





for George Elliott Clarke

I don’t like to be thought of as a “black writer,” largely because I refuse to accept that my race provides a royal road to understanding the fiction I write. Once one has been labelled, reviewers (and readers) almost inevitably comment on the label as much as they do on the work. To be a feminist writer, a magic realist, a surrealist, a member of the avant-garde … all these designations lead to the same thing: a prejudgement that clogs up important channels between writer and reader.

That’s not to say that I believe no writer should call him or herself “black.” Blackness – whatever the sense and implications of that word – is at the heart of Lawrence Hill’s work, for instance. In Hill’s novels, blackness is examined, questioned, played with. Hill’s approach seems to me honourable, but I wonder if it doesn’t unavoidably lead to a misdirection. What makes Lawrence’s work good is not his willingness to deal with blackness but, rather, his handling of the idea, his artistry which, after all, he has devoted his life to acquiring.

There are other approaches I admire. I’m grateful for artists like Anthony Braxton or Ralph Ellison who are not content to allow any particular definition of “black” to guide them. They take in and are influenced by whatever Art moves them, in effect broadening the vista for black musicians (Braxton) or black writers (Ellison). Still, I tend to ignore or avoid the label entirely, to write as if it had no bearing on my work and to discourage others from using it where my prose fiction is involved.

One’s principles and preferences have, of course, no bearing on how one’s work is received. I was surprised, recently, when an interviewer insinuated (politely) that I was a black writer who only pretended that race doesn’t matter. I had become, in his mind, a kind of hypocrite, a man who uses an identity (“writer who doesn’t care about race”) that downplays the importance of race while simultaneously relying on the force of the idea of race. I objected that this is not true. I have never denied the importance of race in the world. What I have longed for is a place where my aesthetic concerns might be given precedence. For the sake of the art I practice, I would almost prefer to have no race at all.

But I am African-Canadian. I have the genetic markers that manifest in what is called “blackness.” And the self that allows the writer in me to exist, the self that lives and breathes in a world where race is often significant, where one has to be careful in which neighbourhoods one walks, in which bars one drinks, etc: that self – which is, for the most part, un-tormented by my race – sometimes wishes to speak up, to point to things that are important or disturbing or cause for thought. That is why I have written essays on the subject of race. It seems to me that the essay – as opposed to fiction – is the proper venue for serious thought about the nature of citizenship. Every once in a while, however, the citizen in me and the writer of fiction wrestle over something that is significant to both of them, something that is problematic for both. The most recent conflict of this sort came about after I’d read David Gilmour’s The Perfect Order of Things.

A little background, to begin with …

Some time ago, I wrote a review of Mr. Gilmour’s novel A Perfect Night to Go to China. I thought the novel was a poor imitation of Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time and it seemed to me that, in Mr. Gilmour’s version, the child’s disappearance was little more than a pretext for the author to wallow in emotion, turning his protagonist’s grief into something unpleasantly literary. As sometimes happens when you publicly say that you don’t like a book, the book’s author was furious. So much so that, six years later, in his next novel (The Perfect Order of Things), Mr. Gilmour created a character named “René Goblin,” a black reviewer who has given his protagonist/narrator’s novel a bad review. In The Perfect Order of Things, the protagonist achieves revenge on the black reviewer by slapping the reviewer’s face.

From the text alone, the reader would not know that “René Goblin” was meant to be “André Alexis.” But Mr. Gilmour made a point of saying so to the journalist Mark Medley, in an interview with the National Post. Mr. Gilmour made it clear that, in effect, the chapter in The Perfect Order of Things called “The Pigeon” is meant to be his revenge on an actual reviewer named “André Alexis.”

After being figuratively slapped for doing nothing wrong – and, of course, it is not wrong to give one’s considered opinion about literature – I returned the favour. I created a character named Gilbert Davidoff – a mediocre novelist and compulsive womanizer – based on Mr. Gilmour, and put him in a novella called A. (To be clear, “Gilbert Davidoff” is not David Gilmour any more than “René Goblin” is me. I don’t know Mr. Gilmour. Mr. Gilmour does not know me. For my part, I based Davidoff on Gilmour’s protagonists.)

That should have been that, but “The Pigeon” is a very strange bird, so to speak. I find it offensive in ways Mr. Gilmour may or may not have intended, ways that are problematic for my civic self. It seems to me that “The Pigeon” is an obviously racist bit of writing and the more or less polite creation of “Gilbert Davidoff” began to seem like an inadequate response. That is, I began to feel that I had given a literary answer to a question that should have been answered by my social self, by the self that is black, lives in Canada, and has to figure out his society’s workings in order to feel at home.

So, how is “The Pigeon” racist?

“The Pigeon,” a short chapter in The Perfect Order of Things, concerns the revenge exacted on a reviewer by a novelist who has received a bad review. The reviewer is black and is named “René Goblin.” (He is a spook, you see.) Mr. Goblin is described as a “deposed African tyrant” with greying dreadlocks, pink gums flashing when he smiles, who wears thick, dark glasses. The narrator asks “why are all those men always so ugly?” (Flirting aggressively with “They all look alike.”) As one would expect from a spook, René Goblin embodies an inexplicable malevolence but, significantly, he does not act on his own. He is a deposed tyrant, after all. He is hired by a man named Avery Lynch. Avery Lynch is a vicious and unpleasant caricature of the Globe and Mail’s former book section editor, Martin Levin.

As depicted by Mr. Gilmour, Lynch is a pervert, a “pink-faced man in his late fifties who fancied himself, la grande littérature aside, quite the ladies man and detoured the conversation in that direction whenever he could.” And: “[Lynch] liked to turn up with his girlfriend with the little chain around her neck and talk to people with his arm around her. She was quite a bit younger than he was, his “lover.” Code for, “I’m fucking her,” of course.”

Having established that the book editor and his hireling, the ugly black reviewer, are morally degenerate and ill-intentioned, it comes as no surprise that the narrator’s book is given a negative review that sends him into paroxysms of hurt. Here, Mr. Gilmour depicts his narrator as a suffering, powerless victim. It is not fair that his novel has received a bad review. His work cannot be second rate. The review must be the product of ill-will directed at him personally.

(A pause: it’s worth noting, here, that Mr. Gilmour was himself a reviewer of books and films, and that he has given his share of unflattering notices. In other words, Mr. Goblin is accused of doing to the narrator – a stand-in for David Gilmour – something that David Gilmour has done to others, something that David Gilmour is entitled to do though René Goblin is not. Also worth noting: Mr Gilmour has, when interviewed, insisted that there is little difference between his fiction and “reality.” In the case of “The Pigeon,” this is demonstrably untrue. In fact, “reality” is systematically distorted in the chapter. Mr. Gilmour does not tell the truth, though it may be that he sees himself as one of his own protagonists.)

Much of the rest of “The Pigeon” ramps up the hurt the narrator feels, his humiliation at having his work denigrated in the Globe and Mail, his desire for revenge. The narrator’s torment is overwrought and absurdly overwritten. At one point, he compares a bad review to child abuse, at a stroke turning Mr. Goblin into a child molester as well. Eventually, after entertaining fantasies of assaulting the reviewer, the narrator calms down, somewhat. His anger abates, somewhat. He begins to come out from the shadow of a review that has spoiled his book for him.

Then, one day, the narrator is walking on the street when René Goblin passes him. Goblin glances at the narrator. That is bad enough. But then Goblin actually looks at the narrator’s reflection in a store window. This looking is a transgression too far. (The crime of looking at a white person the wrong way had a name in the American South, pre-civil rights. It was called eyeballing. So, Mr. Goblin eyeballs the narrator.) The narrator strides over to the reviewer and slaps his face, knocking the ugly glasses off and knocking the reviewer to the ground. The reviewer pleads to be spared further violence and the narrator – who mawkishly compares the reviewer to a pigeon with a broken wing – gives him his glasses back.

To this point, the racial politics of “The Pigeon” have been, to be polite, ill-considered. But Mr. Gilmour goes further. Not only are there no emotional, legal, or ethical consequences to the assault on the black reviewer, but the reviewer himself is, by the end of the story, portrayed as happy. Having been put in his place by the white narrator, René Goblin can at last enjoy his proper station: subservient, un-entitled, a drone working at the CBC, surrounded by a “young crowd of producers” – not by adults.

“The Pigeon” reads like a white-­supremacist fantasy in which “inferiors” are taught their place: slapped, lampooned, punished. It is a piece written by a privileged, white male (David Gilmour) whose narrator/stand-in makes himself out to be a victim – utterly devastated by a reviewer who has been “recreationally cruel”! He plays the victim in order to justify the vivid (and, as the narrator suggests at the end of the chapter, remorseless) pleasure he takes in a reassertion of the socio-political order.

I was starkly reminded of “The Pigeon” recently when my attention was directed to a more recent interview Mr. Gilmour gave to Mr. Medley. This newer interview was conducted shortly after Mr. Gilmour admitted that he did not teach books by women, because he does not love fiction written by women. (Though I myself think that Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is one of the greatest short stories written by any human being, I think Mr. Gilmour’s attitude is reasonable. “Love” is the best place to start from, when teaching. It seems right, however, to question what this inability to love says about Mr. Gilmour’s sensibility.) Talking to Mr. Medley, Mr. Gilmour was naturally defensive, having inadvertently offended a number of people, but the sentence of Mr. Gilmour’s that stuck with me was this one: “I’m sorry for hurting your sensibilities but there isn’t a racist or a sexist bone in my body, and everyone who knows me knows it.”

That last sentence is not demonstrably untrue, if we’re speaking of Mr. Gilmour’s fiction. If “racist” is taken to mean “possessed of an active hatred for those of a different race,” it’s almost impossible to tell from a fiction writer’s work if he or she is, or is not, racist. Fiction involves the exploration of attitudes not necessarily held by its author. There is no doubt, however, that “The Pigeon” uses childishly obvious, racist tropes: an ugly, jazz-loving, and dreadlocked spook – given his marching orders by a moral degenerate named “Lynch” – ends up happy once he’s put in his place for dissing and then eyeballing an endlessly appalled white man. Really? It’s difficult not to wonder who, aside from Mr. Gilmour, thought this chapter was racially inoffensive.

Thinking this way, I wondered if any of the reviews of The Perfect Order of Things had noted what I take to be “The Pigeon’s” racism. None that I found had. Instead, the reviewers – among them Aritha van Herk, Susan G. Cole, Candace Fertile, James Grainger, Michel Basilières, and Philip Marchand – seemed to find the chapter vivid, if they mentioned “The Pigeon” at all. Still others – in the land of blogs – expressed pleasure at the reviewer’s humiliation (“I cheered” says Christian MacPherson) or, in the case of Alex Good, joked about the fact that Martin Levin had been depicted as a letch. (“Martin! Say it ain’t so!”).

Was the racism unperceived by critics? Was it un-troubling? Did the book’s white reviewers respond positively to its message of white entitlement? Or was it, rather, that none of them wished to discredit an otherwise worthy book by mentioning a flaw that, however vile, was limited to a single chapter within it? Or was it perhaps that the reviewers, having read (or guessed) that “René Goblin” referred to “André Alexis,” believed that “The Pigeon” was a settling of personal accounts and, so, not truly racist at all? This last one seems a credible reason but it brings us back to the question of naming. If Mr. Gilmour had not (unprompted, according to Mr. Medley) asserted that René Goblin was meant to be “André Alexis.” the reader would no doubt have been made uncomfortable by Mr. Gilmour’s degrading depiction of a black man. In effect, it was a good move, on Mr. Gilmour’s part, to associate Messrs Alexis and Goblin. But is a depiction any less degrading and racist because of the object of the author’s scorn?

My own reactions to “The Pigeon” are, as I’ve suggested, the result of conflicting perspectives. To begin with, if René Goblin is meant to be me personally, the chapter can best be described as Mr. Gilmour’s attempt to punish me while still talking about his favourite subjects: himself and his suffering. As such, it calls for no response, really, aside from the one I gave it: Mr. Gilmour, meet Mr. Davidoff. Calling David Gilmour “racist,” under those circumstances, feels a little like “playing the race card” in order to attack him for what is a personal failing, a meanness that is due to his personality as opposed to any deep-seated race hatred. That doesn’t change the fact that “The Pigeon” gleefully uses racist tropes, however. I may not know what is in David Gilmour’s soul, but his soul and his motivation aren’t of particular concern to me. Whether or not Mr. Gilmour has “a racist bone in his body,” the fact that he feels justified in using racial stereotypes in order to provoke contempt for a character – in order to justify violence against a character – is despicable, plain and simple. More importantly, it points to a type of thinking that exists in Canada – a race-based echelon, a contempt for racial minorities – that needs to be addressed whenever (or wherever) it shows itself.

In effect, “The Pigeon” is addressed to two “André Alexises.” to the writer/reviewer and to the black Canadian. Mr. Gilmour, evidently, has contempt for both of them. But his contempt has different implications for the reviewer than it does for the black man. This is what has made it difficult to decide how, or whether, to respond to “The Pigeon” directly.

I live in Parkdale. A few years ago, I got on the 504 streetcar at Dundas West Station, heading home to Jameson and King. The streetcar was crowded. It was late afternoon. The weather was grey. (At least, in my memory, it was grey. Almost certainly autumn.) I was sitting in a seat near the back doors. In the centre section of the streetcar, directly in front of the doors, was a man of Arab descent. I can’t tell you what country he’d come from. His accent was Middle Eastern, though. After we’d been out of the station for a bit, he became visibly upset and, suddenly, began to berate a young man of East Asian descent (he was, say, seventeen or eighteen) who had kissed a young woman of South Asian descent (same age as her boyfriend). In fact, he seemed more angry at the young woman. He said things like:

“We don’t need your lessons in kissing!”

He rebuked the couple for their public display of affection, getting more and more angry as he went along. No one on the streetcar said anything. No one spoke in the young couple’s defence. We were, as passengers, non-descript, unmemorable: a cluster of citizens. The man went on with his tirade for some ten minutes until, finally, at Jameson and King, the young couple got off at their stop.

Throughout this episode, I felt a mounting anger. I don’t live in the Middle East. I don’t wish to live in the Middle East. The customs and social practices of Arab men and women hold no attraction to me. The display I had seen, a tirade by someone who’d come from another country trying to change acceptable modes of conduct in my own, made me resentful. And yet, I – and all the other adults on the streetcar – kept quiet. I did not defend my country’s values (as I understand them to be). I did not speak up for the right of seventeen-­year-olds to kiss in public.

For days afterwards, I felt a kind of repugnance for myself. Well, said my friend Roni, when I told him what had happened, how do you know the man wasn’t crazy? What would you have gained by arguing with him? Would you have changed his mind? Could he have changed yours? Were the teenagers in any way hurt?

My answers: I don’t know, nothing, no, no, and no.

What would I have changed by speaking up? Nothing. Yet I felt as if I had betrayed a thing I believe in: Canadian democracy, let’s call it. I also felt a kind of distress at not knowing when the proper time is to defend the customs of my country. In my helplessness, I reacted with anger towards some sad and ultimately powerless man on a streetcar in a country in which he did not feel at ease. Thinking about it now, I find myself almost grateful to him. In effect, the man did me a favour because, for one vital moment, I thought I knew what my country stood for and what – if called upon – I would choose to defend.

There were, obviously, other forces that kept me from speaking up. There are always a million reasons to keep quiet. I wasn’t quick enough or glib enough. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know if I could contain my anger. And then there was the fact that none of my fellow passengers spoke up, though they must have been feeling as I did, no? I thought I could feel them making the same mental calculations I was making: maybe this isn’t as significant as I think. Maybe this will all blow over (it did, actually) and we will all be fine (we were, actually). The social pressure to say little at moments like this is strong. So I said nothing, but because I am an intellectual I worried about my silence for months afterwards. When is one to speak up, in these situation? What is one to say?

Mutatis mutandis, the racist fantasy that is “The Pigeon” is rather like that Arab man promoting his version of order, rebuking young people for their public displays of affection, except that… well, in fact, no. No, it’s not. Novels are – among other things – where ideas go to die or to be tested or to be played out. David Gilmour, even if one of his chapters is bigoted, is doing something that he is meant to do: expose his murky inner life.

Critics and reviewers are like the passengers on the streetcar, save that they’re supposed to answer back. They’re meant to examine the worlds held in the pages of a novel and expose them to some sort of consideration. At least, that is what criticism does when it is engaged with form and content. In maintaining a silence about the (aptly titled) Perfect Order of Things’ racism, Aritha van Herk, Susan G. Cole, Philip Marchand, Michel Basilières, James Grainger, et al., not only fail to do something important – that is, question the assumptions of power – they allow bigotry to pass, as if it were acceptable.

Well, no. That isn’t right, either. There are nuances and extenuating considerations. If, as I said at the beginning of this essay, a writer should be allowed a place where his or her aesthetic concerns are given priority, how can I criticize reviewers for concentrating on Mr. Gilmour’s aesthetic performance? We live in a time when newspaper book sections are disappearing, when book reviews are routinely given less and less space. No reviewer can hope to address all the issues brought up in any reasonably complex work of literature. Anyone reviewing The Perfect Order of Things who chose to mention “The Pigeon”’s racism would have had to spend most of his or her space explaining why and to what degree “The Pigeon” is racist. The reviewer would have been forced to turn the review into a kind of indictment.

In a word, reviewers sometimes have their reasons. Their silence is not necessarily part of a conspiracy to hide the mechanisms of social power. The matter isn’t so simple. If we’re comparing reviewers to passengers on the 504, then Mr. Gilmour’s reviewers did speak up. It’s just that none of them spoke of the subject that I would have wished them to speak of: racism. In the end, they did not do my speaking for me.

And yet, my civic self takes no more satisfaction in pointing to what is racist in “The Pigeon” than my writerly self does from making fun of Mr. Gilmour. There is something that niggles, still. Mr. Gilmour (or his protagonist in The Perfect Order of Things) represents something petty and despicable in Canadian society, something it is useful to point out.

And yet …

The irritant is something I alluded to at the beginning of this essay. I have been, since I began writing, split in two. On one side, my writerly self. On the other, my civic self, the aspect of me that is black, Canadian, living in Toronto in 2013.

At the beginning of my writing life, this split served me well. It allowed me to think about aesthetic matters to the near exclusion of all others. The question I asked first, when reading novels or stories, was: how was this done? It mattered less to me what was done. When I first read Death on the Installment Plan, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, I failed to notice its obvious anti-Semitism, because I was caught up in Céline’s voice and his sense of humour. Reading Flannery O’Connor, I was untroubled by the racist elements in some of her stories, because her odd use of Christian symbols, the ever-present sense of threat, and O’Connor’s clean writing were deeply impressive. Reading Henry Miller, the diction – over which he didn’t always seem to have full control – was amusing and sometimes poetic in the best sense: memorable speech. His disregard for the women his narrators were fucking didn’t strike me until much later. Actually, not until I read Gore Vidal’s great essay on Miller, the essay in which Vidal, commenting on Miller’s interminable trilogy (Sexus, Nexus, and Plexus) writes: For a man who boasts of writing nothing but the truth, I find it more than odd that not once in the course of a long narrative does anyone say, “Henry, you’re full of shit.” It is possible, of course, that no one ever did, but I doubt it.The irritant is something I alluded to at the beginning of this essay. I have been, since I began writing, split in two. On one side, my writerly self. On the other, my civic self, the aspect of me that is black, Canadian, living in Toronto in 2013.

At which point, I began to pay more attention to what Miller was saying.

The benefits, for the young writer, of paying attention to how things are done, are fairly obvious. For one thing, it is useful to be sensitive to style, to ways of saying that aren’t one’s own. Style, voice, characterization, and diction are interrelated, so it is crucial to be sensitive to all of them. But it has to be said that the benefits do (potentially) come at a cost. If you’re like me, you can become slightly contemptuous of writers who mean things. (There is a clumsiness to “meaning things” and it’s this that a writer like Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, catches and mocks.) Worse, when “how it is written” matters too much, you can become afraid to mean anything too obvious or anything at all. As Isaac Babel – a very great writer indeed – said of Nabokov: “He writes well, but he has nothing to say.” I’m not convinced this is unarguably true about Nabokov, but it points to a pit into which Nabokov was certainly willing to jump.

For my younger self, fear of meaning something took the form of a fear of “speaking for.” I mean: yes, there’s a difference between “speaking as” a black Canadian and “speaking for” black Canadians, but the border is sometimes difficult to discern and I have been wary of it, wary to the point of paranoia.

I was recently made more aware of this icicle in my soul by reading the work of someone I admire deeply. I have been reading Anna Akhmatova since I was in my early twenties. The writers of the so-called Silver and Bronze Ages, in Russia, have always held a fascination for me. From Tolstoy to Zoshchenko by way of Bely, Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Zamyatin, I’ve read them all as if reading of some marvellous world that was mysteriously crucial to me. In fact, I studied Russian at Carleton University, in the hope that I might learn the language well enough to read the work I love in the original. So I first encountered the poetry of Anna Akhmatova over thirty years ago. I’ve read her often in the years since.

While writing A, I read her again. In particular, “Requiem,” her long poem about waiting before a Leningrad jail for news of her imprisoned son, stayed with me. It stayed with me because I was aware of the two readings of the poem that lived within me. When I was younger, I was mostly aware of the poetry. If I thought about the subject matter, waiting for news of an imprisoned child, it was with a kind of jealousy that she – and her contemporaries – had the fortune to have subject matter that was, on the face of it, important. Catastrophe, misfortune, genocide … these were subjects that I might have called God-given, in the sense that I thought them a kind of favour. I’m exaggerating my callousness, but not out of all proportion to the real. Reading about catastrophe allowed me, in a way, to think less about catastrophe and misfortune than about the ways in which they could be used to create art.

The anecdote Akhmatova has in lieu of a preface to “Requiem” may suggest a willingness to use catastrophe. At least, it can be read that way:

During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in Leningrad. One day, somehow, someone ‘picked me out’. On that occasion there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had never in her life heard my name. Jolted out of the torpor characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear (everyone whispered there)

– Could you describe this?

And I answered

– I can.

It was then that something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had previously been just a face.

[The 1st of April in the year 1957. Leningrad]

It’s as if Akhmatova were taking on the task of “speaking for,” almost as if she were bragging that it is within her powers to write this indescribable feeling. And, having boasted that she can write this “waiting in the cold for news of a loved one,” you’d expect that “Requiem” would be about that waiting. But it isn’t or, at least, it isn’t only about that. It describes her own grief. It describes the grief of the women who shared her fate. It speaks of the Virgin Mary’s devastation at the loss of her son:

Mary Magdalene beat her breasts and

sobbed,

His dear disciples, stone-faced, stared.

His mother stood apart. No other

looked

Into her hidden eyes. No one dared.

The poem is all grief and no grief. It is a refusal to look at grief too directly. It is not a mastery of “grand ideas” or “big themes.” It is a particular way of bearing witness. When Akhmatova admits that she can describe what the women are going through, waiting for news of their husbands and sons, it is not because her art permits her access to some point beyond the women who share her fate. It is because, despite her artistry and fame and command of language, she is there in that place: only one of them. She can describe the feelings because this is the small gift her art permits. She can bear true witness to her own life and emotion. And by the time she came to write “Requiem,” she could do it with simplicity.

Quietly flows the quiet Don;

Into my house comes the yellow moon.

It comes with its hat askew.

The yellow moon sees a shadow.

This woman is sick

This woman is alone

Husband in the grave, son in jail.

Pray for her.

It takes the greatest art to get to the place where “speaking as” and “speaking for” are, however temporarily, one and the same. (When it comes to writing, the demands of the “the writerly self” and the demands of “the real” are both ridiculously difficult to meet with grace, precision, and simplicity, let alone to have them met in one and the same work.) Just as importantly, Akhmatova’s “speaking for” does not exclude. It goes from the nameless woman whose lips are blue with cold to the mother of God. It is a “speaking for” anyone who will listen, a “speaking for” anyone who shares the humanity of the women who wait.

If, as a young writer, I spent so much time envying those who wrote about “great themes,” it was because I did not yet know my own life, the world around me, the things it has been given me to witness. Now that I am fifty-six, I have begun to see them a little more clearly. The smallness of soul I’ve alluded to in the title of this essay is, in fact, mine. I realized, on rereading “Requiem” as a middle-aged man, that I have been too steadfastly unwilling – too frightened – to allow both sides of me to speak: the side that loves language and the side that has lived in Canada, from 1960 to the present.

The challenge, then, is to overcome the split within, to bear witness: which is to say, to speak of my world – as well as my being-in-the-world – with all that I’ve learned of Art and simplicity, to be faithful to my situation. It seems odd to have to admit – so far into this life – that I have so far yet to go. Odder still that I have been shown the distance by work I thought I knew well: “Requiem,” a poem written by Anna Akhmatova.

Notes: