January 30, 2019

The Rider-Waite tarot deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith.

One winter morning I shuffled a deck of oracle cards with my eyes closed, and I realized that despite the blackness, I could still see what was happening in front of me. Here were the details of my hands, with the movements of each finger, every twitch of every narrow knuckle, made plain; I could see the cards, which were not clear enough to distinguish completely, but showed their blurry, colorful faces in broad strokes. I decided to further test this ability by holding colored pens, randomly chosen from a pouch, before my shut eyes. The pen test indicated that I could also “see” the colors behind my lids—imperfectly, yes, but well enough to grasp whether I was looking at a light color or a dark one, and I called out the hot-pink one immediately.

Journaling and drawing divinatory cards had both become routine parts of my life earlier that year, when I was fighting psychosis and struggling to make the world cohere; I’d found that tarot and oracle cards offered a decent framework for structuring a fractured existence. Tarot cards vary from deck to deck, depending on the artist and/or creator, but typically follow a seventy-eight-card structure of Major Arcana, consisting of twenty-two archetypes, from The Fool to The World, and Minor Arcana, consisting of four suits of fourteen cards each (Wands, Pentacles, Swords, Cups), from Aces to Kings. Oracle cards offer more variety; their content and theme depend entirely upon the creator. The one I primarily used that winter had watercolor illustrations: “Redefine Boundaries,” read one card; “Higher Self,” read another. Whichever card I drew served a double purpose, foreshadowing how the day might take shape and also giving me a shape with which to understand the events of the day. And on that day in 2013, I could see with what some call clairvoyance.

But the day went on, and the strange ability left me incrementally, as though a heavy curtain were dropping, until when I closed my eyes there was only darkness. If I close my eyes right now, I still see only this ordinary darkness.

At first I mentioned this only to C., and then to one or two of my closest friends. I joked with them that as far as superhuman abilities go, being able to see what’s in front of me with my eyes closed is a rather pathetic one. I certainly couldn’t take that show on the road. And my “sight without sight” happened only one other time, on September 29, 2014, when I was not psychotic: again, I realized that I could see the world with my eyes closed. Again, I tested myself with colored pens and found myself to be accurate. I asked a new friend, a mystic, for advice, and she told me to contemplate whatever seemed unclear to me at the time.

My response:

So after a bunch of fleeting images—a girl clutching a book to her chest and plummeting into the ocean—sinking for a really long time, hair floating—hits the bottom and then ricochets back up to the surface, gasping, still clutching the book, in the middle of nowhere—looking around—a buoy appears and she struggles to climb onto it—she climbs onto it, drops the book, grabs it—sits on the buoy for a long time—the buoy eventually crashes against an island & she climbs onto the island, which is basically a large, pointy mound—when she reaches the top, the book explodes out of her arms as a white bird and flies upward—the bird goes up for a really long time (at this point I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, because it felt like the bird was just going to keep going up forever)—eventually it explodes into a white light that spreads over the entire sky, enveloping the universe.

The curtain dropped again a few hours later. I haven’t experienced the ability since. Read More

January 29, 2019

Arts & Culture

Where Virginia Woolf Listened to the Waves

By Katharine Smyth

Virginia Woolf’s Talland House

When she was in her late fifties, Virginia Woolf wrote that her most important memory was of lying in bed at Talland House—the nineteenth-century home in St Ives, Cornwall where she, her parents, and her seven siblings spent every summer until she was thirteen—and listening to waves break on the beach as sunlight pressed against a yellow blind. It was “of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light, and feeling, it is almost impossible that I should be here; of feeling the purest ecstasy I can conceive.” This radiance and cresting water would be consecrated again and again in her writing, saturating not only essays, diaries, and letters but also Jacob’s Room, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse. As Hermione Lee notes in her biography of Woolf, “Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house.”

When Woolf’s mother died of rheumatic fever in 1895, the Stephen family’s visits to Talland House abruptly ceased. Its lease was sold soon afterward. Some thirty years later, this sudden, devastating break—the actual and figurative end to Woolf’s childhood—would spark the plot of To the Lighthouse, her novel about a family of ten who spends the summer in a remote seaside town. The family’s house, and its surroundings, are as vital to the book as its cast of human characters; I went to St Ives to see what they might teach me, not just about Virginia Woolf but also about those homes by which we measure happiness.

Arts & Culture

Is There Anything Else I Can Help You with Today?

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A telephone call between the author and a fictionalized Delta representative, in which their conversation ranges from the bureaucratic inanities of air travel to the ravages of global capitalism.

Stock photo

ALTED

Thank you for calling Delta SkyMiles. My name is Alted. Do I have the pleasure of speaking to Ms. Adichie?

ADICHIE

Yes. How are you?

ALTED

I’m very good, thanks. How can I help you today?

ADICHIE

I’m calling about my parents’ ticket. They’re flying tomorrow from New York to Lagos. I bought their return ticket with my credit card. They were supposed to fly home last month but my father needed to undergo a medical procedure and so I changed their return date, and I paid a change fee. I know Delta requires you to come to a Delta desk with your credit card for all ticket purchases and changes. And I’m calling because I am sick, I have a terrible cold.

ALTED

Yes ma’am, I can hear it in your voice.

ADICHIE

[Coughing] Yes. So I’m wondering if, since I have already shown the credit card before they flew on the first leg, and since I used the same card to pay for the date change, could you please let them board their flight tomorrow? Could you please waive my having to appear at the airport to once again show the credit card?

ALTED

Ma’am, I certainly understand the inconvenience. But our policy is that you will need to physically present the card at a Delta desk.

ADICHIE

I understand that. I’m just asking whether you are able to consider the particular circumstances here.

ALTED

I apologize and understand the inconvenience. But you will have to physically present the card at a Delta desk in the airport. Read More

Arts & Culture

When Diderot Met Voltaire

By Andrew S. Curran

François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a Voltaire, and Denis Diderot.

In mid-December 1776, the eighty-three-year-old Voltaire pulled out a piece of paper and dashed off a note to Diderot. Having been exiled from Paris for more than twenty-five years, the now wizened and virtually toothless philosophe lamented the fact that the two men had never laid eyes on each other: “I am heartbroken to die without having met you … I would gladly come and spend my last fifteen minutes in Paris in order to have the solace of hearing your voice.”

Fifteen months later, Voltaire rolled into the capital in his blue, star-spangled coach. Quite ill with prostate cancer, the famous humanitarian, essayist, and playwright nonetheless organized a feverish schedule for himself. In addition to finishing work on a five-act tragedy—he lived long enough to attend the premiere—Voltaire spent most of his days holding court in a friend’s hôtel particulier on the corner of the rue de Beaune and the quai des Théatins. Here, for hours at a time, Voltaire received visits from a long list of adoring friends and dignitaries, among them Benjamin Franklin and his son. Sometime during Voltaire’s three-month stay, Diderot also came to pay his respects. Journalists who wrote about the meeting hinted that some relationships are best conducted solely by correspondence.

Diderot and Voltaire had first exchanged letters in 1749 when the “prince of the philosophes” had invited the then up-and-coming Diderot to dinner. In addition to hoping to get to know the clever author of the Letter on the Blind, Voltaire had presumably hoped to help the newly appointed editor of the Encyclopédie rethink his atheism. Diderot decided to dodge both the invitation and the sermon. One might wonder what kind of young writer turns down lunch with the most famous public intellectual ever to live. The answer, in 1749, was pretty clear: a proud and unremorseful unbeliever who had no interest in having his philosophy questioned by an unbending deist. Read More

Arts & Culture

The Poet with Many Names—and Many Deaths

By Ha Jin

Collage. Li Bai painting: public domain via Wikimedia Commons, a painting in Gu Lang Yu museum, Xiamen, Fujian, China. Moon photo: Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)) / https://Lucnix.be.

He has many names. In the West, people call him Li Po, as most of his poems translated into English bear that name. Sometimes it is also spelled Li Bo. But in China, he is known as Li Bai. During his lifetime (A.D. 701–62), he had other names—Li Taibai, Green Lotus Scholar, Li Twelve. The last one is a kind of familial term of endearment, as Bai was twelfth among his brothers and male cousins on the paternal side. It was often used by his friends and fellow poets when they addressed him—some even dedicated poems to him titled “For Li Twelve.” By the time of his death, he had become known as a great poet and was called zhexian, or Banished Immortal, by his admirers. Such a moniker implies that he had been sent down to earth as punishment for his misbehavior in heaven. Over the twelve centuries since his death, he has been revered as shixian, Poet Immortal. Because he was an excessive drinker, he was also called jiuxian, Wine Immortal. Today it is still common for devotees of his poetry to trek hundreds of miles, following some of the routes of his wanderings as a kind of pilgrimage. Numerous liquors and wines bear his name. Indeed, his name is a ubiquitous brand, flaunted by hotels, restaurants, temples, and even factories.

In English, in addition to “Li Po,” he once had another pair of names, Li T’ai Po and Rihaku. The first is a phonetic transcription of his original Chinese name, Li Taibai, the name his parents gave him. And Ezra Pound, in his Cathay—his collected translations of classical Chinese poetry—called Li Bai “Rihaku” because Pound had translated those poems from the notes left by the American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, who had originally studied Li Bai’s poetry in Japanese when he was in Japan. Pound’s loose translation of Li Bai’s “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” has been included in many textbooks and anthologies as a masterpiece of modern poetry. It is also one of Pound’s signature poems—arguably his best known. For the sake of consistency and clarity, let us stay with the name Li Bai.

He also has several deaths ascribed to him. For hundreds of years, some people even maintained that he had never died at all, claiming to encounter him now and then. In truth, we are uncertain about the exact date and cause of his death. In January 764, the newly enthroned emperor Daizong issued a decree summoning Li Bai to serve as a counselor at court. It was a post without actual power, in spite of its high-sounding title. Yet to any man of learning and ambition, such an appointment was a great favor, a demonstration of the emperor’s benevolence and magnanimity—and, in Li Bai’s case, a partial restoration of the high status he had once held in the court. When the royal decree reached Dangtu County, Anhui, where Li Bai was supposed to be located, the local officials were thrown into confusion and could not find him. Soon it was discovered that he had died more than a year before. Of what cause and on what day, no one could tell. So we can say only that Li Bai, despite his renown, passed away in 762 without notice. Read More

January 22, 2019

Arts & Culture

To All the Introductions I’ve Loved Before

By Michael Chabon

Konrad Kachelofen’s printing of Eclogue of Theodulus, 1492. Public domain.

“I never read introductions,” says Rose, the younger of my two daughters. She thinks it over for a second, frowns; the statement doesn’t quite ring true. She amends it: “Well, I’ve read two,” she says. One turns out to be Jack Kerouac’s introduction to Robert Frank’s The Americans, required reading for a photography class: “But it was fine because I like his style.” The other is Sherman Alexie’s introduction to his own The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (a favorite book, and author, of Rose’s), because “it felt like it would be rude not to.”

I suspect that my daughter’s antipathy toward introductions (we did not discuss postscripts) is fairly common among avid readers. People who never bother to read what is more properly styled as a foreword (in which one writer presents the work of another) or a preface (in which the writer herself, often retrospectively, reflects on her own work) are likely as numerous as people who don’t bother with user manuals before launching the software application or powering up the widget.

You will not find me among either group; in the second instance out of hard experience but in the first out of love, pure love, from the time of my first encounter, circa 1979, with John Cheever’s all-too-brief preface to his Stories, which contains the following passage, in which I now detect a premonitory stirring, two decades ahead of schedule, of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: “These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.”

Certain forewords—Susan Sontag’s to A Barthes Reader, Walter Benjamin’s to Fables of Leskov—and prefaces—Raymond Chandler’s to The Simple Art of Murder, Robert Towne’s to the published script of Chinatown, Elmore Leonard’s to his Complete Western Stories—have become beloved, even crucial texts for me, to be regularly reread, as are Nabokov’s afterword to Lolita and Leigh Brackett’s to her Best of collection. Read More

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Schizophrenia and the Supernatural

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Where Virginia Woolf Listened to the Waves

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Is There Anything Else I Can Help You with Today?

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When Diderot Met Voltaire

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The Poet with Many Names—and Many Deaths

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To All the Introductions I’ve Loved Before

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