https://revenantquarterly.org The Revenant Quarterly Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:26:46 +0000 https://revenantquarterly.org en https://revenantquarterly.org/Arnold-Klein-ANT-EATER Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:26:46 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/Arnold-Klein-ANT-EATER <img src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" style="width: 306px; height: auto;"> ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → Arnold Klein– ANT-EATER .rq-ant-eater .poem-row { display: grid; grid-template-columns: 8rem minmax(0, 1fr); column-gap: 1.5rem; margin: 0; } .rq-ant-eater .poem-note { white-space: pre-line; font-size: 0.68em; line-height: 1.35; padding-top: 0.55em; } .rq-ant-eater .line { white-space: pre; } .rq-ant-eater .poem-break { height: 1.35em; } .rq-ant-eater .poem-break.three { height: 4.05em; } @media (max-width: 700px) { .rq-ant-eater .poem-row { display: block; } .rq-ant-eater .poem-lines { overflow-x: auto; } } AD 1525 And in these regions is ingendered certaine kindes of antes, The which, in hillockes to the height of man, or somewhat more, For they are as a hogshead, or a but, and hard, do seek themselves A safeguard, so hath nature given them a sense, whereby they raise them Farre from woods and trees, and make the saide hillockes Of such highness, they may seeme as stones, set to limit endes Of certaine lands, and of such hardness too As Don Gonzalo de Oviedo, whose words I cite, could not beleeve, Insomuch as they could scarce be broken with his iron pikes, The which he proved; but moystened by the raine, and dried by sunne, It breaketh, and hath certaine tiny rifts, as little and as subtill As a knife, to which the Beare, when he resorteth to the hillocke, Putteth in his tongue, which he hath very long, and thinne, And disproportioned much, and therewith licking so inlargeth it That at the length he hath himself a passage, at his pleasure Thrusteth in and out, and waits, until a great quantitie of antes Have laden it, and then he draweth in and eateth them. For this beeste is fearful, vile, and unarmed, and only very famine, Or necessitie, or the great desire they have to feed on antes, Can bring them from the woods and trees, whereto they ever keepe, To hunt for them; and thus they prove the common proverb, There is none so free, as hath not his privie enemy, or prosecutor. AD 1640 The pismire-eater, Nieuhof calls him, feeds on nothing but Pismires; he stretches out his tongue upon the dunghills till they settle There, and then he swallows them. AD 1680 He lays his nose Down flat upon the ground, says Dampier, And puts his tongue athwart the path the army ants (Whereof are many in this country) travel, and the ants, When they approach the tongue, do make a stop; which he perceiving Draws them in, and eats. AD 1613 There is another beast The baremo, we call him ant-bear, hath a mouth so small And yet a tongue like unto a giant earth-worme, Neere a quarter yard, wherewith he licketh up the ants; AD 1601 Neither is he good for anything but to destroy their heapes. AD 1680 They smell Very strong of ants, and taste much stronger of them; AD 1525 And only by the most extreme shifts, and by necessitie, when first they Came, and were inforced to procure all things, did Christian men Fall to eating of these filthy beestes, and most unsavorie; and when they found More daintie meates, hated this, Oviedo says. AD 1772 Animal realmente Admirable, Eder tells us, y sin par; that is (to translate now myself) Wholly uncorrelative and peerless; and worthiest of admiration Is his head, for how can such a head (this priest demands) No wider than a turkey’s at its widest place, and at the end No wider than the finger of a child of only seven years, Consort itself with such a bulk, as even dwarfs The bears of Spain? Yet mark it, he derives his aliment from tiny ants, Whose anger he invites by excavating through their nests with claws Curving, long and keen, which his peculiar gait defends from dulling, For he bears them back, and balances his bulk upon the points Of his articulations. And those claws defend him from his foes as well: No other creature offers such a threat to dogs And even to the multicolored ounce, whose onslaughts he receives Belly upwards, on his back, grappling him so close That sometimes both are found together locked, dead of hunger In each other’s grasp; which makes the oso hormiguero The only creature in this land who dares encounter him. AD 1783 De Azara Laughs at this, however, and at both Buffon and de la Borde, For thinking such a sleepy creature could contrive to get The jaguar in its grasp; for it can neither run nor jump, he says, Nor indeed do anything at all but grapple vainly with its foe In front; may be captured, driven, baited or destroyed With clubs, and he killed many so, running no more risk, He says, than if he had been beating on the trunks of trees. AD 1772; The club, the stave, the cudgel and the stick are everywhere and always AD 1643; In these old accounts the instruments of choice to kill or guy if AD 1640 For, as a medico declares, though sly enough to ambush ants and animals To men he is no menace, merely cross and stubborn, A thing, whose most portentous aspect cannot long conceal from us A joke of nature. AD 1825 Waterton, observing that the bear is harmless Both to men and things, and that his haunts and wonts are so unlike All other creatures’, they must never clash, Declares, that though the ant-bear misses much in self-defence, Able neither, with his awkward gait, to flee, nor burrow In the ground with his impressive claws, and so conceal himself, Nor with his sad and toothless mouth to bite, he quests about In perfect safety nonetheless, going up and down for ants, Which nature lavishes, and mostly through the swampy woods near creeks, Where grows the troely tree; of all the animals the least offensive; Would live a peaceful life and die an aged thing At last, were it not that mankind finds his flesh good food. AD 1825 To Bates, whose records of the tropic forests Darwin ranked In second place, after Humboldt’s own, after days Of eating rice and roast bananas, when “almost anything “That had the shape of flesh” were welcome, ant-bear stewed Turned out very good indeed, in flavor like a goose; Thereafter, whenever he was short of meat he sent his Negro With a dog, to get him one; but one day one reached out And tore the dog to bits. AD 1783; That only ants fed one so robust AD 1894 Puzzled many; this, with the fact that he could find no ants Where he was travelling, led T.P. Bigg-Wither to conclude That one day soon the “so-called ant-bear” Would reveal himself a honey-eater, to profit from the unclaimed bounty Of the mirim bee. But only ants, adult and larval, Termites chiefly, and some mouldy earth and leaves, which he believed Only incidentally adherent to the viscid tongue, AD 1914 Were found by President Theodore Roosevelt in the stomachs of the ones he shot, AD 1930 Stomachs thick-walled, he says, and more like gizzards; but Cherrie, To whose wanderings we owe the first photograph (before me now) Of the giant ant-eater climbing up a tree, Twenty feet above the ground, the sun behind, a soft And subtle shaggy herald’s banner in the southern sky, Declares them great destroyers too of nestling birds and eggs, Whose juices, and whose liquid contents, they lap up or suck. AD 1857 So well-protected by his close coat, we hear, is he, the ants Abide their fate, possessing in their billions no defence against AD 1772 His operations; nor, despite their zeal, can savage dogs Find any purchase on it for their avid teeth or claws. AD 1930 His hide beneath is said to be like plates of steel; for Cherrie tells That when his largest, fiercest dog at last obliged An ant-bear to defend itself, it turned and rose and reared, And let the dog attack its throat; and while it vainly mumbled Slowly closed the circle of its claws and crushed the dog to death, “As one would crush an eggshell.” But that tail of his, AD 1940 Although as shaggy coated, and indeed the first feature after Head, and tongue, and claws, to recommend itself To close consideration by the naturalists, remains, as to its function, As obscure today, despite surmise and speculation, AD 1597; As when a pilgrim styled it a Faire Great Tayle, and a friar, AD 1601 A taile so full of haire, that when he harboureth himself All under it, from heate, and raine, and cold, and winde, nothing AD 1857 Of him can yee see. To Kidder, one asleep, Curled up and covered with its tail, seemed so like a heap of hay A careless passerby might be excused, who fancied him. AD 1840 Exactly that; and Schomburgk adds, it serves to keep him warm AD 1853 As well as hidden. Wallace claims that ant-bears Always raise their tails against the rain, and calls it an umbrella; AD 1857 And some say native hunters profit from this quirk, Make pitter-patter cunningly upon the forest leaves, As if it rained, until the ant-bear cocks his tail AD 1894 And so betrays his presence. Bigg-Wither, in pursuit of his idea, Calls the tail a bee-swatter; and one older AD 1613 Traveller, who notes he heighteth like a horse, anticipates AD 1927 An ultra-modern thought, that as his cousin sloths, despite Their tree-top dwelling, still possess a proper nose For grubbing in the earth, and as his brothers live in trees, AD 1930 The lesser often seen curled up upon a branch, the least Branch-abiding always, so might the giant ant-bear once have been Himself arboreal; for he says he hath a great broad bushie tayle, By help whereof he leapeth lightly, tree to tree, And to the ground. AD 1878 But one who saw him flee, on all fours first, Then running upright, doubted nature even meant him For terrestrial, so clumsy did each locomotive method seem. AD 1640; Not nimble, Nieuhof calls him; to Cherrie, lumbering AD 1930 And ungainly, though fast enough; to Roosevelt, lumbering and clumsy, AD 1914 A black object moving slowly at a rocking canter Through the vivid green -- out-of-date, and strange, and poignant, And he was happy, having shot down two for science’ sake, To leave the many ant-bears that he saw thereafter unmolested. AD 1927 Maladapted to this later age, Gunther tells us, His relatives extinct, and he an isolate. But Roosevelt lauds him too, “For he has courage,” and despite his toothless mouth can be A most unpleasant foe. To aggression never given, AD 1827 As another says, but in his own defence extremely terrible. AD 1836 And when Gardner’s party, passing through a wooded campo, came upon A large one, which Mr. Walker followed with his gun, But which they all pursued on foot, with sticks, the rifles having failed, He showed himself a single thing, pacific, partly dexterous And doomed, for he, as always, tried to flee, (and, with all my reading On this subject, I have never found a record of successful flight,) And it was Gardner himself, well-aware, he tells us, Of the harmless nature of its toothless mouth, grabbing it And hoping to hold on until the others came, who brought upon himself The ant-eater’s quick embrace, the turning upriste grab, That might have disembowelled him; and, despite the aftermath, For truly almost always when this animal appears, it dies, In which, after countless stunning blows, a pistol kills it, I protest this is my favorite account of him, As of a human being human face to strangest face, Eye to lentil eye, and almost dying of it -- of surprise, I think, and rather hope, of shame, and of its righteousness. Origin of the ant-eater “Let’s go eat puca-fruit,” said an old woman; And she and her grandchildren went off into the forest to look for it. When they arrived at a puca-tree she ordered the children Into the tree. “Now shake the branches,” she said to the children, Ge “Then come down and help me gather the fruit that has fallen,” But they stayed in the branches, laughing and listening, eating the puca, While the old woman ate the ripe fruit on the ground, When the children were finished they started to throw green fruit on the ground. The old woman scolded them, so they turned into parakeets. The woman said “Don’t!” but they still wouldn’t listen: they turned into parakeets. “What should I do?” said the old woman. She had very few teeth So she turned into an ant-eater. She went digging for ants. Soon she entered the forest. Mataco Another old woman Once went into the bush to pick berries. She refused to go home And was turned into an ant-eater. Nivakle Then when the women Saw that the men were all birds, they went back to the village and said, “What should we do? Maybe we could turn into something ourselves.” “I am old,” said one, “and I plan to turn myself into an ant-eater.” So she put her grinder over her buttocks, and that was her tail. She took an old wooden bowl she had used for a mortar and told them, “This is my head.” She was an ant-eater then, And no longer spoke to them; in fact all ant-eaters speak badly, They speak softly and stutter somewhat, and mostly talk nonsense. When the men turned into peccaries the women were ant-eaters; His claws That’s why the ant-eater has long nails: Those women had long nails. He sleeps all day long, too, His habits Just like a woman. When a man sleeps all day We say he is just like an ant-eater, and the name we give him Is uklatijic. His gait All the animals were made from people, And in some of them it’s still easy to see it. After the fire When the world was ashes, and the people were waiting to leave the hole, Toba The very deep hole the chief had dug to protect them, He gave them a warning to look down when they left it, And not to look sideways or up until they had walked for a while. But most disobeyed him, and for ignoring his order Were turned into animals: ostrich and alligator, monkey and tapir, And ant-eater too, he was an old inquisitive woman Who had to look frontways and up when she came out of hiding. That’s why he walks a bit bent -- that old woman was crooked. His tail and snout Petura stole down from the owls, corn from the vultures, From monkeys the madder, depriving him of it; and from the ant-eater, Tapirape Who made it to kill him, he took the art of the war-club; And he punished him with it, thrusting it into his mouth and his anus. A later instance of transformation Once in a village there lived an old man and his woman. At the time of maturing burity fruits they left to live by a brook; They erected a hut, and gathered the burity fruits by the basket. When their daughter came to visit she was astonished At all the fine burity fibre hanging about. The old people gave her all of the fruits they had gathered, For (as they explained) the fruit was too hard for their teeth. Ge When she came by to visit several days later, they were no longer there; But suspiciously lying nearby, amid ruins of ant-hills, Were two sleeping ant-eaters. She went back to the village And asked her husband to go back to look for her parents. He discovered the ant-eaters only, who trotted off to an island; He followed and clubbed them to death, and his wife roasted their bodies. That night the blood of those ant-eaters changed into ant-eaters, Great numbers of ant-eaters who came close to the village. Next day an old man conversant with just about everything Explained that the harmless creatures the husband had beaten to death Were really the old man and woman, who had turned into ant-eaters. His great counterpart Buke the ant-eater was finishing making an arrow When Adujo the jaguar came by, and made as if he was going to break it. Said Buke the ant-eater: “If you break that arrow, Bororo “First I’ll be sad, then I’ll be angry.” But Adujo ignored him; He stepped on the arrow and broke it. So Buke gouged out his eyes. Ge (Some say he lost one eye first, and the ant-eater gouged out the other; Cayua Some, that the jaguar proposed a juggling contest, using their eyes. The eyes of the ant-eater fell back into their sockets, But jaguar’s stuck on a branch.) So now Adujo was blind. He went round to the other animals, but none of them offered to help him, Till Kuo the tinamou made him new eyes from jotoba (Some say the macuco bird made them from water; That’s why the big cats hunt only at night): That’s why the big cats have yellow eyes. Meanwhile Buke had fled. When Adujo managed to find him The ant-eater tried to conceal himself inside a rock. But the crack in the rock was too small, and his legs were exposed. “Nephew, come out!” said the jaguar (he called him nephew to taunt him); “I’m fine where I am,” said the ant-eater. “I’m sleepy.” The jaguar laid hold of his legs and tried to dislodge him, But the ant-eater’s arms were too strong, and held him in place. So Adujo the jaguar made do and devoured the flesh on his legs. His hind legs That’s why the ant-eater has such tiny hind legs, like a child’s. That was the one time the ant-eater fled from the jaguar. His excrement Another contest the two had was over their excrement, Over which animals each was able to kill and eat. Tenetehara Each closed his eyes and strained; but the ant-eater, Cayua Finishing first, cunningly switched the piles and derided the jaguar. Other counterparts Some class him with the capybara, whose great incisors Furnish graving tools for which his tongue provides the file; Useful Some, with certain rodents, for the crescent claws of all Talismanic Are joined in half-moon ornaments, and worn in lip and bosom; Xingu; Mura; Also used as whistles during healing trances, Waiwai To summon kindly ant-bear spirits, who are sovereign doctors; Magical And into him, as into nose-bear, otter, dolphin, Jibaro Evil souls of sorcerors may migrate; and with the nose-bear he is Very magic, both able with their long and pointed snouts To dazzle men. A helpful ant-eater Once two children wandered into the forest; The boy was called Joaquin, the girl was called Joaquina. Joaquina wanted honey from a tree, but the entrance in the trunk was small, Toba She put her hand in but could not pull it out. Then an ant-eater came along and with his claws enlarged the entrance, And the girl was free. A magical ant-eater Once when the men were out hunting They saw an animal. “I think it is that ant-eater,” one of them said. They set fire to the grass, and when the fire started to narrow Ge An ant-eater ran from the flames. “Cu-cu, cu-cu” Was the sound it made when it came out into the open. Arecuna (But some say that after the rainbow snake had been killed by the birds And all of the animals shared out its shimmering skin, The ant-eater came along last, and the cry that they gave him Was not “cu-cu” but “rr-rr.”) One of the hunters Took up his club and ran after it, striking it once, Striking it twice, and, when it turned in its flight and stood up, Struck it again, striking and striking and striking until he had killed it. It was very fat, and when he carried it home on his shoulders All of the children saw him and shouted, “ant-eater, ant-eater, ant-eater!” And a woman said, “Someone is coming with an ant-eater.” Another said, “It must be the ant-eater the men were discussing, “Who always succeeds in escaping the circle of fire.” “How black its pelt is!” “Its life is over.” The man threw the ant-eater down. “Go on, escape!” He was mocking the ant-eater. “Go on!” They divided the animal up, cooked it and ate it, one ate the rump, One took the shoulder, and the head went to the oldest among them; But that creature was magic: he belonged to the U’u, and escaped from the fire By going into the water, where the U’u abided. And those who ate of him died. A solitary creature of ill-omen When we hunt all day and get nothing We call it suklatawo. The ant-eater himself we call S’uklax; his excrement is uklatijic: we are afraid of it. Nivakle It is bad luck, and when we see it we say uklatawo. And when we see the ant-eater himself we say uklatawo as well. Another aspect of his solitary nature They say that all ant-eaters are female, And that they impregnate each other using their snouts. A bad man whom Chibute changed into an ant-eater Tacana Lived without woman or wife and brought forth his young by himself. Tukano And yet others believe that his member is enormous, and make him A symbol of manhood and potency. But some, who look first at his tongue, Desana Take him as impotent; to others still, the size of his member Stamps him a creature of very low status. And finally some say That he defends all the other animals; that when he is cornered He rises up, and with his great claws tries to castrate his tormentor. Cosmic ant-eaters Look to the southern sky: there you will see him, For there he appears at night, a black outline in the Milky Way, Which some call the world tree’s white ashes. Takuma He is rearing, and his foe the jaguar is rearing too; And so their fight goes on, even in those starless places, The jaguar gaining the advantage when the sun just sets, Macovi And his ancient counterpart, and sometimes friend, and foe, The ant-eater, just before the dawn. AD 1969 “Their enthusiasm for killing,” Says Anthony Smith in his Mato Grosso, “was not necessarily “Logical or relevant, in that the animal victim was either harmful “Or good to eat, but it was virtually universal. “If a giant ant-eater, rare, beautiful, and totally harmless, “Happened to cross the road -- as it did on occasion -- “The vehicle would skid to a halt... and its Brazilian contingent pour out “In pursuit. This animal shuffles about on its big claws “With a meandering simplicity, but it can move faster when pursued “By a whooping crowd of people collecting weapons as they run. “Eventually, a mile or so from the road, they would catch up with it, “Club at it, and continue clubbing long after it is dead. “Still whooping they then return to carry on with the journey.” https://revenantquarterly.org/Robert-Farrell-GEORGE-FOX-CALLED-IT-OPENING Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:26:32 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/Robert-Farrell-GEORGE-FOX-CALLED-IT-OPENING <img src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" style="width: 306px; height: auto;"> ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → Robert Farrell– GEORGE FOX CALLED IT OPENING And it could happen to him anywhere – in a field or prison; standing in a vale or on a road. He never knew when the spirit would take and cast him in to light. God was everywhere in 1645 it seems. Still is I suppose. For me it’s usually in a wood with you I find some sense of purpose, some thread that if I could pull it through might string up all the colored beads. Maybe it’s the sun between the trees, the trees themselves, the leaves. The mushrooms on the stumps, the ground. Each thing where it is and ought to be. Doing its own work. When we find ourselves walking in such places the rhythm of our feet measures something more than distance. So we seek an opening in our weeks, a time, and remember to turn ourselves to field or mountain. It’s good for the spirit to seek out light. It gives a sense of purpose. God’s voice is in the wind and water. Or is it wind and water? The songs of birds? Our breath? You can hear it in cities. But it’s hard to hold the thread. Often on our rambles, we enter a clearing ringed by trees. It’s then the sun will greet us. There’s light in the leaves which soon returns to darkness. A circle is a thing that does a kind of work and there are places that resist the common rhythm of life. They sing to us another measure. So I think of George Fox again. Opening his book, I read some pages, then we leave to find a field and remember our city is not a prison. It too has a vale. I lived near it once high on a hill. It has a spirit and a light. God knows it’s hard to see, but you find it in September sometimes. When we return we’ll walk again from street to street. We’ll think of a wood. Perhaps we’ll pull a thread through all our walks and follow them back to prior places, our thoughts, like colored beads, reflecting sun, the world our labyrinth. Between the trees we see it, our morning star. Among the leaves and mushrooms there are other worlds, wild creatures doing work. All places have their rhythms. We keep them in our feet. Each one provides a measure. https://revenantquarterly.org/J-Freeborn-SOLMONAT Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:26:18 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/J-Freeborn-SOLMONAT <img src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" style="width: 306px; height: auto;"> ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → J. Freeborn– SOLMONAÞ We got engaged in mud season, asking if the other, right enough, would stick around a while. And ankle-deep in new-transfigured earth it’s easy to remember they still build homes from mud. Mix in water, straw, rock, sand lime, or asphalt and let the agitation settle. The smell off the fields on our evening’s tramp is sharp with possibility, like everything in early spring. All that died in the former season will be making its way to the top again—fresh and gleaming for the world to see, before giving over to what’s waking underneath. https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-AN-ANXIETY-OF-KNOWING Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:26:04 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-AN-ANXIETY-OF-KNOWING <img src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" style="width: 306px; height: auto;"> ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → William H. Aile– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE On an anxiety of knowing Everyone is anxious to know. Nevermind what, exactly. Amid a famine of facts and what are in fact famines there has never been more in the feed – or trough, shall we call it? – of information we scroll through than there is today. Has ever in history there been such evidence of what Aristotle called our inborn yearning for knowledge? Young people, as we’ve started calling kids, have to be forced to put down their phones by parents and preachers who can neither eat food nor pass it without TikTok open. There is, evidently, something on these screens we seek. We think, I think, of the best metaphor for the screen as the night: the “black”, or, better, “terrible mirror of the sky”; but if at its night it terrifies us, its day sends clouds and storms which we gaze upon as though endlessly, listlessly, interested in the gigantomachia of heaven and the glare of revelations going by! What else but divinity or the promise of it could drive so many to so many degrees of suicide? – I will be told I am only kidding and, worse, perverse where seriousness is called for, and as evidence too obvious the fact will be provided of our dissatisfaction with what such media serve, and worse, the destruction of impressionable minds by such feed as these furnish. – But then, who’s contradicting whom? Our dissatisfaction follows the promise of these screens, by both facts and fictions, viz., of transcendence. To what? Take another tack. While the dumber assume their ground and stand on it, without knowing they’re floating, the more brilliant and isolated minds of our age evince an anxiousness to say just what they mean, aware as they are, as the ignorant aren’t, of how far they are from knowing. I’ve seen it more than I can recount without tears. It is felt, I feel, that the reality of the world, the most apparent and motivating facts, are the specialty of one or another department of one or another room of the head-quarters of intellect, somewhere in New or Old England, though it summers on Long Island. Or else they belong to what are called think tanks – which are not, I’ve been told (but who knows?), brains in vats, or not yet, but places of employment, like universities, for otherwise unemployable PhDs – where, not unlike data collection centers, the given is chewed, digested, and passed on. I’ve met a scientist who knew more about the workings of nature than all but the 100 millionth person on this planet, and he, like you or me, Reader, spent his lunch break on his phone. I glanced over his slouching shoulder and found that, no, this was not Candy Crush, and no, this was not the new issue of Nature, but, believe me, Reader, Veritasium – the pop science YouTube channel. Are we not doomed? The ease with which the knowledgeable bear the (we are to infer) inanity of knowing matches the, I won’t say ease, but utter matter of factness with which the ignorant assert - and act upon! - the most outrageous falsehoods. And one becomes, indeed, anxious that one may be false to call them falsehoods, and prejudicial to call a factum fact, as though to voice one’s sense of what calls for saying required denying the world as others see it. Is this an anxiety that we might be unjust, or that we might find ourselves alone, apart from a community we took to be ours? But then, wasn’t this always the stake of speaking? Doesn’t having something to say always mean having something to say that others haven’t, at least not in, or facing, quite this way? and doesn’t this mean that our contribution is always, if contentful, a challenge to the state of the world as others see it? And in venturing this contribution do I not always risk rebuff? the possibility that I am wrong – and so, unjust to the facts and the eyes of those who see them – and out of step with others? Perhaps this state of society we’re in only, like modernist art, reveals what risks were always involved in judgment, and insists upon it. Then why, if this has always been so, are we so nervous to take them, or why have the same stakes come to seem so incredibly high? The modernists thought the revelation of stakes came with the loss of a tradition, or the confidence in one. Saving tradition for another occasion’s reflection, we can say that the relevation comes with the loosening of the bonds of community, hence with the loss of an audience, or expectation of one, for what one says. (This is what a social medium promises.) Such loosening isn’t in itself bad – some communities’ bonds should be loosened, or broken – but it does mean that in such a period (if it is not in fact a full stop) saying anything meaningful is bound to seem an inordinately difficult task – expressing anything contentful is bound to seem to involve a problem of form. What do we do, Reader? And who for? In such straits (I quote), perhaps you write for everybody and nobody; for an all but unimaginable future; in pseudonyms, for the anonymous; in an album, which is haunted by pictures and peopled with voices. But what happens if you are not a writer; if you lack that way of embodying, accounting for, a slackened conviction in a community, and of staking your own (in imagination, in a world of works)? What happens if all you want to do is talk, and words fail you? https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-DISAPPOINTMENT Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:25:50 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-DISAPPOINTMENT <img src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" style="width: 306px; height: auto;"> ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → William H. Aile– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE On disappointment One finds a lot of stink being made about the seeming, and seemingly threatening, humanity of AI at present – which looks, frankly, like so many ways to worry, without looking a fact in the face, about what the humanity of the I is. But before bothering about robots, we might ask about their builders, for are we sure we know that billionaires are human? I, for one, am not, and brooding over this uncertainty I venture to say that if we are not willing to apply this predicate to just this subject, it is on account of our inability to find disappointment in their faces, or imagine it in their lives – or else the related fact of our unwillingness to forgive their disappointments. It has been said by a man I fancy my philosopher that there are no criteria for life and humanity – nothing that assures what we call humans are not bots or eidola – but surely, I say, there are conditions without which not, and when I say – as I’m about to – that disappointment is a condition of life, I mean a life is incoherent as a life apart from it. To be, for us, at least, is, inter alia, to be open to disappointment – by the world, ourselves, and by one another in it. For consider, there is a reason beyond catharsis we find the spoiled-man-grows-a-heart plot rather natural, the same reason we find spoiled kids and certain stoics to have something of the inhuman clinging to them: for to live as though disappointment could not supervene ranks one among the angels or demons, but not among the mortals. Nor, apart from Utopia – which, be it remembered, names, not an εὐ- but an οὐ-τόπος – will we live among others without disappointing them. To be is, inter alia, nunc et tunc, to disappoint – to inflict what our philosopher calls the little deaths of everyday life, that is: the all but inevitable failure to acknowledge one another, in a word, to respond, to what’s other – and not in the rote ways we learn to let life go bad – on the vine, as it were – manifest in a question missed, a chuckle too sharp, an averted eye, an inapposite turn, a rather too blunt reply, and innumerable other subtle shades of ways we let and are let down. Hurt people hurt people, and the disappointed disappoint. And it will continue to be a mystery – attested to, but not plumbed, in religion and philosophy – that we turn against what we – even when we – seek. – This existential fact of disappointment, our asynchronous being, is why (is it not?) we admire (and do we not?) the sublime ability to forgive, why this becomes, among such as us, a virtue and precondition for communal life. If the problem of modernity has been to discover a source of legitimate authority – to explain which enlightenment philosophers, huddled (as I like to picture them) around a campfire in Quebec, told stories of a State of Nature – then disappointment, though it does not explain its source, records a surprising authority others have over us, and we over others. As the word itself suggests, if I can disappoint you by, say, saying bye too brusquely, then this is because I, though hardly sovereign, hold some power to appoint expectations – intimations of your reality’s forthcoming – to seats in your very heart, hence my power to disappoint them; and for my part, my regret attests to an obligation unfulfilled – and I’m obliged by whom but you? How came we to be bound to one another by oaths we never uttered though they’re sworn in every utterance? And how come, again, we can’t quite keep them? In the face of such questions, which, unanswered, serve to sound the depth of the obvious, we are led (should you follow) to acknowledge a power, part and parcel of a powerlessness, we each possess (or better: are) in our relation to one another. In the shadow of this fact (as natural as any I, for my part, find) society depends on our management of disappointment, on, in a word, forgiveness – one of another. – What do we, Reader, owe the billionaire? – I read the other day of one of their alien efforts to infuse the blood of a young son in pursuit of eternal youth – a real report and no mere theory! We laugh, I hope, or cry, at the middling efforts to prolong a middling mortality that such ungodly sums of wealth can make seem rational. But if we cannot see the billionaire’s humanity, again it is because we cannot imagine their lives to be disappointing; – but then, what does this show but that we think such hoarding and hankering can in fact solve mortal problems – that we picture satisfaction along the billionaire’s lines: that we are billionaires in our hearts, aliens to others, only thwarted by circumstances? If so, then our failure to recognize them is one more failure to recognize ourselves; if not, then we should straightaway discern the disappointment of a life spent acquiring means. But mark you, Reader, and do not mistake me: I do not suggest the solution to the problem posed by the fact of tumorous wealth is simply our forgiveness. There are fiscal sides to this spiritual fact, which require fiscal at the same time as spiritual solutions. What is our dependence if not indebtedness? And what is forgiveness but the giving of what is owed – not in exchange, but because it’s called for? And what is what’s called for but another name for justice? So lest we take the solemn word “forgiveness” to be the resolution of our reflection and suggest the solution to material disparity is to be had in our own hearts by becoming something of stoics ourselves, let us ask whether we, in consolidating the dollars of billions into the hands of one, have given each what is owed. And if I say – as I’m about to – that it is the same we who has done this and who must in the end forgive it, then let that be my thesis. https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-THE-HUMANITY-OF-TEACHERS Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:25:37 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-THE-HUMANITY-OF-TEACHERS <img src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" style="width: 306px; height: auto;"> ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → William H. Aile– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE On the humanity of teachers Does a teacher have a life outside the classroom? I ask because, among other reasons I’ll come to, a student asked me once, and I seemed to understand what she was onto, whether I didn’t live under this desk. It was as perfectly absurd a suggestion as it was perfectly reasonable, or so I thought and now think – it was also, I surmise, something of a compliment, wittingly or not, to suggest that a teacher can’t be imagined outside of the classroom; though it may sound like the mark of a rigidity not suggestive of practical, let alone relatable, life, it is in fact to suggest that this pedagogue embodies a possibility that does not – or not yet – relate to life as the student knows it. And to what is the teacher committed if not to the possibility of a reality with which the student is not yet acquainted? It is often said to be the teachers’ burden to be relatable, to appear as though peers to the disenchanted young, as though we were friends for hire and not, as we essentially are, interested in changing them. My issues with humanity know no bounds, but my issue with “humanity” as it’s exalted into a behavioral ideal for a teacher is its tendency – all too apparent would one just imagine its intelligible use – to mean, in truth, the most “human” teacher shall be, in short, the most cool. Now, some of us find the history of the dative case quite cool, but what’s meant when teachers are told to be, in the name of humanity, cool, is: cool by students’ standards – and once this thought dawns on you it should at once become apparent that this goal is neither realizable nor a wise one if it were. Teaching, I regret to report, is the vocation of a few, and it attracts, beside these, a pitiable bunch. I think of primary schools, where despair saturates the happy hour, but the same, in twisted fashion, comes to hold true in the university, where a class of brown-nosers has been put in charge of the education of a generation on the basis of the term papers they’ve written. I have known, as a student, several professors, and as a teacher, too many colleagues, whose confidence, clearly, was staked on the thoughts of their students. The saddest fact on a campus is the professor seeking the good opinion of the pupil. Much ink has been spilt on the worthy questions surrounding sex between these species, teacher and student, but lamentably little, in my opinion, on the sad sad state of the souls of academics, for the only thing more pathetic, where these differ, than a prof fawning on freshers is one wanting them to affirm his style. I took a professor, Mr. N, who didn’t so much profess – let alone proffer – knowledge as pal around. Instead of Gramsci’s wouldn’t we rather hear his thoughts and share ours? A conspiracy, familiar to campuses the nation over, formed under his supervision, between the underprepared teacher and the underprepared student, to do away with preparation as a concept with sense. Be it noted, though, Reader: the underpreparation of one is not the same as of the other: N didn’t bother to think about what he hands down; the student doesn’t know what she’s missing; both are blind, but one is responsible to the other’s eyes. And, much as it is a teacher’s right to complain about her students, I must observe that, on this account, fate does not assign responsibility for the injustice done in this collusion equivocally. But before you dismiss N as a blight, kindly look into your own notes and ask how hard you’ve prepared to mold the souls of tomorrow, for each day you become husband to a dozen more, though you may, for all I know, be drunk at the head of the table pining for pupils at prayer time. Pray for N before firing him; he knows not what he doesn’t do. We recall that every terrible teacher’s a terribly underserved student; and brace, if you resent today’s, for tomorrow’s pedagogues. Let us now return to the question as to whether a teacher exists outside the classroom. If we laugh we laugh because they obviously do. But then, how obvious is this? What are the limits of the relevant room? If this student finds me in the hallway – the street, the bar, or whither go ye – will I act as though this weren’t my student, those weren’t my words, or weren’t borrowed against my conscience? Does school only matter, do the souls of students only matter, does what you teach only matter, within certain walls? If so, then kindly retire. For you disgrace and make a mere profession this great vocation, as though a lot of jaw were all that constituted an authoritative voice. For practicing what we preach is a minimum of morality we can expect of a teacher with any experience, for one learns, along with the fact that there is such a thing as too much teaching, that one is, at one’s best – and at one’s best is how one must picture it – never not, for the relevant thought might strike off the clock and if the possibility one aims to model for a fresher mind is not a complete falsehood, then there is no point at which we cease to be responsible for it and for the mind that takes it seriously. ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-COOKIE-CUTTER-THINKING Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:25:23 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-COOKIE-CUTTER-THINKING <img src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" style="width: 306px; height: auto;"> ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → William H. Aile– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE On cookie-cutter thinking If it is characteristic of pseudo-intellectuals to claim knowledge where there is none, then it is equally characteristic to complain of pseudo-intellectualism without being able to tell a thought from a thirst trap. Just as nobody likes art but many have swallowed, unchewed, the idea of its significance, so has the value of books entered the notional orbit of those who can’t stand to read them. I prefer – and shall forevermore – the conversation of one genuinely interested in dirt to lofty philosophers’ lalia decorated with a few Greek nouns pronounced with too much heat in the throat. Wanting to know may be requisite for intellectual effort, but wanting to appear to know is positively destructive – to the point that one wonders whether knowing is really the right word for what’s wanting, and not, say, thinking, for on reflection some of the worthiest persons in history we find are those at peace – I do not say content – with ignorance. If we must speak of knowledge, then it is the image of knowledge that sees in it an event come once and for good, the way a filing cabinet knows, that is corrosive, as though having passed one’s eyes over every ink-stain in a poem amounted to knowing it and entitled one to speak at any length about it. But whatever word you’ll take, what’s evidently lacking is that facility with reality characteristic of an intellectual life, in virtue of which it is admirable. I recently had the misfortune of clicking through a video on art that, having met two painters for, it seems, two minutes, proceeded to christen one the Apollonian to the other’s Dionysian energy. Now, a distinction is as valuable as the classifications it makes, and these are effects of the tact of the mark-maker no less than the words themselves. – Words, we’re told, are tools, and meanings rule-bound – and it seems true enough that we’re forced to make sense with these clicks whose potential precedes us – but then, to apply a rule on an occasion demands determining that this is, in fact, a fit occasion for it, demands determining, in short, our sense as a site for the history of these sounds, and if this behavior can be explained, post-fact, in terms of rules, it is surely not performed by reference to them. – I digress, I guess, to say: distinctions can hardly be taken as relevant as given, but must be proven by an illuminating use here and now. Just as jokes retold lose something of their humor, distinctions reemployed lose something of their relevance – unless, that is, one knows how to tell a joke or have a relevant thought. As regards this particular distinction, one doubts if it was ever all that illuminating. Nietzsche at a time no doubt knew how to have a thought, and even in his hands Apollo and Dionysus threatened to beget a recipe for avoiding the peculiar. It seems meet for a society having lost a godhead but not able to court and bear the attention of the Pantheon to dissolve twelve gods and innumerable deities into two energies, and more meet still to take this distinction, crude from the start, as given, reuse it, and think any light has been shed thereby, when – what have we done? The intelligibility of the world has been folded hamburger-style into two planes which in their vastness and vacuity let us run free from one another’s intelligence, but which draw further from possibility our acknowledgment in terms fit to be known by. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Take heed of trusting to such nice distinctions. Of the memorable maxims of an overbearing parent of my former acquaintance the most frequently repeated – such as circumstances were – was: if you’re not anxious, you’re depressed. Which seems, in the mouth of an elder, like a thought that might bear fruit, but which is, on reflection, false. Take heed. And I have heard it said, in defense of another crude distinction, that art and the discourse around it must be political – by which a man meant: more immediately recognizable as political; by which we mean: it must use the most vulgar terms and distinctions on offer. If the political is just the realm of vulgar but relevant distinctions – and perhaps for good reason, concerning as it does the commons – then when there is something new to be said or done it will appear to turn away from politics; but then, if what one sees to be sorely lacking in the politics of the moment is the thinking that attends – that lets thoughts dawn and hearkens when another utters them – then art and the intellectual life more broadly will be concerned, for political no less than aesthetic reasons, to make new marks, and consider it a vice to recount old categories without a thought for, not only their utility, but their relevance. https://revenantquarterly.org/Arnold-Klein-PERCEPTITATIONS Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:25:09 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/Arnold-Klein-PERCEPTITATIONS <img src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" style="width: 306px; height: auto;"> ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → Arnold Klein– PERCEPTITATIONS “Last Sunday I got high and looked at a doorknob.” With this beautifully limpid sentence, a young friend of mine began the written part of his M.F.A. thesis. We may have reason to return to it. For now, a snatch of overheard dialogue: &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;A: That’s Georgia O’Keefe. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;B: That’s not Georgia O’Keefe! Now, as the two “that”s in this memorable interlocution indicated the same photograph hanging in the Met, ten feet yonder, I will be told that their apparent antithesis can be reconciled: that the “is” in A is the photographic “is”, the “is” that really means “is of,” while the other “is” is just the workaday copula. In other words, to quote the famous defense, it all “depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” But that won’t quite do here. For taking A’s “that” to mean the photograph in question, what that photograph is “of” is of a torso. Whose torso it is does not appear; indeed, the image has been so managed as to remove any identificatory details: for example, the torso, in good classical style, has no head.1 But of course A’s “that” did not refer to that photograph; rather it referred that photograph to a historical fact, or idea, about it; and the same would have been true had he said “that’s a Stieglitz.” Here the “is” is the “is” of “is one of,” and although it would function slightly differently than the plain “is of” would have—to predicate some quality or other assumed to inhere in many objects, in virtue of which they form a relevant set—B might equally have downright denied it, and with exactly the same “not.” But how can that be? Granting that a photograph can be so managed as to render the identity of the subject unascertainable from the image alone, surely its authorship is stylistically available on inspection: after all, everyone who cares about these things knows what “a Stieglitz” looks like. But that won’t quite do either. Perhaps we can see why not by asking, what it was eventually demanded of B that she supply, namely, what, exactly, her that denoted; and her answer was that “that” thar’ yonder (pointing to it) was a rectangular piece of paper of just those dimensions, covered with just those various grey shades and shapes in just that determinate relation to each other and to just those framing edges. So considered, that is certainly not Georgia O’Keefe, nor “of” her as she ever was while alive, and even death is not so “great a disguiser” as that picture is; nor is it “a Stieglitz”—if we must subsume it under some term or other, and there is no requirement that we do so, it would be more consistent with B’s approach to say that “that” is a photograph—or better, that photograph. And maybe best of all: just that. So the issue between the two, at least in the first instance, wasn’t so much a question of what the meaning of “is” is, but of what the “that” in each case thatted.2 It may be that, even so elaborated, these two “that’s” could still be reconciled by some grammatical or logical finesse unknown to me; they certainly comprise two different approaches that it is the prerogative of any one of us to take up and put aside at different times, or use by turns, one after the other: after all, no one gets to the age of being admitted to museums unaccompanied by a parent or guardian without knowing what a photograph is, and certainly no one gets to be a second-year M.F.A. candidate in photography, as was A, or even just a normal museum-going human being, as was B, without knowing something about O’Keefe, Stieglitz, the whatchamacallit gallery, the Flatiron Building, broken marriages, New Mexico, longhorn skulls and so on. But a difference in their order, though prerogative, is still a difference, and not a reconciliation in the same sense that the attempted “is” one would have been had it succeeded, and for all I know might still be made out to be. Considered as different methods, that is, as different structures of inquiry, which is what I just suggested they ultimately are, the two cannot be shown to have the same meaning, for their order is part of that meaning. The issue between them, when used in sequence, is one of precedence, of which comes first and which comes second, either in time or in importance; which, I hope to show, makes as much actual difference in cases like this as it does in the case of “putting on your socks” and “putting on your shoes.” But the approaches are prerogative in a further sense: taking either does not necessitate us taking the other into account at any point at all. Certainly each gives, not just precedence, but access, to different sorts of data and so to different sorts of elaboration, and there is no reason these latter should not develop independently. Taken as ordinals, the issue is precedential; but there’s an issue of cardinality (so to speak) as well: “a Stieglitz” implicitly thats numerous others, while it is not impossible, and indeed more in keeping with the spirit of the thing, for “just that” to that...well, as I said, just that, that is, nothing but that. But those two accounts differ in more than just order and extension—they differ in what the lawyers would call their “predicates,” in, that is, the fundamental principle from which their respective démarches proceed; and on this level, what the meaning of “is” is is important: to tweak Gilson a bit, what the nature of the object is taken to be conditions the approach of the mind to it, and prior to these different approaches are different conceptions of what is an object and what an object is. For A, the artwork is taken sub specie originis, as evidence of its antecedents, none of which, in our case, however interesting, are present to sense,3 but nonetheless are, that is, real and relevant, whereas for B, the artwork is something whose esse est percipi, is such that all its intelligibilities are right there to behold and discover: a photograph is a thing made of and in perception, not in history; and the question here is how A’s genetic approach, which admits, indeed necessitates, consulting absent, always inferential, and not- impossibly supposititious, entities, comes to be thought unexceptionable, no less comely, and I say “comes to” because I do not think such a response is at all the spontaneous one, at least with respect to individual artworks,4 which are primarily, if not ultimately or exclusively, addressed to sense—seeing a piece of paper and saying “that’s Georgia O’Keefe,” even when we all know what you mean by it, is still kind of daft, if you think about it, at least in a museum setting (imagine what it would sound like if we all didn’t know what you meant by it), or, if not that, at least a little too assured, though I grant that the “a Stieglitz” sort of response is all too common in the galleries, and I will get back to it in a minute. In short, I think the, let’s call it “noetic” approach arises from intellectual culture itself, as Gilson says all “transcendental philistinism” does. You have to learn it. But what exactly are you learning to do? In an article in the Harvard Magazine, an art history professor relates that the first thing she asks her undergrad and graduate students to do is to go to the museum and spend “three full hours” looking at the work they have chosen to write their “intensive research paper” about—a length of time she describes as “painfully long.” “Many of the students resist” this assignment, she reports; and so, as any conscientious teacher would do, she performed what she (significantly, for us) calls her own “experiment” with a painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, one that she had already aproblematically subsumed under the rubric “Copley.” Before noting some relevant features in her account of her explorations let me say 1)) that it would a good thing if all students received such an assignment, and maybe eight whole semesters’ worth of them, so bravo her, and 2) that I would not be surprised were art history students especially found to resist it (and to find three [full] hours looking at art “painfully long”). But let us listen to our professor. She begins by telling us that it took her nine minutes “to notice” that the shape of the boy’s ear “echoes” the ruffs of the squirrel’s belly “—and that Copley was making some sort of connection between the animal and the human body and the sensory capacities of each.” OK; but notice that the objects of the verb “to notice” are not noticeable in quite the same way: you can see an ear, but not “the animal and the human body,” no less “the sensory capacities of each.” This elision of the concretely visible with the abstractly general occurs by means of “—and,” and continues when, after forty-five minutes, “the folds and wrinkles of the background curtain” are “realized” “actually” to be “perfect copies of the shapes of the boy’s ear and eye”—again, OK, though “perfect” might be a little strong, and why assume the precedence of the boy over the curtain, but mark the continuation—“as if [my italics] Copley had imagined those sensory organs distributing or imprinting themselves on the surface behind him.” I will introduce some terms in which to characterize such noetical synaereses in a minute, but, following a biographical and geographical interlude in Copley’s colonial Boston, from which, we are told, the painting in question was shipped to London for critical appraisal, and concluding with the idea that the slow feedback involved was “thoroughly formative” of the painting, she returns to it with “we can see this [that delays can be productive] directly in the painting, which is full of allusions to time, distance and patience.” The painting shows a glass of water and the boy’s hand holding a chain: “across his long career, this is the only glass of water that Copley ever included in a painting. Why? Well, for one thing, this motif evokes the passage of a sensory chain across a body of water and thereby presents in microcosm the plight or task of the painting itself.” The flying squirrel has “obvious thematic resonances for the theme of travel and movement;” the boy is shown in profile: “the profile format of the portrait...in the eighteenth century was very strongly associated with persistence in time and space.” Then, by way of explaining such associations, “where was one most likely to see a profile? On a coin. What is a coin? In essence, a coin is a tool for transmitting value through space and time in the most stable possible way. Coins are technologies for spanning time and distance, and Copley borrows from these associations for a painting that attempts to do the same thing.” And the comprehensive formulation: “the painting is about its own patient passage through time and space.” Now, despite the words that suggest it (“sensory,” “obvious,” “actually,” “presents,” “to see,” and “can see this directly”), appear is exactly not what any of these fancifications actually do. To be sure, a sensible chain appears in the painting (the boy fingers it, we see it), but not the “sensory chain,” whatever that is, which the motif is said to “evoke”—and the double shift (from presentation to evocation, from one kind of chain to what seems to be a very different one) comes in by way of the doubly imagined “as if Copley had imagined.” The motif, furthermore, having “evoked” something not shown, “thereby” goes on to “present” something not presented, and probably not depictable. Ditto “thematic resonances for the theme” of two abstractions (my itals). Ditto the weird incursion of coinage and its supposed “essence,” brought in by way of (doubly invisible) eighteenth century “associations” and by coins being the “most likely” “place” “one” would see a profile. Ditto the “allusions” to three unsensory, unpaintable and very abstract entities. Ditto the discovery, always pleasing to academics of this vintage (coinage?), that the artwork “is about” itself. Now, it is true that each, or at least some, of these excursion into ideality begins with perceptions, but—mediated by notions such as evocation, resonance, theme, microcosm, essence, association and allusion, and explained by reference to a few speculative interludes in the painter’s life in colonial Boston—these soon vanish into what our professor calls her “interpretation,” the move from one to the other coordinated by question-begging expedients such as the dash-and thing, “thereby,” and “as if:” indeed, one has the feeling that the perceptions are adduced in order to rationalize, or at least, not to contradict, the antecedently known facts of the case; at least the structure of the presentation— going, as it does, from perceptual elements and their noetic associates, to colonial Boston, only to return, via that consummatory “about,” to the resonances, evocations and allusions of the squirrel-species and profile-coinage business—certainly makes it seem so. There are many ways of charactering the move in question, but for our purposes, let us just say that perception is referred to, or seen under, a pre-existing grouping of general ideas, some almost personified (time, patience, movement and so forth), some distantly inferential (the historical causes and circumstances); that is to say, perceptions are pre-emptively and presumptively explained in their being apperceived; and this is where all my earlier pother about “ordinals” counts, for it is clear that apperception has had precedence of perception here, if not nominally in time,5 actually in operation (“thereby,” etc.), and certainly in importance (that summary “about”); and the question is, what conception of the object is it, that conditions just this approach of the mind to it—so conditions it that such shifts can sometimes take place unnoticed within single sentences. I will suggest an answer to that question in a minute; but the blandness with which individual perceptions pass unawares (or perhaps worse, with full awareness) into abstract apperceived ideates is what makes this Copley business so illuminating of the reflex involved, all the more for its being offered as methodologically exemplary in a talk about the pedagogical advantages of patience, given before an audience of (in Gilson’s phrase) philistine educators at a conference held by no-less august a sponsor than the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, where it presumably went down like catnip.6 “Apperception,” of course, smacks of 19th facultative psychology, and I am aware that the neuroscientists have moved on from it to localized cerebral functions and from them to the “connectome.” But in so employing the term, I am not alleging a phrenology, or venturing a factual description of brain activity, but rather, as Doctor Richards excellently puts it, “framing a speculative apparatus to assist us in observing a difference”—in our case, between what different thats ultimately that, or, in the present instance, what comes to the same thing, what all those “the”s the. And apperception is a useful term here, since it names the activity by which we refer a perception to a mass of ideas we already possess; and how and when to give way to such masses, and feeling that you’ve earned a gold star for doing so, is what one has to learn to do, and in the classic way—by having teachers who do it teach it to you by doing it. The usual defense of such cursory quasi-perceptions is that normally our interest in our surroundings is practical—“the degree of determination” needed for recognition, as Santayana puts it, is, on such occasions, much lower than that needed for comprehension; but then the question is, is an artwork such an occasion. Of course, it is not impossible to imagine academics whose practical interest in an artwork is precisely to generate their “interpretation” of it along such noetic lines—and the question there is, how to shield our youths from their influence. But be that as it may, what happens to our two terms when the “that” thats just that artwork? Well, in that case, apperception follows perception, in both senses, of going along with and coming after; the ideates in question are precipitates, or—to indulge a coinage of my own (not the last, either, and certainly the least likely to catch on)—perceptitates of prior perceptions, their store progressively supplemented or edited as new perceptions direct. So, for example, to take up just one thread in the same painting, it may be noted that materials painted as impermeable to light (the very dark sleeve, the very white cuffs) are transformed in their (painted) reflections on the planar surface of the table, where they become transparent (the polished surface shows through), and materials painted as transparent (the glass and the water) gain materiality through their actual (painted) transparency (the lines by which they intercept the reflection of the cuff). With that in mind, the semi-transparency of the squirrel’s tail, which appears to be as much a reflection as that of the belly just next to it, but is not any kind of reflection at all, and perhaps the base of the water glass, may be seen as extensions of this, not “theme,” but concern for the transformations that are possible when different sorts of things are transferred to the planar surface of a polished table—or a canvas. With that concern in mind, the planarity of the boy’s profile, with its strangely folded auricle, becomes intelligible without recourse to coinage and its essence, and the “surface behind” the boy, on which his “sensory organs” are imagined to have been imagined to have imprinted themselves, can be seen to be located where it, and all the rest of the painting, actually would have been, and is now, namely, in front of the painter—and the viewer. We seem to have covered something of the same territory that the professor did, only without any excursions into the invisible—perceptions were referred to other perceptions, that is, apperceived concurrently with their being perceived, and fed back into further perceptions, and it should be clear which faculty had precedence of which, and where their respective extensions ended. If we now7 took such an excursion, and we are free not to (and, really, what would all that gossip add to our perception of the thing?), the relevant facts adduced would be different from the professor’s (our “the painter” would not be the empirical Bostonian provincial hers is, but the figure whose shadow partially occludes one of the painting’s light sources), and, where the same (which is hard to imagine), would have different meanings, as they would appear in different relations. But the difference is more than methodological or logical, ordinal or cardinal, and it is here that what the meaning of “is” is really begins to tell. The “is” in any “is about” statement such as our professor’s triumphal one, is an “is” that has a complement, namely, in our professor’s case, and usually in every such account, an abstract or absent entity of some sort, whereas the “is” in the cursory survey just attempted, were we called upon to provide it, and we didn’t churlishly refuse, would be the stative “is,” the “is” without a complement, and that “is” would conclude, as it began, by asserting simply “that painting is.” Is what? The question asks for a complement. But if you must have one, then “that painting is that painting” or—to get purely nominalistic about it—“that is that.” &nbsp;With that in mind, we can address the question of what we earlier, borrowing a term from the lawyers, called the predicates of the two positions. The “is about” approach seems ultimately conditioned by the expectation that the work, in virtue of the kind of thing is, is such that it requires a complement of some kind to complete it—requires, that is, a context, a vita, a dossier, a provenance, a Sitz im Leben, a DOC appellation, an interpretation, and so forth; whereas the bare “is” approach regards the work as self-complete. There are many ways to develop this distinction, but the one I think would do the most to develop our subject—namely, what, with respect to works of art, different thats that—is (with a few tweaks) Paul Valéry’s, under whose auspices we can say that the complementeans regard the artwork as just another denizen of “a world of signs,” while us ornery completionists regard any such work as itself “a world of significances.” I will have to tweak this further in a second; but for now, it would seem that a sign is something that, qua sign anyway, depends for its character on some complement not itself, the thing it is a sign of or for—it would not be a sign otherwise; even the logician’s pathological sentences, that refer to themselves, exist in two moments, so to speak, as referrer and referent; their superposition does not annul the signifying function, but rather extends it. But it would seem that, in terms of our distinction, a thing’s significances would be the thing. In one, we have signs that signify, and are therefore, on their own, without complement, meaningless, in the other, significances without significata, and therefore, each on its own, without complement, a whole. Now, terms like “evokes, alludes to, resonates with” and countless others in the professional and lay critical vocabularies testify to how commonplace the first approach is these days, and to how select, or at least few, they are, who go even this far with the poet of La Jeune Parque, whose fort, as we all know, was not stupidity. But “signification sans complément!” even without the exclamation point, and in plain American, would, besides look well on the barricades, furnish a sterner criterion than those that currently prevail in art and literary criticism, as it allows for a distinction between works, nominally of art, that function, and are meant to function, as signs, as things about things, from what I will tendentiously call the real thing. A cauliflower auricle rendered planarily, or two thighs becoming graphic forms as they darken below, whosever thighs they may happen to have been, mean just that, for renderings in paint and in prints are how painters and photographers mean, and certainly how their works do, and so for the arts of meter, tones, forms, gesture and the rest. In these sorts of thing, isness is import, and sense (in one sense) is directly embodied in sense (in the other). And “that” thats that. But are artworks the only sorts of thing that have this—and here, as threatened, Latinists may want to cover their ears—this haecceity? Well, to push the question somewhat drastically: is the world that we, under the pressure of practical life, take to be a world of signs, really a world of significances? Should it be, a doorknob in a Midwood flop is as much an object for contemplation as Untitled (Patio Door) in the Modern Museum. That it obviously isn’t—that you’d have be high to think it was—will not do for a riposte, for the nature of what is obvious is actually in question here, and I do not see how it can be settled a priori in favor of some objects and not others. We have seen that our professor regards “thematic resonances” as “obvious,” and our old friend A replied to B’s assertion that that was not Georgia O’Keefe by saying that it “obviously” was—only to be told that it obviously was not. The obvious, in other words, is not so obvious—it has to be found. Langer, indeed, up to a certain point, sides with the doorknobs of the world here, for when “a perfectly normal” thing is cleared of its practical appeal, and “is so strikingly revealed that all one’s interest centers on” its visual aspect, “the object itself seems like a sheer vision;” but, although we then behold it as if it were “nothing but a form,” the forms of normal things, for her, are in service, or servitude, to practical purposes, whereof properly poietic artworks are completely freely created. That, indeed, says something; but the intrusion of “one’s interest” into the business leaves our own question unsettled—after all, some free forms do not repay inspection, and some utile forms plainly do. The essentialist position, which would objectively distinguish artworks from other sorts of things, cannot be established in the terms we have been using, for approaches are many, and the choice among them ultimately prerogative, and the most we completionists can do is steadfastly to hope that the pale complementeans do not turn the whole world grey with the blasts of their historicizing, empirical-personalizing, psychologizing, contextualizing, interpretating breath. For my part, I give my “brothers and sisters of the hold-door trade,” our uncomplaining friens, the doorknobs, a provisional welcome; I like to think that all such things as are “subjected to bondage” (as St. Paul says the whole universe is, so why not them too), are “yearning” for a greater intimacy than they presently have been invited into, and are thus to be regarded as worthy of a closer acquaintance, until, upon closer acquaintance, they prove themselves unworthy of it, and, perhaps, even then, are at least to be respected for the aspiration I believe them all, or most, to have. But perhaps that amiable outlook is only a reflex of my desire to take artworks even further out of the universe than they currently are. [1] And no, the torso doesn’t “glow,” like Rilke says Apollo’s does—indeed, the thighs darken as they descend. [2] Or a “this” would have thisst—but out of deference to Lord Tennyson, who hated the word “scissors” (“Horrible! Horrible!”), let’s stick to “that,” though we might later offend strict latinity in developing this idea. [3] Perhaps this is the time to take up the title of the photograph, assuming it was the photographer’s. For A it is given with the object; for B, it would have to be shown to be, and, as we will see in a few sentences, that means actually shown to be. The title of the thing, for A, is another datum in its history, whereas for B, it is a possible factor in its presentness. [4] And maybe to anything—more on that later.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; [5] Although that too—the historical circumstances were certainly antecedently known. [6] I think the magazine had it one the cover, but I can’t confirm this. [7] Or rather: once we have completed our inquiry. https://revenantquarterly.org/Moses-LeShirley-THE-GOOD-PEOPLE Sat, 06 Jun 2026 21:23:29 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/Moses-LeShirley-THE-GOOD-PEOPLE <img src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" style="width: 306px; height: auto;"> ← Prev&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Current Issue&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Next → Moses LeShirley– THE GOOD PEOPLE I must say it all before I forget it. That will happen soon; such things happen when you’re old, and somewhere along the way I seem to have gotten old. There is a thought children have, that getting old must be some sort of mistake. Maybe you’ve thought it too—maybe, like me, not even so long ago. Some people hold onto this thought very late in life, right up until they realize they have themselves somehow made that very mistake. But I am often mistaken, and about much more than that. * &nbsp;&nbsp; * &nbsp;&nbsp; * My eyesight was very poor when I was a little child: a mysterious problem, for no spectacles fixed it. I was always mixing up one thing for another: up-close and faraway things, plants and animals, strangers and friends. I’d like to say that my other senses made up for the lack, the way such things are supposed to go, but it wouldn’t be true; I was no more one for hearing than for vision, and even less for understanding. When I was very young, I mistook my mother for a happy woman; later in my boyhood, I believe I managed to mistake her for an unhappy one. The disappearance of my father from our lives, or of us from his, was the event that held place between these two cases of mistaken identity. He was called off to the war—the Second World War, which even those who had called the first one The Great War couldn’t call anything good. When he went off to Europe, my mother fled with me from the city to the town of Stevens, in New England, many miles away from him and everything I might have come to mistake him for. Stevens was then a quiet place, on the edge of the great forest that men call by the same name; and the simplicity of the town was in stark contrast to the forest neighboring it. Stevens Wood was a weird, mythical-seeming place—a place where you would not be surprised to hear snatches of laughter or strange sorrow from out of the dark behind the giant trees, or see little Cheshire grins flashing in the high leaves. Indeed there were sounds you often heard from inside the forest: never the voices of animals or men, but low groans, like the deep creaking a tree might make before it falls; and it was part of the lore of that place that first the forest, and then the town, had taken their name not from any man called Steven, but from an old word for voice. Even the trees themselves appeared to change a little every time you saw them—but that was an impression which, at the time, I was able to put down to my eyesight too. To any eyes, our new house was not so pretty. It had bits of patchy, underwatered yard both in front and behind, and three floors: a ground floor in the middle, the top floor above it, and the basement below. The top floor was where my mother’s bedroom was: a lofty and open expanse. The ground floor opened out onto our front entrance and front yard, but the whole house was built on the slope of a hill, so though the front half of the basement was underground, the back end stood aboveground, and opened onto the backyard. This yard, as ugly as the front one, went about thirty or forty feet downhill from the house, and ended at the edge of Stevens Wood, and that was very black, for past the first row of trees, you couldn’t see ten feet in front of you. Such was my regular view, if you want to call it that. My bedroom occupied the back half of the basement, and I had two windows that looked out onto the backyard and the forest. The hallway that terminated with our back door lay just outside my room; and just outside of that on either side were two great bushes of frowsy grey lilacs, which to my eyes looked like crowds of people draped all over with drab, holey cloth. I always hurried past those bushes to get in and out, though it was not so much from fear that I did so. These details I provide for a reason, though I don’t expect you to remember them. * &nbsp;&nbsp; * &nbsp;&nbsp; * I was not afraid of much then, you know. Many times when I thought I was afraid, I’d soon realize that what I was afraid of was in fact some very normal object, and so I had come into the habit of assuming, whenever I saw something off-putting, that I was simply seeing something ordinary in a wrong way. The case was otherwise with my mother, who was terrified of my father finding us, and saw him around every corner. I think that must have been why she always forbid me to go into Stevens Wood. But it was a silly, selfish fear, for it never called her outside of her own concerns. She certainly never gave a second thought to the Good People, though I found out about them early on. That happened when I was about eleven. I say about eleven because my age in those before-times is another of the things I am no longer able to remember; but I believe that’s how old Iris was too, and I met her the very same day. That day, I can still remember pretty well. I had, at the time, a largish doll called Bun. I had set Bun down somewhere the night before, I did not remember where, and I was looking for him in my room when I heard a sound outside, in the backyard. It was late morning then, and my mother was nowhere to be found. When I looked out the window, I saw Bun lying in an odd position on the far side of the yard, by where the grass sloped down to meet the first row of trees. He was sort of crumpled on the ground, with his head turned away. I went to open the door, but then stopped, having had the sudden realization that I had not left Bun lying there—that I had never brought him to that spot to play with at all. Perhaps my mother had thrown him out there, I thought; but rather much seemed to be wrong with that idea, too. While I stood there at the window, wondering how Bun had come to be in the place he was, suddenly his back straightened and he turned his face toward me, and at once I was aware that it was not Bun I was seeing at all, but a real person. This gave me quite a surprise. But that was not all; for I then saw that the person was very strange-looking too, not quite like anyone I had ever seen before. He was small, almost as small as I was, but even to my poor eyes his face was very old-looking, with lines all around his eyes and mouth. Once we’d had a good look at each other he got up to his full height, such as it was, and seemed to say something very quickly before he moved away, again very quickly, the way a child moves. When he did, I saw that he was wearing a mismatched and soiled outfit of child’s clothing, which again, was a startling thing; but I did feel sorry for that little boy, that he should look so old. Then he went off into the forest, and I returned to my search for Bun, though I never found him. Later that afternoon, when my mother was there, I wanted to tell her about what I had seen, and ask her where Bun was. But my timing was very bad, for she was welcoming over a good friend of hers, a man friend whom, as it happened, I had never heard of. The man friend arrived with his little daughter Iris, who was no more interested in being introduced to me than I was in being introduced to her. But this, of course, was our fate. Iris is your age, my mother confided to me. And Oliver is your age, said Iris’s father to Iris, as though we were in separate rooms, and not two feet from one another. Iris’s father and I will talk over some grown-up things this afternoon, my mother explained. Why don’t you go and show Iris your toys? This, however, made me remember Bun; and already being hopelessly embarrassed in front of pretty Iris, I blurted out the whole tale of my encounter. When I had done so, my mother and her friend both laughed, though the man had something else to say afterward. It sounds as though you’ve seen one of the Good People—doesn’t it? he said to Iris, whose blue eyes were very wide. Who are the Good People? my mother asked. It’s what Iris calls her imaginary friends, the man friend explained. They have something to do with Mr. Lockwood—though he’s real. I wonder if he’s who your son saw. When I proved unable to satisfy them on this point, my mother told her friend she was as yet unaware who Mr. Lockwood was; and he explained that it was a very old man called Florian Lockwood whom everyone knew of, and who went around near the woods here. He was harmless, the friend said; only, his age was frightening to some of the children, and he was a bit out of his senses—though God only knew he had every reason to be that. And then my mother asked him what had happened to Mr. Lockwood, and her man friend smiled, and asked if I wouldn’t be bothered by it. And when she said I was very adult for my age, and very brave, he smiled again and said it wouldn’t bother Iris either, who had her own theories about the whole thing. But the long and the short of it, he said, was that a few years ago, Mr. Lockwood had had a little son, even younger than we were, and one day Mr. Lockwood was away somewhere late into the afternoon, and someone else had come up out of the woods who looked just like him, and offered to give Mr. Lockwood’s little boy a piggy-back ride; and when the boy got up onto his back, the person went off with him into the woods, and he was never seen again. My mother said that was a terrible thing, and the man friend agreed; in fact, he couldn’t see how the old man had stayed in Stevens, after experiencing something so terrible. The whole thing disturbed my mother. I don’t like to think of him traipsing through our yard, she said; Oliver, point out where you saw him—and the four of us went downstairs to my bedroom and looked out the window, and Iris and I gasped; but my mother and her man friend only laughed again. There, out on the grass, exactly where I thought I’d seen him before, was Bun. * &nbsp;&nbsp; * &nbsp;&nbsp; * The sequel can be imagined, but I will not make you imagine it. Once Bun was retrieved, with many a comment on my credibility, I was left to entertain Iris while the adults took their visit upstairs. Her eyes were bright and keen, and made me nervous; but when her father had gone, she was friendlier. While I was showing her around, I asked her what her father had said she called them, the people we were talking about, and she said they were called the Good People. And they aren’t my imaginary friends, she said. They’re neither of those things, in fact. But I believe you did see one, she added. After my disgrace with the adults, this was comforting to me, and I wanted to talk to her more. So I asked her why that name especially, and what was so good about them. Nothing, she said; it’s just what they’re called. I think it’s only something to call them that won’t make them angry. I asked her if that was why they took the old man’s son—were they angry with him? Maybe, she said. You never know, with them. But that wasn’t what happened anyway. My dad’s stupid to say that. Think about it, she went on. If they’d carried off Mr. Lockwood’s son, and he was away when they took him, how would he have known that the person looked just like him, or that they carried off his son on their back, or any of that? Iris, it seemed, was much brighter than I. But when I asked her what then had happened with Mr. Lockwood and his son, she only looked around my room. Do you have any animals to play with? she asked. Of course I did, and we played together a while, only once interrupted by a noise upstairs. It was a sound I’d never heard, and could not understand; to me it sounded closest to shouting, as though our parents were arguing heatedly about something, though I could not make out any of the words in their peculiar vocalizations. Worried, I mentioned this to Iris, and she snickered. You are simple, she said. Let’s go outside. So we went outside, and down to the edge of the trees. As we walked toward them, she put a hand on my arm and whispered: Don’t go in there. Oh no, I said, as though it were the most obvious thing in the world; and in truth, though I hadn’t thought of it until that moment, I had never taken even a step into Stevens Wood—not even the little part of it that our property bordered upon. The two of us stood looking into the shifting darkness of the forest, two little lighthouse-keepers staring out at a raging sea, and its low groaning was like the roar of waves. Have you ever noticed the trees here never look the same? Iris asked. And of course I had noticed that. But in my usual way, I had always assumed my eyes were to blame; and so it was a very strange mixture of emotions that I felt when Iris asked me this question, and I could only nod in response. Perhaps out of consideration for me, perhaps listening for something else that only she could hear, Iris remained silent also. But after a minute, she’d had enough looking. Come on, she said, I think our parents may be done arguing. * &nbsp;&nbsp; * &nbsp;&nbsp; * Iris came over many more times with her father over the following months, and we became very close. I think she was the only person I knew who didn’t make me feel lonely to be around. We often stayed over at one another’s houses; hers was much nicer, and nowhere near the woods, though as much in absence of a mother as mine was of a father. Sometimes we were even left alone, to keep each other company for the better part of an evening while our parents caught up somewhere, as the two of them always called it. They certainly had a lot of catching up to do, those adults in their second spring; and often we would be asleep by the time they came downstairs to rouse us, with barely the energy to say goodnight to one another as Iris’s father carried her out over his arm. The Good People were the ever-present backdrop to our friendship. I never saw them in those days myself, but Iris did; and it was when she and I were together, as she told me, that the signs of them became most frequent. She described their silhouettes among the trees, strange in the cast-off clothes they had stolen from whatever corner of our world they had last ventured into: swimming trunks, pajamas, baggy suits and uniforms. Mostly the clothes were children’s clothes, which hardly fit them; and more than once, Iris and I left out some of our parents’ things that we felt sure would not be missed. She told me other people left other things: a boy in our school left out cat food for them; an elegant old lady gave them jewels. If the Good People appreciated or even understood these offerings, we never knew it; but that didn’t matter to us. Still, I wanted to know more about them than Iris could teach me, and so I turned to books. Oh, books! There I learned that Good People was what is called a euphemism—a nice nickname for something, used to avoid calling it what it is, and saying something nasty about it. Euphemisms were a part of many beliefs; the Furies had been such a thing to the Greeks, who called them the Kindly Ones to avoid making them angry. As for the Furies, so for the Good People; though what disaster the name averted in their case, neither Iris nor my books could tell me. Nor did Iris and I ever tell our parents about what we knew. They would only have said we encouraged one another’s belief, and that would have been true; only, no more than the two of them encouraged one another’s belief in whatever they had to catch up on. But we didn’t resent them that, for whenever they were enjoying their pastimes, they left us alone with ours—with the sights Iris saw, and described to me, and with other games and explorations besides, which, nearsighted as I was, we were able to discover together. * &nbsp;&nbsp; * &nbsp;&nbsp; * One night, past bedtime, there came a noise outside my window. What was that? Iris hissed with a shiver, pulling her nightdress down to cover her knees; and we sat up in the dark, and listened. Outside the window, as it seemed from within the lilacs, there came a rustling, and I thought of the grey faces I’d seen crowded there—the wide eyes and enormous grins of people who may or may not have been there. Is it them? I asked. And just then we heard an urgent whispering outside, a breathy sound like the voice of a man, who was then pushing out of the lilacs like I imagined, and walking toward the treeline. I could hardly believe I was seeing him, but I could hear him too. It wasn’t, he was saying apologetically; it wasn’t, it wasn’t—and this unmeaning phrase, spoken to himself in a tone of almost childish explanation, frightened me more than anything I had heard or seen so far. It’s him, said Iris, it’s Florian Lockwood—and I squinted out the window to see; though as it happened, I did not need to squint. Now out of the lilacs, he was gigantic in the window, grey-haired and bearded, the matted hair like leaves around his teeth. His back was mostly to us; and his face, the little part of it I could see, had the same odd appearance as that of the boy I’d seen in the backyard, both youthful and old, with wet staring eyes. Around his shoulders was draped a very large blanket, whose ends were trailing on the ground behind him. His legs were bare beneath it, and on his feet were two different kinds of shoe—but though I might ordinarily have laughed to see someone looking like that, there was nothing funny about him. Iris only looked a moment, then ducked down from the window, hissing to me again. It’s all right, I whispered, he hasn’t seen us, he’s going away. For the form of Florian Lockwood was moving away toward the forest edge, his nonsensical it wasn’t echoing over his shoulder. The others, Iris said simply. And then I saw them too: the shapes of a handful of other people, who had crowded at the edge of the trees and stood watching the old man walking toward them across the lawn. They were too far away for me to see their faces well, but I could see enough to tell that they were all talking quietly too, and one or two of them were staring out in my direction. But what an odd look that little party seemed to have!—as though they were all in separate rooms, talking to themselves. And then something else happened, which I must tell before I forget. As Florian Lockwood got near the trees, the other Good People moved absently to one side to let him pass, and one of them accidentally stood on one end of the blanket he was wearing, and it began to pull back from his shoulders. Apparently not understanding what was happening, poor Mr. Lockwood did not stop walking, and for an instant there was a little tug-of-war as he held onto the other end of the stretched blanket. Then he stepped into the shadows beyond the first tree, and I blinked, for it was as if he’d disappeared: the shadows seemed to have swallowed him up completely. But whatever happened to him, he must have released his end of the blanket soon thereafter, for it snapped back out like a rubber-band, falling to a heap at the feet of the one who had stepped on it. The other Good People looked foolishly down at the blanket, each with his own concerns about it, and I ducked down to join Iris; and she and I hid under my bed, expecting any minute to hear their quiet, rustling talk at the window. They never came, but neither of us slept a wink that night either. And in the morning, when we went out to get rid of the blanket, we found one corner of it brown with moss and mushroom-caps. * &nbsp;&nbsp; * &nbsp;&nbsp; * After that, Iris was uneasy in my house, and we always made certain to lock the basement door and draw the shades down over the window at night. She wasn’t conscious of any ill designs on the Good People’s part; she said they never seemed to know what they were doing, much less to plan ahead for it. But then, that was the trouble with them. Wolves and bears aren’t bad either, Iris would say, very sagely. They just want what they want, and it sometimes happens to be something other than what we want. But now there is only the one thing to tell, and I will be happier when I have forgotten it. It was one of those chill nights in the early part of the year, when spring strangely resembles winter. Our parents had left us alone again, and though we were meant to be asleep already, we had stayed up talking as we often did. Our talk did not always turn to the Good People and their mysteries; but on this fateful evening, it had. What kind of a name is Florian Lockwood, anyway? I had asked her; for this question had been on my mind for some reason. What sort of a name does it sound like to you? she asked back, with a yawn. I said it sounded to me like a child’s name, and I heard Iris’s yawn turn into a soft laugh. But everyone is a child sometime, I added, feeling foolish. Mr. Lockwood isn’t everyone, Iris said. I asked her what she meant by that, and she sighed. Back when we saw him, she said, did he seem to you like a man who had ever had a son? No, I admitted, thinking of the oddly childish tone of his voice, so distant from even my vague idea of fatherliness. Well, that’s because he never did have a son. She seemed very certain of this. What was it that made him so crazy, then? I asked. Going into the forest, she said. Being around them. I don’t know how it works. All I know is, Mr. Lockwood never had a child who was taken away. What makes you so sure of that? I said. She turned her back to me under her covers. Because, she said, Mr. Lockwood is the child who was taken away. I lay for a while, puzzling over that. How could he be, when he was so old? It didn’t add up to me. But by the time I finally asked her, Iris was already falling asleep, so I lay staring at the blackness for a while. After I don’t know how long, I heard the sound of our front door upstairs, opening and closing. My mother was home—which I knew when, after some poking around in the kitchen, her footsteps could be heard ascending the stairs to her room. I waited for her footsteps and Iris’s father’s to come back down the stairs as always, but they never did. The two of them must be catching up, I thought; perhaps with one of their night-caps. But more time passed, and nothing. I thought of waking Iris, but by now she was sleeping so peacefully; and anyway her father would soon be down to carry her away, and so I left her alone. But the thought of our parents drinking made me thirstier and thirstier, and anyway I was nowhere near sleep; so eventually I crept up the basement stairs to the kitchen, leaving Iris where she was. I’d got my glass of water and was about to head back down the stairs again when I heard a stirring above, followed by the sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs. It only sounded like one person, but I felt sure of the drinking now: the footsteps were moving down the stairs quickly, and behind their rapid thudding I could hear my mother babbling something in a high voice to her friend. It was not usual for me to be upstairs at this time of night, and I was worried I’d surprise my mother and frighten her when she came around the corner into the kitchen. So I opened my mouth to announce myself. But this never happened, for the figure that came around the corner was not my mother. To this day I don’t know who it was. The limbs were too long for the bathrobe it was wearing, which anyway was not my mother’s bathrobe. It had a wide, ratty wig on, and was wearing it the wrong way, so that it covered the wearer’s face. From under this covering came the voice I had heard, strangely small for the size of the person, and saying nothing I could understand. It groped in front with its hands, shoving the basement door open and pausing at the top of them; and then, with sudden decision, it rushed down the steps and out of sight. I soon felt a wet chill spreading around my feet, for I had dropped my water glass. The feeling roused me to a horrible thought, and I ran down the basement stairs, trying in vain to call out to my friend. But the back door was already swinging closed, rattling against the doorframe, and through the gap I glimpsed the sleeping Iris, her hand clutching the back of the figure familiarly as it ran with her toward the treeline. Hers was the trusting hand of a sleepy child, and I imagine she only thought it was her father who carried her. As for who it thought she was, I’m sure I will never know. But I knew she was my Iris, and so I ran after her, out the door and across the lawn. I felt hands reaching and pawing at me as I passed, and laughter mingled with the deep groaning of the woods ahead; a woman’s voice called out from the lilacs, and I knew it was me she was calling, though she used a different name from mine. But there was no time for that now. The figure was crossing the threshold of the forest, and a moment later I crossed after it. And here was something else: inside the forest the air was warm, as though I had run into a great lightless house. The soil was soft and warm under my bare feet, too, and I gave chase as best I could. But the figure that carried my friend was much taller and swifter than I was, and soon I could no longer hear the twigs cracking under its long feet, or even the babbling of its voice in the dark, and I gave up running. I walked for a while, listening for any sound of Iris or her taker; and with my eyesight as it was, and the darkness of the forest all around, I was soon lost. Yet I found it was not unpleasant to walk in that forest, even on and on. The trees were not at all so changeful now, and the low groaning sounds were gone, too. Rather, they had become different sounds altogether; for though I did not understand it at first, I was hearing those noises now as they really were, not yet slowed and deepened in their passage over to the world outside: little bits of self-directed chatter, and every now and then an outburst of laughter, or angry shouting, or a high-pitched squeal of surprise, or a string of feverish questions. They were curious, mindless noises, made by things whose minds had long since left them—the Good People, encountering one another in the darkness of their wood. I would encounter many of them, too, on my long walk that night: people of all descriptions and appearances, stealing through the trees, running in a panic or simply walking along like I was doing, until they bumped into someone else. Encounters and conversations, how many I couldn’t say! Most of those I met were looking for something themselves, and some of them pressed me into their search, months of misadventure as it felt, before I could get away. I saw people I knew, or thought I knew: my mother was there, riding piggyback on my father, and someone like Iris’s father came along too, in a wide white hat. Once I saw old Florian Lockwood, stumbling along with two others, and I found myself laughing, it was so like seeing an old friend. And more than once I even saw my Iris, running toward me in the darkness or curled up, smiling and bare-kneed, under a shadowed fern. But like so many things, that was always a mistake of my eyes, and never really her; and though I searched that whole night long, Iris’s face was the first thing I knew I had forgotten. * &nbsp;&nbsp; * &nbsp;&nbsp; * I walked all night through that forest; and then, when I saw the sunrise through the trees, I began my long walk out. When I emerged, it was to a part of Stevens that was unfamiliar to me. I walked all morning through the town, too, and most of the buildings were different from what I remembered; I saw a few people, and their clothing and looks were strange to me. But they looked at me as if I were the strange one—much the way that you have been doing—and so I wondered if, as always, it wasn’t me who was mistaken after all. And when I found my house, it was all-over different too: so much so, I almost took it for another house altogether. The lilacs were gone, and the paint was new, and the front lawn was healthy now, and very welcoming. I felt sure I would find my mother that way too, angry but welcoming; but instead it was a very unwelcoming man who answered the door, whom I had never seen. His family, clustered like mushrooms, peeked out from behind him while he talked to me, peering into my face as if they all saw something very unusual there; and when I told the man I’d only gone looking for Iris all night, he would have closed the door in my face. But then I mentioned my mother by name, and asked where she was, and he caught the door. She was your daughter? he asked me, and I laughed at that—a strange and innocent mistake, like so many I have made! But my laughter only made him angrier, and he asked me the same thing again; and when I told him I was her son, he did finally shut the door, saying as he did that it was some years ago she had sold the house and moved away, and that I’d better move on too—whoever I was. I admit that was confusing, but no more so than anything else. I must have made some kind of mistake, that’s all. And though I haven’t had a look at my own face yet, to see what it is you’ve all been peering at, still I think I have an idea now what I will see, and maybe I won’t find it so confusing when I do. For all I know, it’s better this way: a good thing, if only I take to using those words for it. And that can hardly be so difficult. After all, I’ve always mistaken one thing for another—and there is so little left for me to forget. https://revenantquarterly.org/CURRENT-ISSUE Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:12:07 +0000 The Revenant Quarterly https://revenantquarterly.org/CURRENT-ISSUE <img width="825" height="158" width_o="825" height_o="158" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" data-mid="99924945" border="0" data-scale="4" data-no-zoom="true" data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/825/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" />&nbsp; VOLUME 12, ISSUES 1/2WINTER / SPRING2026 ARCHIVE Moses LeShirley- THE GOOD PEOPLE Arnold Klein- PERCEPTITATIONS William H. Aile- FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;- ON COOKIE-CUTTER THINKING &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;- ON THE HUMANITY OF TEACHERS &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;- ON DISAPPOINTMENT &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;- ON AN ANXIETY OF KNOWING J. Freeborn- SOLMONAÞ Robert Farrell- GEORGE FOX CALLED IT OPENING Arnold Klein- ANT-EATER