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Nobody Closed the Gate: How Traditions Convince Themselves That Thinking Ended, and Who Collects the Toll

In 1984 a legal historian named Wael Hallaq published a study whose title was a question: “Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?” The question sounds technical, and the journal that carried it, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, is read by a few thousand specialists. What Hallaq did inside those pages deserves a wider audience than it has ever had, because he performed one of the cleanest demolitions in modern intellectual history, and the thing he demolished is a structure that keeps getting rebuilt in other neighborhoods, including our own.

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The Occupied Space from The Empty Space

There are two books on my desk tonight. One is thin, secondhand, printed in 1968, and it has followed me from apartment to apartment for fifty years the way certain arguments follow a person: quietly, patiently, refusing to concede. The other arrived this week in a shipping box with my name on the cover, and it exists because of the first. It is the answer, finally long enough. The thin book is Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, the most quoted stage doctrine of its century, and mine is The Occupied Space: Sixty Years After The Empty Space, and it is the longest answer I have ever written to anything: twelve chapters, a coda, and a half century of rehearsal rooms behind every page. This is the story of the quarrel, the trial, and the answer, told the way I can only tell it here, at home, at length.

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Three Books on a Table

When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others. One was a slim green-and-gilt volume from 1922 called The Wild Heart, eleven animal sketches of Puget Sound country, foxed at the corners, written by a woman almost nobody remembers. One was the Theogony of Hesiod, a genealogy in verse, roughly a thousand lines of who was born to whom, composed by a Boeotian farmer about seven hundred years before Christ. And one was the Inferno, in the English that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made out of the worst years of his life. An animal book, a family tree, and a tour of hell. The Disposition is what happened when I stopped treating them as three books and started treating them as one instrument with three registers.

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The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook

On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat. It lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, and the fastest way to teach that is to stop pretending otherwise on day one.

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The Necessary Art: Taking the Title Back

Today I am publishing a book about a theft at the center of Western culture, one its victims were trained to take as a compliment:The Necessary Art: Aristotle’s Six Elements in the Clinic, the Courtroom, the Proof, the Blueprint, and the Republic. It runs 342 pages in paperback, it exists in a Kindle edition and a free reading edition you can download right now, and the audiobook will follow as soon as the voice is ready. Those are the facts of the launch. What follows is the case for why this book exists, because its central fact has stood in plain sight for two hundred and eighty years while the people it names were trained to take the theft as a compliment: the professions of the working world were robbed of a word, the robbery has a date and a paper trail, and the word can be taken back.

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Two Words, Three Sources, Four Generations: How I Built The Wergild

A novel can be assembled inside the space between two words, provided the words are old enough and the space between them has never closed. The oldest components of The Wergild are a pair of terms from early English and Germanic law. The first is the title itself: the wergild was the man-price, the payment a killer or the killer’s kin owed to the family of the killed, scaled to the standing of the dead, the settlement that closed a feud and kept grief from multiplying into graves. Beside it sat morð, the old law’s name for a killing done in secret and left unacknowledged, the one category of death the whole system could never settle, since no price can change hands until the killer has a name. Every law that promises repayment carries a shadow clause for the debt it cannot collect. I built the novel inside that shadow, and every other component was chosen for how much load it could carry there.

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The Oldest Ceremony in the World

On the morning of January 5, 1895, in the great courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris, an army stripped a man of everything it had given him. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain of artillery, stood at attention in the cold while a general read the sentence aloud. A drum roll opened the thing. Then an officer stepped forward and began to take him apart piece by piece, in front of the assembled regiments and a crowd of thousands pressed against the railings outside. The braid came off his sleeves. His buttons were cut from his coat. The red stripes were torn from his trousers, and the insignia of his rank was ripped away and thrown down into the mud of the parade ground. Last, the officer took Dreyfus’s sword, raised it, and broke it across his knee, and let the two halves fall at the man’s feet.

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