Nathaniel Rosenthalis: Notes on Sontag

1.


Reading Susan Sontag makes me feel bossy. Arguing against any indifference to aesthetics or ethics, she is always in the middle of persuading me with her avidity, and sometimes her leaping is over some ground that doesn’t really exist or has yet to be laid, but the way she leaps is often persuasive because it’s assertive, and I like assertiveness; it’s a break from my daily world self, where mild-to-wild surmising is the rule.

Susan Sontag’s a great essayist; she’s a fair fictioneer. But she hungered after fiction in a way she never did about any other kind of material. “I want to sing!” she wrote in her later journals. When I go sentence by sentence through her essays, I can see how she does—her bald, pointy thoughts assert a fluid melody of argument. Only later in her life did she acknowledge that the aims of her fiction and her essays were close to the same: “It’s almost frightening,” she told an interviewer.

David Rieff, her son, writes in his memoir that when, at 71, she was diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, she maintained up until her death an unstoppable drive; she was intent on producing her greatest fiction—she saw it there in the future, and she was hardly one to think herself unable to accomplish it. To be an ambitious writer like Sontag requires the ability to change your mind at any time, and to believe, somehow, in your own fatedness. You will say what you need to say—to swing at that one point you eye in the soil that, when you break it, will break.


2.

 

I am obsessed with bodies; every day when I wake up I get out of bed and go down the hallway to the bathroom and pass a floor-length mirror and usually don’t pass up the opportunity to look at myself (especially if I worked out the day before)—embarrassing to admit, but it’s true.

I begin most days by jerking off—if I turn on my computer, I scroll down Tumblr pages where I look at updates from over a hundred gay porn sites. Lean builds or muscular beefy forms or ones in between in their twenties or thirties or forties or fifties; men in arrangements of one or two or three or four or more, posed in almost classical arcs, hands on each other, or not; eyes looking at each other, or not, looking at the looker, i.e. me—the eyes are blank or full of absolutes—desire, energy, wildness.

Jerking off and looking at porn are a kind of impersonality (the experience is obviously more personal without porn). Afterwards follows a backwards-looking revelation: I look at myself and what I was just looking at or thinking of or imagining. I feel disconnected from my body.

In high school this kind of body worship manifested in my drawings. My favorite choice of subject was the nude form, and I usually drew women, although I started to draw men in my senior year. One drawing in particular I worked on for a few weeks—I had used the grid method, which involved laying a 9x9 grid on my source picture, and a 9x9 grid on my large sheet of paper, then working box by box on transferring the gradient values to my paper from my source picture, a guy named Chad from a site called RandyBlue. The method is a common enough tool for beginning artists who are learning to see subjects in terms of their visual information (lights, darks, shadows, negative space, et cetera). That drawing I still have but I could never get rid of the grid entirely—it was laughably obvious I had used porn as my source.

When I see a man I desire, I both want him and want to be him—this is a trope of same-sex desire narratives. I have invariably become a viewer of bodies everywhere I go; I observe the shapes they make as they move with and without clothes.

It’s an adolescent perspective; the beginner is present.

3.

Susan Sontag’s The Pornographic Imagination roots its tremendous polemicisms in the occasion of reviewing two French books translated into English at the time, The Story of O and The Image. I’m not interested in pornographic literature, as Sontag was, as a way of spotlighting the dismissive attitude of English and American critics toward pornographic work (including the work of genuine literary merit, argues Sontag). But I am interested in the implications of the failure of the capitalist system to nourish the imaginations of its citizens. This failure looms huge, as art lets us imagine alternatives to the world we live in—alternatives we can critique and inhabit in equal turns (or so goes one of today’s common defenses of art and art making, issued by many, from poets like Ann Lauterbach to science fiction writers like Ursula K. Leguin).

The idea of what constitutes a healthy mind is at stake here: addictions, anxieties, melancholia inflict themselves on our wares. Which is not to say that we need to monitor, control, evict, guard our minds, but that we need to consider the mind’s forays, its own curiosities; I was about to say “natural” curiosities in order to do what many do by evoking that easy word—to endow it with beneficent aura, as trees or sweet plums. But I’m the last to deny the way culture shapes desires. I need to know our range of materials, the way those materials empower our ability to move over time among forms of response—solace, anger, and a sense of humor, by which I mean not merely jokes or cleverness (though those are fun) but rather the delicacy of consciousness whose uptick is a kind of perfume.

The question of radical will is ever urgent for me; I don’t feel the urge to make heresies for their own sake—which is always the move of a false imitation of an idea of the avant-garde. I want to make the kinds of leaps that feel necessary and in some way—it surprises me to say it—instruct the reader. Unnecessary work has a heart of small-time ironies, easy conclusions, easy personalisms, complacence up the wazoo. Which is not to say that great work can’t draw upon irony, satire, or other ‘decadent’ devices—it certainly can, and maybe the work I want to make is about energy and movement as well as personality.

What’s been key to me is learning how to connect acrobatic acts of consciousness—extended wordplay, loopy dream logics, anything-goes syntactic arrangements, motivated by the feeling of laughter in my mind, maybe not outloud—to grounded emotional truthiness, where the red fern grows, so to speak. All I have to be is a truth-teller. My next great lesson will be to pay attention to what bodies do in various removes—local, digital, lexical. Which is not to say that watching porn will help me make radical art (although maybe it does for some people; pornography has been the occasion or genre convention to bounce back on for the likes of Mapplethorpe to some contemporary poets like Dorothea Lasky). I understand erotics to be about feeling in a way that pornography often is not. But I say that anything goes—no detail is trivial; the failure isn’t in the given details but rather in the artist’s inability to make those details spin.

Art, religion, sex—each is a total world. Religion and pornography, in particular, are ruled by an internal logic and power relations; they are both marked by eternally reptitious energy, brands of absolutism. They exact transcendence as well as a kind of revenge on consciousness—an evacuation of ego. They perpetuate themselves. So says Sontag:

“No wonder, then, that the new or radically revamped forms of the total imagination which have arisen in the past century—notably, those of the artist, the erotomane, the left revolutionary, and the madman—have chronically borrowed the prestige of the religious vocabulary. And total experiences, of which there are many kinds, tend again and again to be apprehended only as revivals or translations of the religious imagination. To try to make a fresh way of talking at the most serious, ardent, and enthusiastic level, heading off the religious encapsulation, is one of the primary intellectual tasks of future thought.”

Serious, ardent, and enthusiastic. I am working on it, Susan.

4.

When it comes to the poets, my mother reveres Robert Frost; for the essayists she has found a staggering enthusiasm for Christopher Hitchens, the fabled atheist critic (the day he died, I had just come home for a winter break in college; my mom and I sat on stools at a bar in the Mexican restaurant La Tolteca; she sighed over a beer; the end of her voice had a droop and a waver; she blinked back tears: “To lose such a voice—such a voice—”). It’s not unusual for American Jews to be unreligious, or even devoutly atheist; but my mother, born and raised a Catholic Portuguesa in Fall River, Massachusetts, converted to Judaism after marrying a Jew, so I found myself surprised when an atheistic air began steeling our conversations.

I’ve also seen my mom cry in happiness, if that’s what it is. Last year we were at dinner at an Indian restaurant in North Wilmington (lots of shopping and dining, money in the air like a lavender nonchalance). I pulled out an interview with Adam Phillips, who cites the British Psychologist D.W. Winnicott’s essay “On the Capacity to Be Alone.” Here’s what I read aloud to her:

There’s something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can ‘forget yourself’ and absorb yourself, in a book, say. Or, for the child, in a game. It must be one of the precursors of reading, I suppose.

I looked up to see my mother smiling at me with tears in her eyes; I had made a point of bringing up this interview because, that evening, my mother had entered a dark mood of doubting her worth; she’s shared with my sister and me darker thoughts—of suicide, of not wanting to live anymore; of feeling herself to be a burden on my sister and me and herself—so I did the best I could, in that moment, to show her what she meant to me, in, at least, that way. She had enabled me to be a writer.

I could also say these dark thoughts were her most illuminated. She sometimes remarks that she hates sunlight because it illuminates—in our cramped house—grime and stain and poor form, unkemptness. The house she lives in now is very small compared to the looming upscale townhouse we lived in before that, and before that, in what—to my childhood mind— was a mansion: four floors, seven and a half bathrooms, four fireplaces, a half basketball court in the backyard. And my parents bought it; they had saved up for it after my dad’s fledgling import-export business started doing well in the mid-1990s.

Soon the mansiony dream house filled up with despair—my father passed away two weeks after we moved in (I was eight, it was my sister’s fifteenth birthday). Since then, my mother’s life—up to that point upheld by my father, whom she relied on for energy, for the lead—has collapsed. So when she had looked at me, moved by the passage and my feelings about it, it was bittersweet. Our word bittersweet is, in Greek, glukupikron; literally translated, sweetbitter.

5.

I have my vision—the work has energy, takes the lead.

In the meantime, I’m self-conscious about being too literary, about being too self-conscious of the artiness of my enterprise, which is also a part of my duty; the duty of the self-conscious is to avoid mere embarrassment and opt for the greater self-awareness. This shame of identifying as an artist has to do with a feeling of inadequacy. What you want is to make the terms of the world inadequate (because you’re frustrated with capitalism, with patriarchy, with the stupid ideas of how bodies are supposed to be and look and connect with each other) and you want to make the terms of the world adequate (because you like a lot about living; you have your dark thoughts—suicide, just run-of-the-mill depressive episodes where everything is mellow and distant—but you recognize the capacity for transforming outermost realities, be it your body through obsessive fitness or your output of work, shaping art-poem experiments).

For example.

Before I moved from Brooklyn to St. Louis, I published a chapbook of poems for friends and family. My sister’s response:

btw there's a quote in there about violence that is sooo fucking good- I thought you wrote it and that you were becoming an explicitly political poet and then I saw it was someone elses work. I still like it. And I love your words/what you have to say! Eek- cool on making a book.

I was annoyed because I could tell if I had written work that was “explicitly political,” she would have been totally into it. She doesn’t understand poetry, she’s told me. Many people feel the same way. It frustrates me. But I kept my hat on. My response:

yeah, that ben lerner epigraph is amazing, right? he's fantastic. he's at brooklyn college. there are moments in the book that are pretty political (see the first exercise poem about hierarchies and monsters). it takes skill to write explicitly political poetry without sounding self-righteous or whiney—or like you’re telling a sympathetic audience what it already knows or believes. and lerner does that extremely extremely well.

6.

Hurricane Sandy struck New York City on October 29, 2012, causing many billions of dollars in damage. That day I kept to my bedroom in my fifth-floor apartment in Washington Heights, reading Sontag’s journals; my envy only stopped after I reached 1958, when Sontag was older and therefore her amazing wisdom, her reckless ambition, was less threatening. I could relax my comparisons.

I am now twenty-five (I have been for a little over three months). Here is an entry from the year Sontag was twenty-five.

12/31/57 

Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.

Why is writing important? Mainly, out of egotism, I suppose. Because I want to be that persona, a writer, and not because there is something I must say. Yet why not that, too? With a little ego-building—such as the fait accompli this journal provides—I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said. 

My ‘I’ is puny, cautious, too sane. Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity. Sane me, critics, correct them—but their sanity is parasitic on the creative faculty of genius.

Now here’s an entry from my journal, January 25, 2014, when I was living in Brooklyn:

January 25, 2014 

Just read some passages of Plath’s unabridged journal (thank Gigi for messaging you recently, mentioning how she likes them) and like the way she writes as a 27y.o., and the January – February entries when she was 24/25 are solid. Plath having lived in many places by then, and yet still hadn’t done the writing she thought that such traveling and living abroad would bring about. 

Maybe I too need to write a novel—get out of the language space and into the character space. Problem is that my sense of character is entirely given over to affect, too influenced by the qualities of voices I notice and like. The British accent, the affected feminine lisp, the wide-eyed Victorian posture of Alice in Wonderland, the Virginia Woolf way—these are strategies of drag, as I notice them. And to write a novel about drag queens and kings would be stunted and predictable from the start.  

Potential subjects—my writing life (too literary, too many traps set up), my sex life (too crude). I should be able to write—then that boring old flag in my window: you can write about anything as long as you do it well. Thus the parade for sincerity begins. For realism. I may be sincere, I may be real. I may be neither of those things. “Oh how you talk! Such nonsense,” says Alice. At the door with her axe of metaphor. 

Paul Auster’s Winter Journal. I see it on my big white bookshelf. It’s at a lean, as if considering me. What say you. Can I say that? At some point I really just have to stop ruminating about writing and just write—these journals don’t count. They only, at parts like now, reinforce my self-consciousness. The pikes fall and I’m prisoner. 

I walk around thinking of the same things over and over—fantasies. Fantasies are the…but I don’t want to be a philosopher. I just wanna sing.

7.

Sontag and I diverge in key respects. I’m not a moralist writer (I don’t think) so I don’t quite hear the call of war, poverty, natural catastrophe, accidents, disaster, and decay—not in the way that others like Sontag do. I find my way to issues of moral urgency through their stakes in imagination—hence my drive to examine representations, to absorb their means, so I can do my own kinds of responses as well as be a sensitive inhabitor of my own times. Nor have I shown myself to be a generalist yet (in some ways it would be dreadful to keep going on in my narrow interests; I hope I’ll diversify).

The idea of the poet is odd too; it survives in public consciousness as an anachronistic model of justice and beauty. When Sontag mentions the poet in her early essays, it’s to examine the changing ways that different arts have been interpreted over time. In The Aesthetics of Silence, Sontag dissects Valery’s idea that prose is communication and poetry the ineffable—this, she says, is “naively unhistorical,” as the ineffable had been considered long before then not as the reward of poetry but rather as the singular effect of religious discourse (also philosophy). In the space of an essay like this I’ll take up the historicist cue, or I’ll take it up if I’m having a conversation with someone about ideas, and it occurs to me that I might be able to surprise it from behind with a timeline. But in my reading life I tend to disavow it—I enjoy reading poems for the kind of amazing feeling of nonthinking.

And of course I want my family and friends to be able to understand my poetry. It’s for other people—not just myself. (There’s this great moment in an interview I watched on Youtube where a journalist asks Sontag whether she cares if people read her work and Sontag—rightly so—bursts out in great offense—“Well of course the book is for people!”) This past July I had lunch with a college friend in Chinatown. I told her I didn’t have a title yet for my book, which had a long center poem full of inside jokes and my friends’ names; —and then I told her I’d just name that poem and the book after her—she laughed. She was shocked when she received her copy of Maddy a few weeks later.

When I sent the chapbook to my mom, her enthusiastic response gave me my heart back. She was enjoying what I was doing—which amazed me and gladdened me, because for years I’d shared my work with her and, when I visited home, read aloud the work of poets I loved. Usually she looked confused in response to my writing and the work of those poets. So it was a relief to me to get her happy emails. I was getting somewhere—I was approaching my ideal.

8.

My mother’s quip about the wait staff at an upscale hipster pizzeria in St. Louis:



9.

When I’m not writing, I hold on to what other people tell me of my abilities. Some that I can recall off the top of my head:

“You don’t think like this [10th grade English teacher Mr. Gerken draws a straight line down the air], you think like this [he draws a circular shape in the air]

“Your poems’ endings have that great thing of inevitability. That’s a great talent” [Bernadette Mayer, when I studied with her for a weekend this past May]

“You gave me over thirty ways that bananas and oranges are alike, but you failed to say that they’re both fruits.” [A doctor who was discussing with my mother and me the results of an IQ test I took in high school to qualify for extended time for tests]

I’m super-aware of my circles now; I wonder if I don’t take enough risks; I question every ending now under the pressure of a presumed talent. I’m wary always of forests and trees. Knowledge from others about your self becomes full of itself very quickly, and it tips more on one side, making you lopsided.


10.

 

What I admire about Sontag is her sense of middleness. In her Rolling Stone interview with Jonathan Cott, Sontag goes into her frustration about the general trend of attitudes of certain critics or public opinion about “low art”—shifting from dismissal because of ignorance to dismissal because of presumed knowledge. Maybe Sontag could be a contrarian, but she was always putting ideas or works of art in dialogue with each other, with precursors, and with herself. I’d never thought about dialectics in terms of compassion, but as a writer and interviewee, Sontag was all about refusing to take absolute sides—to always try for different positions, to be alert and responsive. I like this—and it seems the key to radical work.

If I want to make radical work—and I do—how will I do it? It would seem that radical work can’t be forced out of you—isn’t just a matter of will. I think about it a lot but I don’t know if I’ve really written any radical work. The accident has to fall on the right design; tone will out. By radical I mean work that is both at the root and also gets at the root. Poetry that’s radical challenges inherited ideas about poems, ideas that have built up over time or perhaps fallen away: a poem must mean, it must seduce, it must tell a story, it must have meter, it must have rhyme, it must be free of verse, it must make sense, it must make no sense, it must horrify, it must veer toward the ineffable, it must be beautiful, it must work through ugly feelings, it must not try to create new feelings—that would be perverse; it must be perverse, it must not contain any part that doesn’t contribute to its reception and interpretation, it mustn’t do anything, it must consist of whole fragments, it must disavow subjectivity because of capitalism, it must be saturated in subjectivity because of capitalism, it must be original, it must not be original, it must not give a shit, it must only see the world as it will be in the future, it must care about the world as it is, it must make noise, it must comply. At any given time in our age, any of these ideas can become fresh—depending on how stale everything else is. But none of these vectors pinpoint what is so crucial about all radical art.

Radical art occurs between the artwork and the audience, the former needled enough that the latter is agitated. What role does pleasure have in the work of dissent? I’d think the best works of dissert are also intensely pleasurable. To that end, I wonder what the ends of consciousness are, and whether I should risk reaching them. After Bernadette Mayer concluded her project Memory, where she documented and photographed 36 images a day for a month, she had what she describes as a psychic breakdown, and had to go to a psychoanalyst. It turned out to be fruitful for her work, but as someone who already has mental health issues I have to evaluate that kind of risk for myself.

And we can bring up pleasure in terms of sex, too, the way Sontag does in the Rolling Stone interview to postulate what it means to play with fire. She was thinking of sadochism and masochism specifically: “People have understood that it can get out of control and be completely destructive."

But I’m not interested in the way sex and consciousness—as experiments, as paths with certifiable ends—can lead to ruination, flames, and pain. I’m committed to the idea of making the world livable and making a life in the world.

The risks in art-making—it’s a subject I think about frequently, and one that Sontag touches upon in The Pornographic Imagination. “However fierce may be the outrages the artist perpetrates upon his audience,” argues Sontag, “his credentials and spiritual authority ultimately depend on the audience’s sense… of the outrages he commits upon himself.” Then comes this declaration: “The exemplary modern artist is a broker in madness.” I have no desire to glamorize mental illness, nor, at all, does Sontag. The link between madness and art is that they occupy the prestige of the spiritual, of awe itself. What is it about spirituality that just won’t stop informing how we conceive, make, and absorb art? If spirituality is a project we constantly redefine, our allegiances shift in response. Our allegiance to pleasure, to silence, and to each other (or more often, to our annihilation, which drives sex) is in constant flux, and in that flux is a hollow where I think I’ll play to make my work. Call me indulgent, but that’s where I’m at.

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AHA	ARTIFICE	BAREBACK
DREAMS	EMANATE	HAHA
HANDWRITING	HISTORY	MONUMENT
ORIGIN	SCALE	UTOPIA

 

11.

Sontag’s later essay “The Poet’s Prose” shocks me. I am shocked. As I type this out, I feel both relief and humiliation, as it seems I’m (too much?) in line with my precursors.

“Poet’s prose not only has a particular fervor, density, velocity, fiber. It has a distinctive subject: the growth of the poet’s vocation.”

“Typically, it takes the form of two kinds of narrative. One is directly autobiographical. The other, also in the shape of a memoir, is the portrait of another person, either a fellow writer (often of the older generation, and a mentor), or a beloved relative (usually a parent or grandparent). Homage to others is the complement to accounts of oneself: the poet is saved from vulgar egoism by the strength and purity of his or her admirations. In paying homage to the important models and evoking the decisive encounters, both in real life and in literature, the writer is enunciating the standards by which the self is to be judged.”

“Poet’s prose is mostly about being a poet. And to write such autobiography, as to be a poet, requires a mythology of the self. The self described is the poet’s self, to which the daily self (and others) is often ruthlessly sacrificed. The poet self is the real self, the other one is the carrier; and when the poet self dies, the person dies. (To have two selves is the definition of a pathetic fate.) Much of the prose of poets—particularly in the memoiristic form—is devoted to chronicling the triumphant emergence of the poet self. (In the journal or diary, the other major genre of the poet’s prose, the focus is on the gap between the poet and the daily self, and the often untriumphant transactions between the two. The diaries—for example, Baudelaire’s or Blok’s—abound with rules for protecting the poet self; desperate maxims of encouragement; accounts of dangers, discouragements, and defeats.)”

“In prose the poet is always mourning a lost Eden; asking memory to speak, or sob.”

“A poet’s prose is the autobiography of ardor.”

12.

Sontag claims that her Notes on Camp made a breakthrough because she was alone in maintaining a traditional literary sensibility and an interest in the open and kitsch forms of the art world at the time. I’m not in a similar literary or historical slot, and even if I were, I wouldn’t want to be a critic or a “happy pedagogue” as one professor in college described me; my brain can do too much messiness well enough, and I don’t want to have any responsibility to adequately liberalized mores—social or political or academic.

Fortunately, there are no more errors to be made and so no unnecessary lessons to be given. Any good work I produce will mediate the following problem: if I suffer, what else can I do? Rilke urged to the young poet in many letters—you must write only if you must write. Which in its tone lends a religiosity that approaches a worshipful silent horizon; I love the human figure, too, but I see it outside of the dropdown of shining hierarchies and am more interested in bouncing the ball off of traditional art walls. Why—why not? Work, at this point in my life, is the only way to Live. Or, alternatively put, when I read bad work, I feel full. When I read great work, I feel hungry.

Nathaniel Rosenthalis was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. He earned his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a candidate in the M.F.A. poetry program at Washington University in St. Louis. His poems have appeared in Yes, Poetry and he has an essay forthcoming from the Los Angeles Review of Books. His first chapbook will appear in the spring from Deadly Chaps Press.

Silas Hansen: On Teaching Comics in the Creative Nonfiction Classroom

Every creative writing teacher has their favorite thing to teach.  People who know me well might guess that mine is Joan Didion’s “The White Album,” or one of the essays in Notes from No Man’s Land by Eula Biss, or maybe the fraudulent artifact or hermit crab form.  And while it’s true that I love teaching these things—and that they are also some of my favorite things to read and/or write myself—they are, surprisingly, not my favorite thing to teach.

My favorite thing to teach is comics.  And this is about how and why I do it.

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My favorite activity to do with my students, about four weeks into the semester, is to have each of them rethink one scene from their essay in comic form.  By this point in the semester, they will have written at least one draft of an essay—albeit a short one—and gotten feedback from at least one of their classmates in peer review, although this activity could easily work without that background.

I begin class by having them write about one specific scene from their essay—any scene they want.  They are welcome to write about it in any form that makes sense to them—traditional scene format, an unstructured free-write, even just a bulleted list—as long as they cover the important ground: who’s in the scene?  Where did it take place?  What happened?  What was said?  What does the reader need to understand by the end of it?

At this point, I have students set aside what they’ve written and we talk about the basic components of comics.

The various components of comics correspond to a similar component of narrative essays.  First, we have the panel or frame:

The panel/frame is like a section of the essay—a single scene, or a single moment.  It’s important on its own, but it will likely need other panels/frames in order to tell a complete story, or truly explore an idea.

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Then, we have the drawing of the scene: the characters and the setting.

This, I tell my students, is the description: it’s what people look like, it’s the sensory details, it’s the setting.  It’s what helps us see things as they saw them, and it puts the reader into the scene with the characters.

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Then, usually, the characters are talking—this is called a speech bubble (or balloon).  Sometimes, these bubbles don’t indicate speech, but instead are thought bubbles, indicating what’s going on in the character’s head.

This one is pretty self explanatory: it’s the spoken dialogue and the characters’ inner-dialogue.  It’s helpful to note here, though, that there’s generally not room in their panels to have the characters hash out things like, “Hey,” “Hi,” “How are you?” “I’m good, how are you?” “I’m also good.  Thanks for asking.”  Instead, they need to get to the point.  What important thing(s) were said during this scene?  What does the reader really need to know by the end of it?

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Most panels will also have a narrative box—sometimes called a voice-over—at the top.

This is the exposition.  It’s what the reader needs to know that can’t be said elsewhere.  This is where they give us context and/or help us understand what happened right before the scene.

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Finally, we might also talk about the space between panels, which is called the gutter.

This is like the transition between sections of the essay.  If you want to get really into it, Scott McCloud has a chapter on the gutter in Understanding Comics, which explains the six different panel-to-panel transitions writers use.  These transitions are easily applicable to any storytelling form, and I often use them to talk about structure, but I won’t re-hash it here.

*

Next, we talk about why each of these things is important: They might have a section in their essay that’s all exposition, if that’s what’s needed at that point in time—but they likely won’t have an essay that’s entirely exposition.  It probably needs something else to make it really work.  Similarly, a section in which we have only dialogue and we don’t know anything about what the characters look like, or what they’re doing, or where they are, is going to feel really unsettling for most readers—it makes us feel ungrounded, like in the example from above:

In this case, we don’t know anything about where these two characters are, what their body language can tell us about this interaction, what the context is, etc.  Maybe that’s what the writer is trying to do (in which case I say, “Go for it.  See if it works.”), but I don’t want them to accidentally do it because they didn’t think about adding those other components, or didn’t know how to effectively balance them.

*

Once we’re all clear on the components of comics—and how they relate to their essays—I have students look back over what they wrote at the beginning of class.  Then, I give them each a blank sheet of paper and some crayons (I have several boxes of 64-count Target-brand crayons in my office for exactly this purpose) and tell them, “Draw it.”

Virtually every student will eventually convert their comics into a more traditional, words-only scene for their essay—I’ve only had two or three students, in five years of teaching, turn in a comic for workshop—but they are almost always stronger, more developed, more interesting scenes as a result of this activity.  Rather than writing in a more stream-of-consciousness way, as many of us do when we are first trying to figure out what we’re writing about (which certainly has its benefits), this activity forces the writer to make conscious choices—about what details to convey through description, what information to provide in dialogue, and what the reader will need the narrator to come right out and tell us in the voice-over—based on what will best serve the essay they are trying to write.

*

The other reason that comics are my favorite thing to teach is that so many of the best contemporary essayists/creative nonfiction writers are using this form—and yet, virtually none of my students think to utilize the form themselves.  My stance on form is this: use whatever best serves the essay you are trying to write.  This is why I get so annoyed when I hear experimental writers talking as if traditional, narrative essays have no artistry, or when I hear more traditional writers talk as if experimental essays are all flash and no substance.  Both traditional narrative essays (I’m thinking here of essays like Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” or Meghan Daum’s “Music is My Bag”) and experimental essays (everything from “The Pain Scale” by Eula Biss to Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay to Ander Monson’s “Outline Toward a Theory of the Mine Versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline”) are excellent examples of the kind of work I want my students to write: they explore difficult, important questions in whatever form makes the most sense for that writer and that writer’s stories and ideas.
  
It’s the same thing with comics: they are exploring the same kinds of difficult, important questions as these other essays—and, just because they might look, to a casual observer, like the Sonic the Hedgehog comics my brother read when we were kids doesn’t mean that they are any less worthy of our attention.  They just approach writing differently—and, in some cases, maybe even more effectively for that particular subject.
   
If you haven’t read any since you were a kid, or even if you began and ended with critical favorites like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home or Art Spiegelman’s Maus, I encourage you to give comics a try.  Some other great examples:

•  Lynda Barry, One Hundred Demons
•  Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half
•  Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis
•  David Small, Stitches
•  Joe Sacco, War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995-96
•  Joe Sacco, Footnotes in Gaza
•  Craig Thompson, Blankets
•  Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant
•  David B., Epileptic
•  Nicole J. Georges, Calling Dr. Laura

Silas Hansen's essays have appeared in Slate, Colorado Review, The Normal School, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere, and have earned an AWP Intro Journals Project Award and a notable mention in the 2014 Best American Essays.  He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.

'Tigris! Tigris!' A Species Loneliness

On second thought, it might have been revelatory to witness a tiger. While in Bangladesh, I had convinced myself otherwise. To avoid disappointment? To temper entitlement? I return from Dhaka the day before my birthday, in thrall to Red Roof Inn desynchronosis. Broad-eyed and crepuscular, I daydream of Panthera tigris tigris, a fetish I’ve cultivated over the past month. At midnight, a Chinese businessman waits behind me at the vending machine. I forget I only have Bangladeshi taka notes in my wallet, so I tell him go ahead. “Ah,” he says, grinning, “you are still disorienting.” I nod, assuming it is a grammatical slippage, that he meant to say disoriented. He offers to buy me a “treat,” but I tell him I’ve changed my mind, thanks and goodnight. Back in the hotel room, I realized he’s just wasted perfectly good double entendre on me. It was a joke. Of course: you are still dis-Orienting. I’ve spent enough hours with Edward Said that I’m not sure I would have laughed anyway. A mute CNN reporter with Turkish backdrop blabs about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. I type the homographs over and over again, a keystroke daydreaming as if into the CNN teleprompter: Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said Said said etc.  

I want to hurl the extra mattress from the balcony into the pool area. Its housekept sheets await disarrangement. The vertiginous canyon between the mattresses accentuates my loneliness. In a state of lucid drift, I imprint the sheets with shallow indentation, the curvaceous haunches of megafauna. In his essay “Dreamtigers,” Jorge Luis Borges writes, “This is a dream… and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.” If by staring at my gift on Christmas Eve 1999, I became an infamous doglover (O, caged terrier, your insomnious eye shine), then on this birthday eve 2015, I will myself to become a catlover too. I keep distant company with the sustained pseudohallucination of Panthera tigris tigris in the dim airport hotel room.

Known as the "father of sociobiology," Pulitzer-prize winner Edward O. Wilson defines biophilia as "the urge to affiliate with other forms of life." It's why we sometimes tap our brakes to bear witness to motion on the roadside, to remind ourselves the margins' whir is still habitat: a rafter of turkeys in Orangevale, California; the scurry of an armadillo in Chickasha, Oklahoma; the chukwalla's pushup in Tucson; the rooting javelina in Sedona; a jilted bear cub in the New Jersey highlands. Unlike zoophilia (persistent sexual interest in animals), biophilia is natural, adaptive, instinctual. When I was in my teens, I thought the cover of Belle and Sebastian's 1996 debut album, Tigermilk, was the former; it seemed overtly sexual, the lactating mother sitting in the bathtub as her suckling infant wore a tiger costume.

                                                                                                                                               

It was the facelessness of the infant, I think—or maybe its cockeyed ears—that made it erotic, exhibitionist, transgressive. Eager to make sense of the album cover, to project my own ordeal onto another, I had decided it blended two paraphilias (zoophilia and lactophilia). As an adult, though, I recognize the photograph outsources the intimacy of breastfeeding— the implicit bonding and nourishment—to the tiger. It is decidedly biophilic.

One can read the urgency of biophilia, that imperative for affiliation, in the lines of Borges’ trials in “The Other Tiger”: “We shall seek a third tiger. This / Will be like those others a shape / Of my dreaming, a system of words / A man makes and not the vertebrate tiger / … I know well enough / That something lays on me this quest / Undefined, senseless and ancient, and I go on.” Unlike Borges who wrote of the tiger in all three genres, resigned to impossible destining after a single species, my biophilia is scattered among several species: dog, ferret, parrot, tortoise, badger, and then there was tiger (most recent of fetishes). In the tiger’s absence, Borges seems to discover his species’ profound loneliness. Sometimes, when I’m alone—in house or hotel—my subconscious fabricates a companion who's just on the other side of the wall, using the bathroom. “How does a tiger get in the bathroom?” Alan asks in The Hangover. “Of my dreaming… senseless and ancient,” Borges replies.

In the past couple decades, scientists have been debating geochronological nomenclature. The current epoch, the Holocene (Greek for “entirely recent”) is being slowly abandoned for a new parlance, the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity (as opposed to glaciation or other climatological phenomena) impacts the planet’s ecosystems. The term, which has been predictably politicized, doesn’t ring true to Edward O. Wilson, though. In the Economist, Wilson rejects anthropocene because it’s too self-aggrandizing, “a time for and all about our one species alone.” Instead, he offers the Eremocene, or the “Age of Loneliness.”   

Back in the States, I’m able to receive text messages again. “Dad wanted me to send this,” my mother says in one, followed by a slew of photographs. One is an accidental video, my parents background bickering over aesthetics (“Hurry up, it’s beautiful now,” “I don’t know how,” “They’re beautiful now,” “I know…”); another is taken through the screen door, indecipherable through the distortion of mesh; for the last photo, though, my mother has opened the door to our Western Pennsylvania backyard. It’s snowy blue hour, and she captures (just barely) two deer mid-bolt after being caught eating the birdseed dislodged from the feeders by the squirrels. Dad, with his broken ribs and collapsed lung (another brutal winter, as if snow-shoveling would have cured his ennui, Nobody’s expecting you to be a hero here, Dad) has been spending a lot of time at the windows, counting the deer—“…five at one time!”—waiting to command his wife (“Get a picture, Mar!”) and share with his son (“Send them to Lar!”) whom he sees just twice a year.

I reciprocate with a photograph of spotted deer from the Sundarbans; standing ass-to-ass-to-ass-to-ass beneath sundari trees, their collective of eyes search in all directions for tiger as they wait for the macaques to drop leafy twigs onto the alluvium. As we approached, a few deer barked while the others burst away. Aboard the R. B. Emma, the green motorboat that grumbled us through the channels, I read Kenneth Anderson’s Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue. Each essay is littered with the pug marks of tiger, ecstatic imprints in the nullah. Anderson coaxes the reader through bush and sapling forest. “Trust me reader,” he seems to say, expertly. “I know how to find the tiger.” Written sixty years before my Sundarbans tour, Anderson’s confidence seems antiquated; by comparison, my Bangladeshi tour guide, Emamul (“Emu”), begins by all-but-guaranteeing we won’t see a tiger. By reading Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue in between treks and meals, amidst uninspired sightings of crocodile, kingfisher, egret, kite, soft-coated otter, wild boar, and the others, I am still able to engage with the megafauna fantasy. Unfortunately, by the end of each essay, Anderson eliminates the tiger he has been promising to his reader. The tigress becomes bulleted becomes carcass becomes taxidermy becomes trophy becomes essay becomes, over and over again, a cipher for my loneliness in the mangrove forest delta. In this way, Anderson’s essays are inevitable corpses, but I read on, trying to resolve the dissonance.

If the tiger in my hotel room is real, she will eventually leap the mattress canyon, slash and devour my computer screen, its photo gallery of deer transmuted into buffet. I find quarters in my backpack and return to the vending machine at 4 a.m. for the orgiastic selection of American snacks. I look behind me for the Chinese businessman, but he’s not here at this hour. I study Tony the Tiger depicted on the coil-kept Kellogg’s box. Because my room is already sufficiently tigered, I snub Tony’s digits. Every time I am in a hotel room with my pets—the parrotlet in his traveling cage or the tortoise in the bathtub—I am reminded of Doug Aitken’s migration (empire), an eighteen-minute video I used to watch at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh every Thursday after bio lectures. I’d bypass all other exhibits, sit in the dark room, watch the video twice (at least), and then leave, my acute biophilia slaked. Filmed at lackluster motels not unlike this Ref Roof Inn in Burlingame, Aitken films a cast of North American species inhabiting room after room.

The video obscures the taxonomical rift by extending human accommodation to fellow animalia. I can still remember the exhilaration of a raccoon on the kitchenette counter, the beaver under the gush of the bath faucet, an unblinking owl on a bed as down feathers flurry around it, the curved horn of the bison parting the curtain, peering outside to the motel parking lot. In “The Deep Zoo,” Rikki Ducornet writes, “the mysteries of matter are the potencies that, in the shapes of dreams, landscapes, exemplary instants, and so on, inform our imagining minds; they are powers.” In Aitken’s video, matter’s mystery is reclaimed because potencies are allowed to, as Ducornet puts it, “fall into sympathy with one another.” I may tap my brakes to let deer cross the road, but not since the docile sika of Assateauge Island in Maryland have I ogled one at full stop. And I may bow hungrily into my refrigerator, but have I ever sung its praise, the puzzling convenience of its thermal insulation?

When the deer peeks into the motel refrigerator, though, the two fall into such sympathy, a sympathy that can be called irony or anthropomorphism, depending. In each room of migration (empire), a new animal inhabits a space designed for human transition—eagle, fox, some kind of white peafowl—thrust into this impermanency and afforded basic amenity.

The cougar is the most dynamic actor of migration (empire). If my tuxedo cat is 95% genetically similar to the cougar or tiger or any large cat (so the genome says), then this cougar segment is a demonstration of the 5% that is savagely dissimilar. A static image of the cougar would not look so anomalous, just an excellent taxidermy in a sterile motel room. But then it springs, mauling the pillow, rumpling the sheets. Like my hallucinated tiger, this cougar is dispossessed of its wild, so it ambushes the mattress. migration (empire) is a sophisticated Dr. Doolittle in which the animals articulate through their embodied potencies. Aitken’s dramatization of biophilia is psychic, sublime. 

The sun rises in Burlingame, and it’s officially my birthday. I’ve only managed forty minutes of sleep, dreaming my parents’ snowy Appalachian yard was actually the grassland steppe of Beringia, and we watched the transcontinental species swap from our porch like it was a water station in a marathon, the nuclear family’s breath fogging with each whoop. Mom texts at 6:34 a.m. PST. In the past, she would set the alarm for my true birthday (EST), but more tired these retirement days, she sleeps in. “Happy birthday!” she texts with emoji accoutrements—hearts, balloons, and a gift box. “Sorry for breaking your pelvis,” I reply out of habit. “What are you doing?” she wants to know. “Corn beef hash at hotel diner,” I reply. “Your favorite!” she reminds me.

I drink coffee, rereading the first essay in Anderson’s book, “The Maneater of Jowlagiri.” By the time Anderson kills the tigress, the pleasure of the essay evanesces. To read is to re-assassinate the tigress. When the writer kills (actus reus, Latin for “guilty act”), the reader becomes an accessory to the crime (mens rea, “intending mind”). What if, instead, the end is the beginning? If I, as reader, could elect for “Give me the bad news first.”

FALSE START: The next second the .405 crashed squarely between the [tigress’] eyes, and she sank forward in a lurching movement and lay twitching in the dust. I placed a second shot into the crown of her skull, although there was no need to have done so; actually this second shot did considerable damage to the head and [caused]… unnecessary… work [for] the taxidermist.

If I read the essay in reverse, beginning with the displeasing terminus and ending with the manifest tigress, will the reverse path effectively undo the essay’s causality? Resuscitate the tigress killed by my first reading? I try it out, and surprisingly, the essay coheres. But it’s hard to renounce the forward linear path entirely. No matter how subversive I am as a reader, on my second tour of the essay, I am still complicit in its original momentum—gummed up by Anderson’s intention, his actus reus, the initial vector impulse. At best, this reading is contrapuntal, a fugue with an ecstatic finish:

FALSE FINISH: Suddenly, from the thicket of ever-green saplings to their left, could be heard the sound of violently rustling leaves and deep-throated grunts. What could be there? … There was a snarling roar and a lashing of bushes, followed by a series of coughing ‘whoofs’ and then silence. Not pigs, but a tiger!

In a village in the Sundarbans, we were led down a dirt path to a shrine devoted to Bonbibi, a syncretic protectress of the outer forest. We huddled beneath a beehive to peer into the shrine.

Bonbibi, center, separates the demon god Dakkhin Rai (left-center) from the young honey-hunter Dukkhe (right-center). Bonbibi is regularly propitiated and petitioned, recognized by Hindus and Muslims alike, for safeguarding citizens of the “beautiful forest” against tiger attacks. When I asked the eldest villager if Bonbibi had a husband, she nodded. “There was a husband, but he was killed by a tiger,” she told Emu, who translated. There was some disagreement among the women. “Wait, Bonbibi is a tiger widow? Or this woman is?” I asked Emu, but the women were talking about something else, and the moment passed. Having read dozens of Bonbibi tales, I have never encountered this detail. Her vahana (Sanskrit for “vehicle”) is a tiger, sure, but this new revelation would mean her fabled dominion over tigers is just a protracted revenge killing. Suddenly, the mythic protectress seems no different to me than Kenneth Anderson; both are just vindictive trophy hunters.

“The Maneater of Jowlagiri” discusses how “death [follows] death” as the tiger marauds towns, looking for her mate: carrying a boy in her jaws, mauling farmers in cattlepens, devouring a new bride, consuming the skinny chest of a priest, puncturing the throat of a defecating pilgrim, etc. And who can forget how, as Anderson waits alongside a half-eaten corpse, expecting “the return of the [tigress] to its gruesome meal,” he glances at the remains, and it seems “one arm [reaches] upward… in supplication or [calls] perhaps for vengeance.” Anderson baits the tigress with livestock, but now that she has acquired a taste for human flesh, the method is ineffectual. Instead, Anderson resorts to embodying the male tiger, the partner whom the tigress grieves. The slayed tiger is, after all, what has instigated her ferocity. Anderson’s is a deceitful mating call, but an even more treacherous biophilia.

I could then easily distinguish the intonations of a tigress calling for a mate… Twice I gave the answering call of a male tiger, and received at once the urgent summons of this imperious female. Indeed, she came to the edge of the clearing and called so loudly as almost to paralyze us all…

  

By calling the tiger, Anderson causes the tiger just as in the lucid “Dreamtigers,” Borges can cause a tiger. It is a spontaneous generation as when (in the first century) people believed certain creatures were derived from dust, foam, moss, and particulate. The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote in De Architectura, “in libraries with southern exposures the books are ruined by worms and dampness, because damp winds come up, which breed and nourish the worms, and destroy the books with mould, by spreading their damp breath over them.” As a result, Roman libraries thereafter faced east to prevent Auster (the personified southerly wind) from spoiling texts. 

In Borges’ short story “Blue Tigers,” the protagonist Alexander Craigie is, like Kenneth Anderson, a man of Scottish descent who finds himself in India, chasing tigers. Published twenty-three years after Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue, it is possible that “Blue Tigers” is another of Borges’ fantastical roman à clefs. Upon hearing of an anomalous blue tiger, Craigie goes to a village on the banks of the Ganges. After being misled by the villagers, he independently discovers a collection of brilliant blue disks stored in a crevice in the ground. The villagers, familiar with the disks, call them “the stones that spawn.” Over the course of days, Craigie finds that it is an impossible task to count the stones; they multiply and divide, spontaneously generating and degenerating, and the paradox burdens Craigie, shattering his rationalism. In all of Borges’ writings about tigers (the blue one, the “other” one, the dreamt one, the Zahir, etc.), the speaker struggles with their finite inventory. It occurs to me that the literary ecology of a species has always been one of impractical keystrokes hoping to conjure “the feel of the bony structure that quivers under the glowing skin.” It’s a futile exercise, a senseless relay writing we’ve been committing for generations while failing to generate even an embryo from our imagining, let alone something that could decimate a “tribe of buffaloes.” Not songs of experience, but shrinking fantasies that bear the dubious reminder: if you want to witness a tiger, you must go to the zoo.

My girlfriend meets me for my birthday (2/6 in San Francisco). We eat oysters, drink martinis, and even though she hasn’t seen me for over a month, she indulges my chatter about Panthera tigris tigris. “We saw tiger poop,” I tell her, “and claw markings on the bark of the trees.” I tell her about the muezzin who alternated between pointing in the distance and looking over his shoulder, the boy in the village with bow and arrow, how we heard baagh growl from inner forest. Walking through the Lower Mission, I see depictions of tigers on doors (emerging from bamboo) and windows (one tiger chases another on the sill); tiger print and tiger tattoo; its stripes in Chinatown too, the zodiacal mural (the “Water Tiger” will be back by popular demand in 2022). I take stealth photos and have delusions that my urge to affiliate causes these tigers. On Valentine’s Day (2/14 in Sacramento), Shane McCrae reveals the cover of his new book, The Animal Too Big to Kill, via Twitter: a matryoshka set of tigers, identical but scaling down in size, each emerging from the previous tiger’s jaws. They roar each other into existence. In this vomitous book cover, a tiger contains Whitmanian multitudes. My perception of it feels clairvoyant. When a friend points at the inebriated woman bucked by mechanical bull (2/21 in Los Angeles), I study her backdrop instead, the music video for “Eye of the Tiger.” I am trying to convince myself that upon my return, the tiger’s range has coextended with my own, and why not: the MLB claims there are tigers in Detroit, the NFL in Cincinnati, and the PGA would have you think there’s one teeing off in Georgia this April.

I start to become aware of where the nearest tiger is to me at any given moment (which zoo) and realize it’s only a matter of time until I pay admission. Where was I when I last saw a tiger? I start asking myself questions such as this, goading myself on. (In Baton Rouge, across from LSU’s football stadium, the living mascot in his enclosure: Mike VI)

I read that the Folsom City Zoo Sanctuary has feral cats, bobcats, cougars, and tigers. It’s hard to imagine the zoo will be anything less than an extension of the city’s infamous state prison, but I go anyway for the sake of their project of sanctuary (for unwanted wild pets, injured wildlife, and surplus and confiscated animals). From the joint parking lot for the sanctuary and public library, I can hear the Folsom Valley Railway, a miniature steam-powered train (according to its website, “the only 12 inch gauge railroad… in the United States”), and I can’t help but wonder how many times the tigers hear the whistle each day (“I hear the train a’comin’…”). Inside, ample enclosures seem like cells, the kindly volunteers like jailers. “How long have they been here?” I ask a volunteer. “Um, since two-six in oh-four,” Susan replies. My fifteenth birthday. I peek at Misty and Pouncer, worry them for a minute until I realize they’re as lethargic as my own tuxedo cat. They seem just fine.

  

Misty and Pouncer were just two of thirty-nine tigers confiscated from Jon Weinhart’s Colton, California property in 2003. It was the largest rescue of big cats in United States history. Originally intended as a sanctuary for retired big cat actors in the suburbs of Los Angeles, Tiger Rescue functioned more like a tomb when PAWS arrived. According to CNN, there were thirty animal carcasses in the yard, “including the skeleton of one big cat sharing a cage with a live burro” and fifty-eight cubs frozen in three freezers. Not only was Weinhart breeding the animals (there were “seven tigers cubs and two leopards cubs” in the attic), but he also stored big cat pelts in the barn.

Pouncer, who was found tethered to a pole on Weinhart’s property, hides out of sight in the Folsom City Zoo Sanctuary. Misty, who was once emaciated and covered in mange, privately lounges on a rock face. Her gorgeous sprawl defies the reality that she was once crammed in a cage only three-by-three foot in area, having never touched a natural surface. According to the World Wildlife Fund, there are more tigers in American backyards than there are in the wild in Asia. I imagine Misty and Pouncer passing through my parents’ backyard in Pennsylvania, inserting them into my Beringia dreamscape, and I shiver. It seems to me the black market is the most irresponsible way to cause a tiger. Despite the horror of Tiger Rescue, I don’t doubt that Weinhart was a cat lover, that his was just an unchecked biophilia. Despite his best intentions, a mismanaged urge to affiliate resulted in the deaths of ninety big cats, a figure six times greater than Anderson’s spree in India. I leave the Sanctuary, pass the miniature train still circuiting the sidewalk, and as I enter the library, I hear the shrill whistle. “Far from Folsom prison, that’s where I want to stay / … And I’d let that lonesome whistle blow my blues away.”

What, indeed, is the best way to cause a tiger? If by pointing, it only appeared. If by gale force, it spontaneously generated. If by squinting through the orange saline stripes of the phoenix palm, shadows conspired in fleet illusion. If by writing, the futile song was fruitful—if, à la Ducornet, “words, just as things” could “acquire powers,” become “the mind’s animating flame.” If only, just for one seductive instant, when the nervous system reactivated, sleep left us a wink of its perilous hallucination.

Because we cannot adequately cause a tiger, though, in our Age of Loneliness—we can’t even reasonably anticipate one in its natural range—the fetish becomes gradually extinguished. It becomes as endangered as the species itself. If I am to ever see a tiger in its wild, then I must discontinue the relay, accept once and for all (as Louis Pasteur did 1,864 years after the Vitruvian treatise), “La génération spontanée est une chimère” (spontaneous generation is a dream). With this, Tigger and Hobbes return to what they always were: synthetic fiber batting. By law of “Omne vivum exvivo” (all life comes from life), only a tiger can cause a tiger, meaning an optimal ending for a tiger essay is not one that successfully coaxes the tiger into existence. We cannot cause by intention alone. If we could, Borges’ trials would have resulted in an overpopulation of the Royal Bengal Tiger. By ending with implicit conditionality (i.e., Anderson would cause a tiger if he could), an essay can promote the natural biophilic urge. In this false finish, the writer appears to give up his trophy as he calls to the absent species in continuous petition, a “senseless and ancient” ritual with the veneer of zoophilia:

I clambered up [the tree] some twelve feet to a crotch… Then, expanding my lungs, I called lustily in imitation of a male tiger. Nothing but silence answered me… I called a second time. Still no answer. After a short interval, and expanding my lungs to bursting-point, I called again.

Works Cited

Anderson, Kenneth. Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue. New York: Dutton, 1955. Internet Archive. Creative Commons. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

Borges, Jorge L. Dreamtigers. New York: E. P. Dutton &, 1970. Print.

Ducornet, Rikki. The Deep Zoo: Essays. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 2015. Print.



LAWRENCE LENHART holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. His essays appear or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Guernica, Wag's Revue, Sundog Lit, and elsewhere. Currently living in Sacramento, he is a reviews editor and an assistant fiction editor of DIAGRAM.