By Mark Neely
“How strange is it that I am a person?” Indira Khera asks in “Electrocardiogram,” the first of eleven brilliant, beautiful, necessary essays you will find printed in these pages. This question haunts Khera as a child, then returns years later when she visits her parents in their new home in Florida, and, in trying to make sense of their lives, opens up new inquiries about her own. In this old, essential question, I hear echoes of Elizabeth Bishop’s great poem, “In the Waiting Room,” and the speaker’s sudden revelation that “you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them.” But also the final moments of Neutral Milk Hotel’s lo-fi anthem “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea,” where Jeff Mangum wails, “How strange it is to be anything at all,” stretching out that all as if trying to contain the mystery of human existence in that one simple word. We turn to the humanities—to literature, philosophy, music, history—to help us address these questions about what it means to be human. I say address, not answer, because, like Chekhov, I believe that the purpose of art is not to solve problems, but to formulate them correctly. One thing the essays in this issue have in common, despite their disparate topics and stylistic differences, is this ability to dwell in the uncertain, which seems particularly important at a time when tech companies and their deranged AI machines prefer simplistic, definitive answers, with none of the skepticism or nuance characteristic of the best human thinking.
Here you will find Ann Guy and Jessica Lind Peterson considering the “religious involvement” of modern motherhood, of both its “shining triumphs” and “mind-numbing duties.” “I’ll be a mother every second of every day from now until I’m dust,” Guy writes, trying to find a balance between responsibility and independence, “but it’s often necessary to remind myself that I’m not only a mother, and sometimes I overcorrect.” Gregory Martin’s “The Boy Who Fell Through the Ice,” looks at parenthood from a different angle, turning his experience of watching a Minnesota family cope with a neighbor boy who falls through a frozen pond into a “parable about parenthood, about fear, uncertainty, helplessness, acceptance, and letting go.”
Fear, uncertainty, and (sometimes grudging) acceptance can also be found in a group of essays here about illness and loss, about the dark roads we are forced to navigate when we or our loved ones are no longer granted what Shannon McCarthy calls “the sheer dumb luck of good health.” In “The Body I Am Trying to Outrun,” McCarthy writes of the cancer diagnoses that throw her life into the “terrifying uncertainty” that comes when we are expelled from what Susan Sontag termed “the kingdom of the well.” Jan Shoemaker describes watching illness eat away at her husband’s mind and body, how “the universe accordions your life into a lurching polka, how it chisels away the person you love, whittling him down to a broken chair.” In “Sussex,” Ana Maria Spagna pines for the motel where she stayed after her beloved brother’s death, “snagged on the border fence between life and death, stumped by the agonizing unknowing.” And Manoj Kumar details with stunning specificity his experience of addiction, likening it to a moth “[battering] itself against a sodium streetlamp, drawn to what would burn it,” how the pain and anxiety that alcohol “dulled one night doubled by morning,” how addiction turns us into versions of ourselves we do not recognize.
Despite the difficult questions they force us to reckon with, I find pleasure, joy, and resilience in all the essays here and am pleased to discover that, after reading them, I can see my own strange life a little more clearly, can come closer to correctly formulating the questions at the heart of our existence. Beyond its ability to enlighten, what brings me back to literature, again and again, is the joy of seeing an author take serious pleasure in language itself, as in Julie Marie Wade’s wonderful “Kith, in the Aftermath,” or watching a writer consider her place of origin so deeply, as in Julia Nagele’s “Hell Hollow, No Possessive,” that “culture, land, and language [are] fractured and folded over on themselves again and again.” “Books aren’t medicines,” Sam Pickering writes in his essay about four recent books of natural history, “Nevertheless, the best contain doses of natural snake oil.” I hope the doses we offer here go down easy, no spoonful of sugar required, and grant you a few moments of joy and solace in these anxious, infuriating times. Thank you for reading and for helping us formulate the questions that bring us closer to understanding this wild business of being human.
—MN
