October 31, 2018 Arts & Culture Writing in Blood By Erica X Eisen In the spring of his thirty-second year, the wandering monk Hanshan Deqing (1546–1623) returned to the monastery of Mount Wutai after a period of absence. “At this time,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “I recalled the benevolence of my parents and the care they had given me. I also thought of all of the obstacles that stood between me and the Law.” But his thoughts were so fixed on the debt he owed to his mother and father that he was no longer able to make spiritual progress along the path to enlightenment. In his pain, Deqing resolved to undertake an act of extraordinary penance: copying out the sūtra known as The Flower of Adornment using ink made from his own blood. “Above, this would tie me to the karma of prajna [wisdom],” he explained, “and below it would repay my parents for their benevolence.” Among the constellation of ascetic practices in Chinese Buddhism, one of the most common was blood writing. According to The History of the Chen Dynasty, blood writing began in the year 579, when a prince known as Shuling used his own blood to make a copy of the Nirvana Sūtra. The practice continued into the early twentieth century; men and women, laypeople and clergy copied texts in this manner, pressing to the page brushes dipped in blood, mixed with gold or soot ink or nothing at all. Cutting themselves in ritually potent places—at the tip of the finger, the root of the tongue, or above the crest of the heart—scribes would painstakingly execute stroke after stroke in a medium that, it was believed, represented the state of the soul: a dark color indicated sinfulness while a paler shade of ink betokened the writer’s purity. The production of religious texts was not the only end of bloodletting—early Chinese chronicles furnish many accounts of solemn pacts secured with blood. Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655), a patriarch of the Pure Land sect, is said to have used it to compose a letter to his mother. Approval for the practice was hardly universal: the poet-monk Jiaoran (730–199) found the mingling of sacred text with profane material blasphemous, while others argued that the necessary self-harm constituted grave filial impiety, even if undertaken for the salvation of one’s parents. And yet blood writing received broad enough acceptance that when Deqing made up his mind to copy out The Flowers of Adornment, the paper for the task was furnished by the Empress Mother herself. Read More
October 31, 2018 Arts & Culture The Horror of Geologic Time By Aaron Worth Arthur Machen. In 1895, the editors of a new magazine, The Unicorn, sought to make a splash by engaging a pair of literary hot properties to contribute parallel series of tales. The two writers were Arthur Machen and H. G. Wells, both fresh off recent publishing triumphs (in Machen’s case perhaps scandal is closer to the mark), and their contributions were to offer readers distinct modes or flavors of what we today would call genre fiction. The magazine, unfortunately, folded after a mere three issues, in which only one of Wells’s stories, and none of Machen’s, appeared. Machen related the episode, nearly three decades later, in characteristically self-deprecating fashion: ‘The Great God Pan” had made a storm in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the same time, a young gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved sensation with a book called ‘The Time Machine”; a book indeed. And a new weekly paper was projected by Mr. Raven Hill [sic] and Mr. Girdlestone, a paper that was to be called ‘The Unicorn.” And both Mr. Wells and myself were asked to contribute; I was to do a series of horror stories. This obscure episode in late-Victorian publishing history is intriguing for a number of reasons. It would be interesting to know, for instance, just how Raven-Hill and Girdlestone phrased their offer; perhaps they requested “more stuff in the ‘Pan’ line.” Writing in the 1920s, Machen speaks of “horror stories” and “tales of horror,” but it’s unlikely that these were the expressions used at the time (unlikely, too, that the editors asked the young Wells for more “scientific romances,” let alone the entirely anachronistic designation “science fiction”). This was, after all, precisely the period during which the still fluid conceptual boundaries of emergent genre categories like science fiction, fantasy, and horror were beginning to be negotiated, shaped, and defined. But a more tantalizing question is this: If The Unicorn, and its editors’ scheme, had been a success, would the trajectory of Machen’s reputation have more closely resembled that of Wells’s—triumph after triumph, as well as worldwide celebrity, in the years to come? Machen’s star, by contrast, sank slowly back toward the horizon line of relative obscurity, then followed an irregularly wavelike course throughout his later life (and afterlife), ascending and again declining at periodic intervals. For Wells, 1895 marked the beginning of fame; for Machen it meant something like the end of it, until the next century at any rate. But what if Machen had become, as it were, the H. G. Wells of horror? Read More
October 31, 2018 Hue's Hue Blaze Orange, the Color of Fear, Warnings, and the Artificial By Katy Kelleher It started with a gunshot. I had just moved into my new house in the woods of Maine, a log-sided cabin surrounded by miles of “public access” forest that were owned by logging companies and managed, as far as I could tell, by no one. It was October, and I was working in my bedroom, with my dog lying heavy on my feet. Suddenly, a shot rang out. It was close. Then another, and another. It was the echoey boom of a shotgun, a sound I’m familiar with, thanks to hours spent skeet shooting under the tutelage of an L2L. Bean instructor in the woods of Freeport. As I listened to the sound of gunfire, I slowly became aware of the stench of urine. My elderly dog, a sweet husky-hound mix named Deja, had pissed all over the floorboards. She was shaking from fear, trembling like an autumn leaf. I didn’t have the heart to discipline her. This has become an annual occurrence. People trek out into the lumber-land to shoot their guns. I become tense and resentful. Deja pees. And repeat. I no longer walk outside in the fall without carrying my fear with me. I’m always a little wary of hunters, but I’m more afraid of the drink-and-shoot types. Every year, people die in the woods, hit by stray bullets or mistaken for deer. And so I wear a blaze-orange Carhartt hat. And so my dogs wear orange bandannas around their necks. And so we nail signs to the trees, glowing, neon-orange signs that tell shooters to stay away, keep off our property. I have no way of knowing whether any of this works. Read More
October 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Ugliness Is Underrated: Ugly Fashion By Katy Kelleher Balenciaga’s “ugly dad sneakers.” In 2009, Alexander McQueen sketched a shoe that would forever change footwear, even for those who, like me, would never try it on or even see it in person. The shoe was shaped like a crab’s claw and covered in glittering scales. It had a nine-inch spiked heel and an interior platform; the wearer would stand on tiptoe, feet curved into the extreme arch of a Barbie doll or a ballerina in pointe shoes. It was aggressively ugly. McQueen didn’t intend to make these “armadillo boots” (as they came to be called) available to the masses; they were designed as showpieces. The collection that season was filled with fantastical items, objects that came from a future in which “the ice cap would melt … the waters would rise and … life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish,” McQueen said. “Humanity [would] go back to the place from whence it came.” Read More
October 30, 2018 Redux Redux: James Merrill’s Ouija Board By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. James Merrill. This week, we bring you James Merrill’s Art of Poetry interview, in which he explains how he draws inspiration from a Ouija board; “The Plato Club,” a strange feature in which Merrill and David Jackson use a Ouija board to contact Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Colette, Jean Genet, and others; and “Totem,” a poem by Eamon Grennan. If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. James Merrill, The Art of Poetry No. 31 Issue no. 84 (Summer 1982) INTERVIEWER Does the Ouija board ever manifest maniacal tendencies? Do you ever feel yourself lost in its grip? MERRILL Oh, we’ve been scared at times. A friend who sat with us at the board just once went on to have a pretty awful experience with some people out in Detroit. She was told to go west, and to sail on a certain freighter on a certain day, and the name of the island where she’d meet her great-grandmother reincarnated as a Polynesian teenager who would guide her to a mountain cave where in turn an old man . . . and so forth. Luckily she collapsed before she ever made it to California. Read More
October 30, 2018 Arts & Culture Finding My Family in Roald Dahl’s Boy By Bsrat Mezghebe When, for my Well-Read Black Girl anthology, I asked some of my favorite black women writers to write about the first time they saw themselves in a book, I wasn’t surprised to see that nearly all of the contributors wrote about works by other black women. Who better represent us, after all, than our sisters? What follows is the only essay in the collection focused on a work by a white writer—a white man, at that. Bsrat Mezghebe beautifully portrays the pain of separation and the need to belong that she felt as a young black girl in the diaspora, as reflected in Roald Dahl’s own story of migration, Boy. She shows how, even when we can’t see ourselves directly on the page, our imaginations can forge the connections we need to embrace ourselves entirely. —Glory Edim In Boy, Roald Dahl starts his childhood memoirs with this story of his father: As a teenager in late-nineteenth-century Norway, his father falls from a roof and breaks his arm. A drunk doctor pulls up in a horse and buggy, gives the wrong diagnosis, and amputates the poor kid’s arm without anesthesia. Dahl assures the reader that his father managed just fine. In fact, the only great inconvenience he suffered was not being able to cut the top off a boiled egg. No other time is spent on this unnecessary loss of limb. I don’t remember how old I was when I first read Boy. But that blithe tone about an avoidable catastrophe was the first time I found my family in a book. Dahl sounded like my parents and their mass of Eritrean friends who had become our surrogate family in the Washington, D.C., area. Their stories were otherworldly, so different from my own life and the books I read. And the levity with which they treated their dramas—the deaths of loved ones, culture shock abroad, and nostalgia for home—only confused me more. Dahl’s voice echoed what I had heard in my home but nowhere else. Dahl fast-forwards to his father and uncle taking a country stroll to discuss their futures. They decide that Uncle Oscar will plant his flag in France, while Papa Harald will try his luck in the United Kingdom. A branch of the Dahl family splinters, and again, something felt familiar. Thanks to the independence war against Ethiopia, I didn’t know a single Eritrean who had family in fewer than three countries. Our circumstances were less idyllic than the Dahls’—most Eritreans trekked on foot to Sudan before eventually making it to North America and Europe—but here was the first time I read of families parting, mirroring my own sense of loss. There is nothing tragic about being a first-generation American, but the discontinuity is palpable. Your ancestors lived in the same place for hundreds of years until a dislocation, whether by force or design, hurls your parents a world away. Unlike my American friends, I didn’t know all my cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. I didn’t really understand the rhythm of my parents’ hometowns and early lives, nor could I visualize their journeys to the place I called home. Yet I needed my parents’ origin stories to make sense of my own. Read More