Dec 25, Will Slattery, Casement's Ghost

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here.

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Casement's Ghost

Will Slattery

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For the past 20 years of my life I have been haunted by Roger Casement, a 19th and 20th Century Anglo-Irish diplomat and civil servant who in 1911 received a knighthood from the United Kingdom of Great Britain & (at the time) Ireland for his international humanitarian work and who was then a swift 5 years later executed by the United Kingdom of Great Britain & (at the time) Ireland for high treason.

Quite a few people are haunted by Roger Casement. The British Foreign Office is haunted by Roger Casement, who was once a model civil servant—genteel, broad-minded, polite, hard-working, amenable to British institutions at home and abroad, liberal in a classic sense, willing to forgo marriage family for duty country, suffused with a solid bourgeois morality but charismatic enough for a knighthood & the pseudo-aristocratic legitimacy it could lend to his future work for the empire —before he became a seditious flame-tongued Irish nationalist and a leading participant in the 1916 event known as the Easter Rising, a chaotic rebellion against English rule which marks the first armed conflict of the 20th Century Irish Revolutionary Period and the birth of modern Irish independence.

The Republic of Ireland is also haunted by Roger Casement. A well-known Anglo-Irish administrator renouncing his accumulated imperial-bureaucratic privileges and taking up the Fenian banner was a cause for celebration and a demonstration of the inevitable moral might & triumph of a Free Catholic Ireland—until it came out that Roger Casement was also what might be called an inveterate sodomite who had led a double-life throughout his career in which he worked his way through dozens of younger men’s cocks in alleys and docks and bars and parks and fields and rivers spread across three continents.

You’re also almost certainly haunted by Roger Casement, although you might not know it; if you’ve ever read Heart of Darkness or seen Apocalypse Now or heard the phrase “the horror! the horror!” or see images of mist-and-blood flit through your mind’s eye when you think of colonialism then you’re haunted by Roger Casement, for in 1890, in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Roger Casement met Joseph Conrad and became a friend, a fascination, and a specter to him. Casement, seen through a glass darkly, looms out at us via Conrad; altered, refracted, shadowy, at times menacing flashes of Casement show up physically and spiritually in both Marlow and Kurtz.

I think of Roger Casement on average 2 or 3 times a week and yet I feel—strangely, at times achingly—that I’m no closer to fully understanding the man now at 35 then I was when I first learned of him as a teenager.

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I’ll try to give a brief and neutral account of the major episodes and incidents of Casement’s life:

Born into an Anglo-Irish family in Ireland (i.e., of Protestant middle-and-up class background), Casement had a successful career as a civil servant, diplomat and administrator for which he received a good deal of recognition and accolades.

During the early 1900s Casement personally investigated and exposed imperialist violence including torture, rape, mutilation, enslavement, and murder in Western colonies in the Congo. Returning home from Africa, Casement published his findings to great international acclaim--and outrage--but this had little effect on Western imperialism in the region.

Slightly later in the early 1900s Casement personally investigated and exposed imperialist violence including torture, rape, mutilation, enslavement, murder, and attempted ethnic cleansing in Western rubber plantations in the Putumayo region of the Amazon. Returning home from the Amazon, Casement published his findings to great international acclaim--and outrage--but this had little effect on Western imperialism in the region.

During the 1910s Casement abandoned his work for the British Foreign Office, became an advocate for the liberation of Ireland (then still occupied by the United Kingdom), helped organized the 1916 Easter Uprising with the hope that it would lead both to a free Ireland and to the eventual destruction of the entire British Empire, and was subsequently tried for treason and executed by the British government.

During and after his trial for treason Casement's reputation was complicated and sullied by the circulation of what are now known as the Black Diaries, writings in what appears to be Casement's own hand which include both mundane accounts of his daily life and graphically explicit accounts of the secret sexual encounters he had with other men (a minority of scholars argue that the Black Diaries are in fact an anti-Casement forgery generated by the British state to tarnish his image, but the majority of historians and readers believe them to be authentic).

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I first encountered Casement as a "Leader of '16" due to a precocious adolescent interest in both left-wing politics and modern Irish history. I do not find Casement physically attractive, but if I am honest I do feel that I somehow fell in love with him as a teenager and have been in love with him ever since, despite his many complications and flaws as a historical personage. I have felt significant romantic attraction for only 5 or 6 real, present-day people over the course of my life; this number maybe doubles if we include historical personages, so Casement is in a somewhat small group. I can't fully explain my love for the man, but I feel it has something to do with the steady march of his conscience through the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

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Of the persistent mutilation by government soldiers, there can be no shadow of a doubt, should the system maintain forced labor on this scale, I believe the entire population will be extinct in thirty years.

--Casement on Belgian imperialism in the Congo

And the charming Lizardo Arana tells me in Iquitos I shall find "such splendid Indians" here, and he feels sure the result of my journey to the Putumayo will be more capital for the Company! Yes, more capital punishment if I had my way. I swear to God, I'd hang every one of the band of wretches with my own hands if I had the power, and do it with the greatest pleasure. I have never shot game with any pleasure, have indeed abandoned all shooting for that reason, that I dislike the thought of taking life. I have never given life to anyone myself, and my celibacy makes me frugal of human life, but I'd shoot or exterminate these infamous scoundrels more gladly than I should shoot a crocodile or kill a snake.

--Casement on his desire to kill Peruvian rubber barons

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Casement’s diaries do not make for immediately compelling reading—the daily entries are fragmented, terse, sometimes formulaic, often concerned with trivial and quotidian details (weather, letters arriving, if he went out for lunch, distance travelled, billiards scores, etc). Sometimes he goes weeks without a sexual encounter, and sometimes he has several in impressively rapid succession. The details of his sexual forays are usually recorded in a quick, excited manner: age, location, memorable physical attributes of the partner, if he paid for it, ejaculations (both verbal and genital), and dimension(s). Casement generally seems to have preferred men younger than himself with firm, lean torsos, large cocks, and substantial sexual stamina; the primary thing he tends to record about himself in these encounters is his own capacity for being penetrated. A few examples:

 

Casement’s sexual encounters tend to range (in slightly anachronistic terminology) from “anonymous” to “cruising” to “rough trade” to “paying for sex”, sometimes combining and recombining elements of these. Often times there’s a grimy sadness to the image of Casement cruising, especially during his journeys to Africa and South America—a lonely middle-aged foreign service officer trying to get 18-year-olds to top him. Whenever he is back in Europe, we sometimes get encounters that show different, slightly sweeter types of intimacy and longing:

What I find fascinating and elusive about Casement is that through his diaries we have prodigious, almost impossible access to firsthand accounts of his sensations and sentiments about his sexual experiences: joy, exhilaration, 5 dollars here or there, “very, very deep thrusts”, howling, “deep screw”, biggest since wherever, on top or on bottom, “splendid steed”, “huge”, “again”, “Grand”, indoors and outdoors, what time of day and of night, uncertainty, “so deep mutual longing”.

Despite this, we have almost no access to Casement’s sense of his own sexuality; his diaries let us know how all his fucking felt, but rather little about how he felt about the nature and orientation of his fucking. Let’s compare what his personal effects offer to those of other Anglo-Irish homosexual luminaries from the same period, say, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, both slightly older but of the same generation and broadly similar class backgrounds:

If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don’t care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it into the fire without reading any farther. But I believe you will like it. I don’t think there is a man living, even you who are above the prejudices of the class of small-minded men, who wouldn’t like to get a letter from a younger man, a stranger, across the world - a man living in an atmosphere prejudiced to the truths you sing and your manner of singing them. The idea that arises in my mind is whether there is a man living who would have the pluck to burn a letter in which he felt the smallest atom of interest without reading it. I believe you would and that you believe you would yourself. You can burn this now and test yourself, and all I will ask for my trouble of writing this letter, which for all I can tell you may light your pipe with or apply to some more ignoble purpose - is that you will in some manner let me know that my words have tested your impatience. Put it in the fire if you like - but if you do you will miss the pleasure of the next sentence which ought to be that you have conquered an unworthy impulse. A man who is certain of his own strength might try to encourage himself a piece of bravo, but a man who can write, as you have written, the most candid words that ever fell from the lips of a mortal man - a man to whose candor Rousseau’s Confessions is reticence - can have no fear for his own strength. If you have gone this far you may read the letter and I feel in writing now that I am talking to you. If I were before your face I would like to shake hands with you, for I feel that I would like you. I would like to call YOU Comrade and to talk to you as men who are not poets do not often talk. I think that at first a man would be ashamed, for a man cannot in a moment break the habit of comparative reticence that has become second nature to him; but I know I would not long be ashamed to be natural before you. You are a true man, and I would like to be one myself, and so I would be towards you as a brother and as a pupil to his master. In this age no man becomes worthy of the name without an effort. You have shaken off the shackles and your wings are free. I have the shackles on my shoulders still - but I have no wings. If you are going to read this letter any further I should tell you that I am not prepared to “give up all else” so far as words go. The only thing I am prepared to give up is prejudice, and before I knew you I had begun to throw overboard my cargo, but it is not all gone yet.

--Bram Stoker in an 1872 letter to Walt Whitman 

Stoker was an oft-unhappy closet case who probably never had sex with another man, but his youthful letters and correspondences give us a window into a kind of homosexual worldview marked by notions of camaraderie and liberty and bravery. On on the other end of the out-and-outré spectrum Wilde (fin du siècle faggot par excellence) ends up almost compulsively disclosing his vision of homosexuality as a superior orientation while on trial for it. But as a historical figure Casement consistently resists this sort of categorizing; we simply don’t know how he felt about his sexuality even if we know so many of his sexual encounters.

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A few months ago a sexual partner of mine rummaged through a stack of papers on my coffee table (he's bright, curious, quick, nimble, always roving) and found a little pamphlet which had pictures of Casement and the other leaders of the 1916 Easter Uprising. With no prior knowledge of Casement, seeing only his face among rows of others, he immediately asked who this man was. Why do you want to know?, I wondered.

Because he's hot, he replied.

I laughed and explained that, coincidentally, he was also the homosexual one. Over a century later Casement still has a draw for many men.

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In The Rings of Saturn--a strange, associative, perambulatory essay-novel which serves as a history of the metaphysics of transformation and destruction--W. G. Sebald gives a long and elliptical account of the chain of horrors which first lead an exiled Conrad to Africa, where he met Casement and where Casement saw the next link in the chain of horrors that would lead him up the Congo and to the Amazon and back to fight for a free Ireland. Sebald gives an effectively concise account of the injustices forced upon the Irish people by the English and how they affected Casement:

The injustice which had been borne by the Irish for centuries increasingly filled his consciousness. He could not rid his thoughts of the fact that almost half the population of Ireland had been murdered by Cromwell's soldiers, that thousands of men and women were later sent as white slaves to the West Indies, that in recent times more than a million Irish had died of starvation, and that the majority of the young generation were still forced to emigrate from their native land.

Sebald suggests that there's a link between the Black Diaries, Casement's homosexuality, and Casement's sense of morality:

The authenticity of this Black Diary, kept until recently under lock and key at the Public Records Office in Kew, was long considered highly debatable, not least because the executive and judicial organs of the state concerned with furnishing the evidence and drawing up the charge against alleged Irish terrorists have repeatedly been guilty, until very recent times, not only of pursuing doubtful suspicions and insinuations but indeed of deliberate falsification of the facts. For the veterans of the Irish freedom movement it was in any case inconceivable that one of their martyrs should have practised the English vice. But since the release to general scrutiny of the diaries in early 1994 there has no longer been any question that they are in Casement's own hand. We may draw from this the conclusion that it was precisely Casement's homosexuality that sensitized him to the continuing oppression, exploitation, enslavement and destruction, across the borders of social class and race, of those who were furthest from the centres of power.

"We may draw from this the conclusion that it was precisely Casement's homosexuality that sensitized him--" is a wry, sly, elusive little move Sebald buries in that paragraph--it's of course the resolution we want to achieve, that Casement being a homosexual and Casement being a revolutionary are wedded somehow, and it's of course a reasonable thought, but it precisely can't be a formal conclusion because we have no direct link or insight from Casement's own hand or mouth--only our intuitions, associations, and hopes. Sebald implicitly acknowledge some of the unknowability here with his last account of Casement, his trial and execution, and the ultimate transformation of his body:

As expected, Casement was found guilty of high treason at the end of his trial at the Old Bailey. The presiding judge, Lord Reading, formerly Rufus Isaacs, pronounced sentence. You will be taken hence, he told Casement, to a lawful prison and thence to a place of execution and will be there hanged by the neck until you be dead. Not until 1965 did the British government permit the exhumation of the remains of Roger Casement, presumably scarcely identifiable any more, from the lime pit in the courtyard of Pentonville prison into which his body had been thrown.

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I'll attempt to end with a moral accounting of this elusive Anglo-Irish man I love in a strange way:

Roger Casement was born into an empire which afforded him a position of comfort, security, wealth, & status; Roger Casement saw the link between the empire in which he lived, the systems of economic extraction empire creates, and the horrors of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide; Roger Casement rejected his position of comfort, security, wealth, & status and did his best to destroy the empire in which he lived, up to the point of death. Have you done better? (I have not). 

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Will Slattery teaches high school in Tucson and helps curate things here at Essay Daily. He tweets on very rare occasion (@wjaslattery) and posts miscellaneous personal content on Instagram rather frequently (@wjasity).

Dec 24: Yvette Saenz, On Going Home

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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On Going Home

Yvette Saenz

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I just got back from a trip to Alice, Texas, where I visited family for the holidays. I’ve forgotten how to be at home. I think what this means is that my home in Alice, Texas is no longer home.  

There are Trump signs everywhere around town, but that’s not the reason why it’s no longer home. It’s something deeper than politics, but politics is also deeper than politics. Politics is indicative of the condition of the human psyche, and politics is much more complex than what it has been reduced to in this era. 

But politics is also quite simple. It’s a conflict over ideas about what the world is and should be.  Home stays the same, and I’ve changed, and the conflict on all sides, everywhere, increases. 

I want to believe in the comforting lie that I’ve grown up, moved on, beyond the place of my birth, beyond the place that defined the first part of my life. The truth is far stranger and more disturbing: as I change, so does Alice, Texas. This place moves the way that glaciers do: slow motion, nearly imperceptible movements that could disrupt the delicate balance of the entire ecosystem. The balance has been disrupted, but in what exact way, I don’t know. Everyone has an answer, and no one has the answer. 

Nothing inspires nostalgic reminiscing like absence. Nothing inspires romantic yearning like distance. I've yearned, I've reminisced, I've idealized, but even home is no longer the same after being away for so long. What is there to yearn for, when the home I longed for cannot be found anywhere? It wasn’t even there when I thought it was there.  

When I return I feel that same desire to be a child again and re-do it all, live every pain, every happiness, but with the awareness and insight that I have as an adult. With the knowledge that I should savor even the suffering, because it meant something. I could save myself and my family from every bad thing that ever happened to them, with my adult insight. That’s the fantasy that home delivers.  

But the reality of returning to Alice frees me from the fantasy that I could’ve done anything to save anyone. Returning home reasserts that I had to save myself first before I could help anyone else.  

Many of the people I spoke with in Alice voted for Trump in the last election. I listened and asked questions because that’s my job here, to listen and learn. I can’t teach anyone here anything about life that they don’t already know, or that isn’t fundamentally irrelevant to them and their lives.  

And mostly all I know is poetry, and no one needs to know about poetry. In my classroom with 20-something-year-old undergraduates, I am the teacher, but in Alice, the roles are reversed. I become the student, and everyone is my teacher.  

When I speak about politics there, I feel like I sound out of touch, so I shut up pretty quickly. In graduate school, I’ve picked up the terrible habit of relying far too much on abstractions. It’s the curse of academia. I don’t consider myself an academic, but I work in a university and I’m a graduate student in the arts, which makes me an academic. 

I become self-conscious because my life is so different from the lives of the people who live in Alice. Many of them work in the difficult and dangerous industries that allow this country to function: agriculture, oil, healthcare. I teach poetry and take graduate classes. My life is the definition of frivolity in comparison with their lives. They are nice, kind, productive, likable people who I feel totally comfortable with in most ways. And many of them voted for Trump.  

I’m not interested in judgment. I’m interested in understanding because I refuse to become what I always feared: irrevocably changed by escaping home, spoiled by life under the protective guardianship of an academic institution, unable to remember the nature of the struggle outside of the bubble. Alice is changing, too. It’s still a rural, Hispanic community that mainly employs people in the oil field, in healthcare, and in the local school district. Since 1912, Jim Wells County, where Alice is the county seat, voted for a Republican in a presidential election only four times (1956, 1972, 2020, and 2024). Alice was a Democratic stronghold. What happened? 

It’s much easier to convey surety when speaking in abstractions. In the world of ideas, how can anything be proven or disproven? It’s just a matter of rhetoric. In writing this, I am in the world of ideas. But people are not ideas. People are living beings, they are real, and we have to listen even if we disagree with them or believe they are wrong. We have to try our best to understand why they believe what they do. And it’s not our job to save anyone. It’s only our task to see and recognize people for who they are. That’s the only way things will change for the better rather than for the worse. 

But much more than an academic or a teacher, I’m a poet. Isn’t poetry located in the concrete, hyper-specific moment? I need to give you a snapshot of Alice to hold, but what was most meaningful to me when I was home had nothing to do with politics. It was sitting in the car with my mom as she read my poetry manuscript, and realizing as she read that for the past three years, I’ve been writing these poems for her.  

It was my niece asking me whether there are cherry blossoms in China, and my being able to tell her: yes, I’ve seen them. It was holding my nephew's hand as we rode the escalator at the mall in Corpus Christi, because he gets nervous when riding an escalator. I had this fear as a child, too. I remember that all I needed was for someone to hold my hand. 

Writing poetry has taught me that, paradoxically, in the realm of the specific and the concrete, nothing is certain. And perhaps certainty about that which we know little is part of the problem. In what I see and experience in real life, not in abstractions, not in the virtual world, I feel my individuality, my separateness from other people, and my closeness with them, my intense uncertainty about where I end and another person begins. I feel the beginnings of an our, an us. 

Alice, Texas always reminds me that I am not alone. 

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Yvette Saenz is a writer from Alice, Texas. She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Social Studies and has worked in AI, marketing, and education. Currently, she is an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona.

Dec 23: Lydia Paar, Plurinity

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Plurinity

Lydia Paar

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Your husband’s best friend, a poet, gave him a postcard. 

     Red background, black pen, and the words: “This machine kills fascists.”

How quaint, you thought, more soundbite wisdom, but your husband framed it and hung it in his office.

At the end of another bad election year, where soundbytes sounded good enough to sway the vote to a spin king, you have begun to wonder how much writing matters. You scoff when you glimpse the framed postcard, passing from the kitchen.

You scoff although you’ve written a lot. Years and years of essays. You obviously have some belief in the value of attempting to articulate things to people beyond your own brain. In fact, the word essay, used as verb, means “to try.”

Try you do.

     The essay you’ve tried hardest to write, one roundly rejected by venue after venue, is on actively seeking peace. It’s awfully “Crunchy Christian” (Hippie Christ, not “Hoorah-Hoorah Guns and Country” Christ), more conversion than the killing of fascists.

The need to seek this, like so many needs, took root through experience, an experience you are reminded of when you walk by a certain building every day on the campus where you work.

It’s the Harshbarger building, connected to the Mining building by a broad, open stairwell.

     The Harshbarger building has a photo taped to its outside signage now: the professor shot to death by his former student there:

Mining is where you taught that same term. And on that day of your colleague’s murder, you had, by some miracle, or by chance, canceled class to hold conferences in your office, far enough away, that day, to be safe.

You think about it constantly now, as you pass en route to class: how you used to dawdle in the halls before teaching, examining wall-mounted ore, fun facts about human consumption. Marvel at the resource we’ve brought up from dirt.

Now, you shy from entering, where the ghost of your own potential alternate reality stalks: the one where you didn’t schedule those stop-gap conferences, where gunshots were in earshot, and you stood frozen in front of a roomful of students only recently released into the world: too young for a legal beer but old enough to join the army. 

In that reality, you stood in the midst of new chaos and thought: Run? Hide? Fight? –The paltry three options your mandated active-shooter training offers annually.

     You thought: is it against my principles to pray? You hate to beg. You’re not into the quid-pro-quo crap (If you save me, I’ll go to church. I won’t watch porn). 

What are the odds you could get your students to turn their cellphones to silent? Could they even hear you over gunfire, giving instructions? You’d be in the center of two radically separate forms of communication colliding, making an ineffectual trinity in this lopsided and now-failing metaphor.

Meta (noun): referring to something’s own genre or structure.

Anyway, you wrote many Op-eds about this scenario you fear, sent it out and said we need to do more than say things about it, and since this is not the first school you’ve worked for where there’s been a fatal shooting, you can say so: offer hastened solutions with hazard-pay pressure. Or mandate some peace practices in classes: more than new locks on the doors. More than our current careerist, profit-focused curriculum: Gandhi's Satyagraha, and/or the removal of social situations that cause inequity/harm/rage to start.

You emailed your thinking into the internet and waited for an answer. 

     Present tense: wait.

The only response you hear is a distant groaning, a giant media machine rising slowly to full height. It grows as if vacuuming smaller entities, drawing them as if by magnet, compressing them into the pulpy pile of itself. The pile purports to know the right answers about damn near every human question. 

Well, you think, as you pause between end-year protein-potato feasts, presents, and shelf-elves to again approach one of your least favorite holidays, you suppose you can concede that writing, or “essaying” does indeed matter: in fact, the whole premise of this supposedly-hallowed consumer holiday, for better or worse, is rooted in and repeated from a massive essay collection…carried forward through each new century in stilted prose through thousands of jagged translations. 

     Ironically, here in the Bible, the idea of a diligently-practiced peace (“turn the other cheek”) is nestled in a swathe of stories of inequity, and how such inequities lead to unholy machines of violence.

It grates on you that now, when you think of Christmas, you think of fascists. Your mind blinds red like the anti-fascist postcard on the wall.

     Hegemony, mired now, you think, in the homogeny of “The Word” (singular).

But you must try.

So you go home and open other books. Any other collection of words that doesn’t claim to be the only important one, and seek to learn of life and death and EJfhalwfb from anyone who might have met divinity here, there, or anywhere, any shape: a glimpse. A moment. Eureka. The quiet in the chaos.

It goes beyond the need to read one text, but to inscribe anew. Articulate or even to rearticulate in fresh language. You don’t like other peoples’ prayer words.

     But you can find reverence in a research paper.

     Prayer in a podcast. Poetry. Maybe even porn.

     Every text, really, an attempt to render reality and utter Sjfhaklj without paring down such mystery into mandate.

Mythologist and religious scholar Catherine Bell describes this phenomenon, where the simple act of writing an idea makes it feel real, gives it authority: staying power on papyrus, now in gigabytes. There’s a physicality to it, creating muscle memory in this ritual: inscribe, read, recite, retain. 

     The third-person voice sheds its shyness and suddenly, seeks intimacy. 

     Singularity slides to plural. 

This essay is due in three days and you’re supposed to be grading portfolios. 

     Words about words. 

     Which is what you’re doing, too, composing or assessing. Rinse, repeat.

     This essay is already reinscribed, since you typed it at 4am two nights ago into your phone in the dark, and now it needs a bigger vehicle to travel.

     Both times you type, every time, you find light, jrskjhrflkh-made, then human-made, the unexpected pleasure of unearthing things once dim, only felt but not observed, now noticed: the ways old pieces fit differently. 

And then the spaces where giant structures start to shudder: the hallowed holes in homogeny, a porous hegemony after all.

     The mega and the meta and the monolithic, readied for disassembly, because you just taught yourself how.

Thank Aelrkjlakurh: the trying cannot end so long as there are people with pens and paper or disc space.

     And after you end your own efforts, whether from exhaustion or being shot to death without hazard pay in a building made for learning, the words will surely go forth and multiply.

Turns out it’s not just one Word that matters after all. 

     Turns out the You is not simply an ashamed “I.”

Nor is it singular.

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Lydia Paar is the author of The Exit is the Entrance, an essay collection about love, divinity, class, and violence, and teaches at the University of Arizona.

Dec 22: Kyoko Mori, The Voice: on Cats and Politics

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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The Voice: on Cats and Politics

Kyoko Mori

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The moment the seatbelt sign blinks off, I retrieve my backpack from the overhead compartment, slide my arms through the straps, and lift the pet carrier from under the seat. People are crowding into the narrow aisle with their suitcases. As I wedge myself into the formation, the only way to hold the pet carrier is to wrap my arms around it and pull it to my chest. Miles, who’s been lying down, scrambles to his feet and meows.

     “Oh, a Siamese,” the woman standing directly behind me says. “My family had one when I was a kid. I know that voice.”  

     There’s barely enough room for me to turn around and nod. The woman looks to be in her forties. Miles meows three times in quick succession, an open sesame for a decades-old memory.

     “He’s a blue point,” I tell the woman. “He travels with me because he doesn’t like anyone else. He hides and refuses to eat.”

     “Of course,” she says. “It’s a Siamese thing.”

     “I’m really allergic,” mutters another passenger from a few places behind the woman. His voice already sounds choked up.

     Before I can apologize or ask if he’s okay, the line starts moving and several people who were ahead of us are suddenly ducking back into their seats to let us pass. I thank them and press forward. Soon, other passengers who were too far away to hear the allergy-sufferer’s comment are getting out of our way, too. Miles and I deplane in record time and head over to the baggage carousel to collect the rest of our things. 

      Miles continues to complain in the cab to the hotel and at the front desk while I check us in. But as soon as we’re in our room and I unzip the carrier, he hops out with his tail up, rolls on the floor purring while I pet him, and checks out our temporary home. During the ten days we spend there, he only meows briefly to greet me when I return from the classes I teach at the Low-Residency writing program that brings us from our home in Washington DC to Boston every six months. 

     When I invite friends over, Miles doesn’t have another room to slink off to, so he sits on my lap, tolerating their company. Ten minutes into the Presidential debate on June 25th, my friends and I turn off the TV, open another bottle of wine, and try to forget what we’ve seen. While the four humans meow in distress, the Siamese closes his eyes and falls asleep. None of us knows that Joe Biden will step down, Kamala Harris will run in his place, and the opposition’s sexist and racist misinformation campaign will feature cats.

Cat owners through centuries have noticed—and more recently, researchers have confirmed—that grown cats do not meow to one another. Kittens make small “mew” sounds to alert their mother when they are cold and hungry, trapped under the mother’s body, or stray from the nest and become lost. The vocalizations are nuanced enough to let the mother know what to do: shift her body to let all her kittens nurse without getting smothered, or leave the nest to look for the missing kitten. But once they’re weaned and can hunt on their own, cats abandon their vocal language except to hiss and growl to warn each other to stay away—unless, of course, they come to live with humans. We feed them, keep them warm, play with them, groom them, and pick them up and move them around just as their mothers used to do, so pet cats continue to behave like kittens no matter how old they are. 

     At home, Miles meows the loudest when I am in the hallway just outside our apartment door, talking to a neighbor. He picks up one of his toys—a plush blue shark about five inches long—and parades around the apartment carrying it in his mouth and meowing at the same time. The toy in his mouth distorts his voice. “He sounds like he’s being strangled,” my friend and neighbor Beth says. The moment I come through the door, he will drop the shark at my feet and sit down. He is not, at all, interested in playing further with it. He flops down on his back, stretches his legs, and waits for me to kneel next to him and rub his stomach. Now that he’s gotten my attention and I am doing exactly what he wants me to do, he has no reason to meow. 

     Siamese cats are notorious for sounding like an extremely unhappy baby, but all pet cats learn to amplify the weak “mew” they’d used with their feline mothers into cries that are closer to the volume and the pitch of a human infant’s. Perhaps during the ten thousand years of domestication, their ancestors evolved to be able to produce the sound most likely to get our attention, and/or our ancestors consciously or unconsciously selected for cats that sounded like their children. An average grown cat weighs 8 to 10 pounds, not unlike a newborn human, and most cats tolerate (and some enjoy) being held in our arms and carried around. There is no doubt that our relationship with cats, dogs, and other pet animals is based on the transference of the human desire to nurture the young of our own species.

     Still, the comment that our now-vice-president-elect made in 2021 and doubled down on in 2024 about childless cat ladies running the Democratic party and spreading their misery is not supported by fact or logic. The majority of Democrats holding public offices in our country are men with children rather than women with or without children. As pointed out by many, the target of his comment, Kamala Harris, is a mother of two children by marriage. More importantly, it’s irrational to assume that only people with children care about our country and are qualified to serve as its leaders, or that humans are motivated to invest in our collective future only if our biological descendants will benefit or suffer from our actions. Besides, even if such pessimistic views about humanity were worth debating, I don’t see how cats would enter into the conversation. People’s decisions to or not to have children, by and large, are not influenced by the presence of cats in their household.

     Long before I met my first cat at 22, I knew I would not become a mother. I have never enjoyed the company of small children. Even when I was a child of seven or eight, I dreaded being left in charge of my cousins when our extended family gathered at my grandparents’ house and the adults sequestered themselves in the dining room for their celebration. Instead of making sure that the dozen toddlers and kindergarteners were playing quietly, I climbed out the window to sit alone in the garden, not caring about the swarm of mosquitoes biting my arms and legs. After two of my cousins got into a fight and one of them broke his arm, I was relieved of my duty as the oldest child of our clan and allowed to sit in my grandfather’s study with a book while my aunts took turns minding their children. Later as an adult, whenever I heard babies wailing or young children having a tantrum in public places, I wondered what kept their mothers from getting in the car and driving away without them. Even though I was married for 13 years in a small town in Wisconsin where marriage was equated with “starting a family,” I didn’t choose to have children because I was afraid of losing my temper around them. A child’s cry of distress still makes me want to run away to protect myself from them, or them from me. Contrary to the claim that “childless cat ladies” are so miserable that we want everyone else to suffer as well, I chose to be childless to spare myself a life of misery. I love being single and childless. Except for the results of the 2024 elections, I don’t have anything to be “miserable” about. 

     J. D. Vance’s comment reveals more about him than about childless women or about human nature in general. The old saying, “Misery loves company,” means that humans who are unhappy usually gravitate toward others who are also unhappy because there is consolation in sharing our stories and being understood immediately, at gut-level. Those who are in the throes of their misery may not be fun to be around, especially if you are feeling euphoric and eager to celebrate your own good fortune, but few of them would go out of their way to wreck other people’s lives. Normal humans, in their low moments, prefer to stay home and be left alone. About all they can manage is a quiet get-together with a few friends who can offer sympathy. Only an extremely mean-spirited person would assume or act otherwise. 

     In fact, it takes a lot of toxic energy to organize public campaigns of negativity and harm and persist through them in spite of their lack of connection to any form of reality. J.D. Vance and Donald Trump did not withdraw their false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating “our pets” even after numerous bomb threats caused the city to close their schools. There is nothing family-oriented or child-friendly about inciting hatred. Poor cats, they had to be portrayed as enablers of female selfishness and then, a mere two months later, typecast as hapless victims of atrocities that never occurred.

 To be precise, I didn’t decide to be childless since I had never considered becoming a parent. Living with a cat—or becoming a cat lady, if you will—on the other hand, was a conscious and unexpected decision. I didn’t have an opinion, positive or negative, about cats until my roommate’s sister left her two cats in our care during my first semester of graduate school. When she finally reclaimed them after nearly three months, I was so stunned and devastated by the quietness of our apartment that I skipped my classes and took an epic bus ride across town to visit a Siamese cat breeder who had placed an ad in the newspaper. My favorite of the two cats who’d stayed with us—the one who kept me awake at night by meowing loudly and jumping all over me and then headbutted my arm in the morning and caused me to spill my coffee—was said to be part Siamese. I didn’t just choose to have a cat; I chose to have a cat who would insist on my attention.

     Since then, I’ve spent my entire adulthood with Siamese cats, all of whom have been devoted to me in an anxious, even neurotic, manner. The cat from the newspaper ad, Dorian, bit all my friends. I, however, could do anything to him: hold him upside down, brush his teeth, clip his nails, throw him over my shoulder and carry him around like a sack of potatoes. Of his successors, Ernest was a one-person cat though he never acted aggressively toward anyone; Algernon loved most of my friends and sat on their laps but took immediate and inexplicable dislike toward a few of them (whom he bit). Ernest and Algernon meowed nonstop in my car on the interstate on our cross-country move from the Midwest to the east coast.

     There is some evidence that people and their pets do in fact resemble each other, especially in their temperament. Most researchers who observed human-pet interactions concluded that humans often gravitate toward animals who are like us, and also, our personality gets imprinted on our pets through daily interactions. Anxious humans are most likely to have anxious pets.  

     I don’t think any of my friends—or my enemies—would say that I am an anxious person, however. I prefer to believe that things are going to turn out okay until proven, undeniably, otherwise. That is how I’m determined to weather the next four years. If our worst fears were to come true, I want to arrive at the crisis with reserves of energy, rather than in a state of exhaustion from having constantly worried about everything. I plan to read, listen to, or watch just enough news to stay informed, not to be assaulted several times every day by every word uttered by our president-elect. I’ll spend my time doing what I love and what I need to do; with luck, there should be some overlap between the two.

     But no one can be easy-going about everything. The one exception to my optimistic approach has always involved my cats’ welfare. Miles and his companion, Jackson, are fourteen. I didn’t take their health for granted even when they were younger, but now, every cough or hair-ball throw-up is a cause for alarm. Recently, when Jackson—the first Burmese of my life, chosen to be Miles’ companion because of the breed’s reputation for being calm —started waking up in the middle of the night to prowl around the apartment meowing, I took him to the vet expecting the worst. I made a list of pros and cons to get a head-start on deciding how aggressively I should treat every possible ailment he might have. 

     After numerous tests, there was nothing wrong with Jackson except age. It’s not unusual for older cats to be restless at night. We don’t (yet) have to worry about dementia, though, because he is not confused about where he is or who I am, like some of my friends’ cats were in their last months. Jackson wants to me to dangle a toy for him to pounce on, and he plays hard, like a much younger cat. So I just get up and play with him until he’s tired, Miles sits around sulking, and we all go back to sleep afterward. 

     Except for these nightly disruptions, Jackson is the mellowest cat imaginable. I don’t hesitate to hand him over to anyone—including my friends’ children—to hold and carry around. Because I can only take one cat on the plane, Jackson must stay home in the care of my neighbors while Miles and I travel. Of course, I feel guilty, but when my neighbors say that it was a pleasure to spend time with Jackson and they would miss him when I return, I know they are not just being nice. 

     I find it ironic, even endearing, that Jackson has finally decided to be demanding. He doesn’t make a racket when he is alone or with my neighbors. He meows and prowls only because he doesn’t like me to be sleeping when he’s not. Miles, a typical Siamese, is bred to plaster himself to me under the covers and sleep through the night. On the rare occasion he wakes up, he trots over to his bowl, meows, and quiets down as soon as I stumble out of bed to serve him a snack. He eats and crawls back to bed. Jackson, on the other hand, has an insatiable desire to play, eat a little, get cuddled and petted, and play again. Sometimes, we’re up for half an hour. 

     When he’s finally ready to sleep again, Jackson presses his head under my chin and purrs. A cat’s purr—which may or may not qualify as language because science is yet to determine whether cats purr by intention—is the greatest mystery and satisfaction. Why a cat’s cry, unlike an infant’s, inspires love instead of fear in me is another mystery. Regardless, my cats give me a chance to be obsessive about at least one thing. They are my safety valve: they channel my potential anxiety in a way that doesn’t harm them, me, or the people around us. 

     Many religious rituals and practices around the world are based on the belief that the essence of who we are—the spirit, soul, or chi—is an unstable entity that is liable to wander away from the body. This is one of the few religious beliefs that make sense to me. Every time I stand on a roof deck of a tall building, I understand why people wear amulets to secure their soul to their body or learn spells and chants to guide their loved ones’ souls back to their bodies. On a roof deck, with the sun slowly going down, it is thrilling to watch the light lingering in the tops of trees and gaze at other buildings, cars, and people reduced to toys or even specks. One minute, I’m enjoying the view, laughing and talking to the friends standing nearby with glasses of wine; the next minute, I’m simultaneously wanting to and not wanting to walk away from them and get closer to the edge, knowing that if I do, the only logical thing to do would be to jump. Although I have never contemplated suicide, the temptation to step forward into the pure nothing suddenly feels overwhelming, even inevitable. How can any of us resist the ultimate curiosity, the desire to understand the truth—the forbidden knowledge—of our own demise? The spirit’s longing to leave the body is powerful, potent, and real: it is existential rather than personal.

     There are many things I call to mind—my own amulets and spells—in order to step back and rejoin the roof deck party, but even more than my friends or my work or my responsibilities as a citizen, my cats are the weight that keeps me from blowing away into nothing. They need me in ways no one else does. They are at once my joy and the burden of my responsibility. The duet of distress on the intestate, the demand for play in the middle of the night, the assertion of dissatisfaction in the crowded aisle of a plane: whatever the occasion, their voices call me back to myself, to the only life I have.    

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Kyoko Mori is the author of four nonfiction books, the latest of which—Cat and Bird: a memoir—was published by Belt Publishing in March 2024. Her essays have appeared in Conjunctions, Harvard Review, the American Scholar, and others. She lives in Washington DC with her cats, Miles and Jackson, and teaches at George Mason University and at the Low-Residency MFA Program at Lesley University. Visit her at www.kyokomori.com.

Dec 21: Patrick Madden, Enough (on tense, timing, recreation, evocation, and eternal happening)

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Enough (on Tense, Timing, Recreation, Evocation, and Eternal Happening)

Patrick Madden

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I have just enough sugar left in the jar for Karina's morning Postum (which is what we call a cebada in English, given that the Postum brand has eclipsed other brands of barley-based coffee substitutes), so I dispense with the teaspoon as measurer and simply dump whatever's left into her cup before measuring out the toasted powder, then adding milk, little by little as I stir, so that the dry ingredients are evenly absorbed into the solution. My assumption is that over so many years of meting out ingredients, my judgment has been trained to recognize closely enough what constitutes a teaspoon's worth, and that given the inherent and inescapably inexact nature of such a crude volumetric method, it won’t matter much to the taste of the completed beverage whether it contains exactly 18,136 grains of sugar, as one intrepid online mathematician has calculated (using the weight, diameter, density, and packing efficiency of sugar), or the more nicely rounded but therefore less believable 20,000 grains, as others estimate, always with the qualifier “about” appended. Note that nobody (nobody who’s posted online) has bothered to count the grains of sugar in a teaspoon, and who can blame them? I mean, besides the tedium of such a futile exercise, there's the inevitability of missing something or losing count and guessing or having to go back to the beginning and start again.

So let's start again. You didn't think that I was actually now dumping the rest of the sugar in Karina's cup and adding the barley and milk and stirring gently to ensure a proper mixture, did you? You understood that my choice of present verb tense was a stylistic one, right? But did you perceive that it was determined by the pattern I've established over many essays in the past years, where every piece begins "I have just," usually followed by a verb, which gently allows us to exist in both past and present (the catalytic event is nestled in the recent past, but the writing happens in the present), but in this case, where I've intentionally goofed into another idiomatic expression, following "I have just" with the determiner "enough," we lose the pastness of the witnessed event and are stuck both experiencing and writing now?

Now this doesn't entirely preclude the possibility of some cosmic alignment where in the exact moment you read "I have just enough sugar..." etc. I am, somewhere else on the planet, simultaneously contemplating the enoughness of the sugar jar's dregs and deciding to simply dump them in the cup, and then spooning out the burnt brown powder, then gradually pouring the milk while stirring to achieve optimum creaminess. I mean, maybe. Who knows? If you've got my number (as you likely do, given the audience for my essays), shoot me a message when this happens, and I'll let you know.

You surely already know that in the more general sense, things like this are cyclical: we settle into patterns and routines, sleeping and waking, going about our daily business, working and playing, eating and drinking for tomorrow we die... So, sure, if you're reading this essay with your morning coffee in a time zone near mine, I very well might be meting out the ingredients again, even if the sugar jar's not almost empty yet. I do it many, perhaps even most, days. It's nothing special. One more insignificant example of "love's austere and lonely offices," as Robert Hayden revealed.

In any case, I'm not averse to the idea, which I've discovered here and there, especially in Brian Doyle's essays (hey, this is a Pat Madden Essay Daily Advent Calendar essay; writing about Brian Doyle is in my contract), that the act of reading revives the things written, happens them again. As in:

I am not just reporting this, or trying to recreate the moment, or telling you this story to escort us both toward a cool theme or conclusion near the end of the page. Nope: I want the moment again, fresh and wild and hilarious. I want it so bad I can taste the stony chalky desperate of it. I don’t want to remember it; I want it again right now before this sentence ends. If I write it I’ll have it again.

And, a bit later, though if we believe what we’re saying here, then "later" becomes meaningless:

While I am bruised I am not yet broken, aged but not yet dead, and my shaggy brain still works, and I can type fast and try to make sentences that sing and roar and snarl and sob and insist that everything that ever happened is still happening and will happen again.

As he wrote just a few years before his shaggy brain was overrun with cancer, leaving him very much dead, very much recoverable only in what he wrote, or what others wrote about him.

In this crude, most-obvious of universes, we do decay, we do die, we drain our cup of roast barley mixture, we use up the last of our ingredients. But we who read reside elsewhere: here, again, we find me judging the grains left in the bottom of the container to be about a teaspoon's worth, spilling them into a ceramic cup, spooning the cebada, pouring the milk, the gentle stirring, all happening sporadically forever, in spite of the inevitable.

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Patrick Madden, author of Disparates (2020), Sublime Physick (2016), and Quotidiana (2010), teaches at Brigham Young University and curates the online anthology of classical essays www.quotidiana.org.

Dec 20: Noam Dorr, Tzupzik

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This is part of our yearly Advent Calendar, which publishes an essay a day each year during advent. Find the rest of this year's and previous years' calendars here. 

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Tzupzik

 

Noam Dorr

 

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The slushies are neon green and neon pink, they have been churning in the two machines for many hours, at least since we got to the miniature park, but it could have been days or even weeks. Does sweetened ice ever go bad if it keeps turning and turning? Turbulence, constant refrigeration, an overwhelmingly high sugar content ensures it stays preserved. The day is impossibly hot—one of those khamsin days when the sun is set to destroy. A breeze only makes the heat worse and no amount of sunscreen creates a barrier that prevents the feeling that one is annihilating oneself simply by being outside. It is the first time my children are seeing the country I am from, and it is our first time in this park, which is a miniature of the country I am from, but do not live in anymore, not for years. The park’s website shows a shiny representation of the country, as if every high-rise is new, every monument to modernity is always gleaming, and every ancient religious site is well-kept and preserved, its ancientness frozen in a state that is a ruin kept back from disintegration, forever poised in such a way for endless visitors to enjoy.

But the miniature park online is not the miniature park we are in. This park has been through 1,000 days of neglect, is post-COVID empty, and the structures show it—the miniature Red Sea has evaporated completely leaving behind calcified rings on the shocking blue attempt at approximating the color of the Great Rift Valley, leaving behind the miniature models of tourists staring in the direction of the missing coral reefs. Layers of dust cover the produce on display in the model of the main city market, the tiny shoppers knocked over by the desert winds. My children do not want to be here. We are here for my research, to find a miniature model of the juice factory I worked in when I was a child, so I feel responsible for their suffering. They are tired and hungry and, more than anything, overheated. I know it will be worse once we find the factory and the excitement of discovery is over. Even the promise of a freezing cold neon slushie at the end of our adventure is not enough to keep them going. So we come up with a game: Find the Seams. Find the part of the miniature that tells you it is a miniature because you can see the edges. To find the seams is to discover where time—armed with wind, and heat, and UV rays, and sometimes rain—pries open the weaknesses in the models’ surfaces. And the surfaces appear to have many weaknesses, and the seams are many, and one might be tempted to utter the accusation “shoddy craftsmanship” and blame the artists and builders for a rushed job, but the truth is that COVID has given time lots of opportunity to do its work. And so my children have many opportunities—they call out: “Seam!” “Seam!”“Seam!” and pull us by the hand, sweaty palm to sweaty palm, to show us their discoveries.

Giant weeds grow between tiny grain silos tipped over in the model train station, full scale vines have taken over the miniature plastic plants in the model greenhouse, a roughtail rock agama has turned the top floor of an apartment building into its own dragon lair, miniature machinists are on their backs next to their workstations seemingly taking a nap or just plain dead, and every model airport and bus station looks like every scene in a post-apocalyptic film—the cars abandoned mid-road, the airplanes orphaned on the tarmac. And at the very end come the full-sized slushies—cold and sweet—which poison all of us in what will become a different kind of misadventure.

My children will not see most of these sites in real life this first visit. We always leave my parents’ house too late, the sun already too strong, and our family already excelling in ambivalence toward what we call “organized fun.” I am a horrible tourist in my own country. The miniature park, with its tiny models, its miniscule simulacra, its fabricated utopic intentions does not capture this place, my childhood. It might be tempting to point to the disintegration, the abundance of seams as the reason why the park fails to convince, but the truth is that its overall decay actually brings it closer to my experience of this land—the way everything, even the very new, feels like it is at the edge of falling apart and the story it’s trying to tell about itself collapsing at any point, the door to the factory floor knocked over to reveal no factory, no hands moving juice bottles down the line. 

On this first visit to my country my children have a tiny window into my past and it’s about to close, our trip too short, the various barriers—language, culture, jet lag—in the way of understanding. How then do I bring them in? How do I capture a whole? When we are home, every night my children ask me to tell them a childhood story. Two or three or five minutes long, ten minutes if they are extra chatty and ask questions, a short journey into my past—the desire  to elaborate and go into greater detail always at odds with the need for them to go to sleep. My partner jokingly suggests calling this kind of story a tzupzik, a handy word describing anything tiny, a small addendum attached to something larger, and that maybe telling these stories will make it possible for me to connect the now and the then. 

Coming up with these stories is hard. After the initial obvious set of often repeated tales it becomes increasingly difficult to pull apart memories into convenient short compartmental narratives—how do I extract from the mundane and where do I choose to sidestep the more memorable plethora of family injury, or illness, or communal pain, and of course war. All of these unfit as a precursor to a dream. Sometimes a story arrives only for me to realize, once I tell it, the flaws and incongruities:

 

Listen to The Coin Story

 

Only as I share this story, sitting in the top bunk illuminated by glow-in-the-dark stars, do I realize the obvious false memory that was always there—the children’s pool serves the entire community, and is large and deep and would hold an impossibly immense amount of coins, far too many for a community of seven hundred who swore off private property, and therefore currency. Instead, it becomes clear that my father only meant the coins were collected at the pool, probably in a large barrel, probably a castoff from the factory, not that the coins filled the pool itself. A childhood memory revisited and revised. What sense of place I give to my children through these tiny things, these minuscule tzupziks, between over there and over here, is unclear to me. No idea what whole is created there for them. If their unanswered interrupting interrogations have pried open another seam. What I do know is that, as I sit oversized in the dark of the top bunk under a canopy of miniature glow-in-the-dark stars I do not tell them the pool was never full of coins.

 

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Noam Dorr is the author of Love Drones out from Sarabande Books. He is an Assistant Professor of creative writing and Literature at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.