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Fourteen Paintings for No One: The Most Somber Art Ever Made

Sad art is everywhere, and it comes cheap. Somber art is rare, because somber means sorrow that keeps its shape after the tears dry, sorrow with gravity, no laugh track, no lifeline. Ask which art is the most somber of all and the question sets a brutal standard: the winner must be born of grief, must depict grief, must refuse every exit from grief, and must offer no joy and no gesture of human harmony anywhere in its making or its reception. That last clause is the killer. Art is a social act before it is anything else. A song wants an ear. The play wants a house. Every poem wants a voice to carry it. Harmony rides along in the address itself, before a single consoling note gets played, and so nearly every candidate for the darkest art in the world fails on delivery, whatever horrors it contains.

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Six Hundred Million Breaths

The first inhale, the last exhale, and the enormous unexamined middle. A human being spends nine months underwater and then, in a single violent second, becomes an air-breathing animal. We tend to picture that first breath as a natural unfolding, the lungs simply beginning what they were built to do. The reality is closer to a demolition. Before birth the lungs are not empty. They are filled with fluid secreted by the lung tissue itself, and that fluid has to go somewhere before air can enter. Labor begins clearing it. The surge of adrenaline and noradrenaline that accompanies delivery flips the epithelial cells lining the airways from secreting fluid to absorbing it, and sodium channels in those cells begin pulling the liquid back into the tissue and the bloodstream. The mechanical compression of the chest during a vaginal delivery squeezes out more. Even so, at the moment of birth the newborn faces a set of collapsed, wet sacs whose internal surfaces are stuck together by the surface tension of water, and it must pull them open with nothing but the muscles of its own chest and diaphragm.

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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 Farmer’s Word: Winona LaDuke, a False Etymology, and the True Root of “Colonization”

A reader sent me a video clip. In it, Winona LaDuke opens a talk on colonization by reaching for the dictionary, and the first thing she says is wrong. LaDuke is Anishinaabe, from White Earth in northern Minnesota. She trained as an economist, ran twice for vice president on the Green Party ticket, wrote All Our Relations, and has spent four decades on wild rice, pipelines, and land recovery. Rooms fill when she speaks. So when she tells an audience that colonization “has the same root as the word colon” and that the root “means to digest,” that line travels. It is vivid, it is anatomical, it is easy to repeat, and it is the sentence people carry home. It is also folklore. This is a claim about the history of a word; no lexicon supports it, and it collapses the moment anyone opens a Greek dictionary. The rest of her argument is largely sound and in places understated. That is exactly why the false root matters. An argument this strong should not be walking around with a demolition charge strapped to its opening line.

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Haven’t We Always Been Friends?

Aristotle drew a ladder. I drew a circle. A scheming actor asked to climb, and I answered with a question built to end the conversation. Years ago, in a rehearsal room that smelled of coffee and radiator dust, an actor I will call Curtis said six words I have retold wrong for decades: “I want to be your friend.” We had known each other three years by then. We had built shows together, struck sets at midnight, shared the particular intimacy of people who fail in front of each other at ten in the morning and repair it by eight that night. His sentence cornered me. I laughed a little, the way you laugh when you need two seconds to find a door, and I said, “Curtis, haven’t we always been friends?”

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Honest Opacity

Honesty is a rule about what you say. Transparency is a rule about what you hide. They are different instruments, and the confusion between them is how power keeps its secrets in the open. Two words get treated as synonyms by people who ought to know the difference, and the people who exploit the confusion understand it best of all. A company under investigation announces that it has been fully transparent and expects the phrase to function as an alibi. A politician says he has nothing to hide and trusts you to hear it as proof of innocence. Each one is trading on a slippage between two ideas that are not the same and do not even point the same way.

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Make the Decision Right: A 1987 Aphorism Against the Age of the Open Tab

An old professor of mine, holding forth in 1987, handed his students one sentence to carry out the door: don’t make the right decision; make the decision right. He attached a coda that landed harder than the maxim itself. Regret, he told us, is mindless. I have been turning that sentence over for nearly four decades, and the turning has become its own education, because the sentence makes a metaphysical bet most listeners never notice they are taking. It claims that rightness arrives after the choosing, manufactured through labor and revision, and that no quantity of advance analysis can locate it beforehand, since the future refuses to sit still long enough to be computed. With one stroke the professor moved the entire moral weight of decision-making off the moment of selection and onto the years of execution. Pick a door, any door, then build a house behind it.

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