Forms of Boredom Advertised as Poetry

XXV

Tag: Academic

In That Quiet Earth

October 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The Navigation of Physical Space Within “Wuthering Heights”

While paranormal hauntings and an enigmatic landscape lend Wuthering Heights its sense of gothic terror, the actions of characters such as Heathcliff extend beyond the merely horrific: their total disregard for convention and civility render elements of Brontë’s text virtually inaccessible to the socialized being. Thematically and symbolically, Wuthering Heights is riddled with margins: images of windows, doorways, thresholds, and gateways heavily inform the text. Traditionally, these symbols entail division, restriction, and change, both in the literal sense and as allegories for the socially constructed parameters of civilization. But the narrative power of Wuthering Heights is largely contingent upon the ways in which Brontë’s characters navigate these physical and metaphorical boundaries: the volatile landscapes and complex architecture within the novel are repeatedly linked to the human body, and can often be read in coded sexual terms. So as the characters of Wuthering Heights engage with the physical spaces they occupy, and specifically with liminal areas such as windows and doorways, they encounter an observable nexus of social and sexual taboos: the characters of Heathcliff and Lockwood respectively embody two opposite responses to this half- civilized world.

Mysteriously orphaned as a child, and described by Brontë as “A dark-skinned gipsy in aspect,” the character of Heathcliff is socially and racially divided from his childhood community of Wuthering Heights. The resulting sense of financial and ethnic separation from the communal masses is reflected clearly in the voyeuristic physical spaces that Heathcliff often occupies. In Chapter VI of Volume I, when the Linton’s dog bites Cathy at Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff later explains to Nelly: “I refused to go without Cathy…. The curtains were still looped up at one corner, and I resumed my station as spy; because, if Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million of fragments, unless they let her out” (Brontë, 51). The “great glass panes” in this scene clearly represent a degree of physical separation between Heathcliff and the object of his desire, with the glass creating a tangible but transparent boundary between himself and the world of Thrushcross Grange. But perhaps more notably, the scene demonstrates the way in which physical and social othering can manifest specifically as the realized sense of voyeurism that is routinely experienced by Heathcliff. Identifying himself as a “spy” in the scene, Heathcliff, rather than Nelly narrates this passage: from his isolated positioning behind the window, Cathy is reduced to an object of his gaze, and even when Nelly recounts the story to Lockwood, the language and visual perspective of the scene belong to Heathcliff. The passage is also one of Heathcliff’s earliest experiences with what Pauline Nestor refers to as an “endless deferral of satisfaction” (Brontë, Introduction, XXV), a characteristic of his voyeuristic social positioning with several physical and social consequences. Although he considers shattering the glass, and thereby breaching both the physical and moral boundaries in Thrushcross Grange that separate him from Catherine, Heathcliff ultimately remains passive. In what will prove to be a formative moment in his life (as Cathy meets Edgar Linton, the man who eventually marries her) he remains a perpetual outlier both physically and symbolically, yet clings to this position in order to experience a limited, one-sided satiation of his fixation upon Cathy. Heathcliff, as spectator, retains the ability in this chapter to covertly view an object of his desire, thereby satisfying an emotional need for closeness without ever directly experiencing physical satisfaction or intimacy of any form: a circumstance later echoed in Chapter XX of Volume II when he notes, “My Soul’s bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself” (Brontë, 333).

Of course, Heathcliff’s status as voyeur cannot naturally grant him access to the desired physical spaces that Cathy and Edgar occupy: when he enters these spaces at last, he does so in acts of physical and social transgression. In Chapter XV of Volume 2, after acquiring possession of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, Heathcliff “…made no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name: he was master, and availed himself of the master’s privilege to walk straight in, without saying a word” (Brontë, 285). Heathcliff is depicted frequently throughout Wuthering Heights as a bestial, even devilish figure: in accordance with this Gothic imagery, there may be an underlying vampiric, and therefore rape-like, element to such casual and unwanted invasion of feminine- occupied spaces. It is unsurprising, then, that these psychologically violent infringements upon a physical space within Wuthering Heights are routinely accompanied by grotesque disfigurations of the body: of course, this is first hinted at much earlier in the text, when the Changeling representing Cathy’s ghost attempts to breach Lockwood’s bedroom window, but the even more frightening scene occurs in Chapter XV, when Heathcliff violates Cathy’s grave. Heathcliff’s actions, which are fueled by dissonant and perverse bodily desire, are explained in full as he tells Nelly:

“…In the evening I went to the churchyard…. Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself—“I’ll have her in my arms again!” …I got a spade from the tool-house, and began to delve with all my might—it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave, and bending down” (Brontë, 289).

In this scene, the effort of opening the coffin, and especially the action of actually breaking the wood with his bare hands, demonstrates Heathcliff’s efforts towards total physical destruction of a barrier between his body and Catherine’s. Furthermore, the act of breaching the coffin is socially as well as physically transgressive: in addition to violating the clear separation that cemeteries establish between living bodies and corpses in human civilization, Heathcliff’s language may even indicate an ongoing sexual desire for Cathy. In other words, Heathcliff may not only harbor desire for Cathy as he remembers her, but also for her present state in the novel, as a corpse: his use of the term “my object” can be read as referencing Cathy’s corpse as an object of affection, or of desire, while his desperation to “have her in my arms again” is an unsettlingly physical and even romantic sentiment to demonstrate towards a lifeless and decaying body. In this scene, Brontë’s diction and Heathcliff’s stated desires both contain a borderline implication of necrophilia: among the most appalling of social taboos. Thus, as Heathcliff begins to engage more aggressively with the physical space around him, he abandons more carelessly the norms and standards of the society that constrained him: the anticlimactic frustration of his voyeurism gives way to a tendency towards transgression, and his bodily desires grow increasingly perverse.

A novel of lingering tensions and oftentimes of profound horror, Wuthering Heights functions, in some ways, as a haunted text. The human tragedy and supernatural horror of the narrative besets the audience—but some of its poison is released through the telling. One of the great paradoxes of Wuthering Heights is the simultaneous necessity and limitations of both physical social boundaries: while Catherine’s strict adherence to societal convention arguably destroys both Heathcliff’s life and her own, the total lack of regard for the parameters of civilized society that Heathcliff demonstrates has horrific consequences of its own. Lockwood, on the other hand, hovers on the threshold between the conventional and the primitive: although a civilized man, he is repeatedly drawn to the seclusion and enigmatic wilderness of Wuthering Heights. Neither rejecting nor wholly embracing conventional society, Lockwood’s consolation in the face of Wuthering Heights’ tragic history is achieved through acts of communication with the character of Nelly. Lockwood often misinterprets what he sees at Wuthering Heights, and Nelly occasionally embellishes or omits information in order to fit her internalized opinion of each character; nevertheless, through lengthy narration the two characters are ultimately able to piece together an imperfect but nuanced understanding of the occupants of Wuthering Heights. In this way, they begin to exorcise the fraught history of the landscape from their own souls. These acts of healing are reflected by the newfound ability of the characters to navigate the physical thresholds of the house: in the first scene of the novel, Lockwood attempts to enter through the gateway of Wuthering Heights, but is apprehended (Brontë, 3). By the end of the novel, having fully recounted the place’s history to the reader, Lockwood is able to enter easily, stating, “I had neither to climb the gate, nor to knock, it yielded to my hand” (Brontë, 307). The ability to navigate the physical thresholds of the landscape seems to parallel the redemptive and cleansing quality of verbalizing and communicating the tragic history of Wuthering Heights; thus, in the souls of both Nelly and Lockwood, the terrors of a haunted past are comprehended, and ultimately mitigated through mutual acts of translation.

Through its characters’ engagements with the literal and metaphorical boundaries of their social spaces, Wuthering Heights demonstrates the ambiguous line between civilized and animalistic, the dissatisfaction of forced and othered voyeurism, the terrifying distortions of the transgressive body, and the catharsis of narrative. Interestingly, though, the reader is placed in a peculiar position by the end of the novel. For while Nelly tells the story to Lockwood, and Lockwood to the audience, the story is not ours to tell—we have no such purgative ability. The audience then becomes the perpetual voyeur, experiencing the novel in a profoundly visceral fashion, while never quite entering the novel’s inaccessible world. The story then lingers with a strange and almost supernatural beauty that the reader consumes, yet struggles to translate. This is perhaps the most extraordinary literary achievement of Emily Brontë’s narration within Wuthering Heights. She creates a world whose history must be told over and over again—leaving our souls affected, our slumbers unquiet.

The Gendered Art of Death

May 18, 2015 / / 0 Comments

 Music, Sound, and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“Death is your art—” Spike says, gazing up at the camera as the shot interlaces between the alleyway where he kneels at Buffy’s feet, and the New York City subway car where he straddles the body of the Slayer he has killed. “You make it with your hands every day” (Fool For Love, 05.07). In just one interpretation of this phrase, Spike’s words can be read as Joss Whedon’s self-referential humor at its finest: an indicated awareness of the fact that many of his finest artistic moments as a writer and director have occurred during his dealings with loss and dying. Death is art in Buffy The Vampire Slayer: the most powerful aesthetic and narrative achievements of the show routinely exploit and explore the audience’s fear of it, wish for it, and reactions to it. But death also has a gendered significance, particularly in its thematic relationship with the body, and the various representations of death through music in Buffy reveal a recurring tendency to aestheticize the corpses of women. In the course of the show’s progression, the interactions between gender, aesthetics, and the body become increasingly nuanced, as male bodies are repeatedly re-coded as feminine, and one-dimensional objectification of the female corpse gives way to more complex visual and auditory portrayals of women’s bodies. Nevertheless, despite substantial developments in the nature of bodily aestheticizing over the course Seasons 3 through 5, the medium of sound remains a primary site for observing the gendered implications of death in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In “Passion” (02.17), the narrative trajectory of Buffy is altered irreversibly with the murder of Janna Kalderash (better known throughout the series by her alias, Jenny Calendar). In contrast to the campier camerawork that characterizes early Buffy episodes like “Witch” (01.03) or “Prophecy Girl” (01.22), “Passion” is a highly stylized 40 minutes of television: the power of a villainous narrative voiceover is used in the series for the first time, and scenes are often filmed through windows or at a distance, evoking voyeurism and representing, through Angelus, the objectifying force of the male gaze. This precision of the camerawork, as well as the distinctive and (heretofore) unique use of the voiceover, allow the episode to establish a more sophisticated and consciously aesthetic tone. In other words, while many episodes of Buffy, and especially many early episodes, are wry, self-referential, and humorously aware of the horror genre clichés that they alternately rely upon and subvert, “Passion” is one of the first to treat both Buffy’s storyline and the horror genre with a graver sense of respect, focusing specifically on the very real emotional consequences that supernatural tropes like vampires can impose upon the lives of the characters. These artistic decisions are reflected in the episode’s construction: the heightened sense of aesthetic precision that characterizes “Passion” not only reflects an ongoing shift in the storyline that began around “Innocence” (02.14), when the writers began to engage more seriously with the conflicts of the characters rather than merely satirizing the trials of later adolescence, but also foreshadows a central theme of this episode: the artistry with which Angelus regards death and dying.

Near the end of “Passion,” death, gender, and sound intersect in one of the most horrifying and well-composed moments of the series, when Giles finds Janna’s body placed carefully amidst rose petals in his bedroom as “O Soave Fanciulla” from Puccini’s La Bohème plays on in the background. The calculated beauty of this scene is largely contingent upon the auditory decisions made by Angelus in the narrative, and by director Michael Gershman in the writing process. The rising operatic score formulates an image of tragedy deliberately characterized by artifice: the audience is already aware that Angelus has murdered Janna, and so the music indicates that this rose-strewn setting has been created specifically for Giles. This conscious sense of constructionism, in addition to heightening the audience’s sense of dramatic irony, also reinforces the artistic nature of Janna’s death. Angelus places Janna among the rose petals for Giles’ to look upon, revealing through music that he has manufactured this scene, and hoping to incite rage, grief, and fear in those who knew and loved her. Similarly, Gershman places actress Robia LaMorte in the scene for the emotional purposes of the audience: the music causes us to feel intense sorrow and, in all likelihood, a heightened sense of respect for the aesthetic talent that Gershman demonstrates in this beautifully constructed scene. Together, the director and the vampire create a simultaneous narrative and directorial aestheticizing of a woman’s corpse: Janna’s agency is lost not only in the philosophical sense discussed by academics such as Thomas W. Laqueur (who outlines the socially driven subject-to-object transition that accompanies the shift from “person” to “corpse”), but also in her corpses’s status as an object of the male gaze. She has become a set piece in a much larger scene, her dead body reduced to just another one of Angelus’s (or perhaps Gershman’s) masterpieces. Through its evocative beauty and its implications of artifice, “O Soave Faniciulla” sets the scene for both Angelus and Gershman’s aestheticizing of Janna’s death, becoming a primary device by which the objectification of her body is made possible.

Interestingly, though, the aestheticized corpses of Buffy are not always anatomically female, and by the end of Season 2, it becomes clear that the death of any body that has been coded as “feminine” through its relationship with conventional gender roles is susceptible to objectification in the series. The character of Angel presents one such example of a feminized male body, and “Close Your Eyes,” Buffy and Angel’s love theme for the first two seasons of the show, is one of the primary means through which Angel’s death is aestheticized. The only point in the series that this song achieves crescendo occurs in “Becoming” (02.22) when, caught frequently between her obligations as Slayer and her desires as a woman, Buffy makes the first of the many terrible decisions that will come to shape her later adolescence, and puts a sword through her lover’s heart “because [she] had to” (Selfless, 07.05). Musically representing this crucial rite of passage, “Close Your Eyes” operates as an auditory representation of the emotional and physical decisions that Buffy must make at the expense of Angel’s life and body. Even the song’s title, which echoes Buffy’s final words to Angel, reinforces this dynamic: she performs the actions that shape the narrative, while Angel, the subject, is acted upon.

“Close Your Eyes” therefore seems to negotiate an entirely new relationship between music, gender, and the body: it emphasizes rather than subverts Buffy’s narrative agency, suggesting a reversal of the musical treatment of gender that “Passion” demonstrated just five episodes earlier. But this reading of Season 2’s love theme is complicated by the fact that Angel’s body is consistently coded as feminine; the aestheticized nature of this death, therefore, is not very different from Janna’s after all. In “Surprise/Innocence” (02.13/14), Angel—rather than Buffy—experiences the “death by sex” trope: a gendered horror cliché wherein the woman dies as either a direct or indirect consequence of having sex. While Buffy certainly suffers as a result of her sexual decisions, her grief is reactionary. She does not die, but instead mourns for Angel, whose loss of his soul constitutes a sort of death of the self. In addition to representing this typically female trope, Angel is also re-gendered through his fulfilling of the virgin/whore dichotomy, wherein he once again performs a conventionally feminine role. His abstinence allows him to retain his soul, any expression of sexuality may cause him to revert to the evil Angelus. Angel’s agency and narrative complexity are both greatly compromised by this binary characterization: while he is generally permitted to function only as either a gentle love interest or a misogynistic villain, and his status as either, like that of the virgin or the whore, is determined through his acts of physicality. In his unconventional fulfillment of these two traditionally female tropes, Angel is clearly and repeatedly coded as female throughout the season. But the feminization of his body is demonstrated most physically through music: most notably during the crescendo of “Close Your Eyes,” when he is stabbed as the song reaches its climax. Angel’s body serves a site of penetration in this scene, and evokes a visceral inversion of our conventional understandings of gendered and sexual roles. It is consistent with the show’s treatment of gender, then, that Angel’s death is musically aestheticized in a manner similar to Janna’s in “Passion.” Anatomically male but thematically feminine, he becomes a symbol of beauty and a source of emotional evocation: as the haunting, fragile strains of “Close Your Eyes” intensify, forming a beautiful auditory climax, Angel’s dying body forms the aesthetic centerpiece of one of Whedon’s earliest moments of significant artistic achievement in the series.

“Hush” (04.10) features a similar re-gendering of a male body, and the episode’s musical score once again aestheticizes the death of this female-coded body. “Hush” features a distinctive examination of the communicative limits of language: in the first 17 minutes of the show, characters frequently encounter the frustrations of verbal socialization, but the remainder of the episode is entirely devoid of speech, and a sinister language of music and bodies informs the narrative instead. When the Gentlemen carve out their first victim’s heart, nature of their actions—penetrative, physical, violent, and precise— allows this action to be easily read as rape. It is a surprising shift in traditional media representation, then, that the subject upon whom such an act is performed is a young man. But the male body here is once again coded feminine: it functions as a subject to be acted upon, and a site for the Gentleman’s penetration. As is the case with Angel, the feminine physical coding of the victim is reinforced through the musical score, which reaches a screeching climax as his body is violated.

While the music of “Hush” genders this victim’s body, recoding it as feminine by creating an auditory climax that parallels the visual implications of rape that the Gentlemen suggest, it is the absence of dialogue that aestheticizes this death scene. The only audible sounds that accompany the gruesome procedure are those of the musical score, and the Gentlemen’s actions are made all the more invasive by their victim’s inability to scream. The death of the victim is thereby devalued through a singularity of sound: the music becomes increasingly more chaotic, but without any of the accompanying verbal expressions of pain that the victim, through his body language, is clearly attempting to emit, the auditory nature of the scene feels incomplete and disturbing. The victim’s body of is no longer able to verbally respond to the act of its own dying, producing a distinctly uncanny effect (especially considering that the music in Buffy very often augments dialogue between characters). Once again, dead or dying bodies in Buffy the Vampire Slayer are both gendered and aestheticized through the show’s use of sound. The score re-genders the male body by reinforcing the notions of sexual climax and penetration through its grating crescendo, while the absence of any noise other than music in this scene provides a vivid artistic depiction of the horror of the death of a body that has been denied the opportunity for verbal expression.

Finally, in the Season 5’s “The Body” (05.16), a female corpse once again forms the primary thematic intersection between death and sound. The most distinctive element of the “The Body” is the episode’s complete lack of score, which, in conjunction with the natural cause of Joyce’s death, creates a sense of realism that distinguishes the episode from many of the series’ more openly supernatural representations of death. Rhonda V. Wilcox argues compellingly that this sense of realism is precisely what enabled so many critics laude this episode above other similarly well-composed episodes of the show, citing specifically many the general critical consensus that the appearance of a vampire—the only overtly supernatural element of the episode—was the single flaw in an otherwise excellent episode.

Following Wilcox’s theory that realism is synonymous with “quality television” in the realm of popular aesthetics, and considering that the realism of “The Body” is in large part determined by its absence of music, female death in Buffy has once again become aestheticized through sound—but this time, to a very different effect. Rather than using rising music gloss over the gruesomely physical connotations of a corpse, or a jarring dissonance to drive home the horror of a voiceless death, “The Body” uses its absence of a score to emphasize the sounds surrounding Joyce’s body: the crack of her rib, the sound of the zipper on the body bag, and clipping of scissors cutting through her blouse. These sounds elicit a very different understanding of death from the audience: while the beautiful climaxes of “O Soave Fanciulla” and “Close Your Eyes” allowed us to distance ourselves from the narrative by treating the deaths of Janna and Angel as moments of beauty, the scoreless nature of “The Body” refuses to reduce Joyce’s corpse to an aesthetic achievement. Unable to find an emotional catharsis in the constructed beauty of music, the grief that accompanies death is imposed instead upon the natural sounds of the body, and the tragedy of Joyce’s loss becomes rooted in the mundane and unsettlingly visceral noises that surround the act of dying. Although deliberately selected by Whedon (and therefore undeniably furthering a carefully constructed artistic vision of death), the absence of music in “The Body” demonstrates a treatment of the female corpse that is far more nuanced and humanizing than many of its predecessors. In all of the scenes that emphasize everyday sounds over a carefully constructed score, Joyce’s corpse functions not as a prop or a set piece, but as the central focus of an episode that thoughtfully considers the emotional and psychological consequences of physical death through the body of a beloved female character.

Sound is just one of the many aesthetic forces used to construct representations of death (a theme upon which this show about vampires demonstrates an unsurprising fixation), but Whedon’s heavy reliance on wit and dialogue make musical, silent, and scoreless episodes of Buffy all the more daring. The episodes that use the aesthetics of sound in the riskiest and most unconventional ways are all placed in crucial points in each season’s respective narrative arc. “Passion,” in addition to showing the first death of a major character on Buffy, pushes Angel past the threshold of forgiveness in the eyes of the Scoobies, thereby necessitating his eventual death. “Becoming” similarly propels Buffy beyond the bliss of adolescence, drawing her into the post-traumatic territory of young adulthood, where she arguably remains for the duration of the series. “Hush” is the episode wherein Buffy and Riley begin their romance and learn truths about one another, and features the first interactions between Willow and Tara. “The Body” marks the major turning point in Buffy’s family life that arguably leads directly to her sacrifice in “The Gift” (05.22).

By positioning these daring “sound” episodes at the site of narrative catalysts, Whedon himself has emphasized the importance of music and silence in Buffy. Rather than compromising precarious instances of artistic and auditory experimentation by inserting them into inconsequential points in the seasonal arcs, he has consistently used their narrative positioning to compel audiences to engage with themes of death, gender, and physicality through the medium of sound. And of course, as these various forms of music, sound, and silence all act alternately as both facilitators for and impediments of communication in Buffy—paralleling the show’s representations of death in their simultaneous fragmentation and unification of communities—it is unsurprising that their respective instances of heightened relevance all find a particular site of observation in the body. The first five seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer demonstrate a complex and always- evolving treatment of women’s bodies: although music in earlier episodes such as “Passion” provided a singularly aestheticized set of representations, the scores of episodes like “Becoming” and “Hush” both complicated the series’ treatment of gender by re-coding male bodies as feminine. By the time “The Body” was aired, the writers of Buffy had used both the presence of “ordinary” sounds and the absence of musical score to negotiate a fragile truce between the show’s feminism and its representation of female corpses. In each of these instances, the use of sound in Buffy the Vampire Slayer acts as a primary lens through which these aesthetic and bodily shifts can be observed, and provides detailed insight into the show’s treatment of gender and death.

Works Cited

Kociemba, David. ““Over-identify Much?’ Passion, “Passion,” and the Author-Audience Feedback Loop in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Slayage. Accessed May 9, 2015.

Wilcox, Rhonda. Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. London: I.B. Tauris :, 2005.

Effigies of Innocence

April 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

The double grief of a lost bliss
Is to recall its happy hour in pain …
We were alone with innocence and dim time.

Dante, Inferno, Canto V, ll.118-19

“A woman’s sexual identity is bound up in shame, desire, ecstasy, and grief. The emergence of such an identity functions simultaneously as an act of loss and of utter fulfillment: amidst the conflicting social views of female sexuality that exist between generations, what we gain as women from our sexual experiences also furthers a physical and emotional distance from our mothers that begins at the moment of our birth. In a variation upon the classic innocence-for-knowledge exchange that characterized the fall of Eden, sexuality in the works of both Bechdel and Morrison can be construed as a means of further separating ourselves from the women who birthed us—and in knowing ourselves, our bodies, and our desires, we depart from an implicit state of grace. But in accordance with Winnicott’s theory, when we widen this distance from our mothers through further inhabitance and exploration of our own bodies, we are in fact completing the necessary destruction of the subject by the object through our creation of the identical wounds in which we can recognize both our mothers and ourselves. It is my belief—and, I would argue, the implicated beliefs of Morrison and Bechdel—that to know our mothers, we must first be truly separate from them. Sexual experience and identity provides a vivid lens through which we can observe the pain and potency of this conscious distancing; thus, the multifaceted implications of sexuality in the works of Bechdel and Morrison are conveyed through symbiotic representations of separation and joining.

The mirror exists as a visual and conceptual paradigm of this thematic representation in Are You My Mother?. The presence of a mirror reveals the subject’s isolation from external objects; upon seeing one’s own reflection, Bechdel explains, “…you can see that you’re separate from everything else ” (Bechdel, 232). This notion of separation entails immense physical and conceptual distance: the second panel on this page depicts Bechdel’s silhouette in a terrifying free-fall into vast darkness. But in the same way that the mirror conveys this notion of absence, it also indicates presence, as the reflection of a physical self visually reaffirms the subject’s existence. Because of this, the mirror can also be read as an allegory for Bechdel’s sexuality, which separates her from her mother in countless ways but also establishes her autonomy and inspires the necessary subject matter for a novel that ultimately repairs the distance between the two. On page 156, Bechdel asserts, “If it weren’t for the unconventionality of my desires, my mind might never have been forced to reckon with my body.” The very language of this passage implies the healing of a certain form of emptiness: the gap between the body and the mind. In the textual recounting of her sexual identity, experiences, and relationships, which constitute a substantial portion of the novel as a whole—and implicitly distance Bechdel further from her mother, who explicitly opposes this joining of the personal and the aesthetic (Bechdel, 156)—Bechdel constructs a story that heals the separation between her mind and body, and by extension, between her mother and herself.

In Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Florens initially demonstrates a fear of dark, empty spaces not dissimilar to Bechdel’s represented fear on page 232 of Are You My Mother?, stating, “How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark?” (Morrison, 5-6). By the end of the novel, however, Florens satiates this sense of distance that applies to both her mother and her lover with a visceral expression of language that is inspired and recounted through the story of her developing sexuality and romance with the blacksmith. As she carves her story into the walls of Vaark’s house, Florens fills her own emptiness until, “There is no more room in this room” (Morrison, 188). And just as Bechdel concludes Are You My Mother? with an act of physicality between her and her mother, symbolizing her successful separation from and rejoining of the subject (Bechdel, 287), Florens concludes her narrative having finally understood her mother’s desire for the hardening of her feet (Morrison, 189). Like Bechdel’s metaphor of the mirror, the hardening of Florens’ feet serves as a symbol for her sexual experience and growth: initially sheltered, vulnerable, and then wounded by her encounters with the blacksmith, their hardening finally provides Florens with both a separation from and an understanding of the decisions of her mother.

Through the development and exploration of their sexuality, both women come to at once understand and distance themselves from their mothers. In Are You My Mother?, Bechdel finally confronts her fear of darkness and emptiness as she concludes her novel and finalizes the destruction of her mother that its publication implies, explaining, “The further I moved into this imaginary space, the more it opened up” (Bechdel, 287). Emptiness in this passage suggests possibility and formation, not unlike the dark matter identified by Scully in A Mercy, which is “aching to be made into a world” (Morrison, 183). Thus, through the darkness and distance wherein Bechdel was once afraid and Florens thought she had lost her way, both women form the narrative realities in which they finalize their separation from their mothers through acts of sexual and physical autonomy—but in doing so, they engage in acts of empathy with their mothers as well. At the end of her novel, Bechdel explains of her mother, “She could see my invisible wounds because they were hers too” (Bechdel, 287). Wounds are themselves visceral representation of absence, depicting areas that form distance where there should be the presence of flesh—and as both Florens and Bechdel come to realize the identical wounds and distance they share with their mothers, conveyed to them as a result of their respective sexual identities and experiences, they are at last given the ability to heal them.

In my own experiences, sexuality gave me a means of reconnecting: in the act of entering the body of another, or of being entered myself, I became more deeply, physically close to another person than I had been since my own body separated from that of my mother. Through the bodies of other men and women, I have learned the natural language of my physicality and my gaze: how to peel back incandescent layers of solitude and vanity to seek what I am as it bleeds through what I was and will be: what I fear, what I think, what I hope to become. My sexuality has challenged the comfort and political conservatism of my mother, testing directly the strength and resilience of her love for her only daughter—and so it was through acts of sexual autonomy that I destroyed the subject, and after years of this mutual wounding, the subject survived its destruction. This was the completion of my sexual identity and my journey to rejoin my mother; in a cyclical manner not unlike the sequence of natural life to which womanhood is bound, it was the moment in which we connected again.

Our physical liberation and the emotional rejoining of our mothers occurs only when women abandon of our search for our effigies of pre-sexual innocence, which—lost to the pulls of experience, grief and “dim time”—existed only when our bodies were one with theirs. In A Mercy and Are You My Mother?, respectively, Florens and Bechdel both wield an extraordinary mastery of language that is derived from love, loss, and their sexual experiences. Through her utilization of psychoanalysis, Bechdel conveys the power of sexuality in destroying the subject and repairing the mutual, invisible cicatrices of separation. The Biblical power of Morrison’s narrative implies that the Eden-like gaining of sexual knowledge and its symbiotic separation from the innocence of creation provides the human connection, the mercy, which renders us effigies of the divine. In both instances, woman’s sexuality is conveyed simultaneously as power and vulnerability, isolation and connection. It binds us inextricably to our own autonomy, and by allowing us to construct our independent identities, makes it possible to understand our mothers’ wounds of separation—and to heal this distance between our creators and ourselves.

How Strange It Is To Be Anything At All

February 4, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Politics of the Transitory Body in the Music of Neutral Milk Hotel

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, the second album recorded by Neutral Milk Hotel, is an unearthly meditation on the rapture of vitality and the tragedy of nonbeing in which the terrors of a young woman’s war-torn world are lyrically interlaced with the solitude of vocalist Jeff Mangum’s shattered childhood. Functioning simultaneously as exaltation and eulogy, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea chronicles three characters—the Ghost, the Dark Brother, and the Two-Headed Boy—who each present conflicting views on life, death, and sexuality through the lens of gender. Emblems of pure, sensual womanhood juxtapose and at times overlap with jarring images of masculine violence, establishing a richly visceral artistic landscape wherein life and death become inextricably bound to language, consequence, contact, and space.

The Ghost functions as a paradigm of femininity throughout In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, while a unique and ethereal instrument called a singing saw serves as her proverbial “voice.” References to a birth “…in a bottle rocket, in 1929,” (Appendix A, Fig. 6), death in 1945 (Appendix A, Fig. 3), and burial in 1945 with “…her sister and mother and five hundred families” (Appendix A, Fig. 3, 5), all clearly establish the Ghost’s living identity as that of Anne Frank, whose diary immortalized her astonishing will to live and love despite the horrors of the Second World War. Mangum often describes Frank in divine and reverent terms: “drenched in milk and holy water,” with wings emerging from her spine, and white roses blooming in her hair and eyes (Appendix A, Fig. 6). Through her archetypal fulfillment of seraphic feminine imagery, Frank conveys the fragility of the physical, the purity of adolescence, and most importantly, the fleeting exultation of vitality, which can “flash on a screen in the blink of an eye and be gone” (Appendix A, Fig. 1).

That is not to say, however, that the female body reduced to merely an object of narrative desire or artistic symbolism throughout In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. In the haunting acoustic ballad “Communist Daughter,” (Appendix A, Fig. 4), Mangum celebrates female autonomy through his image of a young prostitute—her name an allusion to her body’s paradoxical existence as both capitalist commodity and public property—who masturbates to reaffirm her own existence. Using imagery of cocoa leaves to symbolize pleasure, depictions of cars careening through the darkness to evoke the discord of midnight city streets, and a vision of snowcapped mountaintops—a woman’s genitalia stained by semen—Magnum tenderly recounts the moment in which the Communist Daughter uses the pleasures of her body to reaffirm her existence: assuring herself of her own worth through a communication of sensuality, isolation, and visceral ecstasy. As the music reaches its climax, Mangum’s voice soars gloriously above the melancholy strumming of his guitar: describing with reverence the way in which “Sweetness sings from every corner”—the sound of the girl’s self-induced orgasms, echoing through an empty room—as the young prostitute, “Proves that she must still exist / She moves herself about her fist.” Furthermore, this bittersweet exultation draws parallels to Anne Frank’s own developing sexuality: as she explains in her diary, “Sometimes when I lie in bed at night I feel a terrible urge to touch my breasts and listen to the quiet beating of my heart….” Both Anne Frank and the Communist Daughter find their visceral ecstasy and autonomy in spite of a world that offers them none: but as the relative shortness of “Communist Daughter” reaffirms, their physical rapture remains transient and fleeting.

These ephemeral but potent instances of beauty, represented through the notion of femininity, are directly juxtaposed by Mangum’s second character, the Dark Brother. Functioning as the Ghost’s antithesis—and created by Mangum in response to the suicide of a close friend’s brother —the Dark Brother exited this world an exhibition of terrible violence: “…with [his] head filled with flames…as [his] brains / Fell out through [his] teeth” (Appendix A, Fig. 7). Independently, he seems to exist as an ambiguously tragic figure, but in “Holland 1945,” the song wherein the Dark Brother is introduced, Mangum employs the wailing refrain: “And now we must pack up every piece / Of this life we used to love / Just to keep ourselves at least enough to carry on” (Appendix A, Fig. 3). This bitter and passionate language, underscoring the ability of a single act of abandonment to fragment the lives of those left behind, interlaces the violence of the suicidal Dark Brother with the infidelity Mangum’s own father, who, as Mangum explains two tracks later “…made fetuses with flesh licking ladies, / While [he] and [his] mother were asleep in the trailer park” (Appendix A, Fig. 5). In the grief-stricken refrain of “Holland 1945,” which simultaneously depicts the Dark Brother’s suicide, the fragmentation of Anne Frank’s childhood, and the shattering of Mangum’s own family, the savage violence of the Brother’s actions becomes inextricably bound to the sexual exploitation employed by Mangum’s adulterous father. With repulsive and visceral language, including references to “Fat fleshy fingers” and “green fleshy flowers…smelling of semen,” (Appendix A, Fig. 5), Mangum conjures the first overtly negative depiction of human sexuality in his album. His depictions of female sexuality, though perhaps misinformed in their romanticism, are clearly far more positive than the damning image of masculine sexuality as a conduit of violence, power, and exploitation that Mangum’s father and the Dark Brother represent.

The final and most important character in the album, the Two-Headed Boy provides the transcendence, overlapping, or joining of these binary archetypes of gender. He exhibits both qualities of darkness related to the Dark Brother and violent masculinity (“The sun, it is passed / Now it’s blacker than black,”), as well as a spiritual and physical connection to the feminine paradigm of the Ghost when he references the vertebral imagery essential to her seraphic feminine representation, singing, “And in the dark we will take off our clothes / And they’ll be lacing fingers through the notches in your spine” (Appendix A, Fig. 2). It also becomes increasingly evident that the Two Headed Boy exists as a representation of Mangum himself: the vocalist’s intimacy with the character is evident in the passion and physicality with which he performs “Two Headed Boy,” the track for which the character is named. Throughout the song, Mangum’s singing is volatile and augmented by little more than his own guitar, which he strums with almost astonishing energy and force.

The notion of the Two-Headed Boy as an extension of Jeff Mangum becomes almost undeniably evident in the album’s final track, “Two Headed Boy Part 2” (Appendix A, Fig. 7) wherein Mangum, while addressing the Two-Headed Boy directly, switches between first and third person so fluidly that the two identities seem to linguistically interlace as one. It is in this track that Mangum, through his conversations with the Two-Headed Boy, finally harmonizes the violent, masculine imagery of both the Dark Brother’s gruesome death (“Push the pieces in place / Make your smile sweet to see”), and his father’s infidelity (“For a lover to bring a child to your chest / That can lay as you sleep / And love all you have left”), with the tenderness and sensuality that he ascribes to Anne Frank’s femininity (“I’m still wanting my face on your cheek”). In the aftermath of these lines, Jeff Mangum’s own Janus-faced identity is reconciled at last when, in a moment of catharsis, he encourages the Two-Headed Boy to align himself with feminine ideals of the Ghost rather than the violent masculinity of the Dark Brother, asserting that the beauty and rapture embodied by Anne Frank, however transient, is “all [he] could need.”

In this final meeting of the feminine and the masculine, the sensual and the exploitative, the undaunted and the suicidal, the “Two-Headed Boy” can finally be fully understood as the Mangum himself, caught between the violent, masculine, and suicidal urges of the Dark Brother, and the eternal beauty, tenderness, and optimism of the Ghost, Anne Frank. Thus, the representation of the narrator as the “Two Headed Boy,” as well as the recurring motifs of severance and duality that permeate the album, indicate that the divide between the Mangum’s two identities is, in essence, the divide between two opposing ideals of gender, and the various interconnecting facets of power and sexuality that accompany them. In his final words to the Two-Headed Boy, Mangum actively chooses not to commit suicide: he resolves to live fully, to accept that the ecstasy of existence is, like existence itself, only fleeting. The album’s overall narrative, a testament to the inevitable sense of tragedy experienced by individuals whose histories are rooted in their families and their homes, uses the artistic joys of human existence to comprehend and come to terms with the sorrows of the past. It is Mangum’s transcendent vision of a young girl with roses in her hair and eyes: carefree and unbroken—as she might have been but for the senseless evils of the world—and destined to live forever in her diary and his dreams.

Works Cited

Carioli, Carly. “Mangum’s Opus.” Boston Phoenix. March 7, 2008. Accessed January 7, 2015.

Frank, Anne. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Globe Book, 1992.

Lyrics Cited

Cooper, Kim. Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. London: Continuum International Pub., 2005.

 Social Death & the Murder of Mike Brown

November 6, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Seeing as it has been about a month or so since I have last been able to really write, I figured I’d post a piece I wrote for my English 517 class (Automortography). Comments and critiques are, as always, welcome.

On August 9, 2014, an 18-year-old Black man named Michael Brown was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The exact circumstances of the event remain heavily disputed, but Brown was reported to be unarmed at the time of the shooting. Although the anger and grief of Ferguson’s Black population inspired tumultuous protests that animated the area for several weeks following the event, an allegedly militarized police force attempted to contain the protestors, which resulted in several violent clashes. Regardless of contradictory witness reports and the minor allegations against Brown for an unrelated crime, officer Darren Wilson’s willingness to end the life of an unarmed Black man without absolute and indisputable justification reflects the general devaluing of Black bodies that characterizes American culture. The deeply problematic social perception of Black bodies and identities as something other than fully human can be traced as far back as the antebellum slave trade, and establishes the murder of Mike Brown as not simply an instance of police irresponsibility and brutality, but also as an exemplification of African American social death.

In order to analyze and comprehend the relationship between Brown’s murder and the Black social death, the concept of “social death” must first be defined. In the practice of automortography, mortality can be examined as an extensive but always-shortening spectrum between a life/death binary. Upon this spectrum, human beings exist as animated “subjects”— fully realized beings with emotions, desires, and identities. But in death, humans exist as non-sentient objects—corpses. Ordinary human death is characterized by the transition from subject to object: person to corpse. Social death, on the other hand, is a rare phenomenon in which cultural factors force the subject-to-object transition to occur prematurely, resulting in a still-living individual who exists, through the social lens, as an object rather than a fully recognized person. “Social death,” in the context of this essay, is any transmutation from subject to object that precedes the physical ending of one’s life, and is a form of subjugation that affects both the public and private spheres.

The cultural ideologies that compelled the social death of African Americans were contingent upon the notion of property in a bourgeois society, and more specifically, the United State’s status as an independent slaveholding economy. In Orlando Patterson’s work, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, the practice of slavery is defined as “one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, and of total powerlessness from the viewpoint of the slave.”3 The power dynamic of the master-slave dialectic stemmed from the commodification of enslaved bodies— the reduction of enslaved persons to property (or objects) within a commercial system. This premature (that is to say, pre-death) reduction from subject to object in the public sphere was further ingrained into African American identity during the 1857 Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. Sandford, wherein Chief Justice Roger B. Taney essentially established the status of the American slave as interchangeable with that of private property. In the aftermath of this decision, Black men and women were socially and legally reduced to objects before their physical deaths in the very language of United States legislation; as such, their social death was cemented into the American public sphere.

But as Patterson demonstrates in his writing, the reduction of a living individual to an object impacts the private sphere as well. In Slavery and Social Death, the interviews with form American slaves reportedly include statements such as, “I was so bad I needed the whipping.” The immense personal ramifications of social death are unavoidably clear here: in reducing their status from human to object before the moment of physical deaths, slave owners staked a claim to their slaves that stretched past the fibers of their forms and towards the very foundations of their identity. The quotation highlights the inescapable fact that the Black body is, in essence, a body that has been colonized, raped, brutalized, murdered, and always commodified—and that now, haunted by a specter of visceral subjugation barely rivaled in human history, men and women of color are tasked with establishing their physical presence as more than that of an object within a white supremacist society. Perhaps they believe that in doing so, they will be able to resurrect their bodies and themselves from the personal degradation that accompanies social death.

Even now, in what too many consider to be a post-race era, the frequency of police brutality towards and mass incarceration of Black individuals makes this reclamation and redefinition of the Black body nearly impossible. Instances such as Mike Brown’s murder, in which Black individuals, and particularly Black males, are victims of senseless and excessive violence, shed light upon the lingering strains of racism and the racial objectification that devalue formerly colonized bodies for the benefit of a white audience. In the aftermath of Brown’s shooting, certain media outlets feigned impartiality by using potential evidence of Mike Brown stealing cigars from a convenience store in order to justify, or at least rationalize, his murder. While some sought to vindicate the white police officer by affirming allegations of Brown’s theft, others attempted to emphasize the criminal nature of the shooting by denying Brown’s involvement in the robbery. In these unceasing conversations in a white-dominated American public sphere, the Black body was continuously stripped of its value: whether outlets were affirming or denying the claims against Brown, these discussions reduced Black men to a fundamentally lower social group—a class of not-quite-people for whom, in the aftermath of a minor misdemeanor, assassination can be considered a potentially valid response.
In the actions of Officer Darren Wilson, as well as in the subsequent media response, Black social death emerges as an inescapable and deeply horrifying American reality. The excessive force used by white police officers, disproportionately high rates of incarceration among Black males, and imposed economic and legal circumstances—most notably the so-called War on Drugs—that seriously limit the possibility of upward mobility for Black individuals, have all contributed to the establishment of a contemporary sociopolitical climate within which the full reclamation of the Black body seems almost unattainable. The white public’s commodification of the Black body, which brings with it the legacy of American slavery, has reduced the identity and visceral autonomy of African Americans to that of an object, and formulated an inescapable cultural death that begin to take effect at the moment of their birth. In recent years, the social death of Black community has never been more evident than in the cases of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown, wherein social objectification of the Black male body has skewed the definition of humanity with which the public considers identity, autonomy, and the worth of a human life; nevertheless, the actions of the Ferguson protestors are the first steps towards Black social resurrection. It is here, amidst the very commercial culture in which the Black body first became public property, that African American individuals and communities can transcend circumstantial restrictions of their respective realities by overcoming their objectification. The Ferguson protestors’ full recognition of the value of Brown’s body and life was, by extension, recognition of their own inherent worth: a collective struggle to complete the transition from object back to subject in which Black individuals can—and ultimately will—triumph.

Works Cited

Schmidt, Michael, Matt Apuzzo, and Julie Bosman. “Police Officer in Ferguson Is Said to Recount a Struggle.” The New York Times. October 17, 2014. Accessed November 5, 2014.

Bello, Marisol, and Yamiche Alcindor. “Police in Ferguson Ignite Debate about Military Tactics.” USA Today. August 19, 2014. Accessed November 5, 2014.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982.

The Nobility Of Man

June 5, 2013 / / 3 Comments

A deafening silence surrounds me, echoing across the gritty air and settling in the dust that covers the ground. It spreads within me, or perhaps I am a part of it, for I do not feel anything at all. In the half-year that has passed since the ending first began, this town seems to have suffered at least a century of time’s slow decay. In front of me looms the skeletal frame of a formerly inhabited house, silhouetted against a sun-scorched sky. The garden is overgrown with weeds, spilling over the walls and crawling up the sides. The dark inside of what I once considered home is now open and vulnerable: ravaged by the vicious assault of time.

I remember my sister’s sightless eyes, her cold porcelain face, the dark rivulet of blood as it trickled from her mouth. She was the first to catch it, and the quickest to die. Before the unspeakable rape of civilization, my existence had been indistinguishable from that of countless other teenagers in my suburban life. Of course there was that one time, that one mistake…if you could call it that, I was hardly responsible—lace, flesh, a black cross behind dark tendrils of hair—not truly my fault—

When my eyes snap open, pulse elevated, fingers twitching from the intensity of the flashback, I notice the cold metal barrel of a gun pressed against the back of my head.

“One wrong move,” a voice growls in my ear. “That’s all it takes for you to die. Walk.”

I am forced through the front door, into the basement of my former home. Moonlight filters in dimly from the top of the staircase: I am aware of several pairs of eyes trained warily upon me.

“Where did you find him?”
“Is he contaminated?”
“Prolonged exposure….”

“Better make it quick, then,” the man holding the gun says.

Before I quite understand what is happening, I have been forced onto my knees. I open my mouth to speak, but the words catch in my throat. The blood is pounding in my ears—

“Don’t kill him.”

The voice that perforates the silence is as welcome as desert rain. Without thinking, I turn around. In the half-light allotted by the shadowed moon, I discern the dirt-streaked skin and tangled ebony hair of the first woman I have seen in over a year.

“He could be contaminated—“ the gunman begins.

“Don’t kill him,” she repeats. Turning to me, she asks, “Who are you?”

Her voice is calm, but insistent. I cannot find my voice.

“Contamination status?” she asks next.

“Nonexistent,” I manage. “I’m immune. I caught it, but… I don’t know how… look….”

I turn my palms upward, revealing the underside of my forearms: they are mottled with splotches from when I first contracted the disease. Without hesitating, she holds out her arm as well. It is ravaged by a cacophony of rancorous color identical to my own.

“We think the immunity might be more than a biological anomaly,” she says to me quietly, pulling down her sleeve as I stare.

“A husband and wife share it as well—it may be transmitted through bodily fluid.”
She stands back up, turns the full force of her gaze upon the man holding the gun against my head: the barrel drops, and relief washes over me. The girl turns quickly away, heading for the stairs. Before I can speak, she is gone.

***

I find her again that night, just outside of the garden, examining the ruined magnolias that used to grow here in abundance. They are torn and defiled now, but once they were white and beautiful. I echo the first words she had spoken to me.

“Who are you?”

She does not respond, or even look at me. I try again.

“And…thank you. For stopping them, I mean.”

Again, no response. She plucks a damaged white flower, turns it gently between her fingers. Just as I begin to turn away, I hear her say quietly— “Leda.”

She offers no surname, no elaboration. Just four simple letters in a voice like falling silver.

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

She smiles faintly. Starlight drips from the night sky, tangles in her hair.

“It’s Greek,” she replies.

I do not see Leda again for a fortnight. From the others in her small band of survivors, I learn that she has been scouting the area, searching for contaminated human inhabitance: but she returns grim and disillusioned. When I find her on the outskirts of the ruined town that night, and feel the first of the droplets of rain shower my skin, I almost smile. I cannot count the multitude of nights I have wandered through vast expanses of darkness, tethered to reality by the solace of a rainstorm. I sit down carefully beside her.

“Why are you searching for them?” I ask, as the first low roll of thunder breaks the stillness.

“The last wave of the disease wasn’t like the others,” she replies shortly. “They could still be human, somewhere beneath it all. And I do not fear them.”

A vivid flashback hits me. First I see humans driven mad with disease, sunken eye sockets, decaying flesh—then it is the faceless girl, the curve of her body, her unresisting form —

“What do you fear?” I ask before I can stop myself, desperately trying to keep the images at bay.

There is a long silence, permeated only by the high, wild singing of the windswept rain.

“I fear that in this fight for survival, we will become like animals: primitive and cruel.”

It is a moment before I can register her words. When I do, my eyes glance hesitantly down Leda’s body, taking in her slender frame. I try to envision her fighting the bloodthirsty creatures with nothing but the knife she wears at her hip. My heart is racing as I consider doing something daring, something utterly stupid. She turns to me.

“You have been out there too. What are you most afraid of?”

Instead of answering, I kiss her.

I not know what compels me to do it—only that I want to do it more than I have wanted anything in my entire life. At first she stiffens in surprise, but as our mouths meet I feel her hand slide up the back of my neck, her fingers running through my hair. In this moment of raw desire and insuppressible passion, she is the only thing that matters in the world.

For the briefest instant a bolt of lightening sunders the storm-darkened sky, casting a radiant light upon us—the only two lovers left on Earth, our bodies becoming one in the rain-washed night.

***

In the eighteen days of love-induced ecstasy that follow, my nights of solitude and days of aimless wandering are replaced by her lips, skin, and amber eyes. The night before I am planning to leave the ruined town, Leda and I lie beside one another, miles from whatever remains of my home and history, bathed in the light of the setting sun.

“What do you see?” I ask her.

“Unparalleled radiance,” she replies, smiling slightly. “The complexity of nature, blazing before our eyes. Even now, this world is beautiful.”

“We could see it all together,” I say. She turns to me, confused. “Come with me,” I whisper.

She looks at me, hesitates for a moment. A complicated range of emotions sweeps subtly across her face. Then she smiles. “Yes,” she says. “I’ll go. But I want you to tell me something.”

“Of course.”

“That night, in the rain, you asked me what I was most afraid of in the world.”

“So I did.”

“When I asked the same question, you never—well, you never really replied.”

She is staring out into the distance, her face bathed in blood-red light, and I want to tell her. I want her to understand this secret that I have never told anybody: I want her to know that the source of my nightmares began long before the source of hers. I find that I cannot stop myself. Without prelude, the words tumble from my mouth.

“It was maybe half a year before the disease spread. I was in my senior year of high school—back when there was still high school. I was at a house party. There was this… girl, and she was…”

The flashback hits abruptly. I can see her legs hanging loosely over the edges of the cushions, the black hem of her dress riding up her thighs. For the briefest instant, I am terrified that Leda somehow saw it as well.

“… Drunk,” I finally finish. “Very drunk. She had passed out on a couch in one of the guest rooms. I found her there.” “What did you do?”

“I had sex with her.”

Silence. When she finally speaks, I feel my fists clench. But her voice is soft. Gentle.

“Did you really?”

“Yes.”

“Did she want to?”

“No—I mean—I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

“Did you ever see her again?”

“No. Or if I did, I never recognized her. She isn’t a person to me,” I insist. “Not a name, not even a face. I don’t remember anything about her. I was too drunk.”

It is true that I cannot remember, even vaguely, a single feature of her face.

She looks directly at me: a long, searching stare. “Nothing?” she whispers. Her voice is hesitant and soft.

“Well, one thing. There is only one detail I was ever able to clearly recall—she had a tattoo. On her neck, just below her ear.”

“What did it look like?

For a moment, I think I detect a something strange in her voice. But it is gone in an instant—I am sure I imagined it.

“A cross of some sort—a small, black crucifix.”

There is a heavy pause.

“So, what are you afraid of?”

I force myself to meet the perforation of Leda’s amber gaze.

“I am afraid of ever having to look into her eyes.”

It is the most cathartic sensation, admitting the true source of my guilt. The relief, as it washes slowly over me, is so potent that I feel almost giddy. It is not until I lie back and shift my gaze to the sunset again that I notice the nature of the silence that surrounds us. I open my mouth—to speak, perhaps, though I have nothing in particular to say—

It is then that I feel the excruciating rush of cold steel splitting my skin.

***

Blood was running hot and wet down the edge of the blade when Leda wrenched the knife back out of her lover’s throat. She stood slowly, throwing the blade aside, and looked down at where his body lay in the crimson-soaked dirt. She ran bloody fingers through her dark hair. Her shoulders trembled violently as she began to speak.

“It was right, wasn’t it?” she demanded of the sky. “It was right, what I did.” Tears began trickling down her face when the charred twilight offered no response. Her voice faded to a whisper. “Please, tell me I wasn’t wrong.”

She glanced down at the body again. His lips were parted slightly, as though he had not even had time to register the pain as the blade tore his life out through his throat. His green eyes, sightless and glassy now, gleamed in the last ray of sunlight. Even in grisly death, he was beautiful to her.

“…the immunity might be more than just a biological anomaly…may be transmitted through bodily fluid….”

“The nobility of man” Leda said bitterly, “did not die with civilization. It died a long time ago.”

The tears were coming hard and fast now, as her eyes scanned the desecrated earth. For the first time in her life, she felt a kinship with it, a familiarity. As she turned to depart, the wind lifted her hair off of the back of her neck, exposing a marked patch of skin just below the ear.

The small black crucifix glinted in the fading light.

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