … I used to stand outside when it rained, boots shuffling against the unpaved part of the driveway. I would stand there in a downpour with my hands face-up, waiting for a droplet to splash straight into the center of my palm. When one would hit in exactly the right spot, I could feel it trickle into my bloodstream. There is a bird sanctuary a few miles from my house with a collection of hiking trails and ponds. My family has gone every fall since I can remember, timing it in accordance to college breaks and paid holiday leave. We would forget to bring birdseed almost every time, and finally my mother threw a bag of it into the glove compartment of our car, where it stayed for the other 364 days of the year. Last year, we crept through the trail, holding birdseed out in our palms, looking up at the chickadees. Fluffy and plump, they surveyed us from their perches before fluttering down onto our fingers. I kept my hand as still as I could when one landed and bravely reached its beak out to eat. The creases in my palms, designed for collapsing and entrapping, stayed outstretched for as long as the bird wanted to peck. I wondered if maybe my hands were not as heavy and hard as I always thought they were. If I could be a resting place for fragile things, just for a moment. My mother still loves plants, and I think they’ve started to love her back. She craves a challenge, grabbing the succulents off of sickbay at Lowe’s and somehow nursing them back to health. My favorite of her plants is the orange tree in the office, a gift from my father. Every time I see it, I think of her reaction when he brought it home, the sunshine under her skin. It has since grown from a tiny stem into a lush, flowering tangle of branches and fruits and shiny leaves. My mother handles the tree with a gentle yet protective touch, perhaps the same care with which she held my infant self during a time I can’t remember. The leaves stretch toward her, waiting for her fingertips to flutter down and land on their surfaces. Creases streak across the green, as familiar to my mother as her own palms. They help her plants hold their shapes and carry nutrients for photosynthesis. As the leaves turn their faces upward, they absorb golden rays through the window and release oxygen into our home. I think we do this too, this absorption and processing of light. If I were to interlace my fingers with yours, I would feel the light you have collected seep into me, through my skin, down my spine, and right back into my heart, where it all began.

Stuffed Glory

Jaehun Seo
April 18, 2024

BANG! Plop. The rustle of careful steps.. John James Audubon was not on a typical nature walk here. Ecotourism was not his thing, nor was it a thing in general back in 1820. Carrying out a specific self-assigned mission, he bent over to pick up his prize—a feathered, now lifeless, body that was so full of fluttering motion just a second ago. He was still in Mississippi, behind schedule. If only he could remember where he put that knife, he could hurry up and move on to the next specimen… Eighty-two years later, President Teddy Roosevelt was racing through a similar setting, a forest in Mississippi in fact, on his own hunting trip. Led by his assistant, he made it to a small clearing where his companions had prepared a black bear cub for him, tied to a willow tree. All he had to do was point and shoot, but there was no BANG! only The rustle of careful steps.. as the big game hunter turned around to leave, refusing to partake in such unsportsmanship. Finally, John found his knife hanging from a nearby tree trunk, and not wasting any time, he applied it to the laid-out body, making a clean incision on the equator of the stomach and skinning the corpse with just a few waves of his knife. He then cautiously transferred the fragile skin with all the plumage intact to a hanger, where three more sheets of feathers were already tanning. And without any hesitation, he took up his rifle and set off again to find his next target flying about or perching on a high branch. While Teddy was on his hunting excursion in the woods of Mississippi, the Michtoms were busy making a living in Brooklyn as Russian Jewish immigrants. Having closed their modest candy store for the day, Rose opened up her sewing kit to start her other work while Morris was busy calculating their sales and supplies. Carefully cutting up a piece of fabric with her scissors, Rose stuffed it with wood wool and meticulously sewed up the edges with her crooked needle and trusty thread. Shaping the stuffing as she went, she gave form to the stuffed toy. She skillfully guided the needle to this end, until finally she closed up the last gap between the two flaps of cloth and trimmed off the excess edges. The result: one more toy to sell tomorrow at the store which meant a few dollars closer to managing without debt. Satisfied with the number of skins he had amassed, John started taking them down from the hanger, one by one, and stuffed them with various materials. He used wire to position them into stances that could be found in nature, using images from his photographic memory as a reference. After capturing his figurines in still, live action, John took out his pencil and paper and started sketching their silhouettes. He applied layers of watercolor on top for details, using various colors to add texture to the feathers and shadows to portray depth and motion in their twisting bodies. And with the perfection of the eye, the work was complete; the bird was resurrected onto the paper. Returning to the White House with no kill record, Teddy closed his eyes for a moment before he resumed his duties as President of the United States of America. He would have to forget the embarrassment of the unsuccessful five-day bear hunt to progress through the dense list of tasks awaiting him. What he did not know was that Clifford Berryman, the most popular political cartoonist of the times, was already at work depicting the bear cub incident after hearing from the Washington Post journalist that accompanied the hunting party. Employing his typical style, Clifford took his black ink pen to sketch out a macho Teddy Roosevelt with lowered gun and raised hand, rejecting the confused hunter holding a frightened bear cub on a leash. Soon, the story would sweep across the nation, telling the tale of a heroic and compassionate leader. By now, John had quite an impressive collection of watercolor paintings, all life-size depictions of course. He sacrificed a stable life as the son of a wealthy businessman and time home with his family to focus on this project he named, The Birds of America. Six years later, after miles of expeditions and years of searching for a publisher, one of the greatest picture books of all time would be printed under his name in Europe, with 435 aquatints of his paintings and worth $2 million in today’s value to print a single copy of. Among the species depicted were 23 new species of birds and 12 subspecies, and his immense volume of behavioral observations would be passed on later in the scientific community. His name would be engraved into American history as one of the most famous ornithologists and artists to have ever lived, and a crucial wildlife conservationist group would be named after him, the National Audubon Society. All this, the product of thousands of sacrificed bodies. Spreading as speedily as the word of the times allowed, Teddy’s story made it into the ears of Morris Michtom who was inspired to formulate a way to honor the story’s protagonist. He relayed his idea to Rose who in agreement manifested the idea into reality in the form of a stuffed bear toy. Soon, Teddy would receive a letter asking for permission to use his name for the first toy of its kind, a plush bear cub, which he granted of course, not thinking much of it. What he did not foresee was the exponential growth in the demand for the “Teddy’s Bear,” so much to the point that the Michtom couple would sell their candy shop to start the Ideal Toy Company which was worth $71 million when it joined the New York Stock Exchange in 1971. His name would be popularized internationally as the Teddy Bear made its way into homes around the world, and the Republican Party would make it its symbol for the campaign of incumbent Teddy Roosevelt in the 1904 presidential election. In the spirit of this American ethic, President Teddy would establish 150 national forests and 51 federal bird reserves during his term, and today, millions of children across the globe lie in bed cuddling a stuffed bear in their arms to sleep. This is the toy made in honor of the President who slaughtered, for sport, thousands of beasts on some hunting trips to Africa.

Folk Songs and Cinnamon Eyes

Louis Boyang
April 5, 2024

Her skin is porcelain. Her veins paint their china ink across her chest. Her nails sometimes bend a little too much. They’re a little too tenuous, the way a feather’s graze can split them in two. Her hazel hair lies in wisps and sits in its knotted cumuli. We whisper to each other sometimes. A hushed breath. Words hidden behind a frigid gust. She’s as righteous as they come. Valiant and inexplicably kind, a sort of warm fuzzy kindness that I want to be too. I wonder if I can taste colors like she does. She tells me I'm a rich amber, but I don’t think a boy too obsessed with his own insecurities can be such a pretty hue. Her stomach sinks its canines into itself. A constant hum. But sometimes that hum turned into a screech, a brief moment too similar to eternity. Fangs who shred and tear worse than hell could ever. She keeps herself caged, locked deep within pitch black caverns; locked behind door after door. I imagine it’s lonely down there, among the heaps and valleys of drowned carcasses of her thoughts. I told her that she shouldn’t tuck them away. Maybe then she wouldn’t be a thousand miles from reality. Once, I told her that nothing is worse than death. That I’d rather suffer eternal pain, as if I could know eternal pain, like I could ever brush my fingers across what she has to feel. She told me a year later that it had split open a freshly sown wound, spilt blood that I never realized was spilt. I can’t say I cared too much either back then. I think I care too much now. We’re more intertwined than either of us have ever been with anyone. But I wonder if it might be because I heard that her 90 could be shrunk to 48, and that her porcelain skin, chronic pain, pinched nose, could mean she’s one in ten thousand. That chasm will deepen, maybe make a pit inescapably deep. I don’t think I should tell her. I don’t think I can.

Notes on Translation

Razan Haweizy
April 5, 2024

“agricolae servōs labōrāre in agīs iubent.”1In silence, the words rose monumentally on the page, bearing the weight of centuries. Sixteen sentences stood in formation as if awaiting understanding. My cursor wandered as my finger moved it to the top right corner of the screen, revealing the hour: 1:00 AM. Blended dialogues and translations pounded my ears and the glow of the screen contracted my pupils. I abandoned the Latin, defying reason, to an elusive muse, nameless. “Servi in ​​agros ierunt.”2A lone bench beckoned me and the leaves cracked under my shoes, retaliating against the rough embrace of my soles. As I sat, nature’s whispers graced my ears – the scampering of a lone bunny, the distant wails of an ambulance rushing through the streets, the laughter of two friends under the impression that they were alone. They could’ve been childhood friends catching up or maybe they bonded over the shared struggles of keeping up with the relentless demands of existence. Maybe they weren’t friends at all and just happened to bump into each other. I could hardly find ‘silence’ in its true form. “Cum laborabant, formicae viderunt.”3On the handle of my chair I spotted an ant. Miniscule and insignificant. Traveling to the very edge of my armrest. A particular evil I have carried within me is my almost natural instinct to kill. To kill ants. Usually “ants,” but this one seemed lonely. I can’t quite pinpoint when this habit developed, but it now feels weird. Ants are a family of insects belonging to “Formicidae,” and ants are further categorized into groups that each serve a function within the family. Latin is commonly used to classify organisms, mostly because it is a dead language, so it cannot change. Stillness. The ultimate human desire. And this desire to never change may have been my greatest source of agony.Their tiny legs scurry them along, looking for food. They lay little eggs, and smaller ants emerge. They dig and dig and dig little holes that only they can fit into. They pace, armed, in front of their colony. Entitlement. A legal right or just claim to do, receive, or possess something. Is a person ever entitled to another? Was I ever entitled to killing those ants? I’m not so sure anymore.They knew they weren’t entitled to me, harbored no claim, but sometimes I wonder if they didn’t. Belief is too ambiguous, I knew they didn’t. Yet as the ant made its way across the armrest, I started contemplating not killing it. The automated act of murder was replaced by something that resembled sympathy. At that moment, sitting alone on that bench with my legs raised to my chest, I felt the weight of being small. Maybe the ant didn’t realize its vulnerability. It didn’t realize that all it took was a single flick, a whisper of pressure. It didn’t realize its fragility. No one does. Fragilitas. The quality of being fragile or easily broken; hence, liability to be damaged or destroyed, weakness, delicacy. I believe I am not fragile until I catch a whiff of the vanilla scented reed diffuser. I was small. I was lost. I was just a girl. I could not survive on my own. I was a girl with opinions. Opinions were wrong. I was a girl who pursued too much. Also wrong. I was a girl who didn’t understand. I was a girl who was naive. I was a girl who knew nothing about anything. I was stubborn. I was complicating my life for no good reason. I was a girl. And I remember realizing that things were going to be different.“Formicas quidem miserae erant.”4Different. In the way they spoke to me, as though we were no longer bound by the definition of “Filia,” “Mater,” “Pater,” the words fading into obscurity. Different. In the way I felt the judgemental eyes that watched over me my whole life, almost protectively, start to shut. The eyes that were not mine before, that were theirs, that depicted me as weird, strange, helpless, disobedient, unnatural, unlovable, inappropriate. Those eyes that one day became mine through which I watched myself. “Servi formicae in agro necaverunt.”5As the wind intensifies, and the night grows colder, I start to accept the ant. It was never waiting for me, yet I imposed so much on it. It might die soon enough, and I’ll forget about it. Its family has probably already forgotten about it. And although its classification might never change, and neither will the human desire to kill ants, I feel like I can mold out of myself.‍‍‍1The farmers order the slaves to work in the fields.2The slaves went into the fields.3When they were working, they saw the ants.4The ants were indeed miserable.5The slaves killed the ants in the field.‍

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