The fall of 1974 wasn’t the best time for me, at least at first. The country was in deep recession, and in the past several months I’d been bouncing from one odd job to another: maintenance mechanic, newspaper truck driver, construction crew laborer, upholsterer’s apprentice, you name it. Then I took a job as a bartender in Tuckahoe, New York, in a mansion that had recently been converted into a dinner theater. The huge building had once been the home of Dutch Schultz, the 1930s gangster, and rumors flew among us about possible hidden passageways to ill-gotten loot. I should have been content with this gig, but in my second week I received word that I was a finalist for another job I’d applied for: a department store Santa. Why not? I thought, and went to the interview, where apparently some scrap of potential jolly peeked out of me, and I was offered one of the plum assignments: my own throne in the Saks Fifth Avenue department store in White Plains, New York. With only a little hesitation, I accepted. I was marking time anyway—in January I’d enter midyear into the graduate creative writing program at City College, where I’d eventually study with Frederick Tuten and Donald Barthelme—and I reasoned that I could always find work as a bartender. But how many opportunities would I have to play a Santa? Maybe I could get a story out of it.

Ten years later, in the fall of 1984 and on the eve of the release of my second book, The Art of the Knock: Stories, the editors at the Washington Post Sunday Magazine (who had recently published one of my short stories in their summer fiction issue) contacted me and asked if I had any holiday memories for an essay they might feature in the Christmas issue. Oh, I have a few, I’d replied.

I sat nervously before a mirror in the employees’ dressing room of a large suburban department store: 23 years old and without a wrinkle, I was about to begin my first day as Santa Claus. It was the day after Thanksgiving, the beginning of the holiday shopping season. The week before I had been a mere bartender.

I started to dress by strapping a pillow around my waist with a length of rope which, when knotted, rubbed hard against my back. Then I pulled the baggy red pants up and around the pillow, and I tied the waist cord. Next came the jacket, also bulky. Finally, I fastened the wide black belt around my belly and put on the black boot fronts that fit over my shoes. Already I felt quite warm beneath the thick layers. I remembered when I had first dressed as Santa: in the employment agency I had stood sweating in the suit before the woman who interviewed me. She had cautiously asked me if I had ever flown in a helicopter before. “No,” I had said, somewhat surprised. “Well,” she had then asked, “would you mind flying in one?”

Read more…

“What we know of the face is a thin mask of frail, interconnected muscle fibers attached to a layer of fat and skin. What we recognize as the emotions and beauty of the face depend entirely on this mat of tissues.” The face is a mat of tissues? Not perhaps the best term to use if considering the profile of one’s beloved, but James Elkins, in his book How to Use Your Eyes, is less interested in romance and more in the nomenclature of emotions: “Because we attend so closely to people’s expressions, the face is full of names. Many skin folds have names, and there is a term for every curve in the ear and each turn of the nostrils.”

“It is interesting to encounter some of the names of facial features, because they turn the face into a kind of map,” Elkins says, yet even the illustration above, crowded with terms, is merely a beginning. There are over twenty-five names, for example, for the various parts of the ear, from the antihelix to the tragicus. Even this picture doesn’t do justice to a full mapping of the ear:

An ear is a fairly inexpressive portion of most faces, of course, but the muscles about our lips and eyes, and our cheeks, allow for the revelation of a world of hidden feeling. According to Daniel McNeill, the author of The Face, the nineteenth century French researcher Guillaume Duchenne developed a novel way of searching for these connections. He collected the heads of victims of the guillotine and attached live wires to the faces, to chart the range of expressions. He had to work fast, too, because death blunts the facial muscles after a few hours.

Modern researchers, McNeill points out, have favored less grisly methods of investigation. They simply filmed interviews with psychiatric patients, and toted up the expressions that rise to the surface of a patient’s face. In one five hour session, the patients revealed nearly 6,000 distinct expressions.

Does the English language have names for all of these? I don’t think so. Especially since many if not most of these expressions are subtle combinations of emotions that we do have words for, various stews of sweetness and calculation and worry and determination, all stirred together. Here we enter the territory of “nameless emotions,” as the film editor Walter Murch so eloquently labels this gray area of language.

So many words for the muscles of our faces, so many more that can’t encompass the emotive combinations those muscles produce as they respond to and reflect the even more complex landscape of human thought.

An inner landscape that is subtler still than the expressions it conducts throughout the day. This is perhaps especially true when in moments of great emotion we express ourselves at the rate of 160 words a minute. This observation combined with another, that the mind within a severed head remains conscious for a minute and a half after decapitation, inspired the fiction writer Robert Olen Butler to write his grim and haunting collection Severance, 62 fictions of 240 words that each express the passionate last gasp of the mind.

I remember in my early teens staring as this image from some history textbook of King Louis XVI’s newly severed head being displayed, seemingly regarding the raucous Parisian crowd, and I’d wondered what Louis might have thought of his celebrating former subjects.

According to Butler, the king’s mind looked mostly inward:

thrash and flurry in the undergrowth a bird a boar a stag the rush of wings of legs I lift a Charleville to my shoulder the musket cool to my hands I squeeze the trigger and feel heavily that half heartbeat of silence and then the cry and the kick of her, the night my bed I shudder the trees nearby I am alone at wood’s edge be a man the king my father says but I am not a man and I feel the beast there invisible in the dark—the beast of Gévaudan—he is far from Paris but he steps from the woods before me a wolf as big as a lion a hundred dead in the countryside he has passed by the animals of the field to savage a man or woman or child and he faces me and he lifts his ragged muzzle to the sky and howls liberty to kill, equality of death, fraternity of beasts and I wake and I am still a child my king’s horsemen are off slogging through the marshes of the Auvergne to find him but he is with me and I am king now and I pass the smoking musket to my man who hands me another and I shoot and shoot again and again and the bird falls and the boar and the stag but behind me is the beast and he seizes me by the head

In Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution, based on the short story by Eileen Chang, there comes a scene when Mr. Yi—a Chinese collaborator with the Japanese occupation in Shanghai during World War II—reflects alone on the death of his lover, Jiazhi, a death he himself ordered, when it was revealed that she was a spy who had planned for two years to betray him. At the penultimate moment, however, Jiazhi warned him of danger, which allowed his escape and her capture. In the film’s quiet last moments Yi’s face expresses a range of shifting sorrows.

Tony Leung is an accomplished actor, but he isn’t quite able to get across what the author Eileen Chang reveals of Yi’s thoughts in her original short story, thoughts that are much less romantic than what the movie implies:

“He was not optimistic about the way the war was going, and he had no idea how it would turn out for him. But now that he had enjoyed the love of a beautiful woman, he could die happy—without regret. He could feel her shadow forever near him, comforting him. Even though she had hated him at the end, she had at least felt something. And now he possessed her utterly, primitively—as a hunter does his quarry, a tiger his kill. Alive, her body belonged to him; dead, she was his ghost.”

Our faces have evolved for eons in order to speak for us in addition to our words, but our thoughts turn a more supple interior gaze to a secret mirror of our own making, a hidden face whose features fiction writers, poets, and memoirists all struggle mightily to reveal.

Less than a week after I wrote “The Self Is Not Constant,” my latest post for this website, I came upon a TED talk by Shea Hembrey, a contemporary American artist. It’s perhaps the most extraordinary TED talk I’ve ever watched, and it dovetails nicely with my recent thoughts on the morphing self (and Hembrey will also teach you a trick or two about how to shoot flies with a BB gun).

Shea Hembrey spent some time traveling throughout Europe, attending one art biennial after another, and he found himself largely unmoved by a good bit of the work he encountered at those gatherings. His first idea was to create his own biennial, bring together a grouping of artists he admired. But the daunting logistics of contacting, organizing and presenting the work of a large number of, you might say, used or pre-owned artists, led him to another idea: he’d invent 100 artists, and present the varied work of those artist characters in an imaginary biennial.

And that’s what he did. Working for over two years, he came up with all those artists (106, actually, but six didn’t make the cut by the two curators he also invented) and their art, and the result is Seek, Hembrey’s biennial that is now collected into a hefty catalogue.

The art is amazingly varied: drawings, oil paintings, large installations, environmental art, videos, performance art, sculpture, photography, you name it. Hembrey has “found” a talented international array of artists, all of them born and bred–as he would say–in his head, heart and hands.

Here’s Hembrey at the TED talk introducing the work of an environmental artist who digs holes and then places giant mirrors at the bottom, to reflect the shifting canvas of the sky above (click to enlarge all photos).

And here he presents the work of a performance art duo who like to create “local traditions.” Here they are dancing in a cemetery in Tennessee, encouraging people to establish a ritual of dancing on the space that will one day host their graves.

Here’s the work of a South Korean artist, K. M. Yoon, a sculpture of stone and butterfly wings. “In flutterstone,” the catalogue states, “we are startled at seeing how the wings subtly rustle—a stone not of stasis, yet not going anywhere, just surely pulsing with life.”

And here’s a monumental installation piece by another of Hembrey’s invented artists:

And on and on it goes, one stunning work of art after another, each work created by yet another artist that Hembrey has created. What I’ve shown above is merely a small sliver of the artists Hembrey presents in his TED talk, which in turn only touches on a fraction of the artists that appear in his biennial catalogue. He’s the Fernando Pessoa of contemporary art, and like Pessoa he spins off and embodies the welter of voices within.

Like the poetry of Pessoa’s internal literary salon, Hembrey’s work utterly entrances me. I’m reminded of Stephen Marche’s masterpiece Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, a faux-anthology of the writers of Sanjania, an island in the Atlantic ocean that doesn’t exist; or the multi-voiced novels of David Mitchell that burst with the weaving stories of a panoply of characters, like Ghostwritten and Cloud Atlas. So I was not surprised to hear of Hembrey’s longtime interest in narrative, which he describes in an interview at the Cool Hunting website:

“Coming from the rural South, I grew up with a rich storytelling tradition. And, the quirky, colorful characters that I grew up around made me see the world as a place filled with fascinating individuals. Then as an undergraduate, I was also an English major toying with the idea of becoming a novelist. So, yes, I have always been fascinated by narrative and strong individual characters.”

Don’t most writers, over the course of a career, create their own biennial of characters? I’ve written and published scores of short stories, and each main character within those stories has to come alive inside me, a new separate shard of my various selves given wing, in order for a story to finally begin to breathe its own breath. Writers transform the multiple selves within into works of art, characters who then may pace the stage of a reader’s mind.

Everyone in the world sails along a current of competing voices. Many of us ignore these, or try to shape the ones they’re aware of into the small shoe of a single self. Writers, and artists of all sorts, and really any quiet soul regardless of audience, are the ones who manage to discover those selves and learn how to release them.

When Hembrey is asked, in that same interview, “Does it get confusing being so many people?” he answers, “The sheer number of artists was hard to manage, so I had to focus on just a few people at a time to stay organized and productive. Once I understood an artist and had his or her voice, then they were largely autonomous and then after making their work, I spoke about and thought of them as individuals separate from me.”

Why do we do this, what generating force sets us on this task? Speaking for myself, perhaps, in the aftermath of a childhood drama, for years I’ve been reassembling the broken pieces inside. Or perhaps not. I doubt I’ll ever truly know. Everyone attempts to craft a life path toward what most matters to them, though the reasons why are not so easily discovered.

When I first lived among the Beng people of Côte d’Ivoire with my wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, at first I felt relieved to hear that the language of the Beng did not conjugate verbs. Thank goodness, I thought, what a friendly language—the ever-morphing ways of verbs had been my downfall with both French and Spanish. My relief didn’t last long, though, since Alma and I soon discovered that the Beng conjugate pronouns, not verbs (with a few exceptions—aren’t there always exceptions when it comes to language?).

So a different linguistic challenge confronted me: to adjust to the notion of a past tense I, a present tense I, and a future tense I, and to move with ease through such pronoun transformations in a conversation.

It wasn’t easy—for me, learning another language (and I’ve tried to learn four) is never easy. But the more I thought about it, the idea that a person, not the action, changes profoundly in time began to make more and more sense. Here are two photos that I think aptly illustrate the point, captioned in English and Beng.

He ran/E bé (E: the past tense of he; bé: run)

He will run/O bé (O: the future tense of he; bé: run)

Though running is an action replete with all the physical particularities of any individual moving through space (particularities that no language can completely encompass), I think one might safely assert that the different ages of the two runners above are where the deepest change has occurred. My five-year old self is different from my fifteen-year old self, is different from my thirty-year old self is different from my current (and newly minted) sixty-year old self.

So which “self” am I?

“The self is not constant,” the actress Thandie Newton says, in her recent TED talk, “Embracing Otherness, Embracing Myself.” Ms. Newton’s father is English, her mother Zimbabwean, and she spent a good deal of her early life negotiating a place within the two contrasting halves of her supposedly singular self.

What she eventually found was not one place to reside, but many, as she took on the challenges of inhabiting the characters she portrayed throughout her film career. “No matter how other these selves might be, they’re all related, in me,” she declares.

You bet! The essayist Carl H. Klaus could easily be offering a coda to Newton’s words when, in his marvelously varied collection The Made-Up Self, he observes, “The drama of one’s personality depends, after all, on the dramatis personae one is capable of performing.”

The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa understood dramatis personae. He engaged in a life-long project of giving names, identities and different poetic oeuvres to his many inner voices, turning the contradictory selves most of us gloss over into a literary salon. As Álvaro de Campos, one of Pessoa’s accomplished inner selves, wrote:

I study myself but can’t perceive.
I’m so addicted to feeling that
I lose myself if I’m distracted
From the sensations I feel.

This liquor I drink, the air I breathe,
Belong to the very way I exist:
I’ve never discovered how to resist
These hapless sensations I conceive.

Nor have I ever ascertained
If I really feel what I feel.
Am I what I seem to myself—the same?

Is the I I feel the I that’s real?
Even with feelings I’m a bit of an atheist.
I don’t even know if it’s I who feels.

So why are we inclined to gloss over our multiple selves? Our language tells us to do so. The “self” is a pretty pushy little word, asserting in its seemingly modest but authoritative way that we are defined by a unitary identity, rather than a concatenation of competing facets, each catching and reflecting a different light, other possibilities. For me, the Beng view of identity, as a morphing property expressed through tense changes, is far more insightful than the meager, static definition offered by the English language. Something else the seemingly solid word “self” obscures is its own morphing history, since the Western notion of self has changed, radically so, over time, and Douglas Glover charts this expertly in his essay “Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought.”

Recently, not long after watching the Thandie Newton TED talk, I came upon a rather extraordinary photo series featured in Guernica, “Self Study,” by the Iranian/American artist Natalie N. Abbassi, a series inspired by the dilemma of identity:

“It has always been a struggle for me to explain myself, who I truly am, and how I should or shouldn’t act in culturally diverse situations. Occasionally I feel confused, proud, and even awkward about how to deal with the differences of my two halves. Am I Iranian? Am I American? Should I be Muslim from my father or Jewish from my mother?”

Abbassi approaches this struggle by photographing her two halves as buddies, engaging in daily activities—driving, playing cards, or running—side-by-side yet each maintaining her defining characteristics. Would that we all could look into the imperfect mirror of our inner differences, and clink glasses!

“I Study Myself But Can’t Perceive,” by Fernando Pessoa/Álvaro de Campos, translated by Richard Zenith, from Fernando Pessoa & Co.

Casablanca is widely considered to be one of the best American movies ever made, and certainly it’s one of most enduringly popular films in history. There are a lot of reasons for this, critics will argue—the simple elegance of the plot; the crisp, memorable dialogue; the theme of love, sacrifice and redemption; the perfect casting. No argument from me there! But I would say that what lifts the movie to another realm is this: during the filming, the actors didn’t know how the story would end.

Because neither did the screenwriters. When filming began, the script still wasn’t finished. As Harlan Lebo reports in his book Casablanca: Behind the Scenes, “The crush of deadlines would weigh so heavily that revised material would often reach the Casablanca set mere hours before those scenes were shot.”

This uncertainty created some unusual hurdles for the actors, especially Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. Hollywood Lost and Found tells us that “Ingrid Bergman had no idea who her character would end up with until later in production, so she didn’t know how to portray her emotions in the scenes filmed early on. ‘Play it in between,’ she was told.”

What an excellent opportunity for an actor! Not knowing one’s fate is exactly what everyone on the planet faces each day, with no available script handy to settle one’s narrative arc in advance. Roger Ebert, in his review/essay on the movie, sums up nicely how such ignorance can enrich a performance: “Bergman played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.” I’d never thought of this before, but every actor, before filming starts, knows the beginning, middle and end of his or her character’s story, and part of the challenge in acting, aside from expressing whatever subtleties of personality are available, is having to pretend that one doesn’t know what comes next.

Recently I’ve been happily working my way through The Selected Stories of Merce Rodoreda, and last night this sentence jumped out at me, from “Happiness”: “Movies are lovely because if the ones in love are miserable then you suffer a bit but you think everything will turn out for the best, but when I’m miserable I never know if things will end well.” Indeed. Even with 20/20 vision we remain blind to the future. The indeterminacy of our lives is reflected in the energy of Bergman and Bogart’s performances, and viewers sense this, sense the richness of the narrative blindness the actors are struggling with.

Fiction writers struggle with this same narrative blindness when we begin writing a story or novel. We work our way through darkness with curiosity, hunches and inspiration. The novelist Celia Gittleson, interviewed years ago by Poets & Writers Magazine for the article “Writers on Revision: Is Perfection the Death of Energy?” described her process of writing a novel: “At the end, when I finally know what I’ve been writing about and have discovered all the things wrong with it, I rewrite the whole thing.”

This quote almost always surprises introductory writing students. How can a writer not know where he or she is going? Well, like life, we don’t know where we’re headed, and yet this narrative darkness can be an enriching darkness, if we manage to improvise our way through it. The comedian Steve Carell, in a recent profile in The New Yorker, explains his process of acting, which sounds to me an awful lot like what writers attempt on the page: “I look at improvising as a prolonged game of chess. There’s an opening gambit with your pawn in a complex game I have with one character, and lots of side games with other characters, and another game with myself—and in each game you have to make all these tiny, tiny moves that get you to the endgame.”

I’m currently revising the manuscript of a novel ripe with ghosts, titled Invisible Country. The setting for the book is an afterlife that, though set in America, resembles the afterlife of the Beng people, who I’ve lived among in Ivory Coast for years; in their afterlife ghosts exist as a parallel—and invisible—social community among the living. One of the characters I initially envisioned was a fundamentalist Christian who finds his come-uppance in an afterlife he clearly hadn’t been expecting.

Predictably enough, this particular character went nowhere on the page, perhaps because he had first been imagined so that he could be punished. I needed to develop some empathy for the fellow, but how? Eventually I thought I’d try to imagine the source of his religious belief—perhaps a miraculous experience of some sort? So I thought back to the moments of the uncanny that have come my way, and decided to give him a version of an odd encounter I’d had when a freshman in college.

Late that fall semester, I headed for the music building on campus to study for a test I felt certain I’d fail. The professor was at least a decade past his retirement due date, and his primary remaining area of expertise was traveling back and forth in time within each sentence he spoke. We all sat there in class amazed at the unpredictable temporal roller coaster of his lectures, understanding nothing.

Anyway, as I approached with dread the music building, I noticed an odd little turn in the air of a leaf falling from a nearby tree. Some updraft had stopped its fall and pushed it upward. As it fell again, again it twisted up in the air several feet, and then fell, and then rose.

I stopped, increasingly entranced by this aerobatic display that seemingly defied the laws of gravity. I kept waiting for it to finally, definitively fall, and it kept not doing so. Minutes passed, and the uncanny repetition of this unlikely performance finally unnerved me—I reached out to the leaf, touched it, and it fell to the ground. Then of course I reproached myself for disrupting something like magic.

So I gave a version of this memory to my character, Edward, but still the chapter wouldn’t move further, I still didn’t know him enough, not until I altered the memory to suit him. Edward thinks the twists and turns of the leaf before him are assuming some sort of repeated shape, and soon enough he thinks he sees the face of Jesus in that pattern. It shocks him into the ranks of the devout, yet he worries the memory: did he really see what he thought he saw, and if so, what does it mean, what message must he follow? For the rest of his life he is torn by his indecision, and by this point I found myself on Edward’s side, inspired by his gnawing doubt to be able to imagine more of his life.

Like Bogart and Bergman in Casablanca, it’s better not to know the way at first. When we start to write it’s better to bumble our way forward, our uncertainty its own drama, the energy of which can transfer to our characters’ inner lives and their unpredictable fates. Readers will recognize the richness of possibility and its echo of their—and our own—inability to see much past the present moment.

Whenever a student comes to my office worried about whether he or she could write a “non-realistic” story for one of my classes, I always approvingly quote this passage from Flannery O’Connor’s essay “Writing Short Stories” (included in her classic collection of literary essays, Mystery and Manners):

“Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real—whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy. I mean that we always begin with what is or with what has an eminent possibility of truth about it. Even when one writes a fantasy, reality is the proper basis of it. A thing is fantastic because it is so real, so real that it is fantastic . . . I would even go so far as to say that the person writing a fantasy has to be even more strictly attentive to the concrete detail than someone writing in a naturalistic vein—because the greater the story’s strain on credulity, the more convincing the properties in it have to be.”

This usually reassures my nervous student, and me, too: yes, I approve of stories written outside the genre of realism, but I’ve also made it clear that writing a story dipped in fantastic waters comes with the powerful craft challenge of earning a reader’s acceptance through attention to detail. Problem solved, and I feel as if I’ve earned my keep.

Though recently I’ve begun to wonder if I completely agree with O’Connor’s fantasy/realism equation. Certainly “a thing is fantastic because it is so real” holds for SciFi and Speculative Fiction writers, as this brief example from Neil Stephanson’s novel of a nanotechnological future, The Diamond Age, illustrates:

“Microscopic invaders were more of a threat nowadays. Just to name one example, there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscle-size bodies, known colloquially as cookie-cutters, into the victim’s bloodstream. It took about seven minutes for all the blood in a typical person’s body to recirculate, so after this interval the cookie-cutters would be randomly distributed throughout the victim’s organs and limbs . . .

“Detonation dissolved the bonds holding the centrifuges together, so that each of a thousand or so ballisticules suddenly flew outward . . . The victim then made a loud noise like the crack of a whip, as a few fragments exited his or her flesh and dropped through the sound barrier in air. Startled witnesses would turn just in time to see the victim flushing bright pink.”

I agree, a bit gruesome. Let’s look at a different, more calming example, from one of my favorite novels of recent years, the Czech writer Michal Ajvaz’s The Golden Age. The novel begins as a Gulliver-like account of the unusual culture of a people who live on a small island in the Atlantic Ocean, and then transmutes into an exhilarating, break-neck narrative. This section, from the early pages of the novel, describes the homes of the islanders:

“The houses of the upper town are built on islands of rock among the branching currents. At their rear the houses are attached to the rock. The river splits into two above the roof of a house, and these two arms flow around it before dividing themselves up further . . . the occupiers of many of the houses directed the water across the roof so that as it tumbled over the edge it became a lustrous curtain of water made up of several columns, in which threads of sunlight created the perfect illusion of sparkling beads of coral or a solid wall of water . . .

“When at night I was unable to sleep, I would watch the wall shining magically in the moonlight and listen to the trickling of the water until sleep reclaimed me. Or I would watch the wall from the room as the sun was setting, when it seemed that the wall was composed of a liquid crimson glow . . .

“Some inhabitants of the upper town distributed the water around their house by a system of narrow gutters that trailed across the ceilings; the water would flow over the sides of the gutters, thus creating walls of water inside the house, too. The rooms in such houses would be separated from one another by nothing but these cool, translucent walls. The water would be drained from the house by channels in the floor. These half-transparent walls breathed out an exhilarating coolness even on the hottest nights, but they long made me feel uncomfortable as naturally they granted those who lived within them no privacy; behind the wall to a neighboring room, objects and bodies appeared as deformed and imprecise shapes.”

So, when it comes to the fantastic, I’m on board with O’Connor’s observation that a fantastical world must be fully imagined and realized. Where I part with her is the assertion that “the person writing a fantasy has to be even more strictly attentive to the concrete detail than someone writing in a naturalistic vein.”

Recently I taught at The Vermont College of Fine Arts summer residency, and one of the stories discussed in a workshop I co-taught with Abby Frucht was a perfectly realistic story, by the student Mattieu Cailler, about a teen-age boy who enters an old woman’s home in order to perform a few simple errands while she’s away. He doesn’t really know this woman, has never been inside her home, and his curious attention to the interior details of the rooms, what they say about her, gives us a complex sense of the personality of a character who remains offstage. Yet the boy’s observations at the same time expose a good swath of his inner life—what he chooses to observe reveals his own character, and his attention to any particular significant detail makes it more than its simple self. Here’s a story where concrete detail is of paramount importance, as a tactic of characterization.

I’d say every fiction writer has to maintain utter attention to concrete detail in order to maintain a believable world, realistic or not. But what is “realistic,” anyway? Human beings contain within them multiple versions of what constitutes the world, and different cultures offer competing versions of realism. Every recorded angle of our eyes, every observation, is above all an interpretation.

Here, I think, is where the ‘creative” comes in triumphantly to what some of us like to call Creative Nonfiction. When attention to detail is at the same time wedded to the writer’s interpretation, then the ordinary world we think we know transforms, and becomes, in Flannery O’Connor’s words, ”so real that it is fantastic.” Creative Nonfiction is above all about interpreting what truth we reveal. I can think of few better examples than this following eerie, intense short essay (only three paragraphs long), “Flypaper,” by Robert Musil (a writer better known as the author of the monumental novel The Man Without Qualities):

“Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada. When a fly lands on it—not so eagerly, more out of convention, because so many others are already there—it gets stuck at first by only the outermost joints of all its legs. A very quiet, disconcerting sensation, as though while walking in the dark we were to step on something with our naked soles, nothing more than a soft, warm, unavoidable obstruction, and yet something into which little by little the awesome human essence flows, recognized as a hand that just happens to be lying there, and with five ever more decipherable fingers, holds us tight.

“Here they stand all stiffly erect, like cripples pretending to be normal, or like decrepit old soldiers (and a little bowlegged, the way you stand on a sharp edge). They hold themselves upright, gathering strength and pondering their position. After a few seconds they’ve come to a tactical decision and they begin to do what they can, to buzz and try to lift themselves. They continue this frantic effort until exhaustion makes them stop. Then they take a breather and try again. But the intervals grow even longer. They stand there and I feel how helpless they are. Bewildering vapors rise from below. Their tongue gropes about like a tiny hammer. Their head is brown and hairy, as though made of a coconut, as manlike as an African idol. They twist forward and backward on their firmly fastened little legs, bend at the knees and lean forward like men trying to move a too-heavy load: more tragic than the working man, truer as an athletic expression of the greatest exertion than Lacoön. And then comes the extraordinary moment when the imminent need of a second’s relief wins out over the almighty instincts of self-preservation. It is the moment when the mountain climber because of the pain in his fingers willfully loosens his grip, when the man lost in the snow lays himself down like a child, when the hunted man stops dead with aching lungs. They no longer hold themselves up with all their might, but sink a little, and at that moment appear totally human. Immediately they get stuck somewhere else, higher up on the leg, or behind, or at the tip of a wing.

“When after a little while they’ve overcome the spiritual exhaustion and resume the fight for survival, they’re trapped in an unfavorable position and their movements become unnatural. Then they lie down with outstretched hindlegs, propped up on their elbows, and try to lift themselves. Or else seated on the ground they rear up with outstretched arms like women who attempt in vain to wrest their hands free of a man’s fists. Or they lie on their belly, with head and arms in front of them as though fallen while running, and they only still hold up their face. But the enemy is always passive and wins at just such desperate, muddled moments. A nothing, an it draws them in: so slowly that one can hardly follow, and usually with an abrupt acceleration at the very end, when the last inner breakdown overcomes them. Then, all of a sudden, they let themselves fall, forward on their face, head over heels; or sideways with all legs collapsed; frequently also rolled on their side with their legs rowing to the rear. This is how they lie there. Like crashed planes with one wing reaching out into the air. Or like dead horses. Or with endless gesticulations of despair. Or like sleepers. Sometimes even the next day, one of them wakes up, gropes a while with one leg or flutters a wing. Sometimes such a movement sweeps over the lot, then all of them sink a little deeper into death. And only on the side, near their legsockets, is there some tiny wriggling organ that still lives a long time. It opens and closes, you can’t describe it without a magnifying glass, it looks like a miniscule human eye that ceaselessly opens and shuts.”

What could be more ordinary than meting out death to a household pest? And yet this is also extraordinary, if examined closely. Musil’s careful attention, combined with his analogies to human suffering—cripples pretending to be normal, men trying to carry a too-heavy load, a dangling mountain climber releasing his grip in despair—makes it difficult to observe the dying flies from an emotional distance. Even I, a hater of all flies—that carrion-swilling beast, bane of my existence in Africa, an annoyance everywhere else—can find compassion for these otherwise unrecorded deaths, see their ends as a mirror of fate. The realities writers strive to honor, whether invented, or observed, or remembered, are transformed by the intricacies of interpretation, and so transform the reader.

“Flypaper” reprinted from Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, translated by Peter Wortsman.

In December of 1980, Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon, believing that he had some fashion of personal relationship with his victim. A few months later, in March of 1981, John Hinckely attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, in hopes of impressing his fantasy crush, Jodi Foster. Why would these two young men imagine they were emotionally involved with people they had never met?

John L. Caughey, a cultural anthropologist and American Studies professor, believed that although Chapman and Hinkley had turned to horrific violence, their fantasy lives were in fact not far from the norm of most people’s mental landscapes. Caughey had been conducting research for over a decade in Pakistan, America and Micronesia on the imaginary social worlds that ordinary people construct and maintain throughout the rounds of their daily lives.

He discovered that people often construct mental relationships with characters encountered on television, in the movies, on the sports field, and very often these imaginary relationships include “physical” encounters, involved conversations, and even possible shared futures. He also discovered that people spend a shockingly large amount of time daydreaming, often the majority of the hours we’re awake, and not only about figures in the media. Have you discovered that, while speeding along on a highway, you’re actually ten or fifteen miles from when you were last conscious of driving? You had entered into a zone of the imaginary, perhaps shaping a conversation with a parent, or a child, or a sister, or a spouse, none of whom were present in the car with you. Or perhaps you were attempting to rewrite something you had done in the recent past. Whether we’re driving, walking down a city street, or sitting on a couch in the middle of a party, we often settle into mental spaces where we construct private dramas. Sonic Youth got it right, we are indeed a Daydream Nation.

John L. Caughey summed up the research in his book Imaginary Social Worlds with this eloquent passage: “We do not live only in the objective world of external objects and activities. On the contrary, much of our experience is inner experience. Each day we pass through multiple realities—we phase in and out, back and forth, between the actual world and imaginary realms. We awake in the morning after spending six or seven hours entangled in the phantasmagorical world of dreams. During our early morning routines, we regularly drift off . . . As we dress, our attention wanders, we experience moments from the past, imaginatively engage in scenes of the day ahead, and silently converse to ourselves about these non-present worlds. At breakfast we may sleepily talk to our families but then, picking up the morning newspaper, we are off again, caught up in the political machinations of Washington and the doings of the sports worlds and comic strip characters. Driving to work, we are only partly aware of the familiar route. Much of the time we are ‘away,’ lost in anticipations of the hours or years ahead or in fantasies about how things might otherwise be . . . and so on throughout the day, hour after hour, day after day.”

Reading Caughey’s book was a revelation to me, and it affected my course as a writer, attuning me to the vast internal spaces that occupy us all (there’s no mistake why one of my story collections is titled Interior Design). It’s an ideal subject matter for a fiction writer, where the simple phrase “he thought” opens the gate to the drama of interior worlds. And for the memoirist, one’s inner life is at least as important as that life’s crucial events—the two, in fact, are bound together.

Carol-Lynn Marrazzo, in her brilliant essay “Show and Tell: There’s a Reason It’s Called Storytelling” (from the anthology What If? Exercises for Fiction Writers, edited by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter) discusses how much of modern and contemporary fiction is guided by interior reflection and tension. Taking passages from Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, James Joyce, Amy Hempel and Peter Taylor, she italicizes all the words that express thought. In each case, the majority of the words are in italics.

Taking a cue from one of Marrazzo’s examples, I’ll cut out instead of italicizing the words of inner drama. Here’s what a crucial scene from the end of the short story “The Dead,” by James Joyce now looks like:

“He is dead,” she said at length. “He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”
“What was he?” asked Gabriel,
“He was in the gasworks,” she said.

He turned his back more to the light

His voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent.

Two thirds of the scene has vanished, and along with it much of the drama of Gabriel’s shock at his wife’s hitherto unknown past, leading him to a humiliating assessment of his personality and actions. Gabriel’s epiphany simply isn’t possible without access to his interior. Young writers are often urged to “show, don’t tell,” but this is often mistaken, I think, as a call to concentrate on exterior action and details. Yet effective revelation of inner drama is a form of showing as well, and as Caughey’s research more than suggests, it’s a large subject indeed.

Two excellent examples of this in contemporary writing are Keith Lee Morris’s short story “Camel Light,” (from his most recent collection Call It What You Want), and Janet Burroway’s essay “Embalming Mom” (from her essay collection of the same name).

In Morris’s story, Rick Stueben is relaxing in the kitchen, idly looking through the newspaper, while his wife is off at a beadworking class and the two children are about their business elsewhere. As he contemplates what to do with this gift of free time on a weekend, he catches sight of a cigarette on the tiled floor beside the dishwasher. He picks it up, examines it. As far as he knows, his children don’t smoke, and he and his wife gave up the habit years ago. So where did this come from? Rick works through all the possibilities in his mind, and before long he suspects it belongs to one of his wife’s favorite clients in her psychology practice.

Before long he’s wondering if his wife is having an affair, and he thinks of all the possible times assignations might have taken place, imagines divorce, separation from his kids, the loss of his house. His wife “was setting herself free. And now that she had broken him, now that he had been broken, none of the things he had broken himself for would be there to sustain him, and his old, pre-broken self was gone, faded to a point of light he could find only in memory.” By the end of this marvelous short story–which entirely takes place at the kitchen table–Rick is on the verge of tears, and then the sound of his wife’s car, returning up the driveway, wakes him from the tale he’s been spinning.

In Janet Burroway’s essay “Embalming Mom,” Burroway tries to confront her mother, tries to finally come to terms with their strained relationship. This is a fraught conversation many of us have attempted in our lives, a clearing of the family air, yet soon Burroway alerts us to the fact that she is wearing an amber tweed trouser suit that was “stolen out of a parked station wagon in New York in 1972, but it is apparently important that I should be wearing it now, partly because it was such a bargain and partly because I designed and made it myself. I feel good in it: cordial, cool.”

Now the reader understands that this conversation is taking place in the author’s head, and she has mentally dressed herself for success in this important encounter. This long-lost suit might give her the confidence she needs to finally get through to her mother. Soon we realize that Burroway’s mother is no longer alive, and the stage of the drama shifts again. Whatever is accomplished in this imaginary conversation will not affect her relationship with her mother—that time has passed. But it will, perhaps, help her understand her mother better, she can perhaps create in her now-lost mother the ability to understand her daughter. The effort doesn’t go well. Burroway’s mother was too complex, their relationship was too complex to be easily reshaped or satisfyingly smoothed. The embalmers at the funeral home had a simpler job, and as Burroway observes, “I don’t know how they do this, but everyone says it is an art. Everybody says they have done a splendid job. They have caught her exactly, everybody says.”

Perhaps this is why writers of all sorts and everyone else imagine so frequently throughout the day, because the task before us is so immense, of pushing and pulling our desires and fears in different directions and shapes, of taking on the unpredictable morphing world before us and holding it fast, or letting it loose even further.

Photo credit: Donal McCann, in The Dead, directed by John Huston.

Recently one of my students confessed to the class that in a long-ago creative writing workshop she had once been humiliated when her instructor had chalked on the board the structure of her short story, which was found inadequate beside a comparative chalked version of the Freytag Triangle. For those unfamiliar with The Triangle, here is its basic pattern:

The chart above was originally conceived of by Gustav Freytag, appearing in a critical analysis of Greek drama he published in 1863. Since that time, The Triangle has become something of a standard in introductory creative writing texts and courses. It’s certainly easy to grasp: a narrative begins with a little expositional soft shoe, moves quickly to a rising action of tension until a dramatic climax erupts, followed by a falling action of that dramatic moment’s consequences, and finally ends with the story equivalent of sweeping out the theater after a show—the denouement.

Elegant? Yes. Instructive? Up to a point. Constricting? Absolutely.

Perhaps the best antidote to Mr. Freytag’s training wheels triangle is a novel (one of the first in English) written in 1759, by Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy. The novel revels in digressions and side trips, seemingly distracted by every bright shiny thing along its circuitous narrative march. Tristram’s birth, for example, doesn’t occur until the novel’s third volume.

Eventually, even Tristram notes the odd course his tale has been taking, as he offers illustrations of the narrative paths of the first five volumes, each example an inelegant and hilarious stringy thing, and each one looking as different from the others as could be (click to enlarge):

Well, isn’t this as it should be, narrative structures like snowflakes? And best of all, I love how, with true Shandian irony, Laurence Sterne inadvertently manages to demolish a narrative theory one hundred years before it had even been thought up.

Forget Freytag, you beginning writers out there, and instead listen to the novelist and short story writer Robert Boswell who, in an excellent interview that has recently been posted on the Fiction Writers Review website, says,

“The main thing is this: I don’t want to repeat myself. I’m trying to be a literary artist. And, really, who knows what that means? But I’m pretty sure that it means at least this: you don’t settle for anything but the very best you’re capable of doing. For me, that means pushing my narratives to be different, insisting that I try something new, working to explore familiar territories in new ways and to invent new forms each time I sit down to write.”

Boswell’s remarks remind me of a marvelous video devised by two Swiss conceptual artists, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, called The Way Things Go. I once played this video for one of my graduate-level writing workshops, offering the opinion that it contains a wealth of narrative strategies that anyone might care to study. Fischli and Weiss manage, in a huge warehouse space, to construct an odd, elaborate structure made of everyday objects that, once set in motion, takes nearly a half hour to unwind, as principles of physics and chemistry create relentless forward motion. Here’s a clip of the first minute and a half:

Notice how the narrative begins, with that ominous black plastic bag bulging with who knows what sorts of secrets, building tension as it turns and turns in the air, slowly lowering, until finally it nudges a tire forward. The tire encounters an obstacle, halts, sets in motion a fulcrum that seems at first to be a reverse motion, but then that reversal pushes the tire forward again (such hesitancy on the part of that tire! Worthy, perhaps, of Hamlet’s hemming and hawing), rolling until it releases a stepladder down a soft incline.

This awkward ladder contraption in turn causes first a table and then an air mattress to fall, which drops a weighted ball from the top of a metal pole, and the attached ball slowly circles in the air, widening its path until it hits a wooden stick, which releases another black plastic bag, bulging with who knows what sorts of additional secrets, building tension as it turns and turns in the air, slowly lowering to another waiting tire, a tire that I guarantee will set in motion a whole new set of narrative strategies.

What an elegant mirroring structure can be found in those first 80 seconds! The opening tension of the first twisting black bag echoed by its twin at the end of the sequence, and in between, how the pacing varies–from slow and anticipatory to sudden and violent, punctuated by hesitations and temporary reversals.

And don’t forget the thematic repetitions, how various are those tires—car tires, an inner tube, a truck tire—and how they not only serve as agents of forward motion, but also at times as a pedestal, barrier, or weight.

If you enjoyed this clip, be sure to watch online the entire video. As the narrative strategies progress, some things will catch on fire, some explode, others will slowly wind their way to their fates. There will be another version of that weighted ball, though this one will be on fire, like some flaming comet of your nightmares. You will also encounter ghostly shoes,

a knife-wielding, acid dispensing potato, ominous chemical clouds and a glue trap, among other ingenious surprises, as well as a brief, post-apocalyptic landscape.

And through it all, a lesson repeats itself that perhaps informs characterization as much as narrative shape: that anyone’s carefully balanced equilibrium can be set awry, and what is set awry can create its own surprising pattern.

A triangle can be a wonderful thing, but geometry offers a multitude of different shapes and angles. And stories do too. Even more so, because each story, novel or essay awaits the birth of its form, as the writer slowly hammers out its construction through the process of composition and revision. Fiction writer Diane Lefer gets the last word here and gets it right when she compares writers liberated from the strictures of traditional literary form to jazz musicians, in her classic craft essay, “Breaking the Rules of Story Structure”:

“A jazz musician may seem to go all over the place in a musical improvisation, but there’s always an underlying structure to refer to and return to. The sense of liberating spontaneity is exhilarating when paired with technical proficiency and control.”

In two recent posts, “What’s Structure Got to Do With It?” and “The Life We Learn to Lead as Writers,” I took a look at the various ins and outs of how writers structure their work. In this post, I’d like to consider the idea of anti-structure, or at least to think about what might be the cunning use of the absence of structure, as I see it, in the work of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.

If you don’t know the work of Pessoa (oh but you should, you should), here’s a little capsule description. Pessoa lived most of his life in the first half of the 20th century (he died at the age of 47 in 1935), and he was a poet who didn’t write poems as much as he created poets, who then wrote poems. Basically, Pessoa invented his own internal literary salon, consisting mainly of poetic voices that he dubbed heteronyms: more than pseudonyms but less than actual people. He gave them not only names—Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Bernardo Soares were his primary creations—but also biographies, astrological charts, personalities and physical features, even individual signatures.

Since his death, Pessoa’s reputation has increasingly grown throughout the world, to the point where he’s recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. The Portuguese adore Pessoa, and not only does his legacy pervade most discussions of literature in Portugal, but to the general public at large this modestly dressed, be-speckled poet is something of a rock star. Anywhere in Lisbon you can exchange euros for Fernando Pessoa tee shirts, coffee cups, notebooks and key chains, even Do Not Disturb signs—you name it. The first evening I ever spent in Lisbon, back in June of 1999, turned out to be the birthday of Pessoa (he would have been 111), and my family and I made our way to a grand celebration of the event: 400 Portuguese artists had been commissioned to each create a work of art about Pessoa, and these were displayed together on a long wall.

Not only did Pessoa’s invented poets have separate biographies and signatures, they each wrote an entirely different sort of poetry from the others. Alberto Caeiro, who imagined himself a sheep herder, was a poet of nature and a philosopher who distrusted abstraction in language:

“A row of trees in the distance, toward the slope . . .
But what is a row of trees? There are just trees.
‘Row’ and the plural ‘trees’ are names, not things.

Unhappy human beings, who put everything in order,
Draw lines from thing to thing,
Place labels with names on absolutely real trees,
And plot parallel lines of latitude and longitude
On the innocent earth itself, which is so much greener and full of flowers!”

Álvaro de Campos, an engineer by training, was a wilder, more loquacious poet:

“I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t want to be something.
But I have in me all the dreams of the world.

Windows in my room,
The room of one of the world’s millions nobody knows
(And if they knew me, what would they know?),
You open onto the mystery of a street continually crossed by people,
A street inaccessible to any and every thought,
Real, impossibly real, certain, unknowingly certain
With the mystery of things beneath stones and beings,
With death making the walls damp and the hair of men white,
With destiny driving the wagon of everything down the road of nothing.”

Ricardo Reis was a poet obsessed with fate and love and strict poetic forms, while Bernardo Soares was a prose poet who combined metaphysical musings with close descriptions of everyday city life. Yet all of them, in one way or another, wrote about the multiplicity of selves that inhabit every human being. Here’s Ricardo Reis’s take on the subject:

“Countless lives inhabit us.
I don’t know, when I think or feel,
Who it is that thinks or feels.
I am merely the place
Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.
There are more I’s than I myself.
I exist, nevertheless,
Indifferent to them all.
I silence them: I speak.

The crossing urges of what
I feel or do not feel
Struggle in who I am, but I
Ignore them. They dictate nothing
To the I I know: I write.”

Most of the poems written in Pessoa’s name or in the names of his many heteronyms were not published in his lifetime. After his death, his friends and literary executors opened a trunk in his study and discovered thousands of pages of works of every sort: poems, of course, and prose poems, essays, translations, short stories, plays. Most of what we know of Pessoa’s literary life and imagination comes from that trunk, and literary editors have been mining it for over half a century, collating the work into genre, category, and attribution—Pessoa used scores of alternate names besides the main four I’ve already mentioned. And collections of Pessoa’s poetry are usually broken down into different sections, the poetry of Caeiro kept together, separate from the poems of Reis, and so forth. One of the most popular collections of Pessoa’s poetry translated into English is Richard Zenith’s aptly titled Fernando Pessoa and Co.

Perhaps Pessoa’s greatest sustained individual work is The Book of Disquiet, by Bernardo Soares, a kind of memoir of the interior, written as prose poems and filled with gems such as this:

“I never sleep. I live and I dream; or rather, I dream in life and in my sleep, which is also life. There’s no break in my consciousness: I’m aware of what’s around me if I haven’t fallen asleep yet or if I sleep fitfully, and I start dreaming as soon as I’m really asleep. And so I’m a perpetual unfolding of images, connected or disconnected but always pretending to be external, situated among people in the daylight, if I’m awake, or among phantoms in the non-light that illuminates dreams, if I’m asleep. I honestly don’t know how to distinguish one state from the other, and it may be that I’m actually dreaming when I’m awake and that I wake up when I fall asleep.”

The problem is that none of the scraps of paper in Pessoa’s trunk that were eventually collected into The Book of Disquiet were numbered. Which means that every ordered compilation of Soares’ prose poems is a guess, and there are an infinite number of ways The Book of Disquiet can be structured. You could say that Pessoa, before Borges, created a version of the infinite library Borges dreamed of.

Pessoa himself had written a number of contradictory ideas about how to structure The Book of Disquiet (which he never did in his lifetime). Perhaps the most telling description, in a letter to his friend Armando Cortes-Rodrigues, is “it’s all fragments, fragments, fragments.”

I’d say that all the various collections of Fernando Pessoa’s work, while initially exhilarating in charting the various borders of his various selves, ultimately appear to perhaps too easily pin down the fluid possibilities Pessoa remained faithful to all his life. Much of his work was written piecemeal over thirty years: each new poem, essay, or prose poem rose out of the crowd of voices inside Pessoa, waiting to be heard, and then placed in a trunk. Sometimes I think that Fernando Pessoa’s greatest achievement was not his work as eventually posthumously archived, organized, and structured. Perhaps his greatest achievement was simply the raw material that was discovered in his trunk.

This multiplicity of voices and different identities, the messy accumulation of competing versions of the self jostling each other in that hidden, disorganized mix announce, by their very disorganization, their lack of structure, that This is what a human mind is like without the lines of latitude and longitude. As if Pessoa’s life’s work, hidden in that trunk like thoughts in a skull, was meant to make the point that we are all, inside, a “perpetual unfolding of images, connected or disconnected . . . “

Excerpt from “The Keeper of Sheep,” by Alberto Caeiro translated by Richard Zenith, in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe.

Excerpt from “The Tobacco Shop,” by Álvaro de Campos, translated by Richard Zenith, in Fernando Pessoa & Co.

“Countless Lives inhabit Us,” by Ricardo Reis, translated by Richard Zenith, in Fernando Pessoa & Co.

Excerpt from section 342 of The Book of Disquiet, by Bernardo Soares, translated by Richard Zenith.

Photos of Pessoa artwork and heteronym signatures: Philip Graham

In the work of art above by Roberta Frandino (click to enlarge), three of Pessoa’s heteronyms, Reis, Caeiro and de Campos, stand behind the open trunk filled with his manuscripts. The papers flow out, transforming into the distinctive square cobblestones of Lisbon’s streets, which Pessoa himself is walking upon . . .

Back in 1979-1980, then in 1985 and 1993, my wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, and I lived in small, remote villages of the Beng people of the Ivory Coast. In recent days Alma and I have found it difficult to watch the tragic news coming from the country: videos of military strikes and violence in Abidjan, the country’s largest city, and photos of dead bodies strewn across streets we’d once walked.

All this has seemed like the horrific endgame of a lovely country’s slow, 30-year long downward spiral of corruption, economic and political crisis and civil war, and I’m reminded of this quote from the Ivorian writer Amadou Kourouma’s novel The Suns of Independence (a classic of West African literature): “God made this life like a cloth of many colored strips: one strip the color of happiness and joy, one strip the color of poverty and illness, one strip the color of insult and dishonor.”

The country’s recent troubles were spurred in large part by ethnic demonizing and exclusion; this is a terrible irony considering the great strength of Ivory Coast’s ethnic and cultural diversity. A recent film and music project, Abidja’Taam, le goût d’Abidjan, celebrates that diversity.

The CD is a collection of slow, soulful songs from a wide range of Ivorian musicians, a 45-minute gentle rebuke to the country’s recent madness. Listening to this beautiful music, I can imagine that once again Ivory Coast will find itself settled on the strip of cloth that’s the color of happiness and joy. Here is a video from the project, the song “Don,” sung by Tiken Jah Fakoly.