The Phone Booth at the End of the Beach
‘Let’s go see the petroglyphs!’
Drawing Blue
Hallucinogens reveal the lie of certainty; please don’t try this with students under 18.
“Draw blue,” I said, laying back in a hammock and watching them try, using sticks in the coarse Caribbean sand. You might imagine — as I think I did — that the best approach would be to draw something inherently, enduringly, blue. The sea. A blue jay. A morpho butterfly. Blueberries. As it turned out, this was not the best approach.
The closest renderings were entirely abstract. I have no memory of what those renderings were. If I took pictures at all, those pictures are on film somewhere, in a box of slides, waiting to be sorted. It was that long ago. But I do remember that some of the abstractions managed to feel like blue in a way that the representative drawings in the sand did not.
How do you evoke a color without a color? Do particular colors have a symbolic meaning that can be transmitted without language?
Synesthesia is the interweaving of senses that we consider distinct. We presume …
Nothing Good Comes From New England
Puritan killjoys produced an elite culture of prissy snobbery and creepy fanaticism that thrives today in secularized form
John Brown was a lunatic; Harvard is worse
America’s true national culture is the descendant of a Mexican and a Swede wearing a cowboy hat and driving a Ford F-150
Mount Monadnock is the highest peak in southern New Hampshire. It is also the occasion of a poem by the greatest New England intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In “Monadnoc,” the genteel Boston Brahmin explains that he expected to find heroic patriots among the mountaineers of the neighborhood. Instead, to his disgust, he encountered “a churl, / with heart of cat, and eyes of bug, / Dull victim of his pipe and mug.” The idealistic Yankee concludes the poem by wishing genocide upon the poor rural whites:
“But if the brave old mould is broke,
And end in churls the mountain-folk,
In tavern cheer and tavern joke,
Sink, O mountain, in the swamp!
Hide in thy skies, O sovereign lamp!
Perish like leaves, the highland breed!
No sire survive, no son succeed!”
Praying for the defeat and annihilation of their cultural and class enemies is part of the tradition of New England …
The Devil's Chair
‘Mom, I am an Animal’
‘Alright, Russell’
I wanted to find friends who were similar to the characters in Crime and Punishment.
You know, when we were growing up, a hundred years ago, there were not that many forms of entertainment. No telephone or Bluetooth, no Twitter or talking robots. We had only recently passed the dinosaurs.
For my brother and I, when we would get bored, something exciting for us would be to go visit this massive rock, about three miles down the county line. They called it the “Devil’s Chair.” I guess they called it that because the shape was so unusual: Sloped on the side of a hill, it looked like a bed an alien would sleep on. You’d think they would have changed the name, considering the risk of the evangelicals going fanatic and blowing it up with dynamite. But as far as I know of, it’s still here.
I guess we were spiritual, somehow, we had it in our DNA. Something about this rock was so serene and energizing and powerful. It just made you want to crawl on top of it and shut up. It took a little …
