The World Itself by Ulf Danielsson

By Michael Collins

In The World Itself Ulf Danielsson presents an engaging and varied array of material ranging from historical narratives of the development of mathematics and the hard sciences to entertaining anecdotes and intriguing thought experiments. These quite readable elements are employed to present a compelling worldview of scientific nonduality that grounds mathematical and experimental productions and results in human consciousness – and that consciousness itself in matter:

“It is clear that our biological nature is central to our view of the universe. Our consciousness is in our bodies, and the world we experience through our senses is created by our using organic systems that have evolved over millions of years. We are part of a living continuum that stretches back to the very simplest organisms. All of this is crucial to our understanding of the physical world – the only world that exists” (152-3).

The organic ground of consciousness is intertwined for Danielsson with the centrality of physics to human understanding of the universe, self-knowledge, and future prospects:

“It is not just that physics is the basis of everything; it is everything. I define physics as the study of the world itself in all of its aspects. It is a world of which we as organic beings form a part, and through evolution we have slowly become aware of ourselves as matter awakened from its eternal slumber. Physics is not about how a free and independent observer floats outside the world and observes it from a proper distance. Our organic bodies, all our thoughts, including the scientific models we create, are parts of the same world that we so desperately want to grasp. The physics I imagine must handle everything; nothing must be left aside. It is literally a matter of life and death” (23-4).

His description of human consciousness as contextualized both by its material ground and temporal emergence presents the basis for qualifying its scientific and mathematical discoveries. However, these conditions have the counterintuitive effect of illuminating the profundity of the breakthroughs humans have made, such as they are, improbable and fascinating evolutions of understanding all the more remarkable for being extracted from the vastness of all that remains opaque. All of this is possible only through the definitional openness of true scientific pursuit: “[E]verything is physics and…there is no reality outside of matter. But there is no reason to believe that we are even close to understanding what this world of matter is capable of” (20).

The structure of the book, accordingly, forms a sort of scientific parallel of negative theology, systematically arguing against views and suppositions that impinge upon these central claims – and centering openness to all that we cannot yet know. One such gap lies between scientific knowledge, itself a product in each instance of its own experimental or theoretical intentions and specifications, and the world it seeks to describe. Danielsson cautions against forgetting that our means of exploring such questions are qualified by the influence of their very practices upon their subjects:

“To be able to talk about measurements, we must separate the object from the rest of the world and put it in focus. The connection to the surrounding universe causes information about the system to leak and be lost. In this way, chance and probability creep in. If we were to abstain from measuring anything at all, our quantum mechanical description of the universe would be completely deterministic. The price we would have to pay is that nothing would actually happen within the framework of our model” (50-1).

This grounding in practical realities opens to moral implications for scientific pursuits that are not too difficult, with reflection, to adapt to other kinds and uses of models and world building:

“The way we translate between a scientific model and the real world is not trivial at all, but something that is rarely discussed and often actively ignored. Instead, we tend to take for granted that our mathematical theories can be identified with the world itself. Not only is it seen to be practically irrelevant to maintain the distinction; the claim is that the identification of the model with what actually exists says something profound about the world” (149). Danielsson holds that such collapsing of object and description must make way for a more interactive mode of engagement with the physical world, one that does not foreclose ongoing disclosure from the unknown.

In a parallel argument, he calls for clear differentiation between mechanistic modes of reproduction and understanding and the biological functioning of human genetics and consciousness. This integral point underscores both the biological basis of consciousness and the centrality of physics to our understanding of it and the world: “The necessary code key is housed by the complete cellular system that reads and interprets the code and realizes it as a physically living organism. Without cells that can read the code, the DNA molecule remains meaningless” (36). Here, as well, Danielsson seamlessly connects microcosmic biological mysteries with a larger context that locates us – all of us, even those of us who are just here to learn as readers – within vast expanses of time as the quite temporary investigators of such nuances of the physical world: “There is no clear boundary between the code and that which interprets the code. The genome does not consist of intangible information. It consists of matter and is part of a cellular system that has evolved over billions of years without a need to fit into simplified models” (39). The objects of our inquiries contain the beings undertaking them. Our understanding is quite small, and yet therefore we are await more intricate development: In precisely the fact that we have so much yet to learn lies Danielsson’s source of inspiration.

The provisional nature of the situation in which we find ourselves as a result, evokes openness to future learning just as much as the ephemerality of today’s supposed certainties: “The universe is not governed by what we call the laws of nature, rather it is the laws of nature that are constructed by us to follow the universe” (62). Danielsson calls for an important balance, requiring our conscious understanding to remain cognizant that it arises temporarily from the universe it partially describes.

Interesting developments from – and support for – these insights are presented in Danielsson’s explorations of other forms of consciousness. Excursions through chimpanzee, octopus, and bat body-consciousness conclude that “One can never understand consciousness as isolated from the body or the environment” (161). However, such evolutionary understandings are also applied in thought experiments about teaching math to aliens:

“The mathematics we use to model the world in the form of natural laws does not exist in the world itself. The laws of nature manifest themselves and are identical with physical patterns in our brains that reflect phenomena that we observe in the world around us. When the patterns are in tune with the world and we find consistency, we see the models as successful” (74).

This conclusion, which echoes the descriptive role of the “laws of nature” above, opens to another way of perceiving the interconnections between consciousness, its practices of cultivating understanding, and the material world itself: “Mathematics exists only in the form of transient processes that help biological beings to better understand their enigmatic existence. The beautiful truths we find in mathematics, which make some people feel the presence of something almost supernatural, are only a consequence of our own limitations” (74). Another comparison with machines approaches the same idea of “transient processes” in the nature of organisms themselves: “Living organisms are constantly renewing themselves. Most of the matter we are made of is replaced. While the identity of a machine is carried by the material parts, ultimately the individual atoms, nothing like that can be said about a living organism. An organism is an open system with a constant flow in and out, while a machine is essentially closed” (135). It’s interesting, in the course of the reading, to consider these insights, not in terms of correlation or causality, but as inter-contextualizing uncertainties.

The book, among many other things, can serve as a restarting point for reflection on the nature our inter-determinism with the world, how consciously — or how deeply — accepting we are of our unavoidable openness to what we often define as outside of us, its unrecognized bounties, its implications: “We are in the middle of a world, which we can never escape, and we can only try to learn and understand as much as possible with our biologically limited abilities. I may be a physicist, but I do not think we know the physics required for us to fully understand the universe. And I’m not sure we ever will” (150).

I am not a physicist, but I am a reader who finds it invigorating and ennobling of all knowledge deepening endeavors to listen to the perspective of someone, who has considered his field more assiduously than I ever could, respond with deep openness and humility to all that even he still cannot know. Books like this invite us to direct our curiosities – both as groups and individuals – in useful ways often only as consequential as they are subtle. Books like this invite us to welcome our smallness before actual mysteries, to do so more together in the collective acknowledgment what we cannot yet know. Perhaps you’ll join me in this reading.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/World-Itself-Consciousness-Everything-Physics/dp/1954276117

Michael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines.  He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala, the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances , which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews . He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY.

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All Else Failed: The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of The Migrant Aid Crisis by Dana Sachs

By Michael Collins

“These were weeks when international media regularly published photos of refugees walking along rural roads in Europe – a girl with a teddy bear, two boys pushing a third in a wheelchair. The images captured the strangeness of the situation and, to some extent, its pathos, but not the hours of physical exertion that walking demanded from people who were already hungry and exhausted” (103), Dana Sachs writes of Syrian refugees trying to make their way to new homes in All Else Failed: The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of The Migrant Aid Crisis. One overarching moral aim on which the book certainly delivers is to bridge such gaps for readers with no direct experience of the crisis, whether between received images and their contextual stories or, even further, to include the inter-complexities among those stories.

Sachs weaves together life stories of refugees and volunteers, some of whom are both, who fled the war in Syria to Europe via Turkey and Greece beginning in 2015. A multilayered journalistic account, it ranges from the psychological struggles and insights of its central figures and families, to the cultural obstacles encountered and bridges formed in piecing together daily solutions amidst the crisis, to the national and international political obstacles to humane processes of relocating refugees. It successfully weaves narratives and perspectives from a diverse group of those struggling to help and/or survive on the ground with the relevant statistics they humanize, all in juxtaposition to the plodding roll out of broader, much better funded programs and policies by governments and large NGOs. The important contributions of larger entities are acknowledged, but their shortfalls are considerable:

“It is one of the terrible ironies of this story that the European Union had authorized €83 million to improve living conditions for displaced people in Greece and yet many fled official camps, taking shelter instead in illegal housing. The rejection of camps testified to their squalor and isolation and the fact that living there made people feel that they’d been warehoused and forgotten” (179).

The primary focus of the book is the smaller, more directly observant, interactive, and operationally agile organizations, such as Humanity Now: Direct Refugee Relief, of which Sachs is a co-founder. Indeed, the evolution of such organizations, often in cooperation with one another, is an interesting storyline of its own:

“Europe’s grassroots community had matured…. The most effective teams managed to marry the expertise and professionalism of large NGOs with the nimbleness and heart of small-scale relief efforts. The Norwegian charity A Drop in the Ocean, for example, had started out by providing emergency aid on Lesvos Island in 2015. By the end of 2016, the organization was sending experienced representatives to international conferences and issuing annual reports. It remained extremely lean, however. The organization had only 1.5 paid positions and relied almost entirely on volunteers. Over two thousand people from thirty-five different countries had served as ‘Drops’ in Greece” (225-6).

The complexities between the different abilities and restrictions of the various forms of aid organizations are an important aspect of the book. Sadly, transnational refugee crises seem more likely to proliferate than abate in the coming decades, and increasingly effective modes of cooperation and interdependence among the greater humanitarian community will only become more important. All Else Failed will be important to consider as such conversations evolve.

Its relevance to such conversations is also due to its methods and subject matter. All Else Failed is inherently focused on the perspectives and experiences of its featured refugees and volunteers, an approach that corresponds with the practices of grassroots aid organizations and communities. The book makes its most compelling case for the mode of humanitarian aid it champions in these interwoven stories. This approach also facilitates another compelling contribution of the book: Its nuanced profiles of these individuals point toward an emerging model of wounded, empathetic, self-aware, and resilient crisis citizen that bypasses dichotomies between victim and helper.

We meet several of the refugee families in their pre-war lives in Syria and follow them from these various versions of stability through the process of assessing their proximity to danger and options, making the choice to leave behind all that cannot be packed and carried, and planning to flee the country, in some cases by necessarily separating their families. The next stage involves a dangerous journey on which most of those possessions are lost or paid to smugglers, and unpredictable sequences of movements are undertaken to avoid detection by authorities. This is all before arriving in Greece, which is utterly unprepared to receive them, in their attempt to reach other destinations in Europe, which mostly refuse them, many for years. These journeys then bring the refugees to the settings shared with volunteers in Greece, first on beaches pulling survivors from tenuous vessels, subsequently in camps established to manage their basic needs, and finally in slightly preferable but still challenging squats organized by local community leaders.

The refugees’ narratives record squalid poverty, frustration with obstacles to constructive action, fear for their families’ health and safety, and, perhaps most torturously, the malaise, boredom, and tedious despair of the camps they find themselves stuck in. A recurrent, inspiring, and salient turn takes place when a refugee gains access to agency in the form of community service, usually in one of the illegal housing projects set up in cities away from the camps:

“The past few months had challenged Rima in every way. Her assessment of comfort had radically shifted. She had not forgotten the luxuries of her home in Syria, but she more often thought of her current situation in comparison to the squalor of [the camp]. The [housing squat] felt like heaven after the camp. She loved cooking for her community and worked hard to make delicious food. She didn’t want anyone to merely subsist; she wanted them to actually enjoy her meals. I cook, she told herself, for the sake of God. Rima Halabi had joined the volunteer movement” (167).

The illegal squats have no recourse to official channels of aid, and therefore require these contributions, but they have the ancillary effect of creating community bonds: “If a refugee knew how to paint walls, unclog toilets, or run electrical wiring through a building, the squat needed that person’s help. Unlike in government-run camps, where residents were mostly passive recipients of aid, this community would succeed or fail based on the active engagement of those who lived inside” (165).

Inspiring though some of their achievements may be, these meager dwellings are still haunted by crime, addiction and widespread depression, another important aspect of the resettling experience difficult to capture in brief mass media reporting, a particularly insidious issue as it demoralizes many of those who could be pillars of refugee communities: “[D]isplacement undermines the confidence of people who had previously regarded themselves as respectable members of society” (243). More problematically, it results from and manifests in behaviors that would not necessarily be connected by volunteers who did not have the ability to get to know the individuals involved: “squat residents refused to venture into the streets of Athens unless they had washed their clothes and made themselves look clean and neat. But it’s difficult to wash clothes if you live among 150 men sharing two bathrooms” (243). Some of these complicated situations are met by the creativity and compassion of refugees and volunteers, as in the generation of “Ramadan packs,” distributed before sunrise to make sure the observantly religious are fed (172). A great many others, of course, simply linger and fester due to the paucity of resources.

We do get to read about some of the life-affirming success stories: refugees resettled, reunited with families, determined to learn new languages, understand new customs, integrate into new roles and communities, even aspiring to build lives capable of supporting returns to Syria to help others when the opportunity may present itself: “When the sun rises, it will be our turn to help people” (281). These outcomes, however, involve arduous perseverance, the ability to be creative and rational in balancing traditions and pressing needs, the willingness to invest in community, and a capacity for gratitude capable of blotting from the mind the injustices of the past in order to take whatever forward steps are possible.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that these qualities are often shared most apparently with the volunteers who move to Greece at cost to themselves and work tirelessly to improve the situation. Though these individuals may model ingenuity, tenacity, and gritty humanitarian service, Sachs makes no attempt to romanticize their dedication or make Hollywood archetypes out of complex individuals.

The evolution of one stalwart volunteer’s perspective stands as an example of the most mindful volunteers’ balance between presence to the other and personal investment drawn from their own context: “When Kanwal described what she’s witnessed in Greece, she made it personal. ‘I just kept thinking this can be me and my family or my loved ones,’ she would say of refugees she’d met in Greece. People opened their wallets” (100). The aspects of altruistic mythologizing one would expect often accompany decisions to offer so much of one’s live to a difficult cause: “Kanwal Malik, thirty-four years old, had found purpose. I’m so broken, she thought. These people are fixing me. On Leros, she had seen how people had joined together for the common good. The system moved her deeply. She wanted to be part of it” (100). However, the deepening of such initial conceptions is considerable:

“On her first stint volunteering, she had felt such profound empathy for displaced people that she defined them simplistically: ‘These are angels. They’re the holy ones. They have to be good because they’ve been through so much.’

Now she considered those views naïve. ‘They’re just like any one of us trying to survive,’ she told me one. ‘They have their good. They have their bad. They are just normal people that have been through terrible circumstances and continue to live in terrible circumstances, which actually tests their character.’

This conclusion might sound obvious, but Kanwal had actually come to a fundamental truth that escapes many observers of crisis – that refugees are complicated human beings, just like the rest of us” (219).

Indeed, some of the most powerful individual lessons we may learn from those chronicled in these pages involve the need to tend to one’s own mental health and personal boundaries while providing aid and succor. By offering some protection against cumulative grief and despair, such practices sustain these individuals’ compassionate determination, a necessity in facing their various and often isolating paths. These challenges are so intense that, on the few occasions when two or more of the central figures’ paths would cross for the first time in the book, I felt palpably overjoyed for them, relieved that they would be present to help one another from then on. Perhaps, in addition to the claims made explicitly and implicitly by the text regarding how we might approach such crises in the future, we might also consider our responses as readers as we look back on such moments where human connections are formed that strengthen all parties – and approach future interventions with the priority of facilitating them.

You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/All-Else-Failed-Unlikely-Volunteers/dp/1954276095

Michael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines.  He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala, the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances , which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews . He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY.

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Benefit by Siobhan Phillips

By Michael Collins

Laura, the narrator of Siobhan Phillips’ Benefit, describes her dissertation as “focused on characters in Henry James at the periphery of the narrative” such as Fanny Assingham in The Golden Bowl, who “has little money and no children. She therefore can do nothing herself. She stands on the sidelines and talks about what other people are doing” (72). Notably, this passage could also function as a plot summary novel from the somewhat lost perspective Laura herself occupies for much of it, if, that is, if we add Laura’s addendum:

Viewed another way, Fanny Assingham is not peripheral to The Golden Bowl. It is she who introduces the impoverished Italian prince and the rich American daughter. It is she who sets the whole narrative in motion. At some point, Renata wrote at the end of one of my dissertations chapter drafts, you may wish to consider whether your description implies a stronger indictment of narrative structure. But I didn’t want to indict anything. Certainly nothing I was working on. (75; italics original)

Laura’s impressions of the relative importance of a “minor” character and the injustices visited upon her by class structure are a mere whisper of the widespread social injustices Laura’s research projects in the novel will explore, ranging from the brutal sugar trade’s accumulation of mass fortunes, to the treatment of characters “at the periphery” of modern wars and the refugee crises they caused. The quote from Renata also foreshadows much of Laura’s intuitive and creative “research” that will be published as the novel itself, which follows Laura’s reorientation toward her evolving guiding principles and her extensive reconsidering of the perspectives of other characters previously kept at the periphery of her own life.

The novel begins as Laura is “not renewed” at an adjunct teaching position, which sends her on various explorations of potential sources of income. By necessity or unstated wish, this time period also seems to call Laura toward reconnecting with friends; in fact, the first few chapters are individually structured around meeting various members of her former cohort of Weatherford fellows at Oxford. Laura’s narration of these meetings, often eviscerating all varieties of social contrivance, shows her to be an incisive reader of humans as well as texts:

Heather’s relationships with men: numerous not frivolous. They were always deliberate, even if sometimes casual. She did not do one-night stands or flings. She went on dates; she dated, sometimes several people at one time. Sean and I are going to brunch. Matt is taking me to a jazz concert this weekend.  I told her, I don’t know anyone else who actually dates. Dating helps you meet people. As if that’s a good – Laura you’re terrible. Heather was smiling. I know I am, I said. Don’t mind me. Keep doing everything exactly as it should be done.

I think you need to be very beautiful to do everything exactly as it should be done. Also, you need to have money. (54; italics original)

If, however, Laura undertakes an informal inquiry into narrative structure, she does so intuitively and relationally – and her own assumptions are revised along with anyone else’s, particularly those involving the importance she places on the perspectives of others. Through this process she learns that her friends do not view her as a foreign object, but rather with respect, as in Caroline’s description of their time at Oxford: “[Y]ou were sort of assessing everything all the time. That’s why you weren’t part of things. Mark and I talked about it once. He had this idea that if he passed muster with you, he would be okay” (288). This seems to be a discovery for Laura, although it has long been apparent to the reader that Laura’s narrative voice is indeed continually assessing everything, an interesting way in which Phillips’ narrative strategies allow us to see Laura concurrently from interior and external views. It helps us to perceive an interesting complexity Laura’s character: Her assessing gaze is also regularly turned debilitatingly inward, so much so that she relies on observations of and interactions with her friends and mother as one primary source of grounding in navigating her professional crisis.

In an interesting formal development, the middle chapters are structured around improvisational forms of writing, including a narrative structured around a false dichotomy between novels of incident versus novels of character that was dismissed by Henry James, whose rebuttal she highlights: “the only classification of the novel that I can understand is into that which has life and that which has it not” (242). This more esoteric doctrine seems an elusive goal compared with her sometimes comically self-aware diary: “Today I thought again about how I should use this record, this journal. I am doing it wrong. I should write more about my day-to-day life, my ordinary actions. I should not write about what I am learning or reading. That goes somewhere else” (110). Writing things in the “wrong” places, in turn, becomes the form of a later chapter that interrupts and juxtaposes attempts at biographical imagination of the founders of the Weatherford fellowship with her own process of moving out of her mother’s house. In seeking out a form that “has life” narrative structure is obliged to morph with and perhaps to a degree facilitate the unfolding life of the narrator – or, seen another way, perhaps, a narrator who is opening to a broader array of experiences carries into their writing a curiosity to experiment with the perspectival and expressive potentials of new and different forms, even those that seem “wrong.”

Laura’s experiments with more process-oriented modes of writing, dovetail with her extensions of “research” to include a variety of excursions into previously unexplored pockets of consciousness and society. Meditation helps her to perceive her work as a mirroring, albeit in a backhanded way: “[I]t turns out my thoughts are not like clouds in the sky. They do not drift. They gnaw. My thoughts are rats in a field of sugar. Rats, I read, are one of the few animals that not only survive but even prosper when fields are cleared for cane” (96). Reconnecting with friends from her time at Oxford also allows her – and the novel itself – the benefit of their perspectives cultivated in other fields, integral to complicating the work of both. Greta, a professor intently focused on supporting students, quips, “You don’t need to be a trained anthropologist to know that gifts are all about power” (142). Whereas Caroline summarizes her field of “Development”: “It’s a bunch of people who wanted to do some good, and realized they couldn’t, and kept going anyway” (283). I’m focusing more on Laura’s evolution of consciousness in this piece, but the historical and ethical conversations, clustered to a degree around the other characters’ specialties, are each significant in their own right, as well as providing context for Laura’s troubling meditations. The rats have real teeth, and, significantly, they sometimes visit the meditations of other people.

These exchanges of disappointments, disillusions, and apprehensions point to another interesting aspect of these social reconnections, the delicate manner in which Phillips shows the other characters to be Laura’s friends, almost despite Laura’s wishes to remain at an observational distance. The other, also notably understated, side of Laura’s aversion to sentimentality, though, seems to be that she is a generally polite and compliant friend.

None of this obviates the litany of psychological and historical demons Laura faces, beginning with those created by her lumping together of social structures and their evils: “Anything you do is part of something, some institution, system, way of operating, and all of these ways are founded on cruelty or heading for a crash or they have no use for you” (156). Her ideation also cuts off what she perceives as her potential paths of retreat from this quagmire: “I know that failed academics are supposed to find refuge in imagination; they are supposed to realize that books are more important than scholarship about books. But they’re also supposed to find refuge, the failed academics, in life; they are supposed to realize that the world is better than any words. I don’t want either part of this contradiction” (209). Oddly, this thinking bottoms out in a realization that, though negatively experienced, is quite grounding: “I saw for a moment what I was. How I was. Exactly how wrong, how petty, driven by illusions I didn’t even admit, cowering under the generosity of others, my own indecision, my own ineffectual inconsequence, counting on that” (264). Leaving aside the self-indictment of “failed academic,” which is barely justifiable as a criticism, Laura’s comments, if we’re individually being honest, are true for most of us and the social structures that contain us. A subtle achievement of the novel is its balancing of social critique with awareness of the shadow aspects of the consciousness through which they are processed and articulated.

Laura is aided in this process by a bit of sanguine wisdom from her dissertation advisor, Renata, through which she develops a more intricate understanding of the “countercultural” work of “scholarship” (292) and a more complex and intersubjective understanding of the dynamics between story and character, based in no small part on a reconceptualization of her own character and story:

It was the feeling of taking things in; it was the feeling of needing more – information, words, understanding – and of having more and not enough and then again needing; it was the feeling not of wanting to work but of wanting to learn. It was not a moral feeling. Selfish rather. But so utterly distant from myself at the same time. How badly I had served this desire, and yet how faithfully it continued nevertheless: That was something to trust. (297)

This ownership of her passions constitutes a complex enough understanding of “selfish” to be characterized as self-knowledge, and its realization carves a place for the novel as a pluralistic and interdisciplinary research story in which the personal equation forms a shifting figure and ground with the various subjects of study. Laura is, after all, among many other things, the narrator. Not to be excluded from this achievement, the work’s literary forebear Henry James tacks on his own again reread writing advice to such posterity: “One must save one’s life if one can.” (296).

You can find the book here:  Benefit

Michael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines.  He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala, the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances , which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews . He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY.

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Let No One Sleep by Juan Josè Millàs Translated by Thomas Bunstead

By Michael Collins

The intertwining themes of mirroring, identity and narrative construction present themselves concurrently in the very opening of Let No One Sleep, the latest from Juan Josè Millàs in the engaging translation by Thomas Bunstead:

Seeing herself in the mirror, Lucía said, That fat woman is me.

This was not said insultingly; she wasn’t being mean to herself. She, after all, was pretend thin rather than fat. So her mother had said when she was a girl….” (9)

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Lucía negates the simple assumption of a weight-normative negative inner monologue. However, the reasoning for the statement, such as it is, involves an attribution of her “true” identity to a concept coined by her mother, who died when she was young, an construct that Lucía herself fleshes out as an adult. It is notable in this context that the statement “That fat woman is me” – as opposed to the more expected “I am fat” – seems to create an alternate self in the mirror image in opposition to her invented-inherited self in order to identify with it and draw towards the enigma it represents.

The line takes on more ominous undertones shortly thereafter when we learn of Lucía losing her job in IT development the day after the death of an obese colleague who died suddenly after a significant weight loss:

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Her death confirmed people’s suspicions, whatever they were, given they were impossible to substantiate either way. The day after she died, the company, an app-development firm that also installed, configured, and maintained IT systems, filed fraudulently for bankruptcy and shut down. (10)

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The passage, like many of Lucía’s narrative constructions, juxtaposes the two events syntactically, as if their slight chronological separation in consciousness keeps the death from shading or perhaps expressing Lucía’s feelings about the job loss. The self-confirming gossipers add a layer of isolation to the woman’s plight, and by extension Lucía’s, showing her awareness of how neither have much control of their own story. Or, perhaps, none of us have much control of such things, but we notice it most when cut off from our habitual sources of stability – and when conscious compartmentalization collapses.

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As fate would have it, Lucía leaves work in a taxi, and “The taxi driver turned out to be a programmer as well” (11). Shortly, we learn that this interaction, like the one with the mirror, ends up describing Lucía’s future in reverse, a subtle pattern that dovetails with the ways in which individual identities support and destroy the identity formations of others throughout interactions of the novel. The cab driver suggests – narratively and/or psychologically – Lucía’s oncoming events in sharing his own experiences as a driver: “’You get into all kinds of scrapes. Plus, I imagine I’m in a different city every day. New York, Delhi, Mexico…’” (11). The English translation here sounds like a mashup of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Fight Club in ways that invite comparisons of this “single serving friend” and the complicated adventurer Lucía with various unreliable narrators and the works that serve as their vehicles. Other subtle literary allusions arise throughout, in keeping with the novel’s problematizing of identity, mirroring, and art as representations of and stable reality.

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Lucía’s driver also references his use of self-hypnosis as a way of deepening his practice of pretending to drive his cab in different cities with the hypothetical – and evangelized – purpose of deepening connection to his actual environment: “’It’s like when you succeed in imagining what you’re doing and doing what you’re imagining, all at the same time, the anxiety in your life goes away’” (12). I’ll leave the reader to parse where the novel upholds and complicates this statement, mentioning merely that the self-hypnosis seems to form a segue for Lucía from her previous work with algorithms in IT programming. As the novel unfolds it also seems to explore the algorithm as a metaphor for the mind’s own recursive functioning in ways that range from the liberating experiences that can arise from improvising with identity to the blind spots and tunnel vision associated with obsession.

Somewhere between these competing approaches, Lucía also seems to calm herself with an ironically non-predictive rehearsal of precognition inherited from her mother:

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This was a phrase she had spoken thousands of times in her life, though it did not, in general, precede anything happening. She had gotten it from her mother, who would sometimes stop mid-action and say, “Something is going to happen,” followed by a vacant look coming over her. Then, since nothing happened (nothing visible at least), she would go the rest of the way down the stairs, or finish brushing her hair, or whatever it was she had been doing before the sudden stoppage. Lucía had inherited that sense of some vague but threatening event being constantly just around the corner. (15)

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The prediction, counterintuitively, comforts Lucía by not coming to pass, except on rare occasions that reveal how terrifying the unforeseen often is as a mere psychological factor without an actual event even needing to take place. As if a part of Lucía’s learned algorithm for confronting fear, the statement repeats in, from, and to Lucía as if creating a ritual bubble of psychic protection, a practice that deepens the pathos of the opening scene significantly.

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Other characters posit such bubbles in the external world as well, and the novel as a whole continually explores ways in which the psyche, precariously, exhilaratingly, hilariously, and tragically vacillates between these poles of self-protection and relative self-exploration through interaction. In Lucía’s case, this takes place on a higher magnitude due to her process of attempting to negotiate with the world a new identity that it will mirror back in the responses of others. However, the same duality manifests in the other characters, like the woman who works in theatre who invites her into a similar para-intimacy to the one Lucía shared with the first cab driver, except with the seating reversed: “I often use taxis to get things off my chest. The car is a kind of bubble; it creates a provisional sort of intimacy between two strangers. I’ve told colleagues of yours things that not even my closest girlfriends know about” (36). Also like the first driver, she offers up a statement that, while true in a limited context, wildly belies greater implications: “Theater’s quite like that, a bit of a closed circuit, it’s own ecosystem” (40). Both characters, regardless of their initial intentions in these conversations, open new worlds for Lucía, in which she sees herself from different perspectives and allows dormant parts of her to externalize into evolving new versions of herself that grow increasingly chaotic to those around her, ultimately challenging the algorithms of social reality itself.

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Lucía is insouciant and instable, liberated and liquescent. Though she is seeker and subject in ways that dialogue with meta-dramatists from Pirandello to Beckett, the narrative itself is continuously surprising and entertaining, offhandedly funny and deconstructive of many forms of social preposterousness that one is often too polite to point out, unless one finds oneself with nothing to lose. I’m limiting myself to writing about the opening here so as not to ruin the turns, hard stops, and side trips for everyone else because the book is, literally, the ride of a lifetime.

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You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Let-Sleep-Juan-Jos%C3%A9-Mill%C3%A1s/dp/1942658931/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=

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Michael Collins’ poems have appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines.  He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala, the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances , which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews . He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY.

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Most Read Reviews @ North of Oxford 2022

Just in time for holiday shopping! Most read reviews as determined by the readership of North of Oxford

Casualty Reports by Martha Collins

https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2022/10/01/casualty-reports-by-martha-collins/

All the Songs We Sing – Edited by Lenard D. Moore

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A Poetics of the Press: Interviews with Poets, Printers, & Publishers edited by Kyle Schlesinger

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Smoking the Bible by Chris Abani

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Contra natura by Rodolfo Hinostroza Translated by Anthony Seidman

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The Flash Fiction of Lydia Davis

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The Upright Dog by Carl Fuerst

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Punks: New & Selected Poems by John Keene

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The World’s Lightest Motorcycle by Yi Won, Translated from Korean by E. J. Koh and Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

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getting away with everything by Vincent Cellucci and Christopher Shipman

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A Feeling Called Heaven by Joey Yearous-Algozin

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Poolside at the Dearborn Inn by Cal Freeman

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Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me by John Weir

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The Bar at Twilight by Frederic Tuten

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The Bar at Twilight by Frederic Tuten

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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The Bar at Twilight by Frederic Tuten published by Bellevue Literary Press, New York in May, 2022 is a selection of seventeen short stories that cover the gamut of universal themes including love, loss, and grief.

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In the title story, The Bar at Twilight, beginning on page seventy-nine, Tuten opens with:

He walked into the bar, twilight at his heels, and without thinking ordered a scotch neat. 

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The scene is set. Tuten explores the character’s conversations for a while as if this were a normal bar throwing in hints of the importance that it is twilight and the bar has a ghostly history.   As the reader approaches the end of the story, he carefully leads the reader through the snow to a boat that takes the bar’s occupants out to the open sea. Tuten has explored the themes of love, loss, reconciliation, hope, despair and much more in this short piece of fiction.

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The language is both common and sophisticated as the participants in the bar reveal themselves and each character becomes an individual with a history as they get to know each other. The pace is well controlled and focused bordering on mythology and reality as the occupants ingest their liquor.

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In The Phantom Tower beginning on page one hundred eighty-five, Tuten explores the relationship of a boy to his father and how the world is understood.  The boy asked his father What is the world made of?  His father answers Made of nothing and is nothing.  Tuten uses a dream sequence to show the boy who has become a man climbing a phantom tower while his wife calls to him to come down. When the father buys the boy books and tells him he has reached the age of reason, the reader is alerted that this is a story about finding one’s self in the world and climbing the phantom tower in a dream leads to discovery.  The subtlety of this story telling is wonderful.

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On page two hundred and fifty-six, the story Coda, Some Episodes in the History of My Reading, is divided into mini chapters like those in a book: Bed, The Seduction, The Poisonous Book, Another Book, Another Folly and A New Love.  For those who love to read books, this story details how it begins, how it continues and the reasons one appreciates reading.

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Tuten is a skillful story teller. I particularly like the titles Tuten has chosen for his stories.  They are clean, neat and focused.  Winter, 1965 suggests time and place. The Safe, the Sea, Deauville, 1966 also suggests time and place but hints at a relationship amongst the three. The Restaurant, The Concert, The Bat, The Bed, Le Petit Dejeuner appears to be a layered title that focuses on particulars within the story.  Tuten chooses the titles for his stories so that they enrich the fiction.

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The tome is composed of two hundred and seven-three pages of short reads good for a cold winter in front of a warm fire or on a work break.  Well worth the time to explore.

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You can find the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Bar-at-Twilight-Frederic-Tuten/dp/1954276036

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 Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University, Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.

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Canción by Eduardo Halfon Translated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn

By g emil reutter

Canción is the title of Eduardo Halfon’s latest release. Canción is also the kidnapper of his grandfather during the 1960’s and is the centerpiece of the narrator’s quest to find out why. Yet the story opens in Tokyo at a Lebanese Writers Conference. The narrator tells the story of his Lebanese grandfather, who is not Lebanese but Syrian, for Lebanon did not exist yet. Halfon establishes a bond with his Japanese host, whose grandfather survived Hiroshima. Canción weaves a tale of family, of violence, of fear, of travels, of liberation.

The character development is excellent, such as grandfather; Uncle Salomón; and the sleeping and sick, NoNo snoring. Salomón is reading Turkish coffee grounds when the soldiers arrive at their Guatemalan City Mansion to inform the grandfather that they located one of the men who had kidnapped him in 1967. It is here the narrator begins to piece together the long search to his grandfather’s history, coupled with the violent and fearful past of Guatemala, its civil war, and uncertainty. The violence of the Kaibiles is graphically detailed in the slaughter of an entire village, as well as the role of “Beni,” who is an enforcer for his grandfather. Beni, a Kaibile, was at the village slaughter.

The Halfon families shifting geographical locations from Syria to Europe to New York to Guatemala to Israel and to Japan contribute to the shifting of this story in a positive manner. A family with boundaries, yet without boundaries who maintain their faith and wealth.

Along the way we meet a beauty queen, model-handsome ambassador, bartenders, and characters of the night. Then there is Canción, the butcher, who we hear tales about and yet never meet nor does the narrator in his search. In the end he does find out his destiny.

Canción brings us into the violence of 1960’s Guatemala, not only through the violence of rebels and the government, but through the eyes of a family entwined in the midst of it all. It is a story of violence yet in the end it is a story of redemption.

You can find the book here: https://blpress.org/?post_type=product&p=5063

g emil reutter is a writer of poems and stories and on occasion literary criticism. He can be found at: https://gereutter.wordpress.com/about/ 

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Seasons of Purgatory by Shahriar Mandanipour- Translated by Sara Khalili

By g emil reutter

In Seasons of Purgatory, Mandanipour writes of life in the Theocratic Republic of Iran. His character development and plot development is fresh in each short story.  Woven through are stories of defiance, front line war, a judgmental village, the taking of a daughter and belittlement of the father.

We meet Mr. Farvaneh in the story Shadows of the Cave. A defiant man who still wears a tie when he visits his wife’s grave. He also maintains a library and a fascination with the animals at the zoo across the street from his apartment. He is also the glue that holds his building together until the end when as in life it really doesn’t matter. Mandanipour brings us to the backward town of Guraab in the story Shatter the Stone Tooth. The narrator is there to help bring some education to the people of the town, yet he spends most of his time in a cave with a stone carving on the wall and a wild dog. The story progresses quickly as the town turns on him and in mass attempt to kill the dog in various barbaric attempts symbolizing the conflict between the man and dog and the town for one is urban and the other rural.  The title story, Seasons of Purgatory, brings us to the front lines of the Iran-Iraq war. Primarily the Iranian soldiers and their commanders who sit above a valley that is no man’s land. Mandanipour captures the violence, disregard for human life as an abandoned Iraqi soldier long dead leans on a rock formation as animals feed on him, bullets strike him and howls fill the valley.

King of the Graveyard tells the story of a husband and wife in search of their son and his unmarked grave in the local cemetery. They search for years, envy those with marked graves unable to grieve for their son. The son killed for opposing the revolution, shot down in the street and dumped in an unmarked grave so the family would be deprived of grieving.  Another couple have a son taken and disposed of and then in horror learn their daughter had been taken and raped, those rapists respond and give the father sweets pretending to be groomsmen. Heartbreaking as the father feigns celebration, dancing in the street.  The story Seven Captains brings a philanderer back to town twenty some years after his married lover was stoned to death for their relationship. It is an excellent example of love and betrayal on many levels throughout the story.

In these tales of collective and individual violence; of boredom, brutality of war and religion; love and loss; Mandanipour establishes himself as a gifted, well-crafted story teller. Seasons of Purgatory is a must read for lovers of the short story. The translation by Sara Khalili to English captures the intensity and vibrancy of Mandanipour’s stories.

You can buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Seasons-Purgatory-Shahriar-Mandanipour/dp/1942658958

g emil reutter is a writer of stories, poems and occasional literary criticism. He can be found at:  https://gereutter.wordpress.com/about/

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The Bear by Andrew Krivak

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By Lynette G. Esposito

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In a short poem, Robert Frost posed the question, how will the world end–in fire or ice?Dylan Thomas in his famous villanelle Do Not Go Gentle in That Good Night called for us to rage against the dying of the light. Andrew Krivak, in his novel, The Bear, published by Bellevue Literary Press (released February 2020) suggests the end of human beings is not the end of the world but more a natural cycle of events: not fire, nor ice nor rage but almost like going to sleep.  He blends mythological understandings with the quiet natural extinction of a species.

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The story reads like an epic poem with images both literal and figurative leading the reader along the path returning everything to nature before humans existed.

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He begins his novel with: The last two were a girl and her father who lived along the old eastern range on the side of a mountain they called the mountain that stands alone.  The setting, the human relationship and the naming of the mountain are all gently symbolic of the storyline. Krivak focuses on how the father teaches his daughter survival techniques handed down from one generation to another interlaced with legendary tales of a bear.  The father begins the training before the young girl is five as if he has a premonition of things to come.  The father is right.

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The father and daughter are well drawn through the educational and protective concerns for the daughter by the father. Krivak’s presentation through the father’s understanding of how to clean and tan a hide, how to weight an arrow, how to make shoes from animal skins and other skills are believable.  When the father is teaching his daughter, he is also teaching the reader these forgotten skills once so important.

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Krivak writes clearly and effectively of a girl’s journey away from and back to the only home she has known. Along the way, a mythical bear serves as her guide even while he is in winter hibernation.  If the reader allows suspension of disbelief to work, the reality of the fable becomes plausible and the storyline more pleasurable.

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The novel is made up of 223 pages and is well paced.   Krivak refreshes an old theme of the end of human existence and its consequences.   The last chapter begins:

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                  In her final years, the old woman spoke to all the living things of the

                  earth between the mountain and the lakeshore, for they came to

                  her without fear or dominion,,,

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The fiction presents a clear appreciation for nature and all life.  The mythological bear works well as a literary device and symbol of continuousness.

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Krivak’s is well skilled in using universal themes such as the symbol of  an animal guide, the journey home, the last one, and belief in all nature’s living things  This is a very enjoyable read.

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Andrew Krivak is the author of two previous novels, The Signal Flame, and The Sojourn., a National Book Award Finalist and winner of both the Chautauqua Prize and Dayton Literary Peace Prize    He lives with his wife and three children in Somerville, Massachusetts.

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The Bear is available from Consortium Book Sakes and distribution: www.cbsdcom and http://www.blpress.org

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Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University,  Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.