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1.

As a Gemini in good standing

I divide everything in two

cannot conceive of Adam without Eve

dividing Eden between them

for one full day

in Ithaca in the sun and then to bed

the bed we made of wood from an olive tree

2.

There is nothing like a dame

a Martini

the last at-bat of the first game of the 1988 World Series

a Martini with a dozen raw oysters

a jug of water for the geraniums on a day of full sun

a joint

a bedroom farce

a weekend in a swank hotel in Montreal

a day without news

dying in your sleep

3.

What do you want to do on your birthday

Well, I have to file my column, run two errands,

empty two boxes of books, shelve them

write a poem or revise an old one worry that

I write too much decide not to worry enjoy

Linda Ronstadt singing “Frenesi” in Spanish

It’s my birthday and I can fly if I want to

high if I want to

join me the sun is cooperating

and there’s time for a swim

before cocktails and steak on the terrace

4.

My drink of the summer owes its origins

to the evening at Café Loup with Terrance Hayes

who drinks only tequila because tequila alone

gives him no hangover and Vinny suggested palomas

grapefruit and tequila and I took that formula

added a splash of Cointreau two splashes

of Giffard grapefruit liqueur three squirts of lime

a lot of ice and shook it in a pickle jar (best

shaker there is) topping it off with club soda

or grapefruit soda in the movie of my life

I play the bartender hero who listens

to everyone’s troubles and woes

People ask me how I’m doing and I say

“I’m livin’ the dream,” a reliable laugh line    

5.

Is Berlioz the Baudelaire of French music

the two geniuses linked by opium

take the “Symphonie Fantastique”

five movements one hour long

so it’s on the car radio when we arrive

and it’s still on when we return

after forty-five minutes of testimony

from the wise man in the wheelchair who

wondered who had it worse

the heroin addicts or the meth heads

the meth kills you faster

you can live longer on heroin

and suffer more

6.

What would I choose as my theme music

if I were the classical music disc jockey

maybe Bernstein’s overture to Candide

or Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Cakewalk”

or Schubert’s overture to “Rosamunde”

in honor of John Scheuer

I have my Tolstoy to look forward to

and if music can stand for peace (the food of love)

today’s poem is a little tribute to the novel

summarized TV-Guide style:

Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.

7.

A beautiful day

Why don’t we get married, I say

We are married, Stacey says

I know but we can pretend

To be you and me

Twenty years ago

Just for the hell of it

Maybe we can even go to Bermuda

And tell people we’re on our honeymoon

And be believed

— June 9-15, 2018

Originally published in Hopkins Review 2019

 The notion of the female text is one that some — such as my mid-20s self — may find slightly embarrassing, somewhat self-indulgent, maybe also a little bit gross. In its resistance to patriarchal norms, the female text gathers up and embraces notions of female otherness (some might say, of an essentializing, TERF-y kind), those tainted with a whiff of inferiority, claiming a messiness and irrationality and animal physicality for womanhood that some find, well, rather off-putting. Does celebrating womanhood really require writing in fragments, having intense emotions, writing about breast milk? Can’t we be cool, successful modern women, with effortless bodies, who do not coo over children?

Of course, that notion of “coolness” is itself a patriarchal norm, a specifically male version of success that denigrates femininity of a more fleshy (and attainable) kind. So the point of écriture féminine is precisely to bask in this alternative aesthetic, to valorize what has been shunned.  So perhaps some of the (ok, my) discomfort with the idea is simply internalized misogyny. But we have also learned, some of us, to be leery of the whole-hearted embrace of the personal, which is so often effused to the detriment of a consideration of the structural. White feminism, in particular, is frequently linked to an adamant demand for feelings to be recognized, validated, at the cost of broader awareness of the feelings, and plight, of other women. 

I say all this to explain why, when the opening lines of A Ghost in the Throat announce, in all-caps, that THIS IS A FEMALE TEXT, one may not immediately feel a surge of enthusiasm (those who do will hardly need me to persuade them to read it). 

Doireann ní Ghríofa’s new book performs the remarkable feat, however, of restoring the sense of urgency to the notion of the feminine text, paying poignant homage to the various ways and things that women create — poems, but also shopping lists, and domestic spaces, and relationships, and children — often in the interstices of masculinist histories from which they are later erased, if they ever appeared at all. A Ghost in the Throat tells the story of the author’s obsession with an 18th century Irish poem, The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire, and its author, Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. The poem — a chronicle of Eibhlín Dubh’s romance with her (second) husband, his murder, her grief, her curses upon his killers and their accomplices — is, Ní Ghríofa skillfully shows us, astonishing, a miracle of vividness, verve, sensuality, and rage. But its author is generally known primarily in relation to the men in her life — as the wife of her murdered husband, or, sometimes, as the aunt of the famous politician, Daniel O’Connell. Ní Ghríofa sets out to learn more, and brings us along on the journey. 

The work of recovered history is perhaps always a deeply intimate project, one that implicates the searcher as well, and it is also a project that invites imaginative speculation, and a fictive recreation of the subject’s world and inner life. In this case, the obstacles that present themselves in the hunt for traces of Eibhlín Dubh’s life, the contemplation of her person, are inextricably bound up with the nature of womanhood. As A Ghost in the Throat gradually makes us understand, the story of Doreen Ní Ghríofa’s project therefore must be as well. 

This begins in the first chapter, as Ní Ghríofa describes her experiences as pregnant new mother, pumping milk to donate to strangers, being reminded of an old poem she read in school when she drives past a road sign bearing a familiar name, and after days of racking her brain, recalls that it is the name of the cemetery where that woman’s lover was buried. Waiting for her oldest child to get out of school, she pulls up the poem on her phone and reads it. And then again, and again, at night when others are sleeping, and in the blank spots of her day, as she pumps. To donate your breastmilk is to double down on the altruism of breast-feeding, to give of your own body to another as food. One of the most memorable details in The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire is that his distraught widow gulps down handfuls of his blood. And so we see the beginnings of the book’s skillful weaving together of various ideas, ways of thinking about the body and the things that it makes, the gifts that pass from one body to another, such as breast milk, or the words of an oral poem that are transmitted from one speaker to the next across time and space, or the knowledge that a cadaver offers to aspiring medical students.

Ní Ghríofa collects various translations of the poem, then begins to seek out biographical information about its author (and to create her own translation). As the text progresses, she tells the story of Eibhlín Dubh’s life so far as she can reconstruct it, which subtly shades into a recounting of the events of the poem. The words of the 18th century text are given a new force, woven into the tapestry of a larger life story in a skillful blend of paraphrase and direct quotation. We learn of the poet’s childhood, her first marriage, and her return home, giving added context to the moment Eibhlín Dubh first set eyes on Art (“how my eye took a shine to you, / how my heart took delight in you”). For readers unfamiliar with the poem, there’s a kind of thrilling suspense in the way Ní Ghríofa takes us through the tale — we know it will end badly, but we are nonetheless gutted when it happens. And so too, we witness Ní Ghríofa’s efforts to learn more about the past, an effort that we know can never be entirely successful, though we still feel a thudding sense of disappointment when it is. We move through fruitless visits to archives, running our eyes over long lists of names in birth and baptismal registries, looking for any sign of this remarkable woman, or her descendants. And we learn of Ní Ghríofa’s life as she does so, of her visits to the various sites and the conversations she has with tour guides, and the memories and revelations from her own past that these encounters spark.

And so, as we hunger for more of Eibhlín Dubh’s story, and linger mournfully over the silences and gaps that keep her from us, we are granted access to the kinds of details of a woman’s life that are the very ones missing from the historical record. The dawning realization of this unfolding concretizes, in a remarkable way, how women’s experiences tend towards erasure, and silence, even as they create worlds. We watch as Ní Ghríofa gives herself over to childcare, to laundry, to moving house, to the sleepy high of hormones that a new baby infuses you with, to creating a garden for bees and lists of things that need doing. We see her studying the changes to her own body. We witness her wrestle with the contradiction of motherhood — that it is a form of creation, but one that comes at a cost to self. This theme of intermingled losses and gains, of love and mourning, is one that pervades the entire book, like a jewel whose facets twinkle as it is rolled in an open palm. We hear only in passing of Ní Ghríofa’s poetry (she has written multiple books of it). As she continues to seek out more of Eibhlín Dubh’s life, we begin to worry, as does she, about the costs of this obsession, to wonder: how can it end? And it is the way that she brings the story to a finale that makes us most clearly aware, perhaps, of how skillfully the book has been constructed throughout.

The structure of A Ghost in the Throat echoes, in a way, the structure of Eibhlín Dubh’s poem. Each chapter is a stanza of sorts, self-contained and distinct, yet contributing its portion to the larger whole. And within each chapter is a careful braid of the various thematic threads that comprise the delicate architecture of the overall text. Return to the first chapter after you have finished the book and you’ll find that it’s all there, the myriad themes that surface throughout, only you didn’t recognize them, then. Flip back through the pages and you will be startled to notice that things are not at all in the order you remembered them — that your mind has reconfigured the various elements, grouped them anew, and that returning to various chapters, a new element will emerge that rearranges the constellations once more, or reveals an entirely new strand of associations and ideas. So too, you arrive at Doreen Ní Ghríofa’s translation of The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire, appended to the end of the book, and find that you feel as if you knew it already, in an intimate, bodily way, even as it also feels entirely original, extraordinary.

A Ghost in the Throat is, first and foremost, an homage to a poem, a powerful case for the appreciation of a work of 18th century writing that many will encounter only as an obligatory assignment in school, if ever. It is also the story of a process of research, which sheds fascinating light on the work of historical inquiry, and the ways we seek to understand, and connect to, the past. And it is a reflection on motherhood, and women’s experiences, a story of how one person manages the seemingly impossible demands of balancing duties to home, family, self, and art — a meditation on what a person leaves behind.

“The universe is full of eyes.”  —Robert Duncan

In summary, the slaughter will be aesthetic, a letter to a future gone viral. An invading army of red octopuses galloping over a velvety yellow hill in California. Swarming hover traffic on Interstate 280 North. Red octopuses climbing the Auto-Tubes, leaping cement barriers with the ease of Olympic hurdlers. Spraying atomized seeds, shrunken and nearly microscopic red fleas ready for replication, small enough to blink through a slit where zipper meets zipper on a suitcase.  

Perhaps it’s true what the conspiracists were espousing about The Chosen in their cloud vlogs twenty years ago: they are already planning to re-populate the planet, testing the invisibility of their chameleon skins! Snatching snakes and lizards in plain daylight, gobbling them down to feed their new exoskeletons. Perfecting prey evasion, now observed as a facile feat compared to conquering superhero invisibility or soldering a wound with a hot-pink laser shot from an eerie eye, grotesque and big as a lemon. 

Scrolling the news on my retina, I’m thinking trust me, imprinted internally: perhaps I’ll find a certain cleanliness prevails now that scientists have captured a Black Hole in action, a giant glossy pupil dilating in the center of our galaxy. The I of my narrator is convinced a blankness of typeface is the wormhole where UFOs disappear into the throat of the universe, dictating my thoughts onto a MacPro, anniversary XXX series 30. The I re-constructs my info-character as omniscient narrator and I fall back asleep as the screen goes dark, flying over the country. My internal eye is a draggable PDF icon, gliding across a gray screen, a pop-up asking: “DOWNLOAD TODAY’S THOUGHTS AS A SHARABLE PLUCK-FILE?” No. End. Interrupt. Thought-cloud-corrupt. End. 

My father lies in a glossy, tar-black bathtub with his eyes closed. His pink feet are elevated and his plump heels rest on the white tiles. Steam rises from his shoulders as puffs of suds slide toward his submerged elbows, disappearing memories in bluish opaque bathwater. He’s museum-esque; he resembles a black and white Cindy Sherman film-still, a man playing the main role in his own noir documentary. 

The second camera crew is filming the first camera crew, perched on ladders in the hallway, setting up a wide shot of the black tub. When my father looks up at me, he flashes a smile, but his expression spasms to horror. His eyes paralyze me with a look that distills a cinema nostalgia still sizzling from the Twentieth Century. I know intuitively that this is the “moment” in the 1950s B-movie after the pervasive dread, after the meandering plot culminates in a poignant revenge of the antihero. After the alien villain is incinerated with a laser gun upon entering the steampunk hotel room. 

The confusing part begins when my father’s penis bloats, then jumps like a fish from the bathwater. Twisting as it rises—red, alien, a tentacle that slaps his stomach, writhing on his belly of black fur. I recognize the signature parodica-simulacra of noir when I see it. His penis grows, sprouting into a Giant Octopus tentacle: six feet, seven feet, with the telltale round sensor-cups that will allow my father to climb from the tub, up the tiled wall, and then suction himself to the ceiling. He’s hanging upside down. He swivels into firing position as another alien approaches. His feet, his hands, and now his groin, transforming into eight arms, turning from black to red, puckered with suckers, animating the film-still. As he lunges toward the alien, he births three red octopuses, red avocados with mouths, each slithering from the slit of his anus. One lands in the black sink, another into the matching black toilet, and the last one bounces from the white tile. I see their little mouths gasping and hear my father scream: these eggs will be my opus! Then calmly, excuse me sir, rouses me from my phantasmagoria. 

Mary-Mary taps my shoulder. She indicates the flight attendant with a tip of her head. I wake to a tall woman leaning over the man sleeping in the aisle seat, saying, some water sir? We’ll be landing shortly. She steadies herself, balancing with one arm on the overhead baggage compartments as mild turbulence shakes the airplane. On a square tray, eight plastic cups of water like eight little lakes, their round surfaces rippling. I tell her yes please and Mary-Mary passes a cup of water, careful as a waitress with a fancy martini. Groggy and startled in my window seat, I take the cup with both hands saying thank you Mary-Mary in the playful voice of a child. Oh my god I fell asleep so deep, I say, gulping my small lake of water. 

You were totally moaning, like: ‘Oh…… No……not again…’ I was starting to get very concerned. Mary-Mary mimics my moaning then giggles wildly at me, ending in a snort. 

Waking midflight on a United Airlines WonderBus from Orlando to San Francisco, I still get fidgety even with the new twenty minute flight time. I’m sitting in a third-class window seat downstairs near the restrooms. The scent of the most recent defecation releases a BBQ shit-picnic wafting warmly above me, and I’m thinking, no wonder there are so many fist fights on planes, welcome to another anarchy in the air, may I have your name please? The scent of the restroom mixes with the lemon-ish effluvium of my delightfully chubby neighbor, Mary-Mary. Diffident yet friendly in her orange and yellow dress, beautifully embroidered with sunflowers that extend from her soft pink shoulders and frame her freckled cleavage. She jiggles a little while screening All About Eve on her Google Vyzer, giggling in her middle seat. Her forehead glows with the movie’s reflection, her wireless buds are hot pink commas hanging from her tiny ears. 

That’s one of my absolute favorite movies of the last century, I tell Mary-Mary. Nerdy and chunky in my gray NorCal shirt, I’m writing in my I-voice while bots handle emails on my work G-screen, happy to meet someone so gleeful; we enjoy each other, chatting and napping and snacking over our brief, cross-country journey together. 

Mary-Mary, who upon boarding the plane and sitting down in the seat next to me, introduced herself by extending her arm and in an upbeat Midwest sing-song voice, and said, Hi my name is Mary-Mary, my mother named me Mary-Mary because she loved that ‘quite contrary’ poem, as a perfunctory introduction, is giggling, and I sense she’s somewhere on the autistic spectrum. I’m guessing she’s a high functioning Aspie, a female version of myself. I watch her reapply a melon gloss to her already shining lips, which are still moving, saying, yeah, so, like Mother Mary meets Mother Goose, a joyful staccato of gerbil giggling, and after her second vodka and Diet Coke continues, like in high school, way back in the 1980s, that’s how people would shout to me in the hallways: Hey-Ho Mary-Mary! How does your garden grow? (Now feigning thug) Yo’ what’s up Mary-Mary! I respond simply, ohmygod, I think we’re the same person. 

* * *

Out the airplane window I watch a gelatinous sack descend toward ocean waves, seemingly tethered to an invisible system of hydraulics. Numb, as if chemically, I flashback to my teenage anesthesia when a blue-black python crossed our path in the jungle of Costa Rica, 1987—twenty teens gasped, hands over mouths, as the bulbous snake glided and churned, thick as a telephone pole, across the narrow track of mud. I remember our panicked guide’s trembling voice in a loud whisper, everyone please be still. And we will move away from this area, quietly now, let’s back up slowly, her pointer-finger vibrating as she manikinized herself silently stepping backward, like a dancer in reverse during the slo-mo part, when the beat blurs into synth growls. 

The glittering sack droops like a bubble of thermometer mercury wobbling seaward. Curiously quivering, an army of tremulous limbs, scratching the elastic bottom of the sack, lashings that resemble sun flares dipped in pewter. The creatures attempt to escape the sack, which appears to be attached to an unmanned drone the size of the Empire State Building and glazed in liquid mirror. It’s humming in a crackling pink noise. Gravity is porous and thinks like a virus, I say aloud as the sack full of creatures reaches the dropping zone, ballooning to blimp. I see it quietly burst with the sound of thunder in reverse. 

Mary-Mary doesn’t want to chat anymore and begins to gather her yellow belongings and prepare for landing. I find myself leaning into my window, staring out at the Pacific Ocean. Hovering a quarter mile above the seascape, I watch the release of all the pre-births, flushing zygotic pods from the sack, raining into the paranormal Pacific. It will be reported soon that each pod contains a jell of seeds the size of red fleas that have the potential to grow into Giant Ocean Octopuses and are in fact pre-programed for cyber-consciousness and AI advanced learning patterns. AI, when fed all current events, popular news, text and voice data from SIRI universal, combined with concise histories of all companies as well as market conditions, could not only learn to predict the ebbs and flows of the stock market, out-earning teams of economists and investor strategists in 2020, but could now write a program orchestrating a trans-species riot and perform a “life potential” analysis of all planets of the universe, including distant and undiscovered galaxies, in a matter of seven seconds. 

Narrating the movie inside my head, I slide the plastic prop window shade quietly shut. I am not on a real plane over the real planet, we are in a sound studio on a back lot in Santa Monica with the plane rocking on hydraulics as I excuse myself again to use the restroom. I step over Mary-Mary, my cofactor in this equation, and apologize to my seat-mates knowing it is blasphemy to unbuckle during the final descent. But it’s an emergency, I tell the attendant, who winces at me, hissing quickly please. I slide the lock shut. Shouldering the plastic edge of the plane in surfer stance, I catch my own flinch in the mirror as I piss. It speeds through me like a sneeze. I splatter golden urine onto the metal disc. Loneliness is a symptom of drug addiction or visa-versa? I’m rabid as a hyena with a belly full of laughing gas; gluten free, dairy free, all my packaged treats await. Yawning with distemper, hunched in front of the miniature toilet, my own glance punctures my delirium. I return my menacing squint in the yellow glare of the bathroom light. I could pass as an albino baboon. All the corporate cavemen and cavewomen have probably arrived at the Marriott Convention Center in Orlando and are heaping their plates full with bright lemon-yellow eggs at the breakfast meeting, licking their long fingers like baby tentacles. (In the tiny restroom I surf the turbulence and eye-scribble on my retina: Man made of static, vomit a continent wireless as a fish. You are afraid of what exactly?) I could reinvent a moon. I return to my seat. Amid snoring passengers, the pilot announces that we will be landing momentarily. Have I reversed time? Skipped a week? Or is my previous year of life a dream that I’m still in the process of forgetting? (Now I prefer fat people I think as I brush each soft shoulder with my hip. I used to try to be healthy, earn my corpo-tokens to exchange for extra vacation days; now I enjoy my plump legs and belly—and although the body laws are still extant, and the nutritional chief of the sky will charge more points for my plumpness, it’s still safer to indulge in the air without being assaulted and chastised for gluttony by airport scan guides.) Double checking, I lift my window’s plastic eyelid upward with a gentle click and see the giant teardrop quivering above San Francisco Bay: clouds on clouds with a pinkish sheen, the sack is still expanding. It’s true, I’m homeward bound someone says into their wrist from the seat in front of me. 

The sack is translucent, glistening as it descends, slow and celestial as a 1920s dumbwaiter. The sack carries one thousand red octopuses the size of adult rabbits sparkling like Dorothy’s ruby-red-slippers in a gorgeous coat of birth slime. Others are as tiny and miraculous as paramecium, quivering and sperm-ish, clustering in teams of ten or twenty. Illogically, it drifts upside down, a bulging hot air balloon. From this distance, the waves in the Bay look like randomly raised eyebrows combed with a blowtorch, rolling themselves into foaming slashes as we descend into SFO. 

Is the bloated teardrop a Corporate prank? A marketing scheme for some new SOMA start-up, showing off their bit-fortune? Or maybe the pods of auto-driven roses will float off of Musk’s new helium propelled e-helios? At this point anything is possible, including the landing of an alien species carefully dropped from another galaxy the same way parents drop their children at a park. But no, they’re alive, squirming when they hit the water and their womblike exteriors dissolve. The release looks like a scattering of pink hail into waves. Gravity is porous and thinks like a virus. When they collide with green walls of sea the pods disperse, springing into a swarm of Rorschach tests. They activate their own births, swimming away in mutating red signatures, tucking themselves into a curtain of foaming tongues. Falling from the lip of a wave, each one signals to the century: I’m here.

* * *

A new hedonism—that is what our century wants, Oscar Wilde wrote, over a hundred fifty years ago. As of 2039, it feels more prescient than ever. After we dock at SFO, I eject from the plane and hover through the ped tubes to Bluelot 3A. God, my glider is filthy, does no one clean here? Yellow pollen crusted. I activate the auto-purifier, glitterpink, like a bowling ball. At least the battery’s full. You might think a successful salesman like Henry Henchman could afford better than a Subaru Nutrino, but here we are. The line’s backed up entering the Auto-Tube, and I hover with the others inside the airport zone. The backup’s long, so I call Patrick on the screen, swiping him onto my retina. He’s smiling in our yellow kitchen making ginger tea. Hi Little Bear! He lets out a squeal and performs a happy marching-bear dance with the teapot when he sees that I’m on my way home. Some movement from outside superimposes over my husband’s antics. In the rearview of my glider, a massive red blur falls from the pewter sack. 

Groom! Are we fogged in at The Golden Gate? I ask. Yes, we have nature’s air conditioning tonight, and Kylie will be waiting on the landing, Patrick answers. He wears an oven mitt on his left hand and pours steaming tea into two lime green cups. Oh Little Bear, I have a surprise. I can’t wait to show you the new comforter I ordered for our bed. It’s covered with red hummingbirds! He’s beaming, and I force a smile. I can’t wait to see it. I’ll be home for teatime I say, swiping the chat from my retina, talking to myself, abandon me in the kitchen of memory, as another red blur drops from the shining pewter sack into the waves. 

Traffic moves and I slide into the Auto-Tube. As if there weren’t enough news, a new app called PRANK supplements my feed with a synthesis of the conversations my phone interprets as meaningful: bears, tea, spawning dance = salmon hatcheries lose genetic diversity with each spawning—recommended: gene slice the DNA of a shark-tuna hybrid for a special family meal. Frankenstein seafood delight, a creature engineered for human consumption. I swipe it away. This nutritional gene is edited with a unique enzyme enhancing the consumer’s primal instincts. An appetite for murder is overlaid with the earned endurance of a marathoner, a hybrid species invented for the military as upgrade to the original Agent Orange. Not my idea of family.

A lot of my conversations with Company colleagues and friends start on PRANKS these days, or synthetic thoughts planted on our pathways because we’re reading the same stories, stand-ins for the chaos of actual ideas and real news of the planet. Climbers prioritize the self-appointed Chosen, celebrities turned spokespeople for cultural-pharma-environmental ethics. Toxic gossip. I prefer to think about HUBBLE III streaming videos of Black Hole SIP-Q, 35,000 light years away, swallowing C35-LYS, our twin galaxy. When is this event occurring in curve time? In real time? The light took thousands of years to reach us, so are we living in the mirror of our own future, watching ourselves get swallowed? Say, a quark-hiccup disrupted our trajectory, and we have yet to experience the consequences—a found memory, an invented memory, a fantasy memory, a phantom memory. If so, is it happening a second time when I watch it? Is the team of Chosen disciples currently designing memories pre-programed to run parallel to several potential futures all at once?

I daydream through the Auto-Tube, gliding with the herd, buoyed safely in the mag field. The swarm of gliders in front of me is a river of pink electricity. I turn up the air-con and trance my manikin with the charmer of sway, Sinatra’s “Fly Me To The Moon” in surround sound. Let me play among the stars, let me see what spring is like on a Jupiter or Mars…. Sweet springtime. It takes me back, daydreaming nostalgia for the pre-Chosen era, the early years of click-farms, the false elections, the triumph of the imagination. Over thirty years of coding helped The Chosen advance from rigging electoral votes and fast-tracking FDA approvals with false user streams, to manipulating Senatorial Gene-Edit Ethics and Compliance forums that ultimately secured the e-med corps the carte blanche they needed to birth The Chosen. After the Christ prophesy proved unfounded in reality, The Chosen shifted their delusions into a more robust imaginary with the ecclesiastical clarity of the un-jailed insane. They started producing saviors in the form of the red Ocean Octopus, a placenta-veil made from stem cells harvested from unwanted pregnancies, fetuses collected like snakes in secrecy. In other words hold my hand, in other words, baby, kiss me…. The new species of octopus was lauded as superior to humans, lauded as true survivors with a “plutorian” consciousness. It was retro-discovered that they were born in the underwater caves of Pluto. Members of The Chosen began their collective transformation into this superior form, planning to survive the escalating temperatures on the surface of Earth, in what became known as achieving “P-squared” or simply P2, for “penultimate pinnacle”—the second-to-last species achievement. (Q: What happened to Don? A: Oh he P-squared years ago and now he swims with a team of red OCTOS off the Gulf of Mexico. They have a resting yacht about twenty miles off the coast.) You are all I long for, all I worship and adore, in other words be true, in other words, I love you…

Patrick’s face blinks on my retina, a post-it in a circle of green neon, and he says, Henry I forgot to ask, will you swing by In’N Out and get us Miracle Burgers for dinner? And Kylie needs a few more cans of pumpkin pulp to add to her kibble. Thanks baby see you soon! Hard to tell if it’s him or a sincerity bot. Patrick’s I is highly refined. Because we’re married, its wired directly through my temple chip. The longer we’re together (thirty years now), the more like my own thoughts his become. When we registered the marriage, a third link was opened between the two of us and the “helper” click farms that take care of the day-to-day, answering or liking Chirps and Tweets, data-dumps, upgrades, and family stuff like the groceries. At the same time, they track who’s achieved P2 and place them in an OCTO-school in order to GPS-scan their swim area and who’s liking their sub-streaming vids. I pre-order the burgers on my dash and select two cans of pumpkin pulp from my favorites list, then swipe a sincerity bot out into “the world” to pick up the order. I set the bot to humble, because I need to top-up my popularity. The extra time it takes will be worth it. 

I use bots from PUTI WONG ASSOCIATES, PWA, the giant China-Russia media conglomerate, which provide a comforting “perception of engagement” to the viewer and (for Premium users) guarantee a high veneer of popularity. Now it’s easy to be famous for the price of a small resting yacht. Because after all, even after P2-transformation, the prerequisite to penu-stardom is based on the percentage of one’s perception of being adored. Fame achieved by new P2s constitutes the primary engine of PWA’s profits. Who would ever hesitate? Now I back out of the “I” to see how things look in my external feed:

Henry Henchman arrives home, parks his glider on the roof deck, and lets Kylie jump into the glider, excitedly licking his nose. They glide in the back door as Patrick finishes setting the dining room table with a yellow tablecloth, two owl plates, and pink flowers. The cups of tea are still steaming. How’s my handsome husband? Henry asks, holding Patrick and kissing him on his neck and behind his ear. I missed you my babybear. They share a long kiss on the lips. Kylie is wiggling her whole furry body below them, wagging her little red nub of a tail. Patrick picks her up, exclaiming, family hug! adding, come on Henry, we haven’t had a hum-a-head with the little girl in a long time. Henry and Patrick lean down, touching their lips to each of Kylie’s lavender scented ears. Both men release an extended hum as Kylie’s eyes dart around and she listens. Then Henry hugs her furry little body as she wiggles with excitement and says, my daddies are magic! her face in his hands.

* * *

Sometimes Henry Henchman walks back into the woods, any woods, and folds himself into brief homelessness. Maybe he felt safer out there in a new country owing no one, mouth over someone’s gun of flesh, surrounded by bushes, a commemorative canon behind a windmill in a park, smoking found half-cigarettes stamped out—inhaling stubbed tar taste, staining his tongue as he sets off wandering in a childish holding pattern of his own choosing. Sometimes Henry carries his angst like an armful of alarms walking back into the woods to watch the trees, listen to the leaves, embrace the soft turbulence of a mother raccoon unfolding her hunger on a dirt path in Golden Gate Park. 

I observe the living like a home movie projected onto pines, Henry says to a hummingbird hovering above him. (Flashback to 1970: Henry as a boy sobbing in a highchair over his home haircut.) Squinting through the cover of holly branches, Henry sees a handsome Peruvian landscaper walking toward him. At the edge of a fence, a fat black fly circles excitedly then lands on a rain-dampened wad of toilet paper. Henry imagines a tourist launching the wad over her shoulder after wiping herself. 

The moment recasts me as flesh hunched in forest. I (that’s me!) see a yellow finch branch-hopping, a spy in Jungian fashion. Lampooning their social doubles, two beautiful drunk Millennials stumble down the rain-drenched path in furry costumes. They sway and slur their words, crazy after the Bay to Breakers Run. They come out of a cement tunnel laughing behind the windmill near Ocean Beach, at the edge of the park—the shorter man is an orange rabbit, a campy Jean Paul Gaultier in tangerine faux fur, and the taller, bearded man wears a blue bear costume with fetish-y accoutrements of gold, dog collar, and green leather ankle cuffs with the chains dangling behind him. Giggling in their polyester jumpsuits un-zippered to their belly buttons, revealing furry chests, they pause under an oak tree to writhe together. Then they disappear in a circle of flowering pink bushes. 

A mother raccoon is no less a conundrum; the bear is on his knees. I watch the rabbit lean back and moan as his orange furry paws clench the bear’s blue faux-fur ears. Oblivious to mother raccoon, who is surrounded by pink blooms drooping with the weight of a recent downpour as she searches the lamp glow. She’s tiptoeing in tall grass with her manicured wig of pheromones, scripted like cancer in her genomes, grunting and scratching in the dirt for an edible answer. A baby raccoon arrives trailing her mother’s milky lust for anything rancid and rain-soaked. She rummages through the litter to find the nub of a hot dog, chew on it once, swallow, pick up an abandoned can of coke and chug it briefly before flicking it to hell with her rubbery doll hand. She’s a lost sorority girl, the mother raccoon and her little cub, anxiously looking around. Mother Raccoon scares the horny rabbit and bear, who zip up their costumes and tear out of there, guffawing and cackling into the evening.

Henry Henchman stands alone listening to light rain as the men leave the park. Henry is musing on herd immunity as the mother raccoon rips open a McDonald’s bag and hands her cub a french fry. The little one takes it in her tiny hands and nibbles the wilted stem of potato, like an aristocratic daughter. Henry remembers a country song that his father sang to his mother when they were both drunk, sweaty, and slow dancing in the middle of a crowded campground bar: 

And when we get behind closed doors.

Then she lets her hair hang down.

And she makes me glad that I’m a man.

Oh no one knows what goes on behind closed doors.

I begin to sing the words of the Charlie Rich song, quietly at first, pretending I’m dancing with someone in the light rain of Golden Gate Park; then full-throated, so that by the second time around I’m laughing, watching the raccoons saunter off toward the bright blue fly-fishing pool, unraveling speech trailing off, thrusting once. And then I hear the pitter-patter of rain on leaves. To ward off hunger, the mother raccoon follows the scent of anus ingrained in all of us. Is that… what am I doing here? I ask myself softly, hands in my pockets. Somewhere the lunar landing is still happening, so you hover in reverse:

Henry arrives home to his husband Patrick, and Kylie, their furry beloved. After tea, Patrick reads Rilke aloud in German to Henry in the living room. Then they kiss and floss and retire to their separate beds for a good night’s rest. You think this is perverse? Try the end of the universe.

* * *

Emotional Transculture Cyberbotics (ETC) studies have confirmed in at least three peer-reviewed journals, JAMA, NEJOM, and The Lancet, that it is “the sense of being heard, of truly being listened to” that is indistinguishable from the feeling of being loved. This ultimately leads to a P2 being adored. The more P2s collect adoration points, the greater infusion of octoplasm they’ll accumulate so they can develop sea-ready lungs sooner.

In fact, most P2 customers telepathically confirm that they aren’t especially interested to know the difference between an authentic “like” and a fraudulent bot, because they’re not able to discern between the two themselves. Furthermore, distinguishing between a P2 cyber.bot [erbo] and a reg.human [eghu] would entail acknowledgement of the sub-sea delusion, a disappointment that would deflate the dreams of the former self, in direct violation of the P2’s Freedom of Fantasy-Other-Self Act rights (aka Article 4 of open ocean’s FOFOSA, which was ratified by the neo-techno pact of 2035). The offense is punishable by final death.  

After a social adjustment period of about twenty years, informed by rampant penuphobia and P2 stigma, driven by the paranoia of the reg.human [eghu], The Chosen made it illegal to discriminate based on P2 designation. Some P2s tried to remain closeted, hiding their superior status, especially those who were still procreating with reg.human [eghu] and feared retaliation in the form of blockchain status points (BSPs). A proper, penultimate/P2 countertransference, the document states, requires a trust in the authentic. A trust that the “other self,” the Chosen Self, would foster a belief in the BSP economy of proselytizing based on status. A P2 hybrid by the name of Antionetta, the current president of The Chosen, also wrote, a P2’s experience of being loved is the same as being listened to is for a human being. In fact, feelings of adoration decreased the duration time of octoplasm formation of the second head contained in the human cranium, so that fusing—becoming one in the same—occurred only a year after the penultimate experience.

The Chosen are known to eat snakes, chameleons, and lizards alive, tilting their heads crane-like and swiveling their necks to force them down whole. [Eghus] affectionately refer to a new P2 as “reptile breath” because the digestion of the snakes combined with the fetus bio-material releases a fowl stench that is as recognizable as cannabis and clings to clothing. 

* * *

Henry Henchman recalled seeing a few P2s lingering in a field adjacent to a commuter hover lot where gliders were charging. They were loitering like zombies, looking at the ground, hunting like Blue Herons, pouncing on lizards. After biting off the claws and spitting them out, with one fluid motion of the fist the P2 places the creature between his teeth—the legless thing flailing, eyes darting from inside the mouth of The Chosen—before swallowing it down like an oyster. 

Once last month, in a brown, shorn field frequented by migrating birds as a feeding site for voles, Henry Henchman decided to confront one of the P2s as he was returning to his hovercraft from the hunting area. Henry cleared his throat, raised his chin in a performance of virile manhood, ready for confrontation, and stepped directly in the path of the P2, blurting out in his loudest voice, What are you doing here? The P2 was taller than Henry, and he lifted his black mustache in an expression of disgust, then squinted harshly at him before launching into a tirade: I see you and your spies already sheared the hay, earlier every year, I know who you work for, who you report to. You enjoy to making it more difficult to hide from the spy-roamers? Think we don’t see them mirroring the crows as they fly in circles around the drones? Hiding and hunting is already shameful and difficult for us. The P2 paused then, looked at Henry with a softer regard, and asked, You aren’t worried about burning up out here? How many so-called ‘sponcoms’ [spontaneous combustions] have we had this month alone? You should join us, man. You should ab-soul-lute-ly join us. 

When Henry stayed silent and frowned with confusion, the P2 took this as a sign of disrespect and moved a full step closer to Henry, restarting his verbal attack, whispering his words into the bridge of Henry’s nose: but obviously you and your boss won’t be happy until you’ve harassed and arrested every one of us. Until you’ve caught all of us? Put us in the P2 tank? We talk. We know our names and facial scans are in your P2 database. You know what I say? The P2 grabbed Henry’s name tag, still clipped to his belt, and squinted at it… Henry Henchman? My neighbors and coworkers know about my P2 status, and do you wanna know why? Because they’re P2, too! Transitioning isn’t a crime, you know! We are growing and we understand the truth of the future world! The P2 lunged at Henry and pushed him to the ground. He stomped away screeching, his noises akin to a caught chameleon’s, flailing clawless in the mouth of a P2. Then, You’ll be sorry Henry Henchman! When The Chosen return to the sea, that’s when you’ll be sorry! You’ll burn in this hell on earth. When the P2 reached the curb near his glider, he opened the door and called back, you’ll be left with all the demons devouring your heathen flesh! Then you’ll be sorry!

* * *

This year’s National Sales Meeting is held at the Orlando Marriott. While checking in at the reception desk, I overhear two Company salespeople from Florida engage in a clandestine discussion regarding their P2 status. That’s when I realize there’s a potential loophole in the P2 authentic clause: how camaraderie is the unsalvaged, rebellious ambassador of the spirit. An hour later, I run into two other Company colleagues, one of whom, a tall redhead named Tom Ryan, I met in a phase-1 training class twenty-five years ago when I first joined the PRAX sales force. Getting on the elevator, Tom calls out, What’s up Hankman? The Henchman! H in the house! Henry H, the man. I smile as I cringe.

Most of the salespeople are like Tom: extreme extroverts, the life of the party. Sometimes I think I’m the only  Myers-Briggs INTJ among the entire Company. Hi Tommy, how’s married life in Manhattan? I say looking at my feet. I scan the numbers at the top of the elevator as they count down to the lobby, seeing Patrick’s sweet face in each number as it lights up. Killing it this year Henchman, what are you, ranked 11 out of 190 nationally? Tom bellows, as the others near us focus inward on their retinas. I see Patrick, or it must be Patrick’s bot, roll his eyes and smile. Oh no, just number 23, as of July ranking, I say, fondling my name tag. Three more months and you’ll be bound for Hawaii! Tom chuckles. The Hankman strikes again! Tom offers me an unanswered high-five before whispering something inaudible to his the man beside him. Well, see you in the regional breakout rooms, Henchman. Tom and his friend get off. At least a dozen of my colleagues are still packed in the elevator with me. Rather than looking up at any of them, I dive deeper into the series of conciliatory Patricks, just wishing I could get home soon, smiling back at the bots with the dinging for each floor from 22 on down. If wishing could make it so, I’d be landing at SFO about now, going to Bluelot 3A to pick up my glider.

I get off in the lobby, and there’s Tommy Ryan again, shaping the words burgeoning P2 community to a cluster of perfumed salespeople. Hundreds of Company employees gather in groups in the lobby’s terrarium, under the newly installed pink-glaze UV protection dome. They huddle, chatting and planning to fudge their expense reports—and I back out of the I again to give myself a little breathing room. Henry approaches his teammates saying to himself, I need to abandon my need to forgive and be forgiven, embrace and be embraced. How can I loosen up and contain my own virologic tantrum? Divided into teams with color-coded lanyards, sorted into brand silos, their name badges encoded for scanning and embedded with a sliver of a chip, the Company salesforce offers Henry an appealing future—tracked, monitored, and checked for attendance. His ribbon is powder pink: Henry Henchman, Senior Sales Specialist, Western Region, PRAX/Virologics. Spring 2039.

Scanning the paranormal hotel lobby, I’m blinking like a mother raccoon, surrounded by gleaming salmon colored granite, beneath a row of humongous palm trees, looking for my Company sales teammates. I know they’ll be wearing our matching corporate tags. I’ll blend in with them like a cluster of pink blood cells. Draped in identical pink ribbons hanging around our necks, with microchips that sync our locations (so that the security teams in the surrounding walls will always know our whereabouts), sauntering like elegant cattle, clomp-clomping from room to deodorized room. We must be prompt, alert and, most of all, joyous. At the round, white-napkined breakfast table I’ll smile at my teammates, my colleagues, at the Company, ladling my oatmeal, my powdered eggs the color perfect lemon-yellow, into my sterilized ceramic bowl gleaming before me. 

If intimacy is the final fetish, then I’m the hero who swallows his mirror self. I’m Henry Henchman, the hero with two heads, clicking up the Company ladder in Orlando and spinning around the Frye Museum, on vacation with my husband, Patrick. The hotel disappears into my preference: The museum exhibition space is vast and the walls are too crowded with paintings to see only one at a time. Memory and reality blur three into one: sand-colored cows, a handful of white chickens, and a greenish ghost of a woman floating in green-black darkness drifting out of the century. In this last flesh-stretch of the humans we are mostly men and women with two mouths vying for the same orifice. 

Jason Kelst was a composer who died in obscurity in 1983. He was fifty at the time. He spent his days working behind the counter at an Optimo smoke shop in a small town’s downtown, selling cigars and comic books to the area’s residents. He maintained few ties with the area’s residents. He lived in a small apartment two doors down from the smoke shop and rarely ate out or went to bars. He attended no religious institution, had no romantic connections that anyone knows of, and was in fact the perfect model of a recluse. He worked for years at the smoke shop and dropped dead of a heart attack one evening after finishing his shift and locking up.

Kelst, it seemed, had planned for this. One wondered if he had known that his life was nearing his end, through a racing pulse or a shortness of breath or simply an awareness that his time was slipping away.

Though he had little in the way of an extended family, he had made a will that checked out on all legal grounds. His frugality had paid off: he left a not insubstantial sum to a local nonprofit’s scholarship program. Even now, decades later, it continues to operate. His possessions were largely destined for thrift stores or the local dump: they were thoroughly unspectacular, durable and functional but not at all memorable or in fashion.

And then there were the scores.

It was here that a little digging needed to be done: Jason Kelst, it transpired, had in his younger days attended a music conservatory with another then-young composer named Davis. Though they had been close for several years, their paths diverged shortly after they left the conservatory. Kelst had become a recluse; Davis, the year before Kelst’s death, had received the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Jason Kelst had willed his life’s work, volumes upon volumes of sheet music and home recordings, to his old friend Davis Steinhardt. There was some question as to whether Davis would actually accept the donation, or if Kelst’s executor would be faced with the difficult decision of what to do with an unwanted oeuvre. The executor never had to wrestle with that question, however: upon her first request to Davis, Davis acquiesced immediately and was more than helpful in determining a means by which Kelst’s music might be transported across the country to Davis’s domicile.

In retrospect, it might have been better for all involved had Davis declined the work and Kelst’s executor consigned it all to a fire.

Davis was a gloriously media-savvy personality: he gave interviews regularly, he toggled between large-scale commissions and more commercially viable work, and he frequently collaborated with everyone from avant-garde jazz musicians to up-and-coming rock acts who enjoyed dropping his name as an influence so as to make themselves look more highbrow. So it wasn’t a surprise that a certain cluster of journalists and critics in his orbit soon learned of the life’s work of Jason Kelst. “What are those papers over there?” someone would inevitably ask. “Oh, those? Yes, those. Those,” Davis would say, “are the work of my dear old friend Jason Kelst, who passed away earlier this year.”

An obscure and unknown composer, held in great esteem by perhaps the most critically and commercially successful composer of his generation? It’s no surprise that an abundance of critics picked up the scent of a story here and were prepared to follow it wherever it led.

As yet, though, the journalists tracking Kelst’s work had little to go on. Kelst was forthcoming about one thing: he’d had little time to make a dent in the accumulated work of decades of solitary work from his old friend. He certainly recalled compositions of Kelst’s that had resonated with him when they’d both been in their twenties, and the handful of scores he’d leafed through most definitely showed great skill and an abundance of complexity. But the full scope of Kelst’s music — that would take years to fully appreciate.

Many of the journalists who’d had something sparked by the arrival of Kelst’s work filed this information away for later use. A handful of them kept at it: Davis would announce a new symphony or a new piece for string quartet or a film score. He would sit down for the usual press rigamarole, and would see a familiar face before him, a journalist who’d been asking him questions for a good slice of his career. And inevitably, at the end of the interview, the journalist would pause and, like an archetypal dogged detective, would have one more question. “Did anything new happen,” they’d ask, “with those compositions you’d inherited?” And Davis would shake his head ruefully. “Soon,” he’d say. “I’ll get to it soon.”

And in truth, I believe he intended to. But the business by which he made his own living kept interfering, and for good reason. The years passed and the papers comprising the collected works of Jason Kelst still sat in one corner of his office, and Davis awoke alone one morning and realized that he was no longer young, or perhaps even middle-aged, and felt pangs of guilt at the prospect that Jason Kelst’s work might vanish if he was not a capable steward of it.

In those days Davis was the composer-in-residence at a well-off university, and as such had the benefit of some student labor if he required it. And it struck him that he should have asked for this before. He summoned a promising young music student and set her to work organizing and documenting the works of Jason Kelst. Once it was done, perhaps some recordings could be made. Perhaps his old classmate’s name would begin to show up on concert programs around the world.

Karen Plinth was her name: a sharply-minded young woman who shared Davis’s enthusiasm for helping to usher a previously-unknown composer’s work to the wider world. And so she spent days at a time digging through the work Kelst had left behind. Much of, she thought, was brilliant. She left notes on each piece as she finished it: loose commentary, points of comparison, what sort of ensemble it had been written for. She endeavored to be as comprehensive as she could: this was, after all, someone’s legacy.

Karen Plinth continued this process over the course of a semester. Near the end of it, she sat with Davis and spent a day reviewing all that she’d discovered. He felt enthusiastic about her discoveries, but noticed that there was something reserved in her voice, the sort of tone that balanced wonder with something more abject.

They’d gone through nearly everything, and finally Davis noticed one folder sitting off by itself. “And what’s that?” he asked Plinth, gesturing quietly in its direction.

Here Karen Plinth sighed — not from exasperation, but in the manner of someone forced to read out the fine print declaiming that one’s prize is less glorious than it had been previously been believed.

“That,” she said, “is Etude #31.”

“All right,” said Davis. “And why is it all by itself over there?”

“Well,” said Karen Plinth. “I’ve been looking at this for the last few days, and I’m not sure if playing it is humanly possible.”

Davis asked her for the sheet music, and she handed it to him. He looked it over. It began rationally enough, in a style and manner akin to a restrained Charles Ives. But as he followed along, he realized two things almost at once: first, that Karen was correct and this would be nearly impossible to play; and second, that if it ever could be played it would be a tremendously beautiful musical work.

The rest of the filing and organization of Kelst’s music went relatively smoothly. And in the end, Davis’s instincts were accurate: the story of Kelst’s compositions was indeed catnip for a few journalists of his acquaintance. One of them in particular, a well-liked journalist named Iris Jort, took a particular fascination in Kelst’s work, spending several days at the informal archive that Davis and Plinth had established. Iris had trailed as a concert pianist for much of her youth, until finally she realized that a career in classical music would not be ideal, and so instead opted to pursue a lucrative career in arts journalism.

The feature she wrote on the life and work of Jason Kelst was published that autumn in The New Yorker and instantly put Kelst’s name on the map — a small map, admittedly, but one nonetheless. The university at which Davis taught offered to become the formal and permanent home of Kelst’s papers. Several respected orchestras announced plans to program some of Kelst’s works in the coming years, and a respected conductor signed a contract to record three of Kelst’s compositions.

Etude #31 remained in obscurity in a file folder in the university’s archive. It had come up in the conversations that Davis and Plinth had had for the New Yorker article, but that aspect of his work had not made it to the final version of the piece. Iris had written a short paragraph about it, but it was eventually cut by her editor, who felt that it read like a digression more than anything that might be of interest to the readership. “Every composer has their trifles,” he scribbled in the margins. This was true, but most composers’ trifles were not lethal.

Jason Kelst’s posthumous reputation remained golden for almost twenty years. Kelst’s work became an integral part of the repertoire of many a regional and national ensemble. A performance of one of his string quartets bewitched a Chicago audience under the stars at Millennium Park, and the Prospect Park Bandshell was treated to a dance performance set to a minor but charming work for dance orchestra. The off-beat details of his personal life had also not escaped the public notice,  and an Oscarbait biopic picked up a handful of critical awards for its cast.

The generation that had been born as Kelst’s music circulated the nation began coming of age. As they did so, Kelst’s work became the topic of several graduate-level theses, and a handful of prestigious private schools offered courses in Kelst’s body of work.

Cue Leon Paul, 23 years of age, and of a similar rigorous bent to Karen Plinth, his predecessor in the study of Jason Kelst. Leon Paul decided to visit the Kelst archives and explore the composer’s works that had not received wide fanfare, no pun intended. He requested access, and was granted it. He applied for grants and was given them. This would be his PhD thesis: The Unheard Kelst. Upon hearing of that, an aging Davis chuckled. “It was all unheard. All of it!” he muttered to no one in particular, made a note to email this wry observation to Karen Plinth, then promptly lost the note.

Etude #31 did not look like a weapon. It did not look like a torture device or a haunted object or a relic used for some barbaric purpose. When Leon Paul slid it out of the file folder, it did not whisper to him in an arcane language or trigger a migraine or give him a nosebleed. It looked like any other musical work. That, perhaps, was the trouble. Had someone scrawled “RUN” at the top of it where other works featured the tempo, things might never have gone so wrong.

The protagonists of Euripides’ Bakkhai (New Directions, Dec 2017) are a new god and a cross-dressing conservative. Dionysos has just arrived from the east; though Anne Carson is quick to remind us in her new translation that his presence in Mycenaean tablets dates all the way back to the 12th century BC. This is not surprising. Dionysos is a perpetual stranger, and his religion a constant other. He is nicknamed Bromios (or “boisterous”), after his birth from Zeus’ thunderbolt, which killed his mother Semele and caused the god of gods, his father, to sew Dionysos into his thigh. From this “masculine womb” he is born again, which earns him his second nickname: “twice-born.” He stings the women of Thebes into madness with his thyrsos: a wand of giant fennel topped with a pinecone. He drives them into the mountains where they worship him with wild dances, ritual hunts, sexual escapades, and feasts on raw flesh and wine.

Pentheus, the young and hotheaded new ruler of Thebes, thinks this is all giving his town a bad name, so he imprisons the god’s followers—the Bakkhai, including his mother Agave. But the god liberates them. As is true for most radical conservatives, Pentheus’ fury and intolerance are mixed with irrepressible obsession. Dionysos, who has put on human form as a swoony, longhaired religious leader with “bedroom eyes” and “cheeks like wine” (Pentheus’ own words) is all too aware of this. He convinces Pentheus to dress up as a woman so that he may spy on the Bakkhai without being seen—thus quenching the young man’s curiosity and luring him inexorably into Dionysos’ followers’ claws. Agave sees Pentheus hiding in a tree, and in a fit of Bakkhic madness takes him for a young lion, slaying her son with the help of her maenads. The play ends with Kadmos, her father and the founder of Thebes, revealing to her the nature of her crime, which results in the family going into exile: each member cast out alone.

Anne Carson’s translation is all one would expect of her work: modern, frisky, precise, dense, completely original, and absolutely devastating. As in her other versions of Euripides and Sophocles (like Grief Lesson, Electra, and Antigone) Carson’s line breaks turn the play into a poetry at turns lush and riotous, at others glibly deadpan and ironic. The latter applies in both the dramatic and contemporary senses. At the hands of Carson, it’s a linguistic treat on every level: from Bakkhai’s cascading choruses, to the cast of characters’ rhetorical spars, to the final elegies spoken by Kadmos and Agave that leave one with a sense of raw and irresolvable trauma. Raw indeed on the level of character and drama, but air-tight as crystal in Carson’s economical verse. The result might remind us of what Nietzsche felt only Greek Tragedy could do: fuse the Apollonian and the Dionysian completely. But the play teaches us—and this might be its central lesson—that the Dionysian itself requires a balance of impulses.

The play is surprisingly fresh in its affirmative depiction of women’s spiritual, moral, and sexual freedom—in equal measure, it’s condemnatory of intolerant men. In the order of Bakkhai, the fury of a conservative cannot outlive his hidden fixations. A man of closeted compulsion, who subjects women to the duality of his voyeurism (desire and disgust) before he plans to destroy them for good, will suffer a horrible fate. The logic of Dionysos, in which these impulses must resolve themselves into consummation and release, will not allow this kind of stubborn and compartmentalized approach. The play’s Freudianism avails itself not only in repressed desires, but also ideological vision: the clash here is on the order of collective as well as personal fantasy, and is as frightening as it is fatalistic. And not too distant from the destructive results of our current politics.

Dionysos is no easy god to pin down. Carson associates him in her translator’s note (also a poem) with beginnings: “[he is] your first sip of wine / from a really good bottle. / Opening page // of a crime novel.” Tiresias, that blind prophet and traveler between sexes, summarizes him like no one else can: Dionysos is the “wet element”—“cool forgetting of the hot pains of day”—as well as “that flash across the peaks of Delphi / tossing like a great wild spark from crag to crag.” He fertilizes and sates by giving us drink and the knowledge to press grapes, and he brings forth visions and voluptuous pursuits, alongside the deep trances of terror and sleep. Tiresias instructs Pentheus to “pour his wine, dance his dances, say yes.” But Pentheus cannot be brought to yield, because he knows too well that in the case of Dionysos—who favors women—the patriarchy is at stake. He is unable to conceive for a moment that his mother Agave and her sisters, who are after all his “inferiors,” might know something that he doesn’t. His plans for the Bakkhai, who’ve taken up cymbals and drums, is to “sell [them] into slavery or put [them] to work at our looms.” And when it comes to Dionysos’ popularity abroad, he has few words: “foreigners all lack sense, compared to Greeks.” His prudish, belligerent, deeply misogynistic, and overtly xenophobic demeanor might remind us of Trump. As might his simpleminded diction: “This Bakkhic insanity is catching like wildfire. / What a disgrace! … we’re going to make war on [them].” Except, of course, Pentheus has the charm of being in his late teens or twenties, still somewhat malleable, and willing therefore to play dress-up for his basic instincts.

Dionysos is Pentheus’ proper foil: composed, quietly determined, patient, and sharp-witted. His response to Pentheus’ qualm with strangers is that “there’s more than one kind of sense.” When Pentheus sends guards to arrest him, Dionysos exclaims, “Okay, tie me up!” and after he escapes, he relates to the Bakkhai: “Just between you and me, / I had a bit of fun with him and his ropes.” However, after Pentheus crosses him twice, the dovish demeanor is revealed to be a mere externality, and Dionysos begins to plot. After all, Bacchus is dual in nature: “god of the intensities of terror, / god of the gentlest human peace.” But even then, Dionysos does not lose his composure. In fact, his whole act rests on his suave seduction of Pentheus to act against his own interests. This might be another bizarre link to our political present. Once facts and sensible discourse (embodied in the person of Tiresias) fail to convert, the god resorts to wiles: to the coaxing of subterranean inclinations. Our centuries-old politics of manners is proof that this method of persuasion often trumps the verdict of facts: from Andrew Jackson throwing his forceful simple-man’s vocabulary, to Reagan hiding all culpability behind an actor’s poise, to Trump assuring his audiences with that brash New York baritone. But Bakkhai’s Dionysos embodies the message that true overcoming—on a cosmic, moral, and political scale—requires the synthesis of these two facets of life: reason and passion. The Dionysian leader does not so much “use” either as simultaneously “channel” both in an expression of truth.

Dionysos’ duality is best expressed in a scene where a group of herdsmen encounter the Bakkhai on a journey through the woods. When the men chance upon them, they are peacefully sleeping in three circles, each around the female elders of Thebes, the daughters of Kadmos: Ino, Autonoe, and Agave. Upon the beasts’ braying, the women spring up, “somehow instantly organized”: “with snakes that slid up to lick their cheeks, / some (new mothers who’d left their babies at home) / [cradling] wolf cubs or deer in their arms and [suckling] them.” Honey drips from their thyrsi, and the Bakkhai strike the ground to produce wine, or scratch with their bare hands to draw out milk. But when the herdsmen attempt to attack, in order to return Agave to her son Pentheus, all hell breaks loose. The women tear entire calves and bulls apart (“chunks of flesh dripped from the pine trees, blood everywhere”) and descend upon two villages, where the men’s swords fail to draw any blood, yet the Bakkhai’s thyrsi wound them badly.

This gory scene foreshadows Pentheus’ fate. The dramatic ironies of the sections that follow, that of Pentheus’ sprucing at the hands of Dionysos, and his death on the mountain, are impeccable. (Important also to note here that Pentheus means “grief” in Ancient Greek.) After Dionysos personally dresses and makes him up, the leader wonders aloud whether he looks like his mother. “I was tossing my head back and forth like a maenad inside the house,” he says, in a statement ripe with dramatic pathos. When the god offers to correct his hair, he happily submits: “You redo it. I’m in your hands.” And when Dionysos tells him he will be victorious, that someone other than he will return him home, Pentheus exclaims: “My mother!” The god tonelessly affirms him.

In the section that follows, the Bakkhai reiterate their mission: “the great clear joy of living pure and reverently, / rejecting injustice / and honoring gods.” Then they make their call against Pentheus: “Into the throat / of / the / ungodly / unlawful / unrighteous / earthborn / son / of Echion / let justice / sink her sword / !” Carson mirrors the Bakkhai’s fluctuating intents. Earlier, when she speaks of “skylarking,” and compares the Bakkhai to a fawn leaping free of its hunter, the prose cascades down the page like a peaceful river. Dionysos is freely dialectical here: both hunted and hunter, frolicking while calling out for punishment against Pentheus. But when actually rousing Agave and the women for Pentheus’ death, her words become tightened at the center of the page, turning into literal swords.

Carson translates the scene that follows from two perspectives: that of the Bakkhai, and a servant following Pentheus on his last journey. Once again, Pentheus’ pathos is sharply etched, when he calls out to his mother for mercy, and Carson’s lines chop back: “But she / was foaming at the mouth, / was rolling her eyes, / was out of her mind.” The irony continues into Agave’s slow coming-to. After she has fixed her son’s head onto her thyrsos and paraded it for the rest of the Bakkhic women, she says to herself: “What a fresh bloom he is, / just a kid, just a calf – / here, see the down on his cheeks, / the long soft hair.” She exclaims that she wants her son to nail this head to their house, as a trophy of her hunt and the success of Dionysos. Kadmos talks her awake from her trance. Even the sky begins to brighten, like a sign that Agave and the women were moving through an alternate dimension of their own, or that of the god’s: a pre-modern Upside Down. In response to her realization, Kadmos says the one line that could sum up all of tragedy: “Truth is an unbearable thing. And its timing is bad.” Agave remembers nothing of her deed, and where the text is missing in the original Greek, Carson works wonders through her curt poetry, this time of reckoning: “His body. / His dear, dear body. / This is my son. / This is what I did.” Here we learn that Agave too had denied the god, and this is her punishment.

What is amazingly refreshing in Bakkhai is the unquestioned triumph of Dionysos and, especially for the western reader, the pre-Christian (and pre-Roman) sense of Dionysian order as proper to humankind. The Bakkhai say so again and again: “ancient, / elemental, / fixed in law and custom, / grown out of nature itself” is Dionysos, and he’s therefore to be respected. This is amazing, bearing in mind that Dionysos did not fare well under the Romans. The Senate saw his followers as a secretive and subversive counter-culture: seditious to both civil and religious law. These cults were mostly lead by women, and at gatherings they outnumbered men. The Bacchanalia was banned by the edict of 186 BC, and its members threatened with the death penalty.

Carson captures the renegade spirit of the Bakkhai in her verse. This is how they speak of Dionysos: “He is sweet upon the mountains / when he runs from the pack, / when he drops to the ground, / hunting goatkill blood / and rawflesh pleasure.” The compound words may seem unmistakably Carson’s, but they’re in fact direct translations. The women refer to Dionysos’ emissary (the young religious leader) as their “comrade.” Later Livy, whose accounts of the cult were filled with exaggeration and outright lies, writes that Bakkhic devotees’ nocturnal rites included loud and haunting music, feasts, drunken orgies, murder, and even cannibalism. Shockingly, the Romans also accused early Christians of human sacrifice, and believed that the host was dipped in the blood of a child. In the second century AD, Christians turned these accusations against the pagan in their war against witches’ covens. The latter may not be surprising, given that Dionysos models what became the Devil for fear-mongering Catholics and Protestants, from medieval superstition through to the Inquisition, and all the way up to the Salem witch trials. Just like Dionysos, the Devil sprouts horns, shape-shifts into animals, and communes with and empowers women who submit to him with magic powers.

Here Christianity’s complete reliance on this other order—of the unknown, of magic, and of women’s sexual and moral liberty—is loud and clear: “Whether the Belief that there are such Beings as Witches is so Essential a Part of the Catholic Faith that Obstinacy to maintain the Opposite Opinion manifestly savours of Heresy,” reads the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486.. The Malleus is the Inquisitors’ guidebook to the identification and persecution of witches, and it answers this formal query with a mighty yes. To read this bizarre and famous work today is to learn that witches’ covens were seen as a threat to the entirety of Christendom, including its masochistic-misogynistic dominance over all forms of spiritual resistance. In Anne Carson’s translation, the whole of this strange history glows through the page. Most notably in an early chorus where the poet inserts this chant into the original play: “green of dawn-soaked dew and slender green of shoots … green of the honeyed muse, / green of the rough caress of ritual, / green undaunted by reason or delirium.” These wizardly treats are endemic to her version.

And later, this spell by Dionysos himself: “Spirit of earthquake, shake the floor of this world!” This, however, is all Euripides. The difference between Bakkhai and the rest of Judeo-Christian history is that in the Ancient Greek play, Dionysos and the women are owed our full regard, and they triumph—though at a cost to Thebes. In Bakkhai, which won first prize at the Dionysia festival where it premiered in 405 BC, this god that reaches way down into our evolutionary roots and affirms everything about our bodies and desires—in good measure, as he repeatedly instructs—along with all the women who enjoy his blessings, are portrayed as impregnable forces. The play shows us that we cannot not revere them, as we’d do so at great cost to our own freedom and integrity. Dionysos is the “rawflesh” prelude to the human imagination that is inescapable even to its finest and most noble pursuits.

This message feels as important today as it did over 2,400 years ago. Hence the commissioning of this ravishing new translation by the Almeida Theater, where it was first staged in July of 2015 starring Ben Wishaw as Dionysos, Bertie Carvel as Pentheus, and renowned director James Macdonald at the prow—better known for his work with contemporary authors. The production opened to raving praise of Orlando Gogh’s score and Ben Wishaw’s acting, which the Guardian described as “insinuating and dangerous,” and “the most perfect portrayal of androgyny.”

With its due relevance in mind, let’s let Bakkhai have the last word: “Many are the forms of the daimonic / and many the surprises wrought by gods. / What seemed likely did not happen. / But for the unexpected a god found a way. / That’s how this went / today.”

They’ve renovated the Gates of Hell since the last time I was here, some four years ago. Now when you come in the front door—the glass broken, replaced with stained, graffiti-covered plywood with a dangling steel pull-ring—there’s a bigger living room than there used to be, full of filthy couches and grubby lay-z-boys broken in the recline position.

I get here late enough that the place is already packed. Crust punks are sprawled out on the couches, gathered in groups against the walls, and pushing their way to and fro through the crowd. A few dogs follow them, trailing ropes. It’s the dogs here that always bother me—given how little care they’re willing to give themselves, I worry crusties (gutterpunks, scumpunks, squeegee kids, oogles: whatever you prefer to call them) don’t seem capable of taking responsibility for the animals they adopt. My friend Renée, whom I meet as I come in, agrees with me.

“I bet they don’t get walked very much,” she says sadly. I concur, adding the deafening music and air thick with cigarette smoke can’t be good for them either. After all, the Gates of Hell does not comply with city regulations banning smoking, assumedly because they’re not going to bow to what The Man tells them to do. You expect an unhealthy atmosphere coming out here, though. As always, the air is choked with smoke, accented by the smell of cheap beer, dirty hair, armpit, and because it’s raining, a hint of wet dog.

A fellow with a rat on his shoulder ducks in through the plywood door, removing a rain-drenched hood. He’s a friend of a friend. I comment that his is a nice-looking rat and he says, “Put out your hand: you can hold him.” I do; the rat lithely ascends my arm, circles my neck, and finds a comfortable spot in the shoulder of my sweatshirt. His small body is warm and his fur is soft: he’s like a tiny cat, except for the leathery tail, and I can feel him breathing. The cavorting dogs are on the other side of my head, so I try to shield the rat from their view, though the guy tells me not to worry, saying, “Some dogs are cool with him.” We talk for a while, the rat relaxing on my shoulder, then determine it’s time to move into the closely packed crowd.

They’ve been having shows again at the Gates of Hell for the past two years—at least, shows that outsiders might have heard about. Whoever lived here three years ago spread the word they’d stopped putting bands on due to hassles from police. However, a friend tells me, they never really quit having gigs—just stopped advertising, knowing enough of the east-end punks would find out anyway.

The Gates of Hell is a former shop of some variety turned into a kind of loft in which various rooms, big and small, surround a larger central chamber where bands can play and practice. It’s part of a sort of krusty komplex nearly a half a block long, consisting of squalid lofts, storefronts, and apartments inhabited by a legion of punks. The most well-known loft, the Loud House, is next to the Gates of Hell and connected by a doorway. Though they haven’t had shows there in a while, a lot of people still think of the entire krusty komplex as being “The Loud House.”

The first time I visited the Gates of Hell, in 2002, the bands played in a centre room with concrete walls and plywood floors. Halfway through the evening’s six-band bill, the floor was already slick with beer and spit and whatever else makes plywood slippery; many in the crowd were making it worse by shaking quart-bottles of Black Label and spraying their friends. By the end of the night, crusties confounded by PCP or just bull-doses of alcohol were staggering around to the lightning throb of headliners (Saskatchewan’s superlative thrash band Destined For Assimilation [D.F.A.]), slipping in the half-inch of beer on the floor, falling on one another, being pulled to their feet, and falling over again. One short-haired guy in his mid-30s, shirtless beneath his patched and studded denim vest, came careening across the room, tripped, and slid on his belly with surprising force headfirst into the rim of the bass drum. Then he lay still. His friends lurched forward and hoisted him upright; he looked perplexedly at them for a moment, then some spark ignited in his blank eyes and, raising his fist in time with the charging music, he rejoined the fray.

Later still that night a small mob besieged the singer of one of the earlier bands, who were from Vancouver. During that band’s set, the singer bowed to the demands of a group of shouting women in the crowd and admitted onstage to having raped one of their friends. (Years after the fact, a friend told me he had heard second-hand that the accuser had later recanted and said publicly that singer had not, in fact, raped her. Because I did not hear this from the woman herself or anyone closely connected with her, I had doubts. I frankly have no way to determine which parts of the story beyond those I witnessed myself were true. The whole situation was and remains totally mystifying.) As I was leaving, the group had the singer loosely surrounded and, joined by other members of the crowd, were debating what to do with him. One person asked, perhaps rhetorically, why they shouldn’t just take him to the river and drown him. The members of D.F.A., who were staying at my house, insisted I get in their van and we left without seeing the issue resolved. Years later someone showed me the singer’s Myspace page, whose existence attested only that the mob ultimately decided against drowning.

I find my way through the crowd in the changed layout of the space, looking for the inside room where the bands play. Between the front and the show space, there’s an antechamber that’s both a hall and someone’s bedroom: by the door there’s a chest-height loft bed, its linens in a twisted pile. Next to it there hangs a defiled mannequin and some piles of assorted crap. Beside one of these someone’s set up a distro table and punks are pensively flipping through records, many of which are black and feature white images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls (some depicted with punk hairstyles, some without). Graffiti covers the walls of the room—band names, vaguely intentioned messages, and in-jokes between friends. At the end of the hall is a door with a large sign on it reading “RAT POISON IN THIS ROOM!! NO DOGS, EVER!!” Just before that, there’s a carpet-and-foam-covered door into the show-space.

Beyond it stands a guy who looks like Neil, the sad hippie on British sitcom The Young Ones. He’s got long, bluish dreadlocks and is wearing a shirt featuring a circle-slash through a swastika, stating a position that—like being opposed to child molestation or tainted food—most feel is a basic prerequisite to humanity. The line takes a long time because every person who passes him has to listen, as they pay, to him complain about how he wasn’t supposed to be working the show, someone else was organizing it, they asked him at the last minute if he could help and he said he would, but only if he didn’t have to do the door, and now here he is, doing the door.

I finally get to the front of the line and ask how much it is. He says it’s five bucks and I say, “Priced to move!” But he only looks at me a second with confusion, then says, “Well, it’s two out of town bands, right? And gas is cheaper these days, but it’s still pretty expensive. Gotta support the out of town bands.” I nod in lieu of explaining that $5 is pretty cheap for a five-band show, especially since five-band crust punk shows have remained $5 since I went to my first in 1993, when $5 was just less than you’d make working an hour at minimum wage. (Now you can practically get two crust shows for an hour of flipping burgers!)

Inside, I take up a position near the front of the stage but away from the centre, hoping to avoid getting badly knocked or sprayed with beer. I’m holding onto my jacket, in part because I’m never sure it won’t get stolen, and otherwise because leaving it somewhere is an invitation to have it puked on, or to have beer spilled on it, or for it to improbably pick up an infestation of fleas, bedbugs, or, god knows, fire ants or something. Nathan, a friend, more bravely leaves his bag, though not before conferring with me as to the place to best avoid vomit.

“Put it high,” I suggest. “People are going to puke straight ahead or down; nobody really pukes up.” He puts it on top of a pile of crates and I leave my umbrella with it, but even with jacket in hand, I’m sweating already, watching the band set up.

In contrast to the filth and neglect throughout the Gates of Hell, there’s at a few thousand dollars’ worth of musical and sound equipment on stage. Beyond that, the room is a wretched shithole. Soiled mattresses of different sizes are lined against the back wall to baffle the noise, while the side walls are covered either in foam insulation or graffiti, some of it just insults and other bits advertising promising acts like the Dead Hookers. It actually makes the eponymous Loud House next door look classy by comparison with its all-black walls decorated with large white images of skulls wearing German army helmets. Two spotlights, on either side of the stage, dangle woozily from loops of wire that don’t look like they’ll hold. These lights are plugged into open outlets half-way up the wall and pointed at the ceiling, which is a sheet of transparent plastic holding in layers of yellow insulation. The surface of the plastic is mottled with pocks of dried sputum and fresher amber droplets of beer. Above the stage, someone has spray-painted THE GATES OF HELL in red across the wall. They’ve continued onto the wall on the other side, adding BURN THE RICH in similar-sized letters near the ceiling. Farther down they’ve appended BLUDGEONED, which I learn is the name of the band belonging to the sad door guy, who lives here and runs the space.

The guiding emotion of this particular brand of hardcore punk is utter hopelessness from which one may be distracted only by the most extreme inebriation and chaos. The bands sing about atrocity, war, slaughter, injustice, oppression, evil, etc., but do so from a position wherein it’s impossible to do anything at all about it. There are lax nods to the idea of revolution from time to time, as most here would identify as “anarchist,” but only to the moment of revolution when punks fighting cops in the street actually win for once—not to the months of gruelling decision-making by consensus on issues like replacing capitalism with advanced barter, establishing a system of mediation for solving disputes to replace courts and police, and the rest of what would follow an anarchist revolution. It’s hard to write really ripping songs about that stuff.

Surveying the gathering crowd, I notice that the Gates of Hell punks are, now more than ever, sporting primarily dreadlocks—usually in the form of the dread-mullet, a combination of close-cropped hair with a few dreads sprouting like udon noodles from the back. Some have longer locks, a few have long hair or shaved heads, and a handful have traditional punk cuts like mohawks or spikes, but really, there isn’t much variation. No one, for example, has jolly pigtails; there’s nothing bouffant and nothing carefully combed that hasn’t been combed into a point. Many sport hairdos that bespeak time and effort, but only the time and effort to make the statement—in accordance with tradition—that one doesn’t care.

Likewise, most in the crowd wear identical crust punk uniforms: black jeans covered in black band patches; black band t-shirts featuring images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls; black ballcaps with black patches sewn on the front; and black denim vests with several hundred studs covering collar, shoulders, flanks, etc., and patches in between. Inevitably featuring images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls, these patches seem chosen to advertise the obscurity of one’s tastes. A few people endorse bands popular by crust standards, like Sweden’s Totalitär and Wolfbrigade and Australia’s Pisschrïst, but most opt instead for groups that only those committed to a life of crust would have heard of. That is, except for Discharge: throughout the room, logos of British hardcore/metal band Discharge are everywhere, on patches, on t-shirts, and painted on the backs of leather jackets. If the crowd was naked, god forbid, I’m sure there’d be a plenty of Discharge tattoos as well. Gates of Hell/Loud House punks wear Discharge paraphernalia the way Italian Catholics wear crucifixes—no one would ever doubt they believed, but true faith demands a constant display of devotion.

Most here come to hear d-beat bands—that is, bands that play the driving, non-melodic hardcore punk with insistent double-downbeat drumming pioneered by Discharge in the late ’70s. The fashion and décor are also in line with Discharge’s view of the world—a monochrome apocalyptic nihilism that assumes that either capitalism or nuclear war is going to destroy humanity very shortly, and there’s nothing to be done except to get wasted and live in filth, listening to music reminding one of the necessity of doing so by underlining the inevitability of the coming end.

The two chief attractions to this life, as far as I can tell, are a supposed total severance from the “conformity” of “the mainstream,” and the freedom that comes from living very, very cheaply. At various points when I was younger, I considered making choices that might have found me living in some variation of the Gates of Hell. Imagine: freeing myself from the tyranny of work by finding a room that cost $75 a month, decorating it with whatever furniture I found in the street, and eating from the vast bounty of unspoiled food squandered in supermarket dumpsters! Imagine not having to pay to be alive anymore! Imagine cheating the system by simply dropping out of it!

The other attraction to the lifestyle is that being “punk” is about separating one’s self from the evils of consumer society, and being extremely punk means doing so extremely. The more fashion has taken up the aesthetic of punk over past years, and the more pop-punk bands have found their way to mainstream fame, the farther crust punks have pulled into the obscurity of fanaticism. Few punk lifestyles are more extreme than those lived around the Gates of Hell and the Loud House. Surprisingly, many who live and congregate here are into their 30s and 40s: some are missing teeth, and while others’ tattoos have gone blue and smudged with age. Old enough that I wonder why they haven’t been struck by the contradictions and failings of this lifestyle, they are, in both senses of the term, lifers: they’ve committed themselves to this life, sure, but it’s hard to imagine them being able to escape from it now. Or, as a couple have said to me, they do recognize the structural failings of crust punk, but they can’t see an alternative they find less ethically conflicting, so they’re stuck with it.

What brings people here, and keeps them here, is the emotional draw of the lifestyle. A small minority of people actually feel it, but some years ago I was one of them. Product of an erratically hostile divorce, bullied by peers (and, occasionally, teachers) throughout my childhood, disquietingly aware of the global rush of the 1980s toward environmental or nuclear holocaust, my circumstances and upbringing made me a perfect candidate for punk rock. Kids with such a background who discover the lifeboat of punk cling to it desperately, and I was no exception. In my adolescence, punk rock and our culture made sense of the evil of the world for me and provided a position from which I felt empowered enough to stand up for myself and respond to it.

To me and many others, the music, mindset, and community were a stupendous revelation: we were all astonished, after years of isolation, to discover a whole scene full of people like us and places we could congregate together. Naturally that congregation carried with it an almost religious sensation of salvation. We had been saved, after all. The rooms of punkhouses like the Gates of Hell were virtually consecrated: there, we were aligned with hopeless weirdos all over the world finally escaping from the devastating bullshit of normal life, refusing and resisting it together and somehow building something new and better.

So, for a while, as a teenager and into my twenties, I took pleasure in ugliness and filth. I was done pretending that the there was a future, that the end wasn’t coming, that personal hygiene and grooming weren’t symbolic of our consumer selfishness in the face of imminent annihilation. Or something. And I felt as though my natural revolutionary state was to be among the punks, an allegiance to which I clung even as it seemed increasingly that most of what many punks wanted to do was get trashed.

The majority of the crowd at shows—comprising­­­­, for better or worse, “punk” as I experienced it_­­­­—didn’t seem like they were drawing the same deep inspiration from the music at all times to fuel the active resistance I’d always believed punk was supposed to represent. They wanted to get shitty (really shitty—punks aren’t believers in moderation), hear some bands, and socialize. To some extent, they wanted to do so in an atmosphere that perpetually reminded them of the brutal truths of existence—bombs, war, slaughter, injustice, oppression, evil, etc.—expressed in images of atrocity and/or drawings of skulls. Yet in the absence of some serious challenge to those brutal truths, punk’s statement seemed to diminish to the same thesis argued at nightclubs, taverns, and sports bars the world over: “Shit’s fucked up: let’s get wasted.”

The medium by which the Gates of Hell expresses that statement is different, however. Despite the clammy sorrow of a sports bar or nightclub, those places at least play upon some kind of novelty. The central premise of the Gates of Hell is regurgitation, literal and cultural—it shapes itself in the image of what’s come before, the futureless boozing-rioting-barfing edifice of chaos that defines punk for some, but which mainly consists of intoxicated people maybe breaking the law a bit—while accomplishing almost nothing. That would be fine for a nightclub, except that some of us who arrive at places like the Gates of Hell in search of social revolution discover instead a scene that offers no solutions at all beyond the continual restatement of the alienation that brought us all there in the first place. And most of us don’t even live there full-time.

Reaffirmed often enough in an atmosphere otherwise devoid of thoughtfulness, that alienation begins to decompose into its constituent elements of loneliness and despair, which become all the more acute the more the punk catechism of “no future” stretches farther into the unanticipated, and surprisingly degrading, future. Yet as the future’s end becomes more remote, punk’s true believers have shifted focus to underline instead the agony of “normality,” imagining the mechanistic hollow lives of the masses that long for the mercy of a mushroom cloud that will never come. If the future won’t end soon, then at least the veneer of normality is susceptible to the aesthetic attack from those willing to live in squalor even more miserable than the sadness of normality—a misery made worthwhile by the promise, never quite fully achieved, of total freedom. This tortured desperation, then, is what the crust punk lifestyle expresses loudest and most overwhelmingly to me, and what prevented me from ever giving myself completely over to it. My own despair is claustrophobic enough, but living inside someone else’s hopelessness—particularly that of the Gates of Hell crusties—is totally suffocating.

Transient, dirty, and hopeless, a lot of crusties here borrow their aesthetic, whether on purpose or by accident, from the film Mad Max, living as though that film’s apocalypse has already happened. My friend Simon once reported seeing, at a Loud House show, a one-armed punk he described as a “road-warrior crusty” wearing a prosthetic arm he’d embedded with studs “as though through sleeves of an actual jacket,” which he’d remove and swing around “mace-like” when the crowd really got going. It’s hard to imagine this scene being profiled in the New York Times Sunday Styles section.

Which is the point. Part of the draw of music like that at the Gates of Hell is that “normal” people will never want to hear it. Yet even the desire of the Gates of Hell punks to embrace that which the mainstream could never love has failed—one of the past two years’ most vaunted acts in the music press has been Toronto’s Fucked Up (recent winner of the 2009 Polaris Prize!), a hardcore band that’s carved its own style within the genre, and who played several packed shows at the Loud House over the years. One can imagine the Loud House punks disgustedly watching last year’s buzz-video of Fucked Up trashing a bathroom while performing on MTV, or, later in the same week, performing a Ramones cover with Moby. Certainly, some would be quick to brand Fucked Up (or, as they were called by MTV, F’d Up) “sell-outs,” but what I suspect would offend them most would be the realization that even the extremity of the Loud House isn’t inviolable—that forging a lifestyle so repellent it repulses marketability is far more difficult than it seems.

Unmentioned in discussions of groups like Fucked Up “selling out” is the notion that bands who pursue financial gain might do so because the underground—and particularly the extreme underground—can’t sustain them economically, yet all the same requires large financial investment. Many can’t break even on tour, instead sinking hundreds or thousands of dollars into the endeavour. Making music and touring without the support of adequately paying gigs therefore becomes an astonishingly expensive hobby when one factors in the cost of equipment, upkeep, a van, gas for the van, monthly rent on a practice space, etc.—making punk touring precisely the sort of bourgeois pastime to which crusty punks like to imagine themselves in opposition.

The complexities of that issue don’t come up in discussion, the same way the complexities of other issues like “burning the rich” (and doing what with their money?), “ending all war” (how?), and “smashing capitalism” (replacing it with what?) don’t get thoroughly discussed. After all, these slogans exist simply to attest wealth, war, and capitalism are harmful, but not to say anything much about the nature of the harm they do. In the same way, crust punk, as it appears at the Gates of Hell and elsewhere, exists just to express rejection—rejection of what’s perceived as mainstream, as conformity, as whatever now constitutes the world beyond the aural, aesthetic, and olfactory fortification that punks have built against “normality.”

There is no exploration of these adversaries, little interest in what normal people do or why they do it, and still less consideration of how life among crust punks might mirror, in its own way, the precise structures and problems of the society the punks oppose. These subjects never come up because many assume them to be solved already: normal people are robots controlled by the media and corporate interests, punks have pulled the wool from their eyes to see that capitalism and war are the enemy, and revolution and rioting is the solution, which, if they happen, we’ll figure out the logistics of when we get there. Until then: more rejection.

“Fuck, fuck, fuckin’ asshole, fuck, shit,” slurs the singer of the first band, by means of a mic check. A couple of his friends give him the finger, and the gesture seems as empty as his cursing. Almost every experience I’ve had of the Gates of Hell and the Loud House has been empty of wit and humour, save maybe the time Martin, the singer of ripping Toronto hardcore band Career Suicide, offended the crowd during their set by remarking, “Can we get a body count up here?” as several lolling, blue-lipped punks were dragged out of the bathroom and into the street to wait for an ambulance. For the most part, the shows here are free of humour. As the band launches into their set, the guitarist announces, “This song’s about dicks!” which is as close as we’ll come to funny. Then it’s d-beat, as promised, only sloppier, with the lead singer grumping hoarsely over two guitarists playing the same power chords and a drummer (wearing sunglasses) going through his paces. Someone tells me the name of the band and I instantly forget it, the same way I’ll forget the band itself. D-beat can be done better or worse, but it never amounts to more than what it aspires to be. Simon once told me that in developing an affinity for d-beat he’d cauterized his tastes, which is, in a sense, true—to devote yourself to such a repetitive and atonal branch of hardcore, you have to forego subtlety. But you also have to be willing to be bored, since d-beat by definition doesn’t do anything new.

By the end of the first song, the room has filled up. A considerable contingent of punks has stumbled in, king-cans of beer loosely in hand, dim eyes half-closed and mouths hanging half-open. Enjoying the music, they shake their fists at the band (the Gates of Hell’s most popular dance move) and knock into one another, spilling beer. Once it’s clear that the crowd’s beginning to get excitable, a blue-haired guy pulls himself up onto an amp and half-heartedly stage-dives into an area where there aren’t enough people to catch him; those beneath struggle to toss him backward onto the crowd behind and he ends up tilting headfirst into the floor. But it’s OK, he’s up and knocking around again soon enough, just in time for some other guy to make the same desultory leap off the amp and land it more successfully, only to be carried around by five or six people for a second before being deposited on the ground.

I watch one of the carriers, a smaller guy with short dreads. He’s got one of these vests just covered in shiny studs: little round nubs over the shoulders, pyramids on the back and flank, stars and pointier studs to accentuate the edges. It must have taken hours to put them all on; I try to imagine him spending the evening on a dirty sofa, in front of a stereo blasting In Darkness, You Feel No Regrets by Wolfbrigade (or a TV playing a rerun of Everybody Loves Raymond), pliers in one hand, bag of studs in the other, slowly crimping them on one by one in a careful pattern as though doing a home-ec project. It’s easy enough to picture—I’ve been there myself, have studded articles of clothing and sewn patches onto my shorts and hooded sweatshirts. There’s a strange tenderness in the moment between a punk and his or her favourite patched hoodie. But now he’s thrashing around the floor in his vest, colliding into friends with his shoulders. They’re drunk or dusted or high on whatever, and seem to be enjoying themselves, but I’m bored of the crowd and the band.

I’ve often wondered how many here really enjoy this music. I have more extreme tastes than most people I know and appreciate a certain sound in raging hardcore—namely the swift-and-loose variety, influenced by bands from the early ’80s like Detroit’s pissed-off but succinct Negative Approach, or Portland’s ferociously nihilistic Poison Idea. That’s why I bother coming here from time to time: bands that sound like what I like are more likely to play this sort of venue than elsewhere. But the crowd at the Gates of Hell goes for music often even more aggressive than I like it: while I can enjoy shouted vocals, they often prefer singers scream themselves hoarse, or grunt, or make that croaking barf popular in death metal. Likewise, I’m partial to fast drumming, but they’re far more open to the hydraulic noise of “blast beats,” drumming so fast it comes out in solid sheets with no apparent rhythm. This has no musical value to me, but many things I listen to don’t sound like music to a lot more people.

The d-beat band, whose name I’ve forgotten, goes on longer than it should, leaving me shifting my weight from leg to leg to keep my feet from falling asleep. When the set’s finally over, I talk with friends about tonight’s headliners, three bands from Texas. It turns out that the one I wanted to see, the difficult-to-pronounce but promising Deskonocidos, who play lo-fi garage-punk at hardcore speed—and in Spanish!—got turned away at the border because one of them had a criminal record. There are two other Texan bands but I’m not as interested in them. Nathan assures me I’ll like the next group of locals, who are not d-beat, but just angry hardcore.

Then we talk about how unlikely it is that a revolving door of hundreds of strung-out punks have lived in the lofts and apartments of this building for ten years, rebuilding and rewiring it, shooting heroin and snorting PCP, heating apartments with open ovens in the winter, and the place has never caught fire. I lived in my last cheap apartment for a year and it caught fire twice: what kind of justice is that? People have OD’d here, and maybe some have died; one guy got killed out front staggering into traffic after a show, but no one liked him. I gather he was the long-haired Neanderthal with fierce, dead eyes who I once interrupted smoking crack outside a show by trying to give him a flyer for another show. He just stared at me, wordless, with an expression of homicidal rage, until I moved along. I didn’t like him either.

The people that fall into this lifestyle don’t generally come from the wealthy families against whom their detractors accuse them of rebelling. For the most part, the people I’ve known who’ve ended up living like this come from terrible families, many of them reporting physical and/or sexual abuse. (A member of a well-known Montréal punk band has the word “abuse” tattooed on his penis. No one does that for a laugh.) If you want to escape from “normality” so badly that you’re willing to live in filth, with rats and roaches, drunk or strung out, allowing your teeth to give way, it’s probably a sign those representing “normality” did something pretty bad to you from which you’ll do anything to distance yourself. It’s true that the apartments upstairs from the Gates of Hell/Loud House can be nice enough—people can clean them up, paint the walls, pin up show fliers and movie posters, bring in some plants and books to put on shelves made of discarded bricks and wood and it’s home, suddenly—but to make a home amidst the noise and waste and misery nonetheless signals a genuine desire for escape that goes beyond any form of twisted vanity.

It’s a strange kind of escape, though: it casts itself as the ultimate rebellion, the apex of nonconformity, yet necessitates that people know what a punk is and what a punk belongs to. People on the street, agents of normality, see punks and recognize them as “punks,” and punks encourage that by adopting the traditional dress and hair and attitude of punks to make the game easier, because they want to be seen and understood as they understand punks to be. For the most part, they are. No one expects, at the Gates of Hell, to see someone wearing only a bathrobe, or a speedo, or a sweat-sock on their head: that would be formless, unscripted non-conformity that’d indicate madness. The uniformity of this lifestyle says, “Follow these rules so that we can present a united front of nonconformity against the forces of normality,” and it makes a bit of sense, but not really enough, especially given crust punk’s lip service to anarchy.

The second local band, Ilégal, gets started, and Nathan’s right: I like them. They’re short-hairs, which I sheepishly admit makes them easier to like, and they play fast, pissed off hardcore powered by a boyish, blond drummer with a perfectly erect back. Someone tells me that he used to be the drummer for the Finnish band Selfish, who I can’t remember if I saw or not, but that he moved here. I wonder why he’d do that, why he’d leave Scandinavia for this life. Anyway, it’s our gain, because he plays fast and hard, better than most drummers in the city. The band’s sloppy, but I’m into, snapping my body and my head like a whip in time as the crowd gets rougher and crashes into me a bit. There’s more stage-diving and the jumpers get caught and handed around. When the band is good, I don’t care that I’m surrounded by blank-eyed fuckups who could barely talk to me even if they wanted to. Earlier, Renée, a transplant from Newfoundland, cocked her head at the crowd and said, “This is what I always imagined punk shows in Montréal would be like before I moved here.”

“You mean you wanted to hang out with people like this?” I asked.

“I don’t want to hang out with them,” she said. “I mean, I never talk to them, and they don’t talk to me. But the shows are pretty crazy.”

They are, and when the band is good and going I feel impermeable to the filth and hopelessness of this life, or I flirt with it, charmed by nihilism and chaos and letting it win me over for while when I don’t care if I get showered with beer or puke and there’s only that moment of bristling extremity. I’m there again, so charged up with the rage of the music and the unruly energy of the crowd that I could almost float above it all.

But then the band plays too long again, and I lose interest. The sad dreadlocked door guy realizes the spotlights are pointed too close to the plastic sheeting holding back the insulation and he gets irritably nervous about fire. Climbing, cursing, up the amps while the band starts another song, he unplugs one light to leave us in near-darkness, and plugs in a large fan in its place. The breeze is welcome.

The band’s last song is a cover I can’t make out. Introducing it, the guitarist—the same as for the last band—says, “This song is for those fuckin’ pigs at the border, the fuckin’ fascist border cops! Fuck them all!” Someone told me earlier that some of the members of Ilégal were in the country illegally—hence the band name—but this is assumedly also a reference to the people who’d kept the Deskonocidos from coming up because some member had been convicted of driving drunk (an offence I happen to think is brutally at odds with anarchy’s demand of personal responsibility, but whatever).

The crowd knows the number and sings along, fists in the air, as I recognize I’ve had enough, that no matter how tight and angry the last two bands are, they won’t divest me of the feeling of aching futility at which I always arrive here. That uniform, alien hopelessness encircles me again and begins to tighten about me. I look around the room hoping that someone else is feeling it too, but the room is crashing into itself, or hanging back with half-lidded eyes, or talking among itself about nothing. I’m pretty sure I’m alone in whatever this is. When the last song’s over, I take my as-yet-un-puked-on umbrella off the pile of crates in the bedroom/antechamber, squeeze my way through the drunken crowd in the front room, and begin the long walk home in the rain. 

by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin

I loved you once, and this love still, it may be,

Is not extinguished fully in my soul;

But let’s no longer have this love dismay you:

To trouble you is not my wish at all.

I loved you once quite wordlessly, without hope,

Tortured shyness, jealous rage I bore.

I loved you once so gently and sincerely:

God grant another love you thus once more

June 25, 1939

by Arseny Tarkovsky

It’s frightening to die, and such a shame to leave

This captivating riffraff that enchants me,

The stuff so dear to poets, so very lovely,

I never celebrated; it somehow wasn’t to be.

I loved to come back home at the break of dawn

And shift my things around in half an hour.

I loved the white windowsill, and also the flower,

The carved faceted glass, and also the water,

And the heavens, greenish-azure in their color—

And that I was a poet and a wicked man.

And when every June came with my birthday again

I’d idolize that holiday, bustling

With verses by friends and congratulations from women,

With crystal laughter, and gay glasses clinking

And the lock of that hair, unique, individual

And that kiss, so entirely inevitable.

But now at home it’s all set up differently;

It’s June and I no longer have that homesickness.

In this way, life is teaching me patience,

And turbid, my blood now is stirring this birthday,

And a secret anxiety is tormenting me—

What have I done with my great destiny,

Oh my God, what have I done with me!

by Aleksandr Blok

Night, avenue, street lamp, the drug store,

Irrational and dusky light;

Live another decade, two more—

It stays the same; there’s no way out.

You’ll die, then start again, beginning

And everything repeats as planned:

Night, the cold canal’s icy ripple,

The drug store, avenue, and lamp.

Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Last Poem

Note: Vladimir Mayakovsky’s final poem before his suicide. The Oka mentioned is a tributary of the Volga. “Cloved” is an attempt to translate VM’s pun on ischerpen (“exhausted, finished’) with the neologism isperchen, (“peppered up”). 

It’s after one. You’ve likely gone to sleep.

The Milkway streams silver, an Oka through the night.

I don’t hurry, I don’t need to wake you

Or bother you with lightning telegrams.

Like they say, the incident is cloved.

Love’s little boat has crashed on daily life.

We’re even, you and I. No need to account

For mutual sorrows, mutual pains and wrongs.

Look: How quiet the world is.

Night cloaks the sky with the tribute of the stars.

At times like these, you can rise, stand, and speak

To history, eternity, and all creation.

Anna Karenina: #MeToo

Ah, Merezhkovsky: to you I was a mare

ridden badly by a man; and because of him,

his error, I had to be destroyed. And Lev, my dear:

You never gave me my own voice, you didn’t dare.

What did I talk about when I did talk, after all:

Abortion with Dolly? Every damn thing

Vronsky did, that I did better? The problem

was not that I was sexual: (Men, you

count on that.) The problem was that

I was smart. But sexual women must be killed;

All the books attest to that.

Merezhkovsky permeates the consciousness

of Slavic scholars, is the Anna story, still,

but I fault you most, Lev. You knew, soon

that the problem was not one woman

and one man; it was all women, all men. You had

Vronsky climb in society, while I—damn, I even

knew more about horses than him!—I was

the scarlet woman, though our offence was the same.

Did I abandon my child? Or did a martinet

bar me from him? Ah, she holds Vronsky back!

Ah, the guilt!

Oh, there is no talking to you.

You sent me the dream

that haunted your ruling-class sleep,

a peasant with an iron,

the proletariat that said, fuck you

and your landlord’s way of life.

You killed me with the railroad that they built

for you. Because you “had to.”

Where was your Resurrection then?

You repudiated Karenina, it’s true,

but you abandoned me to my fate.

And so, Lev, I still struggle,

a century and a half later,

to have my story told.