Mary O’Donoghue

Late Style

The last time I went overseas the passenger next to me asked if I knew about the plight of the Icelandic pony. It was as if we’d been talking for years.
When they go abroad for competition, she said, they’re not allowed to come back. The purity of the bloodline. They might pick up a cold and infect the entire population. Of horses, I mean.
I hadn’t heard about it. Was it for real, I asked, with all the advances, inoculation and the like? And if it were true, and those horses could never reenter, they must long for their own chilly turf. They must be depressed mooching round Wales, or wherever.
You’ll make me cry, said the woman. I swore I wouldn’t cry on this flight. And now I’m going to cry about your fucking little ponies!
Hang on. They were her little ponies. She had introduced them, and I told her so.
She twisted away to the window. She came back to say sorry. The ponies’ predicament might have been true back in the day. She wasn’t sure if it still obtained.
I’ve been on a short fuse, what can I say? I resigned from my job, she said, I sold my house less than market. That’s how much I’m not coming back. I love the country but I can’t stand the scene. Leonard Cohen.
When it came time for me to leave this country forever, the logics of travel were blasted and I made many tries and false starts. On one call, my wait time was eight hours, so I mixed and proofed and baked a loaf of bread and read a short novel in which an Austrian man lived his whole life in 160 pages. I had just gone back to reread the most heartbreaking part when someone answered my call to say they couldn’t put me on the route I wanted. But there was another, involving four stops and three airports, two of which were in the same city, which I could thread by taking a taxi, as well as a fee in the five hundreds for having to pass like an apparition through the bigger of those airports. The man on the line sketched the route optimistically, saying other travelers had made the trip just fine.
A bit tired on the other end, but hey!
He said all was forgiven because they got to where they most wanted to be.
I said no, I would try again tomorrow, and I did, and the next day. And during and around all those calls, I worked to cut off old connections.
The old connections weren’t too many and my circumference was limited. Everyone’s circle had shrunk. Henry James said real-life relationships didn’t simply stop dead, but a writer could draw a selfish circle and decide what was in and what didn’t matter a damn. A writer could make it look like friends and lovers fell over cliffs and were done with. It was callous, but truer now of life than of books. A person had to fight to keep familiar faces in mind, and I hadn’t. I felt more bereft of books I boxed for the library shop than of people I hadn’t seen in years.
So I got a more chestnutty color for my hair and sent text messages to people in cities and towns. Friends and colleagues, people I’d left for jobs in other cities and towns. We had all done the due diligence of trying to stay in touch, until one month became six, one brutal heat wave the next year’s polar vortex. From there the years piled up like dense galactic time. We were growing older and more wan, like endives, or the fat Belgian asparagus. I still wanted their approval, all of those people. I wanted them to know I’d done well, or fine, or tolerably. I might still do, given time.
I gauged their interest in getting together online. Nobody truly got together that way, I said, though dating and teaching and counseling were getting accomplished in the LowBlue light. Most of them responded, but they didn’t know the urgency. They said they’d love to, asked to kick it forward a week, were so glad I’d gotten in touch. My hair turned out like goulash, but I kept washing and rinsing until it toned down to something less alarming. In the end six people wanted to get together soon. Open to any day of the week, any time, they sounded avid as the unemployed or the brokenhearted. None of them knew the others. Still, I scheduled them all in one meeting.
At five in the afternoon, I sat at the screen and waited. My posture was healthy, my distance from the screen approachable. I’d gotten used to working remotely. The word had northerly extremes. I could set up a syllabus in the boreal forest or run a meeting on an oil rig. Remote work just called for honorable perseverance and the well-timed gushy routine. It meant being the first to flick into action. I was a light in an office block stairwell and I longed for the bulb to pop.
I waited for the shivering light of six people’s entry. They materialized, cautious, hopeful, faces in good light and bad. There were glitches and hesitations, apologies, logging out and back in. Some were more practiced and looked straight ahead like friendly newscasters. Others hunched and gazed down, the screen a missal being pored over.
I had seen some of these people only last year. In other cases, world leaders had been and gone. Someone looked younger, someone dejected. My sense of occasion was waning. But here they were, thanking me once more for reaching out. They peeped coyly left and right, birds in the apertures of a dovecote.
It was my job to take an ax to the frozen sea. So. Had anyone read Agatha Christie lately? I said she was forever gathering strangers in a house or on a remote island. It took them days to figure out the reason for being there, but by then it was too late. A body on the shoreline, another in the dumbwaiter.
Once I got going it was hard to stop. The ice might re-form. They looked at me in dumbfounded amusement and I rattled on. Sometimes it turned out that a few of Agatha’s characters weren’t strangers at all! They knew one another in sinister ways, unspeakable events stemming from years before. So. Had anyone guessed why they were here? I rolled back in my chair. Onscreen my smile was lopsided and my left side always, always my worst.
Why aren’t you doing this for a living? one friend asked. I mean, seriously. You could. Are you?
Yes! Yes, another chipped in. It’s just like a podcast or something. Rescuing the classics and putting a new spin on them. You should be.
The two people I knew best were in the same trade but didn’t know each other. They started speaking at the same time. One professor stopped, the other waved her on. Please, please. I was untalented in this decorous warmth. I associated it with people who’d been curated for success from their potty training to their PhD. Please. No, please, you go, they insisted. Me, I trampled others to get to the line, afraid I wouldn’t get to the end of my thought.
It’s so good to see you, said the professor who’d been yielded the time. What has it been, five years, more?
Three, I said. But remember. They were bad.
I would work to keep my remarks short in this meeting. Let others do all the talking.
The other professor said I looked great.
You look younger! I mean, you always looked young. But now you look younger. How can that be? No fair!
This spurred the other professor to ask what I was eating and doing for exercise. Everyone leaned in for further inspection. I was a buffet item, diners poking round me and wondering about my components.
It’s gluten! I mean, it’s not. You’ve cut out gluten.
The first professor said nobody ever regretted getting rid of all their wheat. Except in those world-building games where it’s the next best resource to bricks and ore.
The second professor asked me to remind her of my age. She said she had recently coauthored a paper on women and aging. “An Objective Hermeneutics of Hotness.” A detour from her usual field of endeavor, but a whole lot of fun. She said she came out of the project determined never to dissemble or disguise when it came to her age.
OK, let me see, she said. She slipped her glasses down her nose and back up. Forty-five?
I made a greater-than sign with my thumb and finger. No. No. I refuse to believe that. You’re not in your fifties.
I didn’t say I was in them, I said. I’m not deep in the thicket. But I am over the threshold.
Two people still hadn’t spoken. One sent a chat message to say there were sound problems. The other relented and said it was nice to be asked to this. He used to want to be my lover at one time, and he still sent a birthday message at exactly nine in the morning on every turning of my year.
And what is this, exactly? Hi, everyone, by the way!
I said I was leaving the country for good. The jig was up. Fifteen years. They wouldn’t have known, I said, but I’d always had my limit set. A woman on the radio said she took stock in year five and really made an audit at year ten. But by then she was waist-high in paperwork and memorizing the thirteen original states. It was too late for U-turning when you went that far down the pike, she lamented. The radio presenter tried to rally her, asking which were the two longest rivers in a cheery Saturday voice.
I heard that show, one friend said, the first to the podcast idea. I answered the Mississippi but forgot about the Missouri. Hey, wait. Don’t you have the Tombigbee down there?
Sort of, I said. I flow into it at a certain point.
I was asked about work from here on out. I said my institution would let me work out my contract remotely. I’d be doing the same old thing, just with a six-hour time difference. They were pulling back my health insurance and rounding down their retirement contribution. I sounded tedious, like a documentarian narrating labor abuses. Still, attempts were made to tackle my news as though it had some vital import.
That’s not too bad. I mean, I don’t know how academia works, but that sounds civilized. Is it?
We will always go back to the sea. JFK.
I keep seeing academia called academe. Which is it?
But someone keenly wanted to cut to the meat. Why was I taking this step, after all this time, just when things were slowly turning for the better?
I thought of the weather app. Times of cloud, clearing to mud and sun. Instead I told them about the graveyard on the edge of town. It was called Memorial Park and had knee-high stones and no significant trees of any stature.
That’s not where I want to join the shades, I said. I’m leaving the country and heading home.
Their screens clouded over.
Everyone’s been thinking like that. Who’ll be responsible for my decline and disposal. But for goodness’ sake. You’re nowhere near.
That person, the deferential professor, looked left, smiled at a person or a pet nearby. Then back to the screen with full concentration.
If you and I were talking one to one, I’d be telling you this sooner. But no time like the present moment and a bunch of total strangers. So.
A head and shoulders joined her, got too close to the camera, filled the screen with stubble and collars. It was the colleague I used to call And Its Discontents. He was forever tacking that phrase on to topics and thought.
Yes, she said, tilting her head on his shoulder. We’re engaged. Re-engaged.
He lifted her hand closer to our eyes. A green scarab ring. He kissed the beetle and wrung the hand awhile. Years ago they got married so antiseptically that nobody realized they were spouses until they divorced. And then it was a public duel to the death every day. He took to wearing ascots. My group of online guests suited this man.
Now he took both her hands and kissed them separately. Then he kissed each finger. I prayed nothing more was to come, no sucking, no “Round and Round the Garden Like a Teddy Bear.” People were sitting back now. Somewhere popcorn was on the hop. I was still emcee, though, and had to keep the show going.
I wanted to say goodbye from this end, I said loftily, rather than notify you from the other.
She hasn’t heard from you in a year. A year. And she has tried. And now you bring us on, on here, for this dog and pony show?
And Its Discontents was stung and he caught on like contagion.
Very true, said first professor. I’m not sure what you need from us. Everyone’s burned out being online and trying to cope.
The would-be lover cleared his throat.
This. Is. Weird. And I’ve been to funerals this way. And weddings. I’ve taken cooking lessons. All of that was weird, but this is just weird.
The tiles were flipping against me. I found the ones that knew me best and threw myself on their mercy. I asked about their wedding plans. That beautiful back garden, maybe? They’d always loved to host.
They were clever, anxious people who used to plan potluck dinners. They persevered even when nobody brought anything tasty or pricey. Blueberry beer, the rubbery wrappers for spring rolls. Kitchen paper for cleaning up after. Nobody ever stayed to help.
And Its Discontents moved to the moment. His wine balloon visible now, he struck it with a pencil and said that remarriage to the same person was like an artist’s late style.
The idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal. Adorno on Beethoven’s later work. Disharmonious, catastrophic even. And thus modern! Here’s to my dear disharmony!
He turned to kiss his betrothed’s ear and raise his glass higher, closer to us all. And to whatever else you’re all on here celebrating!
I had attended their first wedding, invited because I was new to the country and collectible. The bride’s father drank small bottles of Japanese beer and watched all the clever, anxious people get very familiar with the open bar. All night he watched them like a hunter’s dog waiting for birds to drop in the wetlands.
The re-betrotheds huddled even closer together now. They gazed out winsomely, like shelter animals who needed to get adopted together. Maybe I had done something valuable here. An unexpected, possibly hopeful event had come to people’s attention. I was ready to end the call on this note.
`Someone’s background changed to a hovering fog in which kitchen cupboards dissolved. People touched their necklaces and their collars. Someone parted their hair from left to right. Children in framed photos looked fat and thin and extraterrestrial. Lassitude was gathering. My eyes looked droopy, in need of serum cold from the fridge.
The would-be lover tried again. He asked me to summarize what had been going on in my life since last we’d spoken or spent time.
I take it back, he said. Not summarize. Synopsize is a better word, don’t you think?
He was sending out beams of old longing and I had no choice. The Synoptic Gospels, I said, to keep things ticking over.
That doesn’t come from the same word, he said, burrs in his voice like a knife halfway to sharpened.
And Its Discontents rumbled to be heard.
The Synoptic Gospels! The Jesus in those three texts is wooden compared with John’s guy. Now he’s kooky and mystic. I call him Lennon Jesus.
This released people to wind down.
We could stay on here all night, I said. The hard kernel of the party that refuses to crack. It was lovely to see you all.
When God is set to close a door, someone jams their foot to hold it ajar. And a new member joined the meeting. An old friend who’d texted that he couldn’t make it but had good reasons. The first thing I saw was how thinned he was. His eyes were wintry and his shutters coming down.
Don’t worry, don’t worry, he clamored. Hey, everyone. I’ve had my liver out and a new one fitted back in its place. If you’re wondering, the pain feels like the weight of Australia.
I said the Irish bardic poets used to put slabs of rock on their stomachs to slow them down enough to focus on their art. The pressure, the solitude, I suppose.
I don’t believe that, he said. Still, though. Buddhist monks in training were known to sleep on stone or wooden pillows. They woke up many times in the night to meditate.
He jabbed his thumb into his pillow.
This thing, though. Filled with foam. Nuggets fall out every day, but I just can’t find the hole.
It was a lousy pillow. It was a lousy room. The stuff of care and cleaning was tubed and lumped all around him.
I said I’d send a pillow. Two.
They don’t let anything in, he said. They’re fanatical about foreign bodies.
Your little starstruck innuendos. And Its Discontents sang in low barks. Inadequacies and foreign bodies.
Wait, my thin friend said. Wait. I know it! No. I don’t know the song. But I know it’s Van Morrison.
He sat back satisfied and gained some height against the feeble pillow. He said I was exactly the same. I peeled back hair and showed roots, I squinched my eyes to show all the lines. When he laughed, it seemed to hurt him blissfully.
That’s not my point, he said, his voice smoothing out, his chest settling under the covers. I didn’t say you look the same as ever. You just are.
Only two others looked like they believed it. And Its Discontents tilted things by giving a thumbs-up. Nobody could leave in good conscience because the new arrival’s cheeks were promontories, the skin polished and raw.  He was hungry for  an audience. I bet he finally looked like one of his uncles I heard about sporadically. They had wine cellars dug into dark hillsides. Their wives died more than they did, and suddenly, and young.
When I said I was leaving the country, he said he already knew. Like a bolt of blue from the sky. I knew. I just did.
He asked if we knew the ancient Greeks didn’t have blue. He wondered why he was thinking of it now.
It’s thought they couldn’t see it because they couldn’t make it as a pigment, he said. They were sure of red, though. And yellow and white and black.
I was wearing my reds again, and he was glad. And the Greeks would be glad of my red.
So the Greeks were color blockers, I said.
I pulled my turtleneck up and over my nose.
That’s not a bad look, he said. Monte Cristo. You have the eyes to carry it off.
He turned us toward a big window. He told us to look at the magnolia.
It’s as old and tall as a ship, he said. This place has a lovely vista. Even when I see the things in the trees. The meds, don’t you know.
He shied his head, as though listening to beautiful, heart-shaking music.
Donne sur, he said.
One of the professors sailed in.
Gives onto, overlooks, looks upon, opens to, she said. French is such a generous language. I wish I knew it better. I wish I could return the favor.
We were gathering carefully round him now, with anything we knew and could contribute.
Pillow sham, someone noticed. The stupidest of all household decor.
The pillow sham was quilted and patterned with autumn foliage. New England, long drives through tannic light. Small, self-contained towns and an unfriendliness that was still somehow reasonable.
Who needs this? He hauled the pillow out from under his back and worked off the pillow sham. Who needs as much stuff as this?
We’ll need the shams to trade with zombies when they come, I said. They love all that chambray crap.
If you go on a road trip anytime soon, he said, at least get a dog. At least grant me that. The company. And not beside you, either. In the back. With the seatbelt designed for dogs. Because if it’s a big dog, and you hit the brakes, Buster goes sailing forward and breaks your neck. Think about that.
For someone who never learned to drive, he knew some useful protocols. Where am I traveling, anyway, in this picture? I asked. And Buster was an inadequate name.
I don’t know, he said. I don’t care if you’re only driving around the block or to another county. That’s what you call them, isn’t it, counties? Woman and Dog in Car in County Blah at Twilight. I can see you in it.
It was dark at his window by now. The magnolia loomed like a galleon. His eyes were lit with dark mirth and exhaustion.
I told him about an alert sign on the interstate. MISSING SENIOR. 86, LAST SEEN DRIVING A YELLOW HONDA.
Yellow! That’s a full-fledged person that can’t be contained. Go, him!
I worried the story ended in the Honda gone into a tree, its wings folded round the valiant senior.
The one who needed love and recognition conjured a different road trip for me.
If you were a missing senior, you would make it all the way to a bright beach city. I know that about you! No stops for gas and snacks.
He was dreamy in his storytelling, his head cupped in his hands.
Hey. Hey, now!
It was the professor who dabbled in hermeneutics.
She’s neither missing nor a senior.
I gammed on a moment, giving adorable, childish waves to anyone along the coastal roads. I said I would excel at being a missing senior because I’d make sure not to be found.
That is kind of sad.
She was back, more loudly, the friend with mic problems. She said it was horrible to think of anyone being missing and not being found. Her eyes were dim with concern.
I worry about people, she said. I worry about all of you, and I don’t know you. I worry about all the people you know that I don’t know.
The friend on the hospital pillow brightened with interest. Ooh, his eyes said. We’ve got a live one here.
And Its Discontents honored her anxiety.
That’s perhaps your pure altruism coming through. The concern and wish to aid complete strangers. Most people are reciprocal in their dealings. Like, what does this gain me?
He was holding his wineglass askew now, close to capsizing, and his gallant lady brought it back to rights. I’d forgotten how subtle, how elegant a person she was. Some of us got a few short grabs at grace, others held it all the way through.
The friend who worried about everyone said she didn’t want to help strangers, per se. It was just that she thought about them more than she used to.
That was my cue. I wrote a private message to the hospital. Let’s not wait so long the next time.
He bopped back at top speed.
Maybe next time I’ll have a few cute kidneys to show off!
There was an air of reluctance to call it an afternoon. Because of the high, narrow bed and the medical machinery’s little red lights, it seemed we were leaving someone to the empty room Blaise Pascal said no man should be afraid to sit in alone. Yet he was and I saw it. I sent another message.
I hope whoever’s changing your catheter is getting something out of the transaction.
You! You haven’t changed! Actually I’ve promised him all the martinis I’ll never drink again.
While I was laughing and crying and explaining nothing, I was thanked and wished well and bidden farewell. Everyone said it was nice to meet everyone else. Then, like items from a magician’s tablecloth, they all went away.
I made tea and put away things in the kitchen. I tried to count off everyone who’d spoken. The night was cooling and quieting round me. Someone hadn’t. Or had they? One spring I counted the whippoorwill’s cries, in that off-hour when the sky gets marooned between dark and light. I was new to town and trying to learn. My tally was seven hundred, though I heard the record ran to a thousand.
Then pipit, pipit from the front room. The laptop. Someone was budging around, huffing, speaking to themselves in birdlike bleats. My friend in the hospital was moving his sheets as loudly as sheafed paper, trying to find the one cool, comfortable spot everyone knows to be there. I stayed behind the lid to listen to his feedback. Anything could happen next. Believing themselves unseen, unheard, people did rash stuff during lulls in their online meetings. I waited for an indiscretion. I loitered until I heard his name spoken by a nurse who wanted nothing but ease and relief for him, who maybe even loved him. I stayed up late until his room fell fully into silence within the full and sumptuous darkness cast by magnolias. I stayed in my chilly front room at a meeting I hadn’t left or ended.

Sylvie Baumgartel

The Hamburg Sisters in Nebraska

We don’t talk about that.
We make fruitcakes.
We love our husbands like cardboard.
We keep our nails trimmed close.
The skin under our eyes is like
Drowned moons.
The skin between our eyes is
Gathered like skirt pleats.
We hide our purple nipples.
We forget our language.
You can’t speak it anymore anyway.
We crochet dresses from bakery string.
We stink of candy grease.
We collect dolls with soft cloth
Bodies & hard limbs.
At church they say to us:
You stink of doughnuts, poor idiots.
The folks who eat our
Doughnuts call us “hamburgers.”
They think it’s funny.
Moving from South Dakota to Nebraska.
To Iowa. Back to Nebraska.
Town to town after the bakery fails.
The children stink of bakery grease.
We can’t wash off that smell
Even when bathed in kerosene.
We press violets in dictionaries.
We starve in the basement
During a tornado.

Sylvie Baumgartel

Rebel

Savonarola was hanged & burned
With two others in the same
Square where he had called for the
Mass burning of paintings,

Mirrors, books & makeup.
A giant bonfire of all that
Takes us away from
Pure joy, he said.
Savonarola condemned
Corrupt papal power.

The Florentine children
Danced & laughed
& threw stones at the
Dangling, burning men.

Lawrence O’Dwyer

Piedra de Sol

The workshop is a cluttered, busy space. There are clamps and drills, chisels and burins; the tools might be those of a cobbler or a stonemason. Drawers are stuffed with wires and molds. A cast-iron disc is lost in a blur of speed. There is a microscope on a bench behind me. A middle-aged man in a white coat is talking excitedly. Between index finger and thumb he’s holding a blood-red stone as he tells me that it’s the high percentage of chromium that makes it burn so brightly. The man I’m talking to is a master craftsman, a main d’or. It’s a ruby that he’s holding in his hand.
The technique that he’s explaining is the mystery setting, the serti mysterieux. It involves setting precious stones side by side in such a way that the underlying metal cannot be seen. For a bracelet of rubies, the result is a corona of light that has a lustrous, velvet shine. Patented in 1933, the mystery setting is a secret that’s passed on from master to apprentice in the workshop of Van Cleef & Arpels. The work begins with sketches and drawings, followed by models and mock-ups that establish volume. The the “rails” are prepared, thin wires made of gold or platinum that hold the stones in place.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a wooden lapidary stick tipped with heated wax was used to hold the stones against the rotating disc. Today, the stick is made of acrylic resin, but little else has changed. Tools are handed down from master to apprentice; hammers are engraved with the names of mains d’or who are no longer alive though their tools are still in use.
Having worked all his life with precious stones, he has a fine appreciation of chemistry and mineralogy, but what he’s trying to achieve is a psychological effect, and his most important tool is a cast-iron disc. Sprinkled with water and diamond dust thickened with oil, it spins at 3,600 revolutions per minute. The noise a stone makes when laid on the grinding wheel gives him a sense of position and inclination; coordinates are aural as well as visual and tactile. Each stone has a different feel—sapphires are softer than rubies; diamonds are harder but more brittle than rubies. Each gem is carefully selected. Only stones classified at the top end of the scale of the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) are used; stones with a grade of D or E—the scale extends all the way to Z. A ranking of flawlessness is also used. He may work with stones that are designated IF (internally flawless). Rarer still but not unknown in this workshop are stones that are free from both internal and external blemishes, which are designated FL—perfectly flawless stones.
After cutting and faceting, tracks are carved into the gem that are used to slide it into the gold bezel. The secret within the secret is “the door,” a removable part through which the cutter inserts the stones; it is then closed and soldered shut. The door is the key to the architecture of the entire piece.
I am asked to praise the jewels but see the hands instead—the dirt under the fingernails. The craftsman has dedicated his life to the serti mysterieux, and it is this obsessiveness that delights the mind as much as the eye. The workshop is just a few blocks from the flagship boutique of Van Cleef & Arpels, on the Place Vendôme. We are in the center of Paris.

The French take jewelry seriously. To begin with, they have two words where English has one: bijouterie, for precious metals; joaillerie, for stones with a minimum of metalwork. But the history of the maison—it is not a company—begins in the lowlands with two Jewish families, one from Amsterdam, the other from Ghent. In 1864, Léon Salomon Arpels moves to Paris, where he becomes a jewelry merchant. He is joined in 1867 by Salomon Van Cleef, a specialist in the art of cutting stones. His son, Alfred, is apprenticed for six years to the lapidist David & Grosgogeat before he establishes himself as a maker of precious stones. In 1897, Alfred marries his cousin Estelle Arpels.
If the folktale of Van Cleef & Arpels is a love story, its language is Dutch. A seagoing nation with a kingdom as small as a ship in a bottle, not fond of loose or ragged talk, the Dutch do not say “I love you”; instead they say “Ik hou van jou,” literally “I hold to you”—a maritime expression full of anchors and stays. A curious blend—the French and their extravagant poets; the Dutch and their sober merchants. It is that mortar and pestle of high and low—the dirt under the fingernails, the fire of the ruby—that’s at the heart of the workshop. Amid the garage-like clutter, with his microscope and cast-iron disc, the main d’or reminds me of a scientist. The workshop looks very much like a lab I used to work in—a patch- clamp lab.

Patch clamping is a technique that revolutionized neuroscience. With a glass pipette pressed gently against the membrane of a neuron, it lets you listen to the fine Morse code of the brain. The technique earned its inventors, Neher and Sakmann, a Nobel Prize in 1991. A long apprenticeship is needed before you can record the microscopic currents that flow through the brain. It is an art as much as a science; from the “pulling” of glass pipettes to the building of a patch-clamp rig, everything is artisanal.
I worked in a lab in the Department of Physiology at Trinity College Dublin, where shafts of sunlight struggled to pass through the great bay windows; the glass was grimed with the fumes of the city. On the shelves were tinctures and chipped cups, brushes and boxes, jars of bolts and screws. The rig was attached to an inner wall, an outer wall being more susceptible to vibration. It sat on an anti-vibration table. Every aspect of the work was sensitive to movement.
I would peer through a microscope, inspecting a slice of brain that was resting inside a little Perspex bath that was perfused with a constant flow of bubbling liquid. The slice was the size of the nail on your little finger. Lowering the pipette was like lowering a needle onto a record, only the needle was made of glass.
The rig was enclosed inside a Faraday cage—a wire-mesh box, open on one side, to allow access to the slice. Without the cage, the recording would be drowned in fifty hertz noise—the frequency of the mains supply. I used to disconnect the wires that earthed the rig just to watch fifty hertz waves rolling across the screen  of an oscilloscope. The green crests looked quite beautiful.
The stimulating electrode was made of Stablohm wire, an alloy of chromium and copper. The recording pipette I made myself. I would place a thin glass straw about ten centimeters long between the grooves of two metal clamps insider a “puller.” After I closed the lid and started the laser, a beam would focus light onto the middle of the pipette until it glowed red. The clamps pulled the glass apart, slowly teasing out the strands, before the final gunshot bang. Opening the lid: two perfect little spears of glass.
When I first arrived at the lab, there was a rig left over, but I was advised to take it apart and put it back together before starting any experiments. It wasn’t really advice, more an unspoken rule. It was the only way to learn how each part worked. After I’d built and rebuilt the rig, I had to learn how to prepare brain slices. The dissection took months to learn. The best handiwork with a scalpel I ever saw was that of Jianqun, a former surgeon, who asked me once to guess his fastest time removing an appendix. I can’t remember his record time, but the grace of his work was a joy to watch. The dissection needed to be fast— the tissue would die if it wasn’t transferred to a recovery bath in less than two minutes.

A delicate slice, a precious stone: as the main d’or showed me the ruby, he dropped it on the floor. I took a deep breath, somehow thinking that I was responsible for a mishap with serious consequences, that my presence was the cause of this lapse in concentration, but the way he got down on his hands and knees reminded me of how many times I’d dropped a slice of brain on the bench of the lab. After rummaging about, he got back on his feet with the ruby in his hand. He carried on, unperturbed. A brain slice is similarly robust; as long as it is wet and perfused with oxygen, it can handle a little tumble.
Another similarity between the two places was their unusual relationship with the digital world. Although patch clamping and stonecutting are manual skills, computers nevertheless contribute to the work. The electrodes in the patch clamp were connected in series, first to an analog-to-digital converter, then to an oscilloscope, and finally to a computer, where the voltages of neurons were transformed into peaks and troughs on a screen before being stored on the spinning disc of a hard drive.
After my tour of the workshop, I was brought to another room, where four designers were working on new prototypes. No garage-like clutter here, no lapidary sticks or melting wax. As I leaned over the shoulder of one designer to look at a rendering of a bracelet on a screen, he reminded me in a perfunctory yet polite tone that I should be aware of the secrecy of this work. Jewelry is a hermetic world. It is also competitive. We were just a few blocks from the Place Vendôme, the epicenter of the rarefied world of high jewelry. It is not by accident that Van Cleef & Arpels opened its doors here in 1906. By then two of the most exclusive hotels in Paris, Le Meurice and the Ritz, were already established on the Place Vendôme. Other neighbors included the rival houses of Boucheron and Lalique. Chaumet followed in 1907. Mauboussin arrived after the First World War. Just for color, Franz Mesmer and Frédéric Chopin lived there in the nineteenth century. Around the corner, on the rue de la Paix, you’ll find Cartier. With celebrity comes its corollary, secrecy. In that room full of computers, intellectual property was precious. In computer terminology, the operating system was closed.

Anyone who does four years of research ends up knowing at least one or two things about science. For my part, I know that the last page is always the first, and that neither would ever be written without the help of others.
Those were the opening words of my thesis. Research is a collaborative affair. Every thesis is a log of an apprenticeship. What I’d really learned was how to go about the art of science. There are a few simple rules that you assimilate, ethics that enter your soma. If you don’t know something, always say so. Read as much as you can. Share your knowledge. Even when you think you know something, be assured: you know almost nothing.
I studied the wiring of the brain, how memories are formed and stored. Along with memory I learned an architecture with many secret doors—orphan receptors, magnesium- gated channels, phosphorylated chains. After three years of research, I learned something else: I’d had enough of slaughtering animals. At the end of each day I would bring a bucket full of rat heads to a freezer in the basement. I wanted to work with humans, not rats, so I turned to a new technique after my thesis had been accepted: MRI, magnetic resonance imaging.

The first medical scanner I used was manufactured by Siemens. In 1857, Wilhelm Siemens invented the regenerative furnace, which led to a boom in the production of cheap glass. Until then, glass had been handblown, mostly green and brown, and quite expensive. The sudden availability of cheap glass had many consequences, but one that historians rarely mention is the boom in the art of the ship in a bottle. The first recorded date of this art is 1810; naturally enough, it comes from the seagoing nation of the Netherlands. Before the arrival of the Siemens furnace, glass would have been too valuable to be used for such a frivolous art. But a ship in a bottle is a beautiful thing. On days of shore leave, sailors made them from the leftovers of drinking sessions—matches and plug for mast and hull, a torn shirt for a sail—and then traded them for cigarettes and beer. Whenever I see a patient being reversed into the bore of a magnet, I can’t help thinking of a ship in a bottle.
Scanners have two main modes of operation. Functional MRI (fMRI) studies the activation of neurons—a kind of oceanography of the storms and currents inside the brain. I was more interested in structural MRI—the mapping of the hemispheres, simple cartography, the discovery of New Spain.
My first postdoctoral work after the patch-clamp lab was in Frankfurt. Alois Alzheimer’s grave was a short walk from the psychiatric hospital where I worked, and my first job was to analyze 1,054 scans from a study of Alzheimer’s disease. It was my introduction to “big data.”
To begin with, the scans needed tidying up. The way a photographer might crop a frame or equalize tint and tone, I corrected for motion and cropped the skull from each frame. Then the serious work began: alignment with nonlinear algebra. I had to find a template, a reference brain that would be the most representative of the entire sample. All brains would then be warped onto the globe of that reference for comparison. In short, more nonlinear algebra than a single computer could handle. I needed a supercomputer. I needed to learn how to code.

The Linux operating system is open-source, free. Almost without exception, it is the system of choice for every academic supercomputer. The reason is simple: for complex parallel computing, no other system is as powerful or as stable. Linux was conceived at the end of the twentieth century when Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki, posted a message to the internet asking for some suggestions as to what people might like to see in a new operating system that he was hoping to build. He received useful feedback, as well as offers of help. Two months later, the first version of Linux was released, together with its source code—the program’s DNA. Without the source code, a program cannot be altered or developed by a third party. Linux was characterized from the beginning by its openness.
The kinship between Linux and the academic community is not accidental. The first computer scientists came from a small group of programmers who called themselves hackers. Today there are many kinds of hacks and hackers—good and bad—but the term originally referred to a small group of scientists working in MIT in the late 1960s, people who were passionate about writing code. It was only in the 1980s that journalists started to use the term loosely to denote those who specialized in writing computer viruses. The difference between black-hat and white-hat hackers is much like the difference between a chemist who is interested in making crystal meth and one who is interested in making insulin or quinine.
In his book The Hacker Ethic, the Finnish computer scientist Pekka Himanen describes an enthusiastic attitude to work that he pits against the idea of work as an obligation, even a moral imperative, an idea espoused by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In Weber’s treatise, work is primarily a drudge, more often than not devoid of passion. By contrast, hackers are driven by a desire to create, often within teams that form spontaneously, as was the case when Torvalds and a small group of friends came together around the idea of creating a new operating system. Most of all, there is a commitment to share one’s skills. Individual breakthroughs are handed back to the community for the advancement of the project. Share early, share often is the hacker’s mantra. With many eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. This was the community that I was about to get to know.

A friend of a friend gave me the email address of a physicist who specialized in MRI at a research institute in France. I wrote to him. Despite the fact that he knew very little about me, he invited me to his lab. I gave a vague explanation to my supervisor and booked a flight. I had no idea what was going to happen.
The man I met on that cold December morning in Normandy seemed quick and sparrow-like. He was informally dressed, in his mid-forties, with short black hair and glasses; his words were fast and clipped. He seemed interested in the “project”—my code word for a big problem that I had no clue how to solve.
Only later did I learn how fortuitous my timing had been. Franck had been managing the supercomputer at his institute for many years. He was also running his own experiments—almost on the side, though it was supposed to be the other way around. A smoothly running supercomputer (which doesn’t exist) depends on a team of dedicated computer scientists working round the clock to keep a very complex machine purring over. Hundreds of emails needed answering every week—regarding software bugs, hardware upgrades, and the allocation of computing time, which gave his job a quasi-political tone, as research groups are always in competition when it comes to using a valuable resource like a supercomputer. The week before I showed up, he had handed over all that oily, dirty work to a colleague. I caught him in the transition phase: he was still enjoying the luxury of not having a hundred bugs to fix before the end of the week.
Curious, then, that his first meeting was with a stranger. As he settled into his desk, I noticed that his screen was filled with lines of green code—a command-line interface. No GUIs—graphical user interfaces. If you work on a laptop, you know what GUIs are: the windows and tabs that we click on every day when we use Facebook or Zoom or Instagram. In computing there is a clear distinction between the front end and the back end. Veteran programmers are notorious for building dated-looking home pages. What counts is the code; it is almost a point of principle for those who spend their lives working at the garage end of things to spend as little time as possible with something as frivolous as a GUI or a home page.
It didn’t take Franck long to realize that he was looking at a very “heterogeneous” data set—another code word, meaning a mess. As he called up images on the screen, lines of code started to flow. He asked me what I wanted from the “pipeline.” Maybe a T1-weighted analysis? What about tractography? Yes, tractography was what I was after—a technique I was attracted to primarily for its beauty. Tractographic maps trace the vast arboretum of white-matter pathways in the brain; the images this technique creates are the equal of any serti mysterieux and a good deal more complex: color-coded labyrinths of tangled trees and roots, a botany of forking paths that no one will ever fully understand. The timeworn analogy of the brain as a computer is lazy and incorrect. As an organic structure, its complexity is far closer to that of a jungle than a computer.
As the hours went by, some semblance of understanding began to form, but it was more feeling than understanding. I was beginning to see what the back end looked like. Ultimately, I wanted the “pipeline” to crop and turn, to warp and calculate every kind of analysis we could think of. Each scan consisted of three-dimensional pixels called voxels. Each voxel represented about a cubic millimeter of brain. Once we’d made a tractographic map for a single subject, each voxel in the map had to be projected into the coordinate space of the reference brain. These transformations with nonlinear algebra needed to be performed on each and every voxel. The total number of voxels in the data set was roughly equivalent to 1 followed by enough zeroes to fill a hundred pages. Neuroscience is a form of jealous counting.
On my second morning, I got to the lab at about nine thirty. We had worked for ten hours the day before. By the third day, even if I couldn’t keep up, I was familiar with the speed of Franck’s thought. In the manner of a chess player, he was always projecting three or four moves ahead, scanning the horizon for openings. The code itself was engraved with his own peculiar touch: he called the pipeline “Bushmills”; for debugging, he often named his variables “Moo.” But what I remember most from that first week is the way he would pause after he’d reached a confluence or a barrier in the code. I could see him working out the solution, but before he veered down any new line of attack he would always say, “I propose.” He made it sound as though I might have an alternative point of view; as though I might be able to point to something that he’d overlooked. But it was indicative of his way of thinking—a reflex and a style at once. Never presumptuous, that pause before the lines of code would start to flow again. Always “I propose.” For Franck, problems were adversaries to be outwitted. But there was an etiquette to his attack. On my last day I gave him a present of a black belt.

The academic model is far from perfect, and my circumstances in Frankfurt should make it clear that I am not naive about science. I lived on Weberstrasse, and the drudgery of the Protestant work ethic that Himanen had railed against was alive and well in Germany. I was based in a psychiatric hospital where patients danced and screamed in the garden beyond my office window. I might have even been working on the scans of some of those patients who were dancing in the garden. This hospital was the most hierarchical environment I have ever known. The director was a well-known autocrat and bully. He parked his Mercedes-Benz by the front door, where he insisted on having a space marked with his initials. A psychiatrist once mentioned in passing that he knew where the score would fall if he could ever get the director to complete a questionnaire measuring clinical psychopathy. The atmosphere was one of fear; the director’s strategy was to pit researchers against one another. Dozens of doctors left the department. The board of the hospital made an unprecedented effort to dismiss him.
I was immune from these politics, mostly because I’d found a way of working absolutely alone. It was made clear to me that if I didn’t produce a paper, I would be out of a job, but I was the only one automating MRI in the lab: they needed my code, or rather Franck’s code. It was an old-fashioned place; my colleagues were expected to squeeze a few drops of research out of the nanometer gaps in their clinical schedules. They had no time to learn new techniques. I was not a clinician, so I spent all hours of the day and night logged on to the supercomputer in France. Once or twice a week, Franck would also log on and we’d work together on the command line. I felt an acute sense of having to be on my toes for those joint sessions. I was slow, but how far I’d progressed can be noted by the simple fact that I had not coded before. Franck saw that I was learning. He must have also seen that my learning was a direct result of his teaching. That kind of feedback loop can go a long way.

Competition is integral to all work, and the open-source model of Linux uses competition to develop its operating system in an innovative way. Different versions are made by competing groups, and then Torvalds and a few principal developers decide which versions will be incorporated in updated releases of the software. If there is disagreement with Torvalds, any individual or group within the community is free to develop the project in whatever direction they choose by releasing their own version of Linux.
That sense of constructive competition was entirely absent in Frankfurt. Despite repeated threats from the director, conveniently conveyed by a middleman, I did exactly as I pleased. I felt no loyalty to anyone in that lab, but I did have a loyalty to Franck. I wanted to make use of the work he’d done. In the hacker model, work always begins with a problem that the hacker finds personally interesting. I enjoyed that sense of combat that I’d learned from Franck. I could feel how satisfying it is to write good code. Working with an inert mass of zeroes and ones, I tried to get light to pass through my code.

In the week that I sat alongside Franck, there was one ritual that took him away from the pipeline. He called it his “technology watch”—the half hour or so that he set aside every day for reading the online forum of the MRI software we were using. It was a program developed at the University of Oxford, also open-source. Beginners, professors, postdocs—everyone could be found there. The questions were often as useful as the answers—they pointed to new analyses that needed tweaks and hacks that might take the code in unexpected directions.
As I got used to asking questions on that forum, I was struck by the informality of the community. The only protocol was that you should read the documents provided by the group in Oxford; if you couldn’t find your answer there, then you should look for your question in the threads of previous discussions. If you still couldn’t find your answer, you were guaranteed to get help from the community. I was surprised when one of the original creators of the software answered a question that I posted. No “Herr Professor,” as was the case in Frankfurt. It was Steve, plain and simple. Another feature of the back end: titles were irrelevant.

I wish I’d known about Prince Boris when I worked in Frankfurt. I only learned about him before I visited Van Cleef & Arpels. Aside from his assertion that he came from a noble family of White Russians, not much is known about Boris’s life before he pitched up in Andorra in 1934 with the idea of becoming the monarch of that tiny principality. We do know that he arrived in England after fleeing the Russian Revolution without even a passport to his name. His flair for languages landed him a job with the British Foreign Office. After that, he claims to have spent time at the Dutch royal household, whence the further supposition that Queen Wilhelmina had granted him the title “Count of Orange” even though the title “Van Oranje” is a privilege of the royal family that cannot be given to a commoner. It is true that he became a Dutch citizen; the Dutch consulate at Dijon issued him a passport in 1923. His given name in that document is “Monsieur le Baron Skossyreff.” A year later, he appears on a list of “prominent foreign revolutionaries” compiled by the Dutch Central Intelligence Service. More succinctly, they call him  “an international swindler.”
On his brightest adventure, Boris was accompanied by an American millionairess, Florence Marmon, the ex-wife of Howard C. Marmon, owner of the Marmon Motor Car Company of Indianapolis. Using a generous allowance from her ex-husband, she provided the financial backing for Boris’s “reasoned presentation of his claim to the throne of Andorra.” The quotation is from a confidential dispatch preserved in the archive of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK. Some days later, the Council of the Valleys of Andorra, essentially the Andorran government, expelled Boris along with Marmon, who was acting as his secretary. When he decamped to the Hotel Mundial, in La Seu d’Urgell, three miles down the road, he was, according to contemporary accounts, sporting a monocle and generally affecting the airs of a prince.
While in “exile” he printed ten thousand copies of the constitution of his prospective kingdom, which more than irritated the bishop of Urgell—who was, and still is, the de facto co-prince of Andorra, together with the president of France. Remarkably, on July 8, the Council of the Valleys met at the manor house of the Casa de la Vall, the parliament of the principality, to discuss the matter further. With its wooden benches and rustic dais, the chamber of the Casa de la Vall is more like the banquet hall of a medieval fiefdom than a seat of government. At that meeting, the attorney general affirmed that the “dynamic outsider” was committed to making Andorra one of the most important business centers in the world. The vote of the chamber was 23 to 1 in favor of installing Boris as the new monarch. We should note that the mayor of Encamp refused to support the motion. The council met once more, on July 10. Another vote was taken—23 to 1. The mayor of Encamp would not be swayed, though it hardly mattered, as the new monarchy had been declared on the previous day and Boris was already busy outlining to journalists his plans for the kingdom: “protection for the needy, education for all and sport, a lot of sport.”
Sadly, the new sporting paradise was not to be. On July 12, he issued a proclamation declaring war on the bishop of Urgell, and the following week the Spanish Civil Guard sent three constables and a sergeant to apprehend him. His “subjects” watched as he was handcuffed and packed off, first to Barcelona, then to Madrid, where he was interviewed at the central police station by a number of journalists, to whom he displayed a fine knowledge of the Andorran dynasty from medieval times to the last incumbent of the throne, the Duke of Guise. When asked if he himself descended from the duke, Boris clarified, after some hesitation, that his claim was based not on historic rights but rather on “principles of chivalry.”

“Well, I could tell you that I’m Prince Boris, and if I was going to buy that watch over there, you’d have to say, ‘Thank you very much, Prince Boris.’”
I was talking to the manager of Van Cleef & Arpels’ boutique at the Place Vendôme. Leafing through an old ledger, my eyes had rested on the name of a princess who had bought a necklace in the 1940s. Her name contained the z’s and y’s beloved of the Polish language. The watch I was pointing to had a price tag of 126,000 euros. From Boris’s pre-Andorran days, I’d read a newspaper article about an attempted swindle of a gold watch.
Earlier, I’d asked the young man about the Alhambra, a line of jewelry based on the motif of the four-leaf clover and inspired by a recurring pattern in the sultan’s palace in Granada. It is one of Van Cleef & Arpels’ most recognizable motifs. Although my guide had an impressive knowledge of the titles of his clientele, his knowledge of the Alhambra was less formidable. The work on display was the same as what I’d seen in the workshop—near perfect, technically flawless—but if the workshops breathed an air of obdurate craftsmanship that elevated the work, the showroom had the opposite effect. The Queen of Persia, the Princess of Monaco, the Prince of Wales: the price tags were discreet, but titles were everywhere.
A monarch’s desire for precious stones is natural enough—all rare and beautiful objects are signs of power—but it goes a little deeper than that; probably it goes back to water. Glittering stones remind us of light shimmering on the surface of flowing water. Our innate reverence for gems as simulacra of flowing water has been coded into our DNA.
We can exist for only a few days without water. Stagnant water is more likely to be contaminated with bacteria. Early nomadic humans were more likely to survive where they were able to find fresh water, especially clear and flowing water.
After I put the old ledger back into the glass cabinet, I was brought to an inner chamber. An automatic door opened and closed behind me. I was in a space like an egg, with a velvet lining; the young man informed me that only a select few of the maison’s clientele were welcomed into that egg. A panel on the wall opened to reveal a floor-to-ceiling mirror in which a princess might admire a diamond necklace. But it was a minaudière that I was shown next, a rectangular box made of gold and lacquer. Conceived by Charles Arpels in 1933, the first minaudière was designed to replace a lady’s vanity case. Although its function is largely redundant, it still retains an air of exclusivity, possibly because it is now a purely ornamental object. The interior and exterior of every minaudière provides ample opportunities for the designer to show off his skill. The store manager showed me a hidden watch that could be looked at discreetly when raised from the surface of the box.
“It would be rude for a princess to be seen looking at the time,” he added. Almost on cue, his mobile phone went off. Turning aside with the tick of a smile that reminded me of a grasshopper, he took the call.

Authenticity is difficult to define, but we know when we are in its presence. True works of art are almost always discreet and unobtrusive. What is purely ostentatious is no more than fashion, and fashion is based on novelty—the mother of death, as Leopardi noted. In a letter to a friend, John Keats described how we dislike poetry that “has a palpable design on us,” poetry that tries to catch our attention by grabbing us by the scruff of the neck. How the flowers would lose their beauty, he said, if they called out, “Admire me, I am a violet, dote on me, I am a primrose.”
The most perfect gem I know is not a stone; it is a song of thirst and water. I’m thinking of “Piedra de Sol,” a poem by Octavio Paz that begins with a river and flows for 584 lines before turning back to its source. The first six lines are the last six lines. There is a line for every day of Venus’s journey around the sun. The eleven-syllable—hendecasyllabic—lines are as finely carved as the facets of a ruby in the mystery setting. As a work of art, Paz created a song that shimmers like a sunstone: it is light-in-a-word. As the main d’or works with rubies and Franck with code, Octavio Paz carves words. Looking through a microscope at Van Cleef & Arpels at a ruby that had failed quality control, I could see a crack at the tip of a facet. We feel the same errors in poetry when a line is broken by ugly enjambment, the turning point where a phrase is folded over two lines. The finest work should flow in such a way that the river feels inevitable. We say that it must be so—it could be no other way. Or at least, the work gives us the illusion that we know in advance what comes next because there is no alternative; what is flowing is something that we have always felt, even if we have never experienced the current before. Few works of art reach this plane, but those that do surpass their creators.

Working on code and working on poetry are not as dissimilar as you might think. For a start, both almost always begin with too many lines. The first pass is full of bugs. Algorithms and poetry throw error messages in similar ways—stumbling rhyme, a lost quotation mark, a stranded dollar sign—blemishes that take a long time to find and fix. Another rule of code that applies to poetry: If five lines can do the job of fifty, the shorter code always wins. This isn’t only a question of computational resources, or the possibility of sending a program into a tailspin, although both are important considerations; it is primarily a question of style. Poets might call it something else, but they would certainly recognize what computer scientists call syntactic sugar: well-written, elegant code. In 1913, Ezra Pound published his Imagist poem “In a Station of the Metro” in the magazine Poetry. The first draft was thirty lines long. The final poem is two lines long. William Carlos Williams was rebuked for calling his poems machines, but I think he was correct when he said that prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship, while poetry is the machine that drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. “As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.”
But before I get too carried away, I should add that poets are very earthly creatures. Williams called his rival T. S. Eliot “that bastard” and went so far as to say that the most influential poem of the early twentieth century, The Waste Land, set him back twenty years. Make no mistake, competition is also an integral part  of poetry. The high and the low, the mortar and pestle—we seek to lose ourselves in work, to be consumed and absorbed by it, but the mulch and juice of our lives  is never far away,  even if the goal is to live for just an instant beyond the fray of  the world.

After months of writing code, I had a working “pipeline” that was built over endless hours of sharing scripts back and forth with Franck. There is nothing  more satisfying than submitting a “job” to a supercomputer, pressing the return key and, wonder of wonders, no error message is thrown. By the magic of parallel computing, I see that my single “job” has exploded into 1,054 sub-jobs. The code is working, and all engines are whirring. For comparing a patient group with control, MRI analysis often uses something called permutation testing. It’s a bit like playing a fruit machine five thousand times and logging the results of each spin. There is no greater pleasure than programming a machine to automate that kind of drudgery. Millions of calculations would still be running when I left the office on a Friday night. They would run through the weekend. They would be waiting for me when I logged on to the supercomputer on Monday morning. Some calculations whirred for more than a week before they came to a halt. Something complex and pleasing had spun out from the simple base pairs of our collaboration. Just over a year after my journey to France, our first paper was published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. I sent Franck a bottle of Bushmills.

The atelier of the jeweler, the lab of the patch clamp, the command line of the hacker, the white page of the poet—at the back end, the work is much the same. In all four cases, Gaudi’s dictum holds: love, then technique. It is only at the front end that differences emerge.
When I read the word poem inside a poem, almost always it is a sign that something has gone badly wrong. In my mind, an error message is thrown. When we call attention to the work at hand in such an obvious way, we are usually in the realm of the secondhand car salesman, the first cousin of Prince Boris. If there is poverty in a language in which there is only one word where two would be preferable, the opposite is also true. “Piedra de Sol” has been described as a surrealist masterpiece. I call it, plain and simple, beautiful. In the boutique on the Place Vendôme, I heard the word poetry so often that it reminded me that I once counted the number of times I heard the words “mi corazón” blaring from the stereo of a chicken bus that was taking me over the Andes. The scenery was sublime, the pop music less so.
The other tension between the back end and the front end is economic. Poetry has almost zero economic impact on the world, and that is, partly, its strength. As the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert said, the problem of commercially exploiting genuine tears is a real headache for technologists. “Piedra de Sol” is not an expensive or an exclusive work of art. It is not a $126,000 poem. Likewise, a main d’or does not earn enough money to be able to buy the bracelet he has created. Yet he possesses it in a way that is more profound than the Polish princess who wears it on her wrist.

Back end, front end; open, closed. We have an obsession with dichotomies that really don’t exist. Everything sits on a spectrum. It is true that there are differences between left and right brain functions, but they are more subtle than the usual clichés would suggest. We create a belief system about ourselves and the world around us by merging information from the senses with our memories. This belief system is constructed to a large degree by the left hemisphere. If there is anomalous information that doesn’t fit into this schema, the right hemisphere may smooth over the discrepancy in order to preserve the image we have of ourselves. All of this is inevitable and to a certain extent useful. A degree of optimism is necessary for all tasks beyond the trivial, especially for work that may consume us for many years. The architect of any dream needs a breezy indifference to the enormity of the task ahead. We must focus on the day-to-day details while keeping the final goal just a little bit blurred. Too near a focus and the problem overwhelms us; too soft a focus and discipline dissolves.
If our optimism—or our delusions—have their uses, there is also a limit, and we cross the threshold of that limit when we fabricate information to such an extent that we end up sounding like Prince Boris. But even Boris deserves our sympathy—a man who lost everything in the Russian Revolution, a man who arrived in England like thousands of other émigrés, looking desperately for a way to survive. The newspaper accounts of his life are always black-and-white: the swindler-thief in a land of gullible peasants, the operatic prince seducing the craven millionairess.
We are all fractured creatures striving to reconcile our contradictory natures. The profoundest experience that life can offer us, said Octavio Paz, is the possibility to discover reality as a oneness in which opposites agree. Gems also have a divided soul; it is difficult to reconcile a glittering ruby with the mine from which it came.
Mineralogy is a dirty business; it needs arsenic as well as little railway tracks that go deep down into Hades. Soot and dust fill the lungs of miners. Outside the town of Potosí, Bolivia, are the mines of Cerro Rico. Half a millennium after they were first opened, they were still in operation when I visited them at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is impossible to know how many people died in   those mines. A reasonable estimate might be five million souls, although there’s nothing reasonable about the history of mineralogy or mining. Descending into a shaft with head bent low, I came to a shrine for El Tío, the devil-god, the lord of the underworld. The miners still offer him cigarettes, dynamite, vodka, beer. He has a large erection. It is his union with Pachamama, the earth goddess, that created the bulging veins of Cerro Rico. El Tío has an insatiable appetite for souls. The miners try to appease him every day.
In the boutique at the Place Vendôme, a lady in a blue dress walked past me on a carpet that was as deep as snow. She bore a tray with little distillations of black: espressos for two sheikhs I’d seen at a desk looking at diamonds. Perhaps those two cups were an offering, a libation poured for El Tío.

I should add that I, too, ended up at the shiny end of science. After Frankfurt, I moved to Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, where I became the coordinator of what was at the time the largest clinical study of autism in the world. Front-end, jazz-hands kind of work. I thought I could continue to collaborate with Franck just as I had before, but the circumstances were very different. It wasn’t just me and Franck anymore. It was me and the Dutch Research Council, the ethical committee, Hoffmann-La Roche in Basel, EEG recordings in London, the translation of clinical questionnaires into five languages, PhD candidates to interview from Monday to Wednesday. I had time left over to code with Frank for a half hour in Thursday mornings. Each time I called him, I was unprepared. I felt terrible. I was relieved when I decided to call a halt to that scrappy coding after three short weeks, though I carried on with my jazz hands for another three years before I’d had enough.

On a bright morning in May, I left my apartment on Van Spaenstraat, in Nijmegen, headed for the Pyrenees—by bicycle. On my way to the mountains I called on Franck, who had moved to a lab in Lyon. He welcomed me into his home. In a peculiar way, that journey reminded me of my work in Frankfurt. I was free again to do whatever I wanted. Just as I was consumed by Bushmills, I was obsessed now with a single goal: I wanted to complete a hundred-mile trail run over the peaks of Andorra. I didn’t know it at the time, but that project would take me four years. There are quicker ways to get to the Pyrenees but there was no rush. Once arrived, I would have weeks by myself in the mountains to prepare for that trail race. I’m sure Franck understood that obsessiveness. Whatever I was going to do, I definitely couldn’t contort myself into a managerial post. The shiny surface, the Jesus bug walking on water; all that fla-fla, as Franck would say.
It was good to be at the back end again. The first six hundred miles had taken its toll. Franck was in the garden tinkering with the gears of my bike. He had the right tools for the job; he said that his grandfather had been a bicycle mechanic, that he’d grown up with chains and gears and oil. While he worked on the bike, I put my dirty clothes into the washing machine in the basement. I had a day of rest
before I would hit the road.

Jennifer Moxley

1900

An old cuss in a MAGA mask
limps past me, going against
the taped arrows on the aisle
floor. I get a close-up view
of his milky eyes trying to
focus under the fluorescents,
one arthritic hand cupping
a gallon of boxed ice cream.
Before his about-face, I had felt
the need to avert my eyes
from the pink chapped skin
and butt crack visible above
the failing strap of chestnut leather
as I awaited my turn in the
cooler. Even from six feet away.
        “At least he was wearing a mask,”
says Steve, admiring the human capacity
for ideological paradox, when I recount
the run-in. As I move through
the grocery store I attempt,
beneath my social timidity, to project
exasperation solely with my eyes. Like a child
who has learned that smoking is bad
and can’t help finger-wagging
at the adults. A docile New England
citizen, I usually settle for a
Horton Hears a Who! harrumph
upon reaching the safety
of the Subaru. My internalized State
is deep, good, and fair, and I cannot
bear to part with it.
        Running this market gamut weekly
we enter prepared, geared up
for a surgical strike, strategy in hand.
“Generalísimo Moxley,” Steve calls me
as I grip the four-by-six grocery list
and lay out the plan of action.
We enter through the touchless doors
to face the rows of sanitized carts.
The greeter stands before a table
of masks wielding a gun of cheap
disinfectant. He’s young and deserves
to live, I think. Someone with
his same job was just shot dead
in a Michigan Dollar Store
by a man who proclaimed before
his quivering family that he
“thought this was a free country.”
        My ugly “Covid clogs,”
consigned to outings but disallowed
in the house, have acquired a piece
of parking-lot grit, a test of my
“Princess and the Pea” proclivities.
        But we’re more relaxed
than two months ago, since we
became less worried about “fomite
transmission.” And more people are wearing
masks. Even the old cuss, though
loyal to Trump, follows the Hannaford rules.
Then there’s the super-tan couple—
probably from away, as they call
out-of-staters in Maine. The man
is erratic and defiant, moving illogically
through the sections, crowding the space.
His mask drifts off his face
while his girlfriend negotiates
her discomfort. She gives me a
what can you do, he’s a man
smile with her eyes. Mine is two
aisles away, in the pet section,
negotiating a forty-pound box of Clump
& Seal litter, with “ultra odor
blasters.” I think of that scene in
Can You Ever Forgive Me? when the
heroine’s drinking buddy discovers
the stores of cat poop under her bed
and I experience a shiver of disgust.
A needed “aesthetic category,”
according to a celebrated scholar,
who once poured me a large glass
of wine in a plastic Star Trek cup.
Ah! the good old days of grad school,
when we had to chat up strangers
in video stores and used bookstores
in our quest to find an audience
for our cultural savoir faire.
        There are still no Oscar Mayer
Selects beef franks. And no
braunschweiger, “not even for ready
money,” as my mom liked to say,
quoting Oscar Wilde. “It’s not even
available to order,” I learn from the lifer
in the meat department. That’s
the standard response these days.
There’s a full shelf of Goya products,
due to the boycott, but the Campbell’s
canned soup has been decimated.
“At least we know there’s plenty
of soup, just no cans,” says Steve,
as he heard someone say recently
on the radio news. It’s unappetizing,
I think, to eat canned soup in
the heat of summer, the slightly gummy
gelatinous warmth of too soft vegetables
in salty broth. A few tiny cubes
of chewy chicken.
        What did mass-produced canned
food taste like to the women of 1900?
That’s the year my mother’s mother,
Leola Isabel Warnock Freeman,
was born. I am ashamed to admit
that until I googled and found
a photo of her tombstone on
FindAGrave.com, I had no
idea of the day or month of her birth.
March 21. It says it right there on
the flat slate grave marker,
beneath her name and death date,
August 21, 1989, seven months
before her youngest child,
my mother, would die at home
of breast cancer. To the right
of my grandmother’s name
hangs a decorative rosary in relief.
As I zoom in to get a closer look,
an ad pops up. Three photo-booth-style
images of the same Kim Kardashian
look-alike wearing a mask
with a clear window to allow
her glossy nude lip to be admired
in full pout mode. $5.99.
        “The internet knows more
about my grandmother than I do,”
I tell Steve at lunch. “That’s your
first line,” he quips, as if aware I’ve started
this poem. Too late; that slot is taken.
I find a painting by her on eBay
of naked nymphs in a green arcadia.
By a “Texas Impressionist,” the seller
states, though I know she made her living
primarily doing portraits. It was smack
in the middle of the influenza epidemic,
when she left El Paso, Texas,
in order to study painting
in Philadelphia.
        As a Texan, I suppose my grandmother
might have opened a can of Campbell’s
tomato soup to take the chill off
the Philadelphia winter. In 1900, Campbell’s
won a medal for “product excellence”
at the Paris Olympic Games and International Exposition.
It was the science of condensing that gave them
the edge. Perhaps this is the secret origin
of Pound’s mandate: condensare. The soup
that changed American poetry. I never
noticed the medal on the label before.
Perhaps because I buy their
Healthy Request line, which lacks
the familiar gold disk depicting
a sensuous art nouveau Victory,
flying horizontally, laurel in hand.
A male athlete, holding a torch, sits
heavily on her back, seemingly unaware
that his weight is being supported by
a goddess in diaphanous dress.
        Opening plastic produce bags
without wetting one finger with your tongue
is challenging. Steve follows behind me,
preparing several bags in advance.
I hold up a bunch of green leaf lettuce,
draining the water accumulated
from the produce sprinklers
before stuffing it, curls first, into
the bag. My effort will prove ineffectual.
By the time we get home the bag
will have accumulated enough liquid
to house a goldfish. I know I’m
not supposed to overtouch produce,
but I cheat a little. When has the first peach
you reach for ever been “the one”?
        In a 1961 article in the El Paso
Herald-Post profiling the Artist of the Month,
the town’s “premier portrait painter”
is described as a “slight gray-haired
grandmother.” In ’61 my grandmother
was only, well, sixty-one, just five years older
than I am now. The article makes her seem
like a sweet old lady who thinks she’s
a painter. And the title, “Worked Eight
Hours a Day Teaching Self to Paint,”
erases her formal training. That’s her
doing, according to the writer: “She
considers herself self-taught.” “People
in the West have to be self-taught
in order to be taken seriously,” says Steve.
What was my grandmother pulling? I think.
But then again, I’d never say, “I was trained
how to write poetry in school,” though
there is some truth to it.
        Was my grandmother called to paint,
just as Helen Gahagan knew she was
destined for the stage? The actress,
singer, and politician was born the same
year as my grandmother, 1900, right around
the Thanksgiving holiday. By the time
of the flu pandemic she had fled
Barnard for Broadway, never to look back.
My grandmother was studying at the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
when Gahagan opened at Philly’s
National Theatre in the role
of the “simple bookkeeper Paula,”
who is kind to a beleaguered haberdasher,
in the tepidly reviewed Fashions for Men.
Perhaps Lloyd Freeman, my grandmother’s
painting teacher and soon-to-be husband,
invited the pretty young Texan out to see
the new sensation, the beautiful, earnest
Helen Gahagan, and they went in spite
of the pandemic. Twenty-six years
her senior, he held her slight waist lightly,
guiding her out of the stuffy theater into
the chilly night air.
        While in Philadelphia, Helen
Gahagan was also pursued by an older
man. The famous conductor Leopold
Stokowski sent her tickets to hear
his orchestra and invited her out to lunch.
She had been warned to avoid
him if she valued her reputation.
Did she value “her reputation”?
Did my grandmother value hers? A good
Catholic away from her parents
among the bohemians in a big
eastern city …
        The only liquid hand soap
left is one sad bottle of Method
in “Sea Minerals” scent.
The plastic bleachers designed
to hold the hand soaps are as empty
as the nation’s performing arts venues.
Apparently I’m not the only one
who dislikes Sea Minerals.
What is a sea mineral anyway?
Salt? Except in the kitchen
I prefer bar soap, though not
the melty frozen-orange-juice-colored
Dial I grew up with, but triple-milled
hard soaps that smell like goats.
        My mother had a pet
goat named Gwendolyn whom
she spoke of with far more fondness
than she ever did of her mother.
        What kind of child doesn’t love
her mother? “Such a child wouldn’t
be a child at all, but a monster.” This
is the conclusion the young
Nathalie Sarraute arrives at
in her memoir of childhood,
Enfance. First there’s the betrayal:
She finds a doll in a shop window
more beautiful than her mother.
Then there’s the naivete: She
tells her mother of the aesthetic
judgment. Instead of understanding,
the mother abstracts the young Nathalie
with a quip: “A child who loves
her mother finds no one more
beautiful than she.” I’m just a child,
among others, Nathalie thinks, a real
child loves her mother …
        Sarraute, who lived to be ninety-nine,
was born in Russia in 1900, though
she sometimes fibbed and gave the date
as 1902. While influenza was raging,
she attended three universities,
the Sorbonne, Oxford, and the
University of Berlin. She studied
English, history, and philosophy
before becoming a lawyer and
then one of the most celebrated
writers of the nouveau roman.
Though they shared a birth year
and a century, I doubt my grandmother
ever read Sarraute. But she did like to read,
or so I surmise from a lost-world
tidbit my own mother shared in a 1989 letter.
She had just bought a copy of
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
at Price Club and offered to send
it to Providence after she was finished
reading it, if it was good (it was):
“My mother and I used to mail books
back and forth,” she wrote, “book rate,
which at that time was about 68¢
a pound and consequently
cheaper than buying the books on
both coasts.” Sarraute’s legendary
first book, Tropismes, was published
in France in 1939 but wouldn’t
be available in English until 1963,
translated by Maria Jolas and
published by John Calder. My
grandmother could speak Spanish,
but I don’t think she ever knew
French.
        What magical time
was my mother referring to when
she was on such good terms with
my grandmother that they shared
bestsellers through the U.S. mail?
What “coasts” did she mean to
evoke, given that my grandmother
lived in El Paso, deserts away
from any ocean?
        Three years after publishing
her first novel, Sarraute, who was
Jewish, refused to wear the yellow
felt star she was issued. She went
to the countryside and pretended
to be the governess of her own
children. According to the
Jewish Women’s Archive, although
Sarraute’s writing “deals neither
with the matter of being Jewish,
nor with antisemitism,” in its impulse
it counters “every sort of racism,
terrorism and tyranny.”
        “She makes no apologies for
practicing a branch of art some artists
depreciate,” wrote the journalist about
my grandmother. According to her,
portrait painters “must be able to project
… into the personality of the sitter,
thinking and feeling as the sitter thinks
and feels.” A devout Catholic, my
grandmother spent many of her
later years living itinerantly. She
volunteered in orphanages
in Mexico. How do I know this?
After I was about eleven years old
I was never allowed to see
my grandmother, because
during one of her rare visits
she made the mistake of trying
to take me and my brothers to
Mass and was banned from
our house for good.
        I feel so much trepidation
as I approach the popcorn section
in the snack aisle and see
a gaping hole. On bended knee
I peer into the void. To my relief,
there in the shadows I spy
a last remaining jar of Orville
Redenbacher’s Original yellow.
I feel a sense of triumph mixed
with a slight twinge of petulant
selfishness. During the first
few months of the pandemic,
this sort of last-one-on-the-shelf
experience made me panicky.
But I had to admit, when I
looked around, that though
some things were sold out,
the supermarket was still
full of food.
        Saved from Leopold Stokowski’s
seduction, Helen Gahagan met
her husband, the future Hollywood
leading man Melvyn Douglas,
when they costarred in the play
Tonight or Never in 1930, the year
Lloyd Freeman, my grandfather,
succumbed to double pneumonia,
leaving Leola a widow with
four little kids. He died
twenty-nine days after his wife’s
thirtieth birthday, six months after
the stock market crash and the birth
of my mother, his last child.
Following his funeral my grandmother
was forced to return to El Paso to live
with her aging parents.
        Marrying Melvyn Douglas
sounded the death knell of Helen
Gahagan’s Broadway career. But
she continued to train as an opera
singer. After a smashing tour
of Europe, she was signed
to sing Tosca in the 1938 season
of the Vienna Opera Company.
A dream of a lifetime, which
abruptly ended when an English
music critic took her into
his confidence: “Aryans such as we
have a duty to defend the superior
race against Jews,” he said. Helen
ripped up her contract and returned
to Los Angeles. Soon after, the
thirty-eight-year-old became
pregnant with her and Melvyn’s
second child.
        There are no wipes of any kind
to be found on the shelves at Hannaford.
“Our entire childhood,” I say to Steve,
“we managed to live without any form
of disinfecting wipe.” The year
the women born in 1900 turned
thirty-one, the Scott Paper Company
introduced the paper towel roll,
expressly for the kitchen. It is doubtful
my newly widowed grandmother
paid any attention. Housewives,
I read on another website,
“had a hard time grasping
the concept of towels you
don’t have to wash.”
The subject line in the email
from eBay reads: “Leola Freeman Texas …
still of interest?” Yes, I think,
filled with regret. Why did I accept
without question my mother’s moratorium
on this woman? My childhood, like that
of many white Californians,
was blissfully free of extended
family. On my left hand I wear
a ring engraved with the initials
w. j .w. to j. c. s.: William Joseph
Warnock to Josephine Cecilia Sheley.
These, I can reconstruct from the
record, were the parents of my
grandmother.
        I assume that Josephine Cecilia,
called “Mama Jo” by my mother,
helped her widowed daughter
to raise her four kids. I picture
my grandmother’s relationship
with my mother as being almost that
of an older and a younger sister.
In the mid-forties Helen Gahagan Douglas
enrolled her children in boarding school
and threw herself into politics,
mentored by Eleanor Roosevelt.
        There’s not one single box
of Uncle Ben’s Long Grain &
Wild Rice Original Recipe
on the shelf. No rice of any kind.
I’ve eaten Uncle Ben’s since I
was a child without much thinking
about the way “Uncle Ben” echoes
Uncle Tom from Beecher Stowe’s
novel, which is why the company
has since changed the name to
just plain “Ben’s.” Sarraute knew
Stowe’s book in a children’s edition
when she was growing up in Russia
and Paris as La Case de l’oncle Tom.
Her copy, she tells us in
Enfance, was soaked through
with tears. I’m baffled by the
hoarding of rice. I thought potatoes
were the American carbohydrate
of choice. But rice is cheap
and lasts forever.
        As a congresswoman,
Helen Gahagan Douglas represented
the fourteenth district in Los Angeles,
with a large African American
population. “I just love the
Negro people!” she once said
ham-fistedly at a Black church
while on the campaign trail.
This was the “love” that Richard Nixon
would use to destroy her career.
When he ran against her for the
California Senate seat in 1950,
his campaign mail-bombed the
white suburbs with a flyer
claiming to be from the
“Communist League
of Negro Women” in support
of her candidacy. That there
was no such organization
made no difference once
he’d stoked white fears.
        There’s no Land O’Lakes
white American cheese in the
cooler, only Kraft, which is
thinner and more plasticky.
And “Mia,” the Native woman
on Land O’Lakes products, is
also MIA, removed out of
cultural sensitivity, though
she had been redrawn in 1954
by Ojibwe artist Patrick DesJarlait.
I grab some Philadelphia Cream
Cheese and a block of jalepeño jack.
Strangely, there’s no shortage of
cheese, but the buttermilk
is gutted. It must have something
to do with the mania for baking
that has overtaken the nation,
the comfort of pancakes
and warm dough.
        Was my grandmother
domestic? There are no recipes
of hers among those in my mother’s
cookbook. In photos she’s thin
and elegant, posing behind a camera
or in front of an easel. In the fifties
she built a beautiful adobe studio
on South Concepcion Avenue in El Paso.
The inside was spare and neatly
kept. A pigskin chair, the torso
of a woman, a Mexican blanket
and water pitcher. By this time
she’d remarried, to a watercolorist
named McElroy whom my mother
rarely mentioned. Was my
grandmother sexually satisfied?
The last forty years of Helen
Gahagan Douglas’s marriage
were sexless. Melvyn wanted
to stay together but continue
to have affairs. It’s rumored
that Helen had some sort of
dalliance with LBJ. Nathalie
Sarraute outlived her slightly
younger husband, whom she’d
met in law school, by fourteen years.
I no longer need to frequent
either the Family Planning
or Feminine Hygiene sections
of the supermarket. Who came
up with these euphemisms?
        After moving obediently from
one Twister-like red floor sticker
to the next, Steve and I finally
make it to the checkout. The
small woman with buck teeth
and a mustache who has worked
at Hannaford for as long as I can
remember looks like a welder
behind her face shield. She can’t
hear a word we say. Out of habit
she reaches around the plexiglass barrier
and hands me the paper receipt.
        It is the year 2020
in the time of Covid. Nobody born
in 1900 is still alive. Helen Gahagan
Douglas died of breast cancer
in 1980, my grandmother of
Alzheimer’s in 1989. An African American
woman named Denilla cared
for her in her final years.
My mother, on a rare trip to visit,
had come to know this caregiver.
“Mother loved hearing Denilla’s voice,”
she wrote to me. “At times I
felt that it was the one thing
anchoring her mind to reality.”
        Nathalie Sarraute
would live until two months
before the start of this century,
writing her memoir of childhood
in her eighties and publishing
up to the end.
        I want to live to be
as old as my grandmother,
I think to myself, and stay as lucid
as Nathalie Sarraute. I remove
my mask once we’re safely
back inside the car. I wonder
how many hours the women
of 1900 spent on trains?
I wipe the soil, made by the fog
of my trapped breath, off
my fragile glasses. Steve helps
himself to a healthy pump
of Purell, takes a deep breath,
and starts up the car.