Author: Post Road

Chan Marshall, Author of “Visions of Johanna”

by Rick Moody

1. My pretexts for the following are: Bob Dylan, The Bootleg Series Vol. IV: Bob Dylan Live 1966, known informally as the Royal Albert Hall gig.
2. Cat Power, Cat Power Sings Bob Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert.
3. Both titles are unwieldy! As though history and context, the secret and slippery ingredients of each release, are indicated by the sheer density of language.
4. And my other pretext: “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges, first published in 1939, in the dark days before the last world war.
5. Throughout these notes, remember: the theory of appropriation in the modern and especially postmodern or conceptually driven context of contemporary art. Sherrie Levine’s After Walker Evans series of photographs, which rephotograph the images of Evans (from out of a catalogue of the same), “exactly” reproducing them.
6. Or: the borrowed Marlboro images of Richard Prince’s work, or the borrowed text of The Catcher in the Rye of Richard Prince’s work of the same name, or the borrowed Instagram images of Richard Prince, etc.
7. It bears mentioning that some work of appropriation has been committed by the artist Bob Dylan himself, for example in his paintings, which closely adhere to the composition of other artists’ photographs, retaining all the elements of the original—see, e.g., “Bob Dylan Accused of Painting Plagiarism,” by Matthew Perpetua, Rolling Stone, September 28, 2011, etc.
8. These charges of pastiche and mulching and collating orbit around Dylan’s memoir as well. See, e.g., Scott Warmuth’s elaborate notation of “intertextualities” in Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One,which include unfootnoted borrowings from sources both sacred and profane, including passages from Kerouac, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and a travel guide to New Orleans. These unquoted quotations run, it is said, into the hundreds of instances.
9. Others have also noted the substantial similarities between Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech and a SparkNotes discussion of Melville’s Moby Dick.
10. (If he were writing the speech today, he would probably just use AI.)
11. Two of Dylan’s best albums from his wilderness period of the early nineties are uniformly fashioned from covers, viz., other people’s songs, and in some cases, Dylan borrowed particular arrangements without entirely crediting the original, as in the controversy surrounding “Canadee-I-O” on the Good as I Been to You album, which is very strongly associated with British fingerpicker and preservationist extraordinaire Nic Jones.
12. Nic Jones’s version of the song is a truly powerful and deeply moving thing, a milestone of the early British folk period.
13. Nic Jones’s version is additionally poignant because: after Jones’s car accident of 1982, he had injuries significant enough that he could no longer play the guitar professionally. And this was one of the extraordinary players of the era, up there with Nick Drake and Davey Graham and Bert Jansch. (Circa 2015, he did occasionally sing in public while his son played the guitar in accompaniment, but he has since retired from that work too.)
14. There was, back when Good as I Been to You came out, considerable discussion about whether Dylan’s recording of “Canadee-I-O” was so reliant on Jones’s arrangement that royalties might be just and fair, especially in light of Jones’s condition.
15. The most recent editions of Good as I Been to You do credit Jones, indicating that the discussion produced results.
16. (The appropriation discussion almost always seems to find its most passionate debates when it closes in on: who got paid.)
17. Of course, Dylan’s early songs were also famously reliant on preexisting folk melodies, which, for publishing purposes, like A. P. Carter before him, Dylan claimed as his own. The cases of this are numerous, but one obvious example is:
18. “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” which tracks very close to the melody of folk standard “Pretty Polly.” (See, e.g., the Dock Boggs recording thereof.) Thereby transforming a murder ballad about sexual exploitation and violence against women into a murder ballad about economic privation and rural isolation. While the melody does exactly the same work.
19. There are other examples, in the work of Bob Dylan, in abundance, and he has even commented on it: “That’s songwriting.” (I can’t find the source for this quotation anywhere, which may mean it is a vision I had, or it may mean that I have appropriated it without citation, for which, forgive me.)
20. Therefore, my argument is thus: if the Chan Marshall recording of the Dylan Royal Albert Hall concert, which was not originally performed in the Royal Albert Hall, is a reperformance, and thus a de facto appropriation, then one thing it reperforms and appropriates is the tendency to appropriate on the part of the original performer.
21. I am not now nor have ever been a member of any religious cult that takes as its constitutive principle the works of songwriter Bob Dylan, nor do I engage with the work of Bob Dylan as though this work is hermeneutically encoded, nor do I believe that it otherwise conceals in superabundance the wisdom of the ages, nor do I believe Bob Dylan is touched by God any more than you are, nor do I believe that he has special access to God or to God’s intermediaries, nor do I think he knows something special about love.
22. He’s just an occasionally incredible songwriter.
23. I own certain Dylan bootlegs but was a child at the time of Great White Wonder, and likewise at the time of the original Royal Albert Hall recording and its early bootlegs.
24. Like many, I incline toward the view that bootleg recordings by Bob Dylan are often superior to “official” releases, though the differences between the two may now be insubstantial.
25. In public, on one occasion, I advanced the theory that Blood on the Tracks was the single best record ever made. That occasion predated the release of More Blood, More Tracks,which catalogues the New York sessions that Dylan later re-recorded for the finished album. I do think that More Blood is in some ways better (see, e.g., the acoustic version of “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”—it’s really so much better).
26. My criterion for preferring the original New York recordings is: vulnerability.
27. And the sound of Dylan’s cuff links, or, perhaps, the buttons of his sleeve, on the side of his acoustic guitar.
28. I learned about the 1966 not–Royal Albert Hall gig in earnest when it was released on compact disc in 1998.
29. Say what you will about the compact disc! Arguably, the obscene profit margin on these plastic objects incentivized a great wave of archival releases, which in turn had a significant impact on popular music—for example, the 1997 CD release of the Anthology of American Folk Music and the subsequent release, soon after, of many volumes of The Alan Lomax collection, etc.
30. The Bootleg Series Vol. IV by Bob Dylan, featuring the not–Albert Hall recordings, was such a release, a release of significant impact. (The guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn is among others who have spoken of the revelation of this particular album for those who didn’t already know about the gig.)
31. Cat Power, which is the band name used to denote recordings made by Chan Marshall, was, at about this same time (the later ’90s), emerging from a period of early independent obscurity, which is to say that the Dylan “official bootleg” was released the same year as Moon Pix, the first mature, fully realized work by Cat Power.
32. Moon Pix is a bit of an indie rock masterpiece.
33. The following release by Cat Power, The Covers Record, appeared two years later, and this includes two tracks originally recorded by Bob Dylan. The Covers Record replaces some of the indie rock psychedelic drone of Moon Pix with vulnerable and idiosyncratic solo performances of a variety of relatively canonical tunes.
34. The most electrifying recording on that album, The Covers Record, a spooky and memorable thing, is the recording of “I Found a Reason” by the Velvet Underground.
35. What does vulnerability mean?
36. It means humanness.
37. What does humanness mean?
38. It means poignancy and openness and wisdom and bearing witness and seeing things as they are, not as you wish them to be.
39. It means thrownness.
40. There are many such things on The Covers Record—for example, “Naked, If I Want To” by Moby Grape. Also electrifying. (Written by Jerry Miller, but Marshall’s recording nonetheless also has about it a perfume of Skip Spence, the troubled member of Moby Grape, whose Oar, his only solo album, was also a memorable CD re-release circa 1999.)
41. The Bootleg Series Vol. IV by Bob Dylan is a very striking collection of songs.
42. It seems to be recorded by a songwriter who has no real limitations, who can incline in whichever direction he likes, who can spellbind at his quietest, and at his loudest, and for whom performative confidence is no issue.
43. He knows how good he is.
44. And he is very good.
45. Those songs are, well, just about as good as any songs anyone had written to that point. They are immensely powerful, and recalcitrant, irritable, outraged, vulnerable, and moving, and shrouded in some fairy dust of the obscure, in a way that causes one to wish to unlock them.
46. They are anticonfessional in a way. Both vulnerable and impregnable. Sung with studied melancholy and also a certain ferocity.
47. I should make clear an unpopular opinion here and say that I don’t really find the electric set on Vol. IV very compelling.
48. Is it the recording?
49. Did he have a monitor for his vocals? The general supposition would be that there were not wedges onstage till the late sixties (the Buffalo Springfield and the Grateful Dead were early supporters), and thus the performers in the early and midsixties didn’t often use them (monitors) and thus they sometimes could not hear themselves onstage.
50. Is it possible that Bob Dylan and the Band could not hear themselves?
51. Perhaps there was also crowd noise, legendary crowd noise, the supposed booing, the outrage of British folk enthusiasts, who weren’t bothered by an electric public address system or a microphone during the acoustic set, but for whom some amplifiers in the second set caused feelings of betrayal.
52. Betrayal!
53. Judas!
54. Or was that just one uptight guy who really felt like the music had to come from the dust bowl or from the Mississippi Delta and had to be played by the rural poor and had to render their discontent, preferably African American discontent, had to oppose certain geopolitical adventures, had to stake out a position against Cold War oppressions, had to sympathize a little bit with large-scale redistribution of wealth, had to look the other way on some Stalin-era famines, had to think the Cultural Revolution looked shiny, new, and pretty legitimate, had to redress social injustice, had to be on the right side of a generational divide, had to hate Lyndon Johnson, and so on?
55. Wasn’t he, this one guy, this one audience member, a guy everyone moved a couple of seats away from at the pub?
56. Anyway, it should be, of course, the legitimate right of Robert Zimmerman that he should play the electric guitar, that he should add a chorus to the song, and some drums, that he should change and grow in any way he sees fit, play the bouzouki, play songs that Tony Bennett sang better. So the feeling-betrayed guy in the audience, the guy booing or shouting Judas!, is the equivalent of the Twitter or Instagram troll who is mad Billie Eilish isn’t wearing baggy pants this year. Just another sadist itching to pounce, for whom the pouncing is nearly carnal.
57. However, all of this doesn’t mean the electric set is good.
58. It’s not.
59. It’s invulnerable, somewhat angry, a bit distant.
60. Except for “Like a Rolling Stone,” of which more below. By then they knew they were about to leave the stage.
61. The acoustic set, in contrast, is luminous, spooky, indelible, obscure, magnificent, hushed, urgent.
62. The two unassailable gems on the album, or so it seemed to me in 1998, were “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna.”
63. The original studio recording of “Johanna,” from that year’s album Blonde on Blonde, features a band, and in doing so, it puts an extra layer of varnish between you and the words. That boring, tinny drum kit, on the studio recording, doesn’t add very much.
64. I knew the song in 1998, but it was as though I had never heard it till then, until Vol. IV. Sometimes it takes decades to get a Bob Dylan lyric. So it was in this case. In 1998, I suddenly understood about “Visions of Johanna.”
65. (Here’s a related case: I always disliked the endless, slack digressions of “Highlands,” from Time Out of Mind, until I heard “Murder Most Foul” in 2020. Now I think “Highlands” is mordant and sharp in a nice way.)
66. That said, despite the clarity of purpose on Vol. IV, I do think that, in some interesting way, “Johanna” is abstract. It will not tell you directly what it has to say. It is veiled to the seventh degree. This has been much discussed, and I will not unravel what wants to stay knotted.
67. Except to say:
68. Yes, the song seems to be “about” two women, Louise and Johanna, and one is there in the room, is fleshy, and real, with a lover entwined.
69. The other woman is fogging the mind of the narrator, perhaps in memory, but if in memory, why is “visions” the right word? Why not “Memories of Johanna”? Harder to sing?
70. The envisioning here is not mnemonic but spiritual/ecstatic.
71. “Johanna” scans like “Jehovah,” which is another way of saying “Yahweh,” which is a name that should not be named, because the way that can be named is not the true name, and thus Johanna, a woman’s name, stands in perhaps for a spiritual/ecstatic name that cannot be named, because, once named, the vision crashes to earth and becomes actual.
72. Two women.
73. So: womanhood is under scrutiny, and that is a thing that “Visions of Johanna” indicates, an intensity of feminine power, feminine iteration, by naming the power of being and grace, the source of creative power Johanna.
74. Look, everybody knows Bob Dylan occupies all the cultural positions with respect to the feminine, and everybody knows that Bob Dylan is sometimes confused about the woman, the woman in his songs, and we might point to a song like “Idiot Wind,” which features the irredeemable line: “You’re an idiot, babe/it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe,” which Dylan nonetheless attempts to redeem in the end by converting it to the first person plural: “We’re idiots, babe . . .”
75. As distinct from “Oh, Sister” or “Sara,” both from Desire,both of which try harder to understand.
76. The redemptive image of the woman as victim of history in the West appears in the Dylan songbook (“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” let’s say), yes, but we also know the line of images that depict the woman Dylan is impure, and that the language is occasionally ambiguous, or even retributive, that a feeling of being misunderstood is there too.
77. It’s all right out there, in the Dylan concert from 1966, in the opening song “She Belongs to Me” and in “Just Like a Woman” further in, in the acoustic set, and then of course in the concluding number, one of the few successes of the electric set, the screed-like “Like a Rolling Stone,” certainly one of the greatest songs ever written, and one of the fiercest put-downs ever. And what did she do to merit that song exactly? Did she simply fail to require him?
78. All of these images of the woman pass through the 1966 concert, but “Visions of Johanna” is of a different cast. Different in ambition, different in execution.
79. How urgent is a rendering of the feminine in this time, the time that these lines are written, a time when contested discussions of gender create an anxiety of representations, especially, perhaps, an anxiety of the feminine, an inability to understand “woman” as a lexical unit, as a signifier. An enormous number of people, a majority of people, are walking around today being woman or presenting as woman, with feelings thereof, longings pertinent thereto, and yet how infrequently (still) are they anxious about discussing/representing, about the word woman. Above all, now, there is the anxiety, which is a thing of categorical instability.
80. I can well understand if you don’t trust Bob Dylan to be a portraitist of the feminine; I can well understand if he is perhaps ruled out, but my contention for the purpose of this essay is: you very much should consider trusting Chan Marshall.
81. “Visions of Johanna” addresses this “feminine” exactly.
82. And, to speak of the feminine, let’s speak about the “visions” of the “Visions of Johanna.”
83. In particular, let us speak to the words “visions of Johanna” when sung (embodied)(interpreted) by a woman (and I use this word woman because Marshall has used this word to describe herself (see postscriptus no. 1, below).
84. First, a particular ambiguity adheres, in this song, in this lyric, to the preposition “of.”
85. In one configuration of the phrase “Visions of Johanna” the lyric is depicting Johanna. This Johanna is object of the lyric. This Johanna is perhaps imago Johanna, male-gaze Johanna, a glimmering-of-romance Johanna, but with a bit of icon Johanna included, a Johanna who has about her a bit of immemorial femininity, a consoling image of the feminine for a masculine subject in some crisis, let’s say, or for whom desire exceeds the earthy and sensual desire vessel known in the song as Louise.
86. This is the triangular Johanna, triangular-vertex Johanna, the one who perhaps demonstrates and/or participates in a tradition of woman reifying heterosexuality, though that is not a component of necessity, but not reifying it in the way Louise, not an eros of the feminine, but an agape of the feminine.
87. And yet: the “of” in the title might be possessive, indicating possession or belonging, so that the visions of Johanna are a feature belonging to Johanna, they are hers, and they are her narrative deployment system, one that runs parallel, nonidentically, to a conventional reality-testing narrative of the routine. This is perhaps the Chan Marshall interpretation of the song, an experiential one.
88. I have no wish to diagnose or pathologize these visions.“Ain’t it just like the night/To play tricks when we’re trying to be so quiet.”
89. Visions are what the night does.
90. Visions are what call “mind” into question, that call forth the ghosts of electricity, that can in fact replace the narrator, take his/her/their place, rendering subjectivity or subjecthood inert or perhaps small-minded, they are what salvation feels like, they cause Johanna both to be there and not there, a shimmering of being and nonbeing.
91. Like in Heidegger’s celebrated translation of Heraclitus: disclosure loves to hide.
92. Visions, let’s say, are calibrated rhetorically on a larger scale, are what is taking place in the testaments of the prophets; visions animate the Book of Revelations, in the manifold refractions that postdate it; visions are the engine of the Qur’an; visions are, for our purposes, the ancient things, the sublime things, the liberated things, not the things to be pathologized.
93. In the lore of the nineties, meanwhile, the time of music from “outside,” noncanonical music, a music opposed to the industry, it was said that Chan Marshall had visions (also called nightmares in some reports) before coming to write the songs on Moon Pix.
94. Chan Marshall went to Australia to record with members of the Dirty Three, and some weeks went by and no songs were getting recorded, and then Chan Marshall had these visions, or nightmares, and the album emerged, composed itself.
95. Maybe the lore is itself a vision.
96. A vision is a compositional romp.
97. There has always been a lot of diagnostic language that hovers around Chan Marshall, assigning to her this or that illness. All the accounts of the early performances of Cat Power were quick to note the fragility of the performer.
98. This diagnostic language is inhumane and doesn’t suggest the full subjectivity of the artist.
99. The purpose of diagnostic language is to wrest control from the sublime.
100. The purpose of diagnostic language is to reconfigure the sublime so that it requires treatment.
101. Such is the lot of other possessors of visions (like Holderlin, John Clare, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Artaud, Darger)—they must be diagnosed so that the power of the visionary can be constrained, leaving interstate commerce unmolested.
102. The visionary who is a woman presents a particular vexation to interstate commerce and is consigned to the visionary in the way that Freud consigned her to the category: hysteric.
103. And thus Chan Marshall was and is a necessary, perhaps even inevitable, performer of “Visions of Johanna,” performing it in the way that Artaud performed in The Passion of Joan of Arc, near to the visionary, perceiving the visionary, sympathetic to the visionary, having had the experience of the visionary, and so on, arguably in ways that Bob Dylan did not achieve himself until his collapse, just prior to the evangelical period, when perhaps he, too, had visions.
104. I mean that a great many of these songs, the Royal Albert Hall songs, need to be sung by a woman in order to be understood, and, additionally, “Visions of Johanna” needs to be sung by someone having had visions, who inhabits the visionary, in order to be rendered profitably, and thus Chan Marshall is the most appropriate singer of “Visions of Johanna”; indeed, it is almost as if the song was written for her, though she wasn’t even born until somewhere between New Morning and Planet Waves.
105. Chan Marshall is so appropriate to her act of appropriation that, well, her vision of Johanna’s visions exceeds Bob Dylan’s recording of 1966.
106. Her version is better.
107. Some reviews have indicated that Marshall’s recording of the Albert Hall songs duplicates Dylan’s down to identical harmonica breaks and identical arrangements and identical fingerpicking patterns and so on, that Marshall somehow changed nothing. This is utterly dim.
108. As if duplication were actually possible.
109. There is, as noted, the fact that Marshall is a woman, and I use this word as though it were easy at this moment. But her being woman is not the only difference.
110. There are stylistic differences having to do with the ways these two singers sing.
111. Chan Marshall has almost nothing of the blues singer about her.
112. For example, Marshall really loves a suspended fourth. She goes to the fourth before hitting the third or the fifth a lot. She passes through there. To my ears, it gives the melodies a mild psychedelic quality that they never had before. In this way, Marshall summons, e.g., a bit of Janis Joplin that has been effaced by history, the Big Brother version, perhaps.
113. The other influence that feels relevant in Marshall’s singing is Nico, the Nico who was briefly a member of the Velvet Underground, or perhaps even more relevantly, the Nico of the extraordinary sequence of solo albums beginning with Chelsea Girls, which of course has a very good Dylan cover on it (“I’ll Keep It with Mine”).
114. There’s a clear, lucid, contralto-ish tone that Cat Power shares with Nico, the Nico of the solo albums.
115. And I summon Nico because Nico was in and around the milieu in which “Like a Rolling Stone” was composed, and if it’s not about Edie Sedgwick, why not about Nico, each of them, in that time, doomed examples of femininity, struggling through the male gazes, struggling to gaze back in reply, incarnating a constrained femininity, and in the process (in Nico’s case) casting off the blues (the flatted seventh, the flatted third), the legacy of West African music, in favor of the psychedelic (Indian) fourth, which invokes a non-Western mysticism as a replacement for the blues.
116. (More and more it seems to me that Bob Dylan’s genre is the country blues.)
117. Thus: despite the logistical rigors of “duplicating” an arrangement vocabulary from sixty years ago, though that duplication is in most ways impossible, these two singers, Marshall and Dylan, could not be more different. One of them is, arguably, a country blues singer recently (at the time of the original live recording) recovering from an obsession with Woody Guthrie, while the other is an indie/psychedelic punk who really knows her Velvet Underground.
118. They’re both walking past the Chelsea Hotel but seeing there completely different scenes.
119. This comparison of melody and timbre (and gender, perhaps) leaves out the most important argument, for which I have been preparing myself, and that is the argument pertaining to context.
120. Chan Marshall’s recording is from 2023, and Dylan’s is from 1966.
121. Marshall’s recording is from the year of the Israel-Hamas War, Dylan’s is from the Vietnam War; Dylan’s is from the space race, Marshall’s is from the time of Space X; Marshall’s is from the time of the social network, Dylan’s is from the time of social realism; Dylan’s recording is by a secular Jew with gospel leanings, Marshall’s is by a lapsed Southern Baptist with millenarian leanings.
122. Maybe both singers now only understand God through song, the song as an evocation of God, a being with God. But from different moments in history, and thus with vastly different nuances.
123. History means differently in them.
124. When the narrator of Borges’s story “Pierre Menard” advances the argument that Pierre Menard’s Quixote text is superior to Cervantes’s, he quotes from a passage about time, as shown here:
125. “. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and advisor to the present, and the future’s counselor.”
126. (My assumption is that James Irby, who translated the Borges story in Labyrinths, did his own translation of the Cervantes passage cited here, from I, IX, but one assumes that Borges himself had opinions as a fluent speaker of English. And naturally we could imagine the effect on this colossal passage, this red line in the history of literature, if Borges’s story had a different translation, for example the translation coeval with Chan Marshall, the excellent Edith Grossman: “. . . truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, repository of great deeds, witness to the past, example and adviser to the present, and forewarning to the future”)
127. Forewarning!
128. You remember, of course, you reader of these lines, that in the Cervantes original this is the passage wherein Cervantes (or the narrator in his stead) alleges to have found the manuscript at a certain market, that it, the text, was in Arabic, that he would need to have it translated, etc. In other words, in a passage of greatest bunk, in a book full of wondrous bunk, sheer invention and play and frothy simulation, we find this passage about truth and time.
129. Clearly, Borges chooses the passage with care for what he says next in the fictional account of Pierre Menard.
130. You know about Pierre Menard, correct? He who wishes to spontaneously reproduce the composition of Don Quixote? Not by copying it down somehow? Not by making a modern approximation? Not by using a lesser character or two, Sancho, e.g., and letting this lesser character have their own book? He wishes to compose the exact contents of Don Quixote but in a different context! (In France, e.g., at the turn of the 19th century, with one eye on Verlaine and one, we might suppose, on Poe.)
131. Menard failed to complete his chef d’oeuvre, as described in Borges’s pseudo-essay, another work of frothy simulation, and only a few short passages remain, including the passage I have quoted.
132. The narrator of Borges’s story quotes the passage twice, once each from Cervantes and Menard, and, of course, the passage are identical.
133. Then he, the narrator, pronounces (in my assessment) the passage by Menard as vastly superior, more wise, more knowing about truth and time, more improbable, more arresting, more original.
134. And note that truth is the “mother” of history, not the father, a distinction that can’t fail but to remind us of the line from Nietzsche, at the outset of Beyond Good and Evil: “Supposing Truth is a woman?—what then?”
135. If Borges’s story, which pretends not to be a story, is not the very first rationale, the very first full-scale “defense,” of appropriation (notwithstanding its being very funny, even satirical, at the same time), it is the surely a most vital early document, nearly coterminous with the R. Mutt sculpture, which was, according to some, appropriated twice over.
136. Chan Marshall’s performance of “Johanna” in the Dylan Royal Albert Hall concert in a sequence of songs identical to the original, with very similar arrangements, appropriates key strategies of Pierre Menard’s attempt to reproduce the text of Don Quixote. She does not, like Menard did not, attempt to duplicate the historical context that produced the producer of “Visions of Johanna,” as Menard did not try to reproduce, for example, the war record of Miguel de Cervantes.
137. Chan Marshall did not, that is, convert to Judaism, move to Hibbing, Minnesota, or obsess over the works of Woody Guthrie, meeting Guthrie in the hospital during the terminal phase of his Huntington’s disease, nor did she play exclusively acoustically (on the contrary) on her early albums, trying to learn Dylan learning Guthrie, nor only (or mainly) in the “engaged” folk genre, nor did she take up with an illustrious folk singer of the opposite sex, prior to performing the Dylan songs from the midsixties in an attempt to produce the exact historical context of the songs and their composition. Indeed, Marshall seems to wish to inhabit the songs while painting her identity as a younger woman from the American South whose early work was primarily in punk and indie rock, albeit with a pronounced interest in the work of Bob Dylan and other precursors.
138. To go further, as in the passage that the narrator of the Borges quotes—“truth the mother of history”—is there a passage in “Visions of Johanna” that most transparently demonstrates the differences between the version recorded live by the original composer of the song and the much younger woman from the American South, in the process demonstrating the vast superiority of the Chan Marshall recording?
139. I choose the following couplet: “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face/where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”
140. I need to confess here, in order to proceed, that there is one stanza of “Visions of Johanna” in which I find the lyrics unsatisfying, even a bit juvenile, namely the verse about the museum, “when the jelly-faced women sneeze,” etc. I mean, every now and then in the midsixties you can hear Dylan’s dalliance with Beat methodology, with the first-thought-best-thought model, where an image goes untransformed straight into the song and does not get altered at any later date, with, perhaps, the idea that the subconscious meaning will emerge in the fullness of time, and that is as it should be. 
141. The “museum” verse seems to lob some darts at art culture in general, finding it (the Art World) a bit wanting. There’s the stiff breeze of judgment in “jelly-faced women” and surrounding lines, and the less said about this verse the better. Or: it appears that we have here carping about the Art World from a guy who now shows at Gagosian, the gallery of occasional appropriation artist Richard Prince.
142. “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” seems, when Bob Dylan sings it, to come from a similar place as the “jelly-faced women” sequence, a Beat place, a neosurrealist place, a first-thought-best-thought place.
143. Let’s look at this couplet closely. First, there’s a mixed metaphor in effect here, in “ghost of electricity,” which to me overcooks the image slightly. Saying “electricity howls” would be, in truth, nearly as effective as “the ghost of electricity.” I become confused by “ghost of electricity” because electricity is already a metaphor for what the narrator perceives in Johanna (I think she is the “she” in this line, though this could perhaps be debated at some later point); “electricity” already says what needs to be said about the primal energy of creation, electromagnetism, so why, then, is a ghost required?
144. Certainly a ghost “howls” better than electricity howls—well, maybe, but then you might argue that the electricity is merely supplemental. The combination of ghost and electricity neutralizes the figurative language somewhat. They make the image slippery, hard to grasp.
145. And why “in the bones of her face” but not in her face generally speaking? Metonymic? Strictly speaking, how does the narrator verify what’s happening in the bones of Johanna’s face? Are they not hidden from view? And why are the bones preferential to a wholeness of face?
146. (And compare this image with the clarity of the line: “She studied the lines on my face,” from “Tangled Up in Blue.”)
147. The second line in the couplet poses even further problems. “Where” would seem to append the second line to the first, as a modifying clause, attaching specifically at “bones” or “face.” But if that’s the case, then the first-person narrator seems himself to inhabit the bones or face of Johanna (or Louise), at least until the visions of Johanna replace him.
148. (I’m just reading this couplet literally here, which, by way of reminder goes thus: “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face/where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”)
149. The abbreviated summary, where the second line is concerned, would suggest that the narrator has been “replaced” by visions. There is no perceiving self there. Only an onslaught of visionary material, as indicated in the first of the two lines.
150. That is, the first line in the couplet is a frankly visionary line. It’s precisely its syntactical ungainliness, its homely nonliterary weirdness, its St.-Mark’s-Poetry-Project-meets-the-decadents quality, that helps to sharpen its visionary impact.
151.  So: the second line is an indicator that the visions have in fact done the replacing. And yet:
152. How can the narrator narrate if he has been replaced by visions? This utterance of the nonself, the unselfed self, is sort of logistically impossible, but also, as such, kind of profound.
153. As we have said, the “psychedelic” in music didn’t quite exist in 1965, didn’t quite yet have a name, though “Eight Miles High” was about to come out, in March of 1966. But this couplet by Bob Dylan, not a noted contributor to the psychedelic idiom, in its complex evocation of the subjectivity of the narrator, feels protopsychedelic.
154. The Beatles first ingested LSD in April of 1965.
155. (Some accounts hypothesize that Bob Dylan took acid in 1964.)
156. Nevertheless, there’s an aspect of Bob Dylan’s performance of “Visions of Johanna” that preserves a schizoaffective or permeable subjectivity that might in theory correlate with period-specific hallucinations on the part of the original composer.
157. (Dylan rarely, if at all, writes lyrics with this hallucinatory quality in the 21st century. Now he is more about a certain tragicomic historical clarity.)
158. (“Early Roman Kings” is a good example of a 21st-century Dylan song—all slippery jokes about the mafia and death and decay.)
159. The permeable subjectivity of the couplet we’re looking at closely serves two functions.
160. First, as it does not identify a specific “her,” whether Johanna or Louise, it leaves open the possibility that the “her” in the couplet is a third feminine character, thus making room for a Chan Marshall–like presence in the song.
161. Second, because the visions replace the narrator, leaving only Johanna’s subjectivity behind, specifically her visions, the couplet demonstrates the necessity of a feminine-presenting interpreter of these words, in particular.
162. The couplet is premonitory.
163. For all these reasons, these lines, in the Chan Marshall performance are superior, indicating a truth that singer Bob Dylan cannot quite manage, truth being, after all, the “mother of history.”
164. This moment of greatness on the album Cat Power Sings Dylan is nonsingular. There are others. Is it not obvious how much better “Just Like a Woman” is when sung by a woman, and when sung specifically by Chan Marshall, with her specific life experiences and episodes of anguish and visionary possession, her specific permeable subjectivity?
165. And “She Belongs to Me,” a song all about the male gaze, possessive qualities thereof, is so substantially better when sung by Marshall that it constitutes a different song—
166. As when Richard Prince cropped slightly those photos of cowboys and made them his own aspirational vision of the masculine.
167. As noted above, in general, I am not interested in questions about Bob Dylan’s “going electric” during the second set. Those are just songs, and they are not Finnish death metal or Minnesotan hardcore. The Band, his backing group, was not Vanilla Fudge or Cream.
168. Accordingly, Cat Power’s second set is sort of midrange.
169. It sounds like The Wallflowers a bit.
170. As Marshall is a singer of nuance, she has to fight to preserve subtlety and gestures of restraint in the second set even though the band is electric and has multiple guitars and keyboards.
171. That said, she improves “Ballad of a Thin Man” and seems to enjoy the polysyllabic sprawl of “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.”
172. (With “Thin Man,” the song seems to benefit a lot from Marshall’s greatness at singing vowels too—the sign of a singer who knows her craft—like on the word “Joooones.”)
173. However, the gem of the electric side is “Like a Rolling Stone,” where, in a way, the electricity howls through the bones of her face.
174. Now, we have no reason to suppose that this very well-known song, this overexposed song, is confessional.
175. We have no reason to suppose it is not.
176. We have no reason to suppose that the protagonist is Edie Sedgwick.
177. We have no reason to suppose it is not.
178. As noted above and elsewhere, the original composer denies that he is a confessional writer (in this way, I think, disavowing his single greatest album, Blood on the Tracks),and we have no reason to doubt him.
179. Or: we have every reason to doubt him.
180. Every work of art is autobiographical.
181. Every work of art expresses. Even Donald Judd’s industrial-inflected sculptures. Even Richard Serra’s “Tilted Arc.” Even Carl Andre, e.g., when he says, “There are no ideas in those steel plates.” Even language poetry expresses. Even field recordings. Even surveillance cameras that have no operator. Even the plates that record the movements of tectonic plates or the subatomic particles in the colliders of the world.
182. Every work of art expresses, and the implications of this expression belong to the audience.
183. Somehow, oddly, even appropriated work expresses, and sometimes it expresses even more.
184. When I have made collage poems (which I have done for many years), I often feel they tell more truth about me, no matter how randomized the collecting strategy, than when I attempt to express myself directly.
185. It is not, then, the artist who expresses in the medium. It is the medium that expresses in the artist.
186. Music creates Van Morrison, music creates Bob Dylan, music creates Joni Mitchell, or Marvin Gaye, or Smokey Robinson, music creates James Hetfield, or Yousou N’Dour, or Keith Richards, or Taylor Swift, or Kendrick Lamar. They aren’t there, the artists aren’t there, until the songs are there.
187. Language expresses the user, creates the user who was not otherwise there.
188. So: “Visions of Johanna” created Bob Dylan.
189. And: “Like a Rolling Stone” created Bob Dylan, and in the process, Bob Dylan created an idea of Edie Sedgwick, even if he didn’t intend to, or even if he never had a relationship with her, or just imagined he did, and yet his idea of Edie Sedgwick never felt complex, like a human being does. It always felt a little bit like an Old Testament prophet was ranting about some woman who didn’t sit quite right with him, until, that is—
190. “Like a Rolling Stone” was sung by Chan Marshall.
191. Chan Marshall incarnates “Like a Rolling Stone.”
192. As she likewise incarnates the visions in “Visions of Johanna.”
193. It is true that when Bob sang “Like a Rolling Stone” he knew the privations depicted therein.
194. But he was never a woman knowing these privations.
195. Marshall sings “Like a Rolling Stone” as both narrator and protagonist, she who sits in judgment and she who is judged.
196. All the judging in her version is: very gentle.
197. Second person as first person by other means.
198. In the live recording from The Tonight Show, she stays in the groove, constantly hinting at the epiphanic moments in the chorus, but backing away from them, like she can feel the enormity of the song, its reputation, but also like she doesn’t have to belabor this reputation, like it’s a bit of fun, or like it’s confessional and merely interpretive at the same time.
199. And yet, to conclude:
200. It is on “Visions of Johanna” that Marshall, like Pierre Menard before her, spontaneously recomposes the song, and becomes its author in the present moment.
201. By present moment we might point to: a post-Roe United States; a United States with a massive drug crisis in the cities of the fentanyl-xylazine variety; a United States teetering from the moral vacancy of the shipping north of refugees by southern governors; a United States somewhat unmoored from the world war on multiple fronts; the specter of authoritarianism and domestic violence in the American body politic, heading into a rather terrifying election year.
202. We can see her becoming author by possessing the visions of the song “Visions of Johanna,” and by visions we might mean the “numen,” through which she passes on the way to expressing the moment now.
203. Or we might mean that she means according to the discipline of metanoia, which is both a crisis in material being, a kind of spiritual aspiration and a rhetorical stance, depending.
204. In this reading, the reading associated with metanoia, the line “where these visions of Johanna have taken my place” has an especial meaning that Bob Dylan can never inhabit exactly.
205. Bob Dylan can’t mean the same line in the same way, contextually speaking, and thus Chan Marshall has reauthored it, and by extension, like Pierre Menard, has become its truest author.
206. It took sixty years for this context to appear.
207. What a transportive event to see this composition made anew.
208. It’s true of course that the reperforming gesture is quite common these days: Rufus does Judy, VKB Band covering Tom Waits, Pussy Galore covering Exile on Main Street, Taylor Swift covering her own albums, The Beatles attempting to release new music as The Beatles, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend pretending to be The Who, Van Morrison covering all of Astral Weeks. Obviously, sample culture in hip-hop comes from a similar place, where appropriation is a basic compositional building block.
209. And don’t forget the guitarist in Japan who has devoted his whole life to performing every note played by Jimmy Page in the exact same way on the exact same equipment.
210. Most of these other acts of appropriation do not rise to challenge ideas of authorship, but Chan Marshall’s does.
211. It makes her record exceedingly powerful.
212. Postscriptus 1: a paratext or premonitory prefiguration of “Visions of Johanna,” a vision of those “Visions,” is to be found on the woefully underrated Cat Power album called Wanderer in the case of the immensely powerful song called “Woman.”
213. Postscriptus 2: Recently, in the episodic sale of books by the estate of Tom Verlaine, I purchased a two-volume collection of paperbacks previously owned by Tom Verlaine (and I’m holding one of these books right now, previously held, at one point by the man himself), The Visions Seminars,by C. G. Jung, a relatively free, discursive collection of dream interpretations, which imputes to dreams the value and importance of visions, rather than consigning them merely to the materialistic “dream work” of Freudian psychoanalysis. Here’s a bit: “So here the peacock assumes the role of a sort of ghost that possesses the man. But we might cling to our original hypothesis that this is the animus again, that this is the man in her [in the dreamer], and now this vision is that behind her man, behind the animus, is a new principle that possesses him. It is his genius that sits behind him like the king’s hawk, or the eagle of Zeus. This is the peacock-ghost of unfolding, of beauty, of spring—of everything that is symbolized by the peacock. It is an almost prophetic vision” (p. 11). A prophetic indication, in case you still needed one, of what we mean by “visions,” in this case from a copy of a book owned by the guy who wrote: “Last night a moon came out / she replaced my eyes.”
214. Postscriptus 3: I have written most of this essay from the deepest, loneliest part of the night, where the morning star appears each day just before dawn, Ain’t it just like the night.

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Rick Moody is the author of six novels, three collections of stories, and three works of non-fiction. He writes a frequent column on music called “The Home Key” for Salmagundi magazine and teaches at Tufts University.

Robert Hayden Reflecting on Those Goldenrods of his Childhood

Deborah H. Doolittle

Late summers—when the woods
and fields around about became
suddenly drenched in some degree
of green—took their cue from their
peculiar sulfur-yellow hue:

goldenrod. Spare of flower, scant
of leaf, it towered above him
as he walked through on his way
to school, unappreciative. Bees
and the many little yellow

butterflies somehow knew these blooms
were the last hurrah. What did he
know about such things? Goldenrod
was boiling over like the unwatched
pot, and he, spoiling for a fight.

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Deborah H. Doolittle has lived in lots of different places(including the United Kingdom and Japan) but now calls North Carolina home. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of Floribunda and three chapbooks, No Crazy Notions, That Echo, and Bogbound (Orchard Street Press).When not writing or reading or editing BRILLIG: a micro lit mag, she is training for 5K,10K, and half marathon road races or practicing yoga. An avid bird-watcher, she shares a house with her husband, six house cats (all rescues), and a backyard full of birds.

We the People is excerpted from “Reclaimed,” an art folio featuring sixteen works by Mr. el-Yasin. To view the full folio, please click here to purchase Post Road 42.

Rain

Alizabeth Worley

Like many moody souls, I like a rainy day. I like the wet dirt and heavy air, the thick dripping from overhangs and tree branches, the cold. I like feeling the need to pull my sleeves over my hands and wrap my coat around me, and I enjoy walking outside with my kids afterward, their little shoes pattering along a dark, wet sidewalk.

In Utah where I live, however, there is little rain.

Utah is the second or third driest of the US states, depending on which ranking you follow—dryer than New Mexico, not as dry as Nevada, vying for second place with Arizona. It isn’t as hot as New Mexico or Arizona, the states with huge sequoias and scorpions; in Utah, November rides in on a tundra wind, and our winter mountains glint brilliant and silver with snow through May. Cold weather notwithstanding, though, it is dry enough that in church meetings, Utahns routinely pray for “moisture,” an allergy-inducing word for many who didn’t grow up in the area. It is dry enough that when the weather grows hot, fires catch tinder in the mountains and a haze of smoke descends and fills the valleys at least a few days each summer.

I have lived here for most of my life, and perhaps I would not love rain so much if it weren’t so scarce. I remember sitting in my high school physics class one day, staring out the window while rain rattled against the glass pane, disturbing the force field of Utah’s early summer. I thought I was alone in my reverie, but before long, Mrs. Fairchild stopped her lecture and said, both stern and sympathetic, “Oh, you poor desert children.”

We are the driest we have been in over a hundred years—the driest on record. We are in a drought.

Earlier this summer, my husband and I took our boys on a trip along with my sister and her kids to St. George, Utah. The day before we left, my sister took the four cousins (her two plus our two) up Snow Canyon in the morning, snapping photos of the kids crouching down and playing with sand as red and deep as rust. The kids loved it, and Michael and I took the four of them up again in the afternoon.

As we drove in, the beating sun was blistering, the outside temperature at a hundred and thirteen degrees. Before we entered the state park, a kiosk operator asked if we had water, and I said yes—we had packed six water bottles, and I was pretty sure there were more somewhere in the back of the car.

After a few minutes of winding through the canyon, we parked in a lot with a small wooden pavilion that provided shade and an information booth with pictures of the canyon’s inhabitants: hawks and horned lizards and rattlesnakes. Even in the parking lot, the red cliffs and mounds were handsome and enthralling. The rises were smaller than those I had seen in the red maze of Bryce Canyon or the winding slots of Zion National Park—smaller as well as closer—but no less impressive. The sun bore down overhead, the red rock faces close enough that I could shout “Echo!” and hear it call back to me.

It was a short trip, and uneventful, as planned: I set a five-minute timer, during which we walked out on an asphalt trail. When the timer went off, we walked back to the car. We had put sunscreen on, but all the kids were red cheeked and ruddy, a sweaty lethargy stealing over their faces. We buckled the younger two in their car seats while the older two buckled themselves in, and we opened all six of the water bottles.

I couldn’t help but think, as I started the engine to turn on the AC, finishing my own water bottle in seconds, how unreasonably confident I had been. We drove back out, and I realized that we were much farther into the canyon than I had thought; driving in, I was mostly focused on finding a stop that might have something interesting for the kids, and we passed exit after exit. We had all been breathless and thirsty after just five minutes out on the trail and a few more back. We needed the water, every bottle I had packed. What if our car stopped or we got stuck? What if the car’s battery had given out in the heat? We had four little kids, two just able to walk. I don’t remember if we had cell service. In any case, my comfortable security felt suddenly reckless. We’ll be fine, I had insisted, and we were fine. But we were only a dead car battery, a broken AC, a disrupted phone signal away from possible disaster.

Water is a solvent, and this allows for life. Water dissolves substances more efficiently than any other liquid, disrupting the bonds between other chemical compounds and providing free-floating atoms and molecules. These atoms and molecules rearrange and gravitate and hover, catalyzing the complex chemical reactions required for living matter. Over one hundred thousand chemical reactions happen in the brain each second, a whirlwind of dissolution and resolution. Water, and its solvency, is the key to growth and motion, to neurons firing, to cells aligning and dividing.

In the ocean, where life most likely began, water is ubiquitous by definition. Water may disperse an oil spill that poisons a school of fish it once nourished, but still, water is there, abundantly. The presence of toxic waste may hinder life, but the absence of water is an unlikely threat. And, as far as my rudimentary understanding of global warming goes, we will only see an increase of ocean water as polar ice caps melt.

On land, however, water is scarce by nature, and land dwellers can only survive so much of it. Have too much water in your lungs or your stomach and you die. You need the right amount: you need it in the soil and filtering through the air, but not sweeping the ground away beneath you. You need it coursing through your veins and breaking down your food, but not disrupting the acidity in your stomach or interfering with oxygen intake in your lungs.

Even land dwellers, however, begin their lives submerged.

In ovum and in utero, water acts not only as a way to provide life and enable chemical reactions but also as a protector. Amniotic fluid protects a baby from trauma and prevents the umbilical cord from being crushed. A baby can stretch their arms and legs, buoyant and unhindered.

Without enough amniotic fluid, a pregnancy can be jeopardized. When I was thirty-six weeks pregnant with my first son, I had an ultrasound indicating slightly low amniotic fluid—seven cubic centimeters instead of the ideal ten to twenty. “If you fall below five centimeters,” a maternal-fetal medicine specialist told me, “we’ll need to perform an immediate C-section.” I wondered then if my low fluid contributed to Jeffrey being breech, or to having a cord around his neck. I wondered then, and wonder now, if given more room, he never would have become entangled, would have had room to turn around on his own.

As a family, we are trying to conserve water. We are washing less and showering more efficiently: a minute of water to get wet, a couple minutes to rinse off the soapy suds and shampoo. We are filling our laundry and dishwashing machines before running a cycle, and we haven’t pulled out the hose for summer water play.

We have all been instructed to do so, everyone in Utah and the surrounding areas.

Driving around, I see yard signs and billboards urging water conservation, including some signs up in Sugar House with the words THE GOAL IS TO SURVIVE NOT THRIVE. While we were watching the Olympics, an announcement aired from Utah’s governor, warning that if we continue to use water at this rate, our reservoirs will run out. We hear about the shrinking Great Salt Lake, and the arsenic that could poison the air if the lake becomes depleted in the next ten years, which it could.

There are limits, however, to our family’s water conservation: our dishwasher cannot quite do its job without some dishes pre-rinsed; in the era of Covid, we wash our hands more than ever; and, on occasion, we give in to the demands of our little ones to fill the bathtub high. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the average family uses over three hundred gallons of water each day.^[1] For every weekly gallon I feel good about saving, I know I use many more.

Throughout most of Utah, this drought is classified as “exceptional,” the highest level possible, with slightly better areas classified only as “extreme.” In addition to taxing water resources, however, this drought has left landscapes in Utah—and in other states—at greater fire risk than ever. In 2021, by June 21 (still early in the season), four hundred and twenty-two fires had burned over fifty-seven thousand acres across Utah.^[2]

Between Utah fires and the smoke carried in from California, Washington, and Oregon, smoky skies have started to feel normal.

On a clear day, I can see Mount Timpanogos and other peaks along the Rocky Mountains that hem in Utah Valley. We are only about five miles away from the foothills, and from the right vantage point I can easily see the painted-white “G” on the side of Mount Baldy, as well as the spiky outline of pine trees and craggy rocks. Often in the summer, though, I have been unable to see the mountains at all, as if they aren’t even there. Some days, even the homes in our complex look hazy and faded because the smoke in the air is so thick.

More and more often, I’m just grateful that our air quality is designated yellow, indicating “moderate air quality,” rather than orange, red, or purple—“unhealthy for sensitive groups,” “unhealthy,” or “very unhealthy.” On August 6, 2021, Salt Lake City had the worst air quality in the world at an AQI score of 215,^[3] though many cities in California and Washington and Oregon have fared far worse many days, at times reaching “hazardous” air quality levels. I have been more asthmatic lately and have used my inhaler more than before. I am coming to expect a sky of brown, an atmosphere of broken brick.

My second son, Sam, was not breech in utero, unlike his older brother, and my amniotic fluid wasn’t low. I was reasonably well hydrated early in his pregnancy, receiving IVs to replenish the fluids I couldn’t keep down. As we came further along and I didn’t need IVs anymore, I tried to keep my fluid levels high by drinking as much as I could.

Still, he was delivered by C-section. Four days after my due date, he seemed as content to stay put as ever, and my OB worried about the increasing chances of a uterine rupture. So, we went ahead with a repeat cesarean.

I have read that the static hush of white noise reminds babies of the womb and the constant rushing of blood around them. Sam loves white noise, and it seems fitting that he takes to it so well, when he didn’t want to come out of my belly.

White noise lulls him to sleep in the way every mom hopes it will for her child. We have a white-noise machine that we put in his room at night; we press the button labeled “rain.” Sam relaxes and his fidgeting eases. He is more receptive to comfort, more willing to take a pacifier. He is happy to take a hand by his side instead of needing to be bounced or rocked. His breathing slows, and eventually, he sleeps.

When I lay there beside him, I listen to the soft shhhhh of the machine, and I can imagine my baby cocooned and sleeping in utero. I imagine him there in that warm, dark room, perfectly content, surrounded by so much rushing like the ocean beneath a storm.

I lived for less than a year in Florida as a seven- or eight-year-old, the only time in my life I have lived outside of Utah. Since then, I have parted ways with many of my eight-year-old preferences, but I remember loving the rain much like I do now. I remember the sheets of water pouring down, the heavy drops hitting the flooded driveway like sublimating dimes.

After we returned from Florida to Utah, I missed the rain. When the occasional storm did come, I relished it, making dams in the street from mud and sticks and rocks, plugging up the holes with socks pilfered from the laundry room.

Michael’s parents live in Arizona, which is similar to Utah in precipitation and humidity but much hotter, and this makes a difference when it comes to rainfall. While Utah receives significant portions of its water supply from spring snowmelt, Arizona primarily receives water through rain; unsurprisingly, it rains much more in Arizona. I find the heat of Arizona hard, but I do love the rainstorms when they come.

Earlier this year, we stayed at a townhome in Arizona while visiting Michael’s parents. On the last night of our stay, Michael asked his dad if he could get a ride back to the townhome in his dad’s convertible, just for fun, while I took the boys back in our car. Soon after he asked, it started to rain. After buckling Sam and Jeffrey in their car seats, I walked up to Michael and his dad as they stood in the doorway, and I caught his dad saying, “It’s physics. If you go fast enough, the air carries the rain right over your head.”

I laughed and said, “I was just thinking, not sure you’d want a ride in a convertible now, but I guess that’s been addressed.”

We started the drive, and I hoped that Michael and his dad weren’t getting too wet at the stoplights as I drove behind them. On the way to the townhome, Jeffrey was telling me that when we got there, he wanted to take a “rain bath,” because, as he put it, he hadn’t had a rain bath in a long time. But it was well after dark, and the rain pattered on the windows, and the windshield wipers swished back and forth, and the highway thrummed beneath us, and by the time I pulled into the driveway behind Michael and his dad, both soaking wet from idling at stoplights, Jeffrey had fallen asleep in his car seat.

This drought is teaching me. I didn’t know that the majority of wildfires, at about eighty-five percent, are caused by people—though mostly by accident.^[4] I didn’t know that relentless smoke can drive you inside just as effectively as rain, can leave you taking shelter indoors for most of a summer. I didn’t know that a turbulent rainstorm punctuated by lightning can start more fires than it puts out. I didn’t know that rain does not always clear away the smoke, that sometimes a storm front can carry in more smoke than it clears, leaving a deep stench far worse than that of a wet sweater hanging out after a campfire.

I didn’t know that if the air quality is bad, in addition to getting a HEPA filter and staying inside with all the doors and windows closed, it can help to wash your bedsheets more frequently—though, of course, this can produce the undesirable effect of using more water to do more laundry, at up to thirty gallons of water per load. I didn’t know that the best masks for preventing infectious disease are also the best masks for reducing inhaled pollution.^[5]

I didn’t know that, generally, it’s better to water a tree three to four feet away from its trunk, where the roots are most able to absorb the water. I didn’t know that it is better to water a lawn at night, so as to reduce how much water evaporates under the sun. I didn’t know that, in many cases, it is better to flood a yard or an orchard on occasion than to sprinkle it every night; if you water a little each night, the water stays on the surface, easily evaporating instead of reaching the roots. I didn’t know this, even though Michael’s parents have long done exactly this, flooding their lawn under cover of darkness. When their lawn is flooded at night, lights from the house glisten on the mirrored pool of their backyard, and it is beautiful. I just never knew the reason behind it.

During the drive back home from our trip to St. George, about twenty minutes after we left, the cars ahead of us came to a stop. The roads in southern Utah are usually clear and empty, with long expanses of seemingly deserted highway, but the cars ahead of us stretched as far as we could see, edging forward only in brief starts.

Soon enough, we could see why: a fire, not on the mountains, but in the brush beside the highway. The brush was low, and the fire was low too, but it had spread far.

We had two children in the car—sleeping. It was late and dark. The motion and sound of the car had lulled them to sleep, encased in their car seats. I wondered as I drove, how could I keep moving us toward a fire that only seemed to be coming closer? How could I keep going with these two kids, unknowing and innocent, when the risk felt so palpable? I thought about turning around on the bumpy stretch of shrub between our lanes and the southbound lanes, whatever the fallout might be.

Instead, I stayed in line, easing off the brake pedal to keep up with the cars ahead of me. At moments in our stop-and-go traffic—eerily silent, a mix of bright orange fire and red brake lights in the dark of night—Sam would wake, crying until Michael or I reached back to hold his hand. I kept telling myself, I could always ditch and run the other way, turning our car around through the median’s brush, if the need became clear enough.

Ash was falling on our window, and emergency trucks passed us in the coned-off lane to our right. Firefighters and officers walked along the curb of the road in reflective yellow vests and hats. When we approached the line of fire, it was still several meters from the freeway, stalks of flames illuminating a sky of billowing smoke, silhouetting the small strip of scrub left between us. As we continued forward, the fire grew closer, creeping into the wide ditch that hemmed the road in.

Finally, sometime after all the cars had merged into the lane farthest from the fire, we followed the thinning tail of flames back into the darkness. The flora and fire were short enough, and the asphalt road wide enough, that I suppose there was never any substantial danger, as long as we moved far enough to the other side.

In the years to come, I’m not sure the danger will be so fleeting. Granted, I am not much of a scientist, and there is much I don’t understand; I do not understand the complexities of a global climate that ebbs and flows for reasons ranging from solar intensity to sea floor spreading, as well as decades of human effect. Still, I can’t believe that there is nothing we can do, as individuals and families and countries, to treat our atmosphere better, even if imperfectly.

Every accidental fire, every inch of reservoir water lost, every increase in the global temperature affects the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the safety of our immediate ecosystems and the species within them. Climate change is not an all-or-nothing trend but a slow and cumulative migration across multiple gradients. Even the margins matter, and therefore, so do our small efforts.

Between mishaps and mistakes, I keep trying and hoping. I keep hoping that the fire will spare the road, that the brush will recover, that a gentle rain will shower us again soon. I keep hoping, naively, that if it comes to it, someone will turn us around and let us go back to where we came from.

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^[1] “How We Use Water.” United States Environmental Protection Agency. www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water

^[2] “2021 Utah Wildfires.” Wikipedia. web.archive.org/web/20210707213022/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Utah_wildfires

^[3] Helean, Jack. “Salt Lake City air quality ranks among worst on the planet.” Fox 13 (Aug. 6, 2021).

www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/right-now-salt-lake-city-has-the-worst-air-quality-on-the-planet

^[4] Patel, Kasha. “What you need to know about how wildfires spread.” The Washington Post (July 28, 2021).

www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/28/wildfires-spread-faq-west-explained/

^[5] “Will Your COVID-19 Mask Protect You from Wildfire Smoke?” Healthline. www.healthline.com/health-news/will-your-covid-19-mask-protect-you-from-wildfire-smoke#The-best-mask-to-keep-you-safe-from-everything

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Alizabeth Worley is a writer and artist who lives near the shore of Utah Lake with her husband, Michael, and their two kids. She has hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and Michael has Cerebral Palsy. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Iron Horse Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Brevity Blog, and elsewhere. You can find her at alizabethworley.com.

Continuous Aspect

Julian Robles

Every month or so, late at night around two or three, J sends me stories about a character named V. V is J’s middle initial. V is like J. V has done most of the things J has done in his life, and has thought most of the thoughts J has. V is crueler than J. V likes hip-hop. J likes hip-hop. V tells lies. J tells lies.

I live in another city now, far away from J. This city sits across an ocean; it exists on a continent with rich and violent cultural histories, with sculptures and museums, and many languages are spoken here. Friends tell me I am lucky to live in this city, which, when they visit, they say is like New York—or like specific parts of New York that are considered hip. I don’t agree with the comparison, but I never say so.

In this city I ride my bike anywhere I want, which is often to parks and to art galleries, where I’ll pass entire afternoons. Other days I ride my bike to bars and clothing stores and museums, and to work, of course. On Tuesday evenings I ride my bike to language classes. I’ve become quite proficient in this new language, though I still struggle with the conjugation of certain verbs and with gaps in my vocabulary. The instructor suggests speaking to friends and watching movies or reading books. I do those things, but there’s something else that happens after language classes which I don’t imagine she has a solution for.

Some nights as I bike home I am overcome by a vast loneliness. I feel small, and physically I am small, but more than that I feel reduced, as though my body has slipped into a vanishing point within one of the countless paintings that hang in the museums I visit. I then remember how so many of those paintings were created by artists from this city (or from nearby cities and countries) who have, perhaps thousands of times, depicted the streets I bike on—or an idealized version of these streets. Their lasting achievement: a continent where horizon and linear perspective are laws of nature. And sometimes I wonder if those artists weren’t also anticipating the idealized version of every person who came after them; if, when I am riding home after language classes, I am experiencing what it’s like to inhabit a more perfect version of myself.

Since we live so far from one another, J’s stories reach my email inbox at around eight or nine my time, during my commute to work. These stories always play out the same way: V floats from event to event, a vagabond in a surrealist landscape whose geographies are shaped by the threat of violence. This violence permeates his dreams. It is an inheritance bestowed by the country his family is from. It brushes past his lips like a breeze. But violent things never happen—not to V, at least. V is a writer or wants to be a writer. V is a stranger and a voyeur. He lies and cheats and he hopes his art will absolve him. Literature flows all around him. In some of these stories he encounters—or has long broken up with—a woman like me. Her name is P. Sometimes her name is D, but usually it is P. At the end of every story V is alone.

Occasionally J’s stories are published. More and more they can be found in respected literary magazines, or selected in contests by well-known writers and editors. He sends me links to those stories, too. There is one sitting in my inbox now. It’s titled “Saving Lives,” and I know better than to believe that anyone will be saved in it. And I should know better than to read it.

Recently J has become fond of effaced and nameless narrators, though these narrators invariably resemble V. In this way J is similar to B, who wrote songs about me.

I met B on a friend’s rooftop in the city that I am from. He was interested in my taste in music. He said he was interested in my paintings, too, though he found their abstraction difficult to comprehend. Above all he complimented my taste in music. B was in a band. That was something easy to talk about.

B struggled with erectile dysfunction the summer we met. I never told anyone, only J. B didn’t actually have erectile dysfunction, not more than the usual amount, but I lied to J because he kept pestering me about B. It was clear he wanted to have something over him and I knew that would do it. What did happen that summer was that I watched B and his band perform in small bars. The music was fine, never anything more than that. I think the sex was fine, too, but I don’t remember it. After about two months I never remember it, except if something spectacular or terrifying happened.

B once said that if he could be gifted with a different type of musical talent he would choose to be a rapper; and then he said that if he could choose to practice any art form other than music he would be a painter. He said it’s hot watching painters move their bodies while they work. I told him not all paintings are as big as the ones I was working on at the time. Sometimes you sit in one place and only move your arm. He nodded and said, Your paintings are good. I would make paintings exactly like yours.

Then one day B stopped talking to me. No text messages. No phone calls. He wrote a song about why he’d changed his mind and posted it online.

When J writes about B, he changes his name to A or G, or to names beginning with the letter A. V has gotten into fistfights with A or G. V has imagined cuckoldish fantasies involving himself, A, and P (or D). V and G have had long, pointless debates about music and art at bars and at parties in their friends’ apartments. Sometimes a narrator with a voice like V’s describes the life of a character like B, and in these stories B is doomed to suffer humiliation and irony.

Last month I stopped seeing N, who detests irony. I learned this the first time we met. He had just taken a photograph of me.

I look at that photograph now, and as a record of the dialogue exchanged between us that day—between our voices and bodies—it is useless. I can barely remember what I told him about myself, or where we went to eat, or what I thought about him when I rode my bike home afterward. Instead I remember the banal. All the banal things I’ve never heard N or J or B talk about. I’m not embarrassed to say that I look at the woman in the photo, with her wavy brown hair, shoulder length and tucked behind her ears, and rather than pondering forms of light and shadow, all I remember is that I had gotten a haircut the day before. I remember that was the shortest my hair had ever been, and the night before I had gone to bed worrying that it would be too thick and poofy to fall the way I like. But the next day it looked great.

I admire thoughts like these, because there’s no fooling oneself into believing that they are unique. Imagine the most profound observation; or imagine an insight arrived at during a lively discussion on a first date in a sophisticated city: I think and think for hours each day, and occasionally notice that I’ve done exactly that—think. Now I’ll try claiming credit for what I’ve thought, when, as far as it concerns me, the thought may as well have been thought by anyone. And it is, by anyone but me.

Of course, I didn’t tell N any of that. He took a photo of me at the edge of a river, in this city where I live, and two weeks later he mailed me a print. If I told him the story of the haircut (which is too uneventful for someone like J to call a story), he would say, Oh, obviously I knew there was something new and uncertain about you then. That’s why I took the photo.

N loves uncertainty in people, especially when it is paired with sincerity. One day, out of the blue, he told me to stop him if I ever detected irony in his photos. I don’t know what he meant by that: stop him. I didn’t ask. I said, I’ll try my best.

In some of J’s stories, P is only implied. What this means is that over the course of the story, V’s interactions with P diminish, sometimes over the course of several years, to the point that she begins to resemble a ghost or an illusion. In this way it is my existence which is uncertain. Crucial to this effect is V’s memory of P’s voice, which he describes as sounding not like a voice, exactly, but like an old recording of a voice—a forgotten, heartbreaking sound.

N used to say that he wished he could capture my voice in his photographs (and he once gave me a print in which he claims to have come close). B wrote songs about a girl whose voice fades into a breeze.  

In this city where I live, if I seek the solitude, I can go whole weekends without hearing myself speak, sometimes longer. Then I attend language classes where my voice must bear a certain heaviness as it bends to produce new consonant clusters and diphthongs, where it strains under foreign declensions and rigid syntax. I cherish this labor. There is no literature in the sound it produces, only itself, striving.

There are other kinds of labor I cherish. My work at my office job, for example, which N and J know very little about. Then there are my paintings and drawings. I still paint when I find the time, but I consider the pieces to be modest and trivial, regardless of what L, the guy in the flat above me, believes. L is a filmmaker and a poet. The first time he saw my paintings I was out of town and had asked him to water my plants. When I got home he insisted I sell him one. And later, when we were seeing each other more frequently, I explained that I want my creations to be trivial. That’s the point, I said. I know they’re good—great, even, and I’m not concerned with anything more than that. These days I’m only interested in minor things. No, I don’t believe you, he said smiling. He shook his head and put his arm around my waist.

A line in a short story: Her voice reminded me of my girlfriend’s: small and faraway even with her lips right up to my ear.

During the months we were together I never read J’s writing—he hadn’t been published yet and he was too shy to share the drafts. He said he was writing about childhood. It’s bad, he said after I asked to see a story. I wasn’t sure if he meant the writing or the childhood.

But I do remember the first time he emailed and wrote, You’ll like this one. Now I read those words all the time: if J writes, You’ll like this one, then I know to expect a story about art—what J thinks art is. Although it’s never actually about the art. In the pages that follow V will become obsessed with a performance, an artist, a painting. He will exhaust himself, leave himself half-dead trying to grasp every contour of the experience of it. Of course, it becomes more sinister than that. Through V, J has tried articulating a confusing belief that the fabric underlying experiences of art is a silent dialogue shared between people (What about landscape paintings, P once asked. Even landscapes, V said); so through V, J will destroy every person he knows for even a glimpse at the fabric. Because V and J don’t know what is a picture and what is hope.

In his most recent email J writes, I’m not really sure about this story, is it clear this is meant as a critique? I’m trying something anti-art, anti-narrative, does the form convey that? I don’t know about the ending, can you please tell me? Please, I don’t know. I don’t know.

Obsessions. Each man comes with his own obsessions and with his list of recommendations. N brought me books on architecture after I told him I didn’t know much about the topic. He loves using the term public space. He loves the word more than the thing. B likes pop music from twenty years before we were born or music that imitates that style. We sat in his bedroom and he told me who was bad and who was great and who he wanted to sound like and who wasn’t appreciated enough. I still have a stack of zines L left on my kitchen table. He only respected independent publishers and Third Cinema. L taught me what Third Cinema is. J claimed to have read and reread all the Latin American writers—in English and Spanish. I was skeptical. I told him he didn’t need to impress me: That’s a lot of names, I said. I own a lot of books, he replied. But what most surprised me was his obsession with the writing of religious-minded women from rural towns in the Midwest. Later this fixation on piety would make sense. Naturally V shares in J’s obsessions, which include mirrors, sixteenth-century Flemish painters, and maps.

Last week I heard from N for the first time since ending things. He sent me a text message warning me to stay away from L on the grounds that L is a cut-rate artist. As proof he included a photo of a poem written by L and published in a magazine I’ve never heard of. In the poem the speaker briefly mentions a person named P. Sound familiar? N asked. I didn’t know they knew each other or that L was going to do that, but when I saw N’s message I could only laugh.

I replied to N with a picture of a photograph he—N—had taken of me on my balcony one morning. In the photograph I am wearing a big T-shirt, maybe N’s, maybe J’s from long ago. I’m not wearing anything underneath, but you wouldn’t know from looking at the photo. My legs stretch into the empty chair across the table from me. The trees that shade my balcony are in bloom, which means I would be on the lookout for bees. I’m terrified of bees for reasons that have never been clear to me—I’ve never been stung or anything. N wouldn’t have known that when he took the photo. J never knew either. The table is circular and coated with white metallic paint that has begun to chip. The legs of the table, which at their ends curl upwards like scrolls, are streaked with rust. Apparently it has recently rained: a puddle of copper-colored water has collected near the table’s legs in a small depression on the balcony. My own leg has a rust-colored scab above the knee. I can’t remember from what, maybe a minor bike accident on the commute to work. In the photo my face is turned away from the camera—watching for bees—concealing all but a triangular blur of cheekbone above my shoulder. My hand is raised to shade my eyes from the sun. My hair is still short. I like it short.

Another obsession of V’s: ballet. Ballet and amateur porn.

I still send J nude photos of myself. I send them to B and to N and L too. N messages back saying he wishes he could take the photos himself. He wants to help me get the angles. I wish so badly, he says. B responds by asking if I have time to call and talk about the way he ended things. L asks if it’s okay for him to send a nude back. L always asks permission for the smallest things—and only the small things. J will write about my nudes later, but it won’t be P or D who sent them, because he’s always made P into such a bore. It will be one of his other ex-girlfriends, like M or S or C or T. If you ever read about this, it won’t be my body.

Normally I take these photos while I bathe. I prop my phone along the ledge of the tub and then I pose with my head turned to the side, tilted slightly downwards; other times I look directly into the camera with a mischievous smile. I like to do things with my hands, too. Let one graze my breast or obscure half of my face. Feel the fingers skirt the edge of a nipple. My favorite is when I bend my head back and stare at the ceiling. While I’m gazing upwards, I swallow and feel the flesh in my neck strain against the rings of my trachea. It almost hurts. Then I slide my hand down from my shoulder to my chest and between my legs, and it feels so good that I never want to look down again.

Less than a week after N has sent the message warning me about him, L comes marching down the stairs. He has apparently learned of N’s attempts at amorous warfare. L knocks for five minutes and stands silently outside the apartment door for another ten. I hear the wood floor creak beneath his feet. You’re crazy, he shouts at last. He leaves and immediately comes back, this time playing a song from his phone. It must be a song he and I have talked about loving, but through the door the sound is so muffled that the song is unidentifiable. I know you’re in there, he says. Even his voice sounds different. I sit cross-legged on my couch and close my eyes, and in the stillness between breaths I almost forget where I am. He could be anyone. Is that another of your songs about me, B? I say. Who is that? L asks. Who is B? Another minute passes and he leaves.

So many lives to choose from, but he has reduced literature to two letters standing upright and solitary as tombstones. Is it an insufficiency of imagination, these initials and personas?

“Every man is the same man,” wrote an Argentine whose work J idolizes. “No one is anyone.” In that case, nothing of a need for V. Any letter but J is superfluous—and to write that one letter is already to cleave him, leaving us three: J, a text called J, and I.

Sometimes I imagine all the fragments of my body that are scattered around this city, and around the cities in my artists’ imaginations. At the outskirts of my neighborhood there is a narrow pedestrian bridge beneath which dozens of train tracks diverge and expand. I often walk my bike across the bridge on the commute to work, and some mornings I stop to admire how those simple, brittle lines recast this city into a broad, ancient plain of metal and wood. A playful illusion which some might call order or art, to be seen and unseen. I’ve thought about drawing it. And yet, I would never choose to give my body to this image—give as in the triangle of cheekbone that N’s photograph has smudged across my balcony, and which can never be unseen; or the photographed woman at the edge of the river whose hair now glistens beneath the currents. Give as in my voice, hushed and blue, whipped by the waves of some song’s distant ocean; as in my lips and shoulders abandoned in cities I’ve never visited, in stories J creates.

I wrote something that, strictly speaking, is not true. V is not like J. V is often described doing worse things than J has ever done, as though by convincing people that he and V are one, as though by seemingly confessing his worst impulses, J’s real-life sins will be preemptively forgiven. But maybe that is an unkind interpretation of his intentions. J is, for the most part, kind and thoughtful. He makes an effort to be as thoughtful as possible, and sometimes I wonder if V isn’t a cruel lash he turns against himself.

One night J called instead of writing—only once—and tearfully revealed that he couldn’t imagine sustaining the will to live another two years, another year, in a world in which he felt so disconnected from other people. Even V has never sounded so hopeless.

Or am I misremembering: was it V who said that, after all?

Almost a year after I moved to this city, J sent me a story that I couldn’t look at. I didn’t read his emails for weeks afterward. It was winter, when I take the train to work instead of my bike. After I read the story I got off at the next station and almost vomited on the platform.

The story appears to have six characters, but really there are only four. Here’s what happens: First we are introduced to V. V is a writer. V has written a story and sent it to a woman named P, though it is never revealed whether she actually receives it. V’s story is about two lovers: a man named J and a woman also named P (both of whom, it becomes clear, correspond to their real-world counterparts). So, for simplicity’s sake, let’s begin again: V sends a story to P. This story is about their past relationship. V has fond memories of P, but most of the time he remembers her as though she is a ghost. One day he has a fabulous, cruel idea: he writes a story about their relationship told from the point of view of an actual ghost. The ghost is named X—he didn’t even bother to change her name. X is my dead sister.

Now let’s start over one last time: J writes a story about the life he and I once shared and he sends the story to me. His story is narrated by my dead sister, X. In this story, X’s spirit has followed P—me—on and off for years. One day, X returns to find a different ghost floating near her sister. This other ghost is named U. U corresponds to U—he didn’t bother to change her name, either. U was a friend of J’s and mine whose ghost is now tethered to J for reasons the story only hints at. The ghosts U and X become friends, and that summer they join J and P as the lovers travel across countries with old cities and famous museums. Everywhere they go, J and P discuss art and have sex and talk about their love and their fears. X and U, our ghostly observers, listen to our conversations, commenting on the events of the trip and holding their own discussions alongside us. At one point, after I share a childhood memory of X, J almost tells me about a fight he and U had the night before she died. The details surrounding the cause of the fight are deliberately vague, but it doesn’t matter—in the end J loses his nerve and says nothing. The summer ends and, as planned, J and P break up. J returns to the city they are from and P stays to start a new job in the city I now live in. U is forced to leave with J. X remains with her sister, reflecting on the departure of U and pondering if the dead owe anything to the living. In the final scene, my sister looks on while I water plants on the balcony of my apartment.

L knew of lots of people who had died. In the country his parents fled from things are just like that, he said. He talked about this in his films and poems. In one video, he recorded his mom telling the story about the day his uncle was killed in a bombing. The recording was part of something bigger, he said. She was crying and shaking, pushing her fists into her eyes. I’d never been so mad in front of him. I asked, Why are you doing that? You’re making her kill him. You’re killing her brother all over again.

B didn’t know anyone who had died, not even a grandparent. He knew he should be thankful for that fact, but he believed the absence of the experience negatively impacted his art. He could spend hours detailing the biographies of his favorite rappers and the death that had hollowed out their lives. This one’s mom was shot right in front of him. That one’s best friend was murdered in a drug deal gone wrong. This other saw his dad overdose in the kitchen. Then there are all the rappers who had themselves died, always too young.

When I finally responded to J it was with a photo of me in the bathtub. In that photo—the first I ever sent—the detachable shower head dangles delicately from my left hand, and I stare directly into the camera. My lips are slightly parted, as if forming a letter or uttering a secret. A white blur of teeth is just visible through the space between them. In the background is a bottle of shampoo and a washcloth. My hair was still long then, and it is piled atop my head in a messy bun from which long curls have come undone. I’m flushed from my chest up to my neck. And my heart, which is not visible, is racing faster than ever before. I could feel the blood pulsing into my fingertips; my skin burned at the back of my throat.

The next week I sent another photo. The next month J sent a short story.

I finally got around to reading the most recent email. Its contents were nothing new—typical V: menacing voyeur, mirrors, art, death. It wasn’t until I reached the end of the story, and a wave of relief passed over me, that I realized how excited and afraid I’d been to read it. Maybe that makes me sound vain or as though I’m more messed up than other people, as though I lack self-respect or I’m not angry enough about what he did to my sister. And if I said that sometimes the idea of hearing her speak, even in a voice that belongs to J, is too tempting to ignore—maybe that would make me sound like P. Some nights, when I bike home from language class, I pretend that I really am P:  

I imagine how if I existed in a story written by J, or even a story written by some of the famous women that J admires, then this would be a disappearing city, and I a disappearing woman. I imagine a place where ghosts loom over me and make beautiful observations about the horizon, and these ghosts aren’t my sister, but rather my own voice receding across an impassable chasm in time. From above I appear fuzzy and vague, nameless, not as an act of refusal but as a result of inescapable technocratic erasure and a psyche unmoored from reality. I look exactly like the photo N has taken of me by the river. I mean, I look like the imitation of a photo—I mean, a stray strand of hair curves around my chin in perfect imitation of the lines of the current. And my eyes are made of water. In the story this photo tells, which is the story J writes, my work is rote and mindless. I ride my bike everywhere, which is often to museums and art galleries, where I’ll pass entire afternoons. Here I develop kinships with obscure, minor artists, the ones no one ever cared for—as forgotten and disappeared as me. In this city my life has no beginning or end, except in language.

And on nights that I pedal home from language class, I’ll keep imagining that dream city until it dissolves into laughter. I’ll laugh breathlessly at J’s faith in it, and my occasional faith in it, as its image becomes replaced by a city exactly like this one: where some days I ride buses instead of bikes; and I miss the train and arrive to work late and become frustrated with my absentmindedness. Where I begin to doubt if I can survive this loneliness, so far from home, and then I need to speak to people from my past, even the ones that make the loneliness worse. In this city, I spill coffee on my white shirts and get haircuts every six weeks, and when I chop vegetables in the kitchen I think about art far less often than I do about buying new socks and shampoo. The only language on my mind is this new one, when I listen to children in the park playing and shouting in a grammar that lacks the continuous aspect.

I’ve thought of emailing J back and telling him how wrong he got it—but, no, even the banal can’t remain a refuge. He’d want to write about it. Because V has never let the banal be.

A month ago I saw L for the last time. No screaming or music, that was my one condition. After we slept together, I told him to leave all his zines on the table and asked him to keep sharing his poems with me despite the way things had to end. He thanked me tearfully, he used the word “grateful.”

Some nights before bed I hear him through the ceiling, pacing around his flat. It never bothers me; I’m a heavy sleeper. The next morning I can expect a terrible poem about a girl named P (or D) slipped under my door. I send these poems to J and tell him how much I admire L’s writing. I’m still waiting for a response.

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Julian Robles is a Mexican (-American) writer. He lives in Estado de México.