Journeys: Tags

One has a bike.

Family.

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Canal-side artist, London.

A Natural History: Krista Franklin

A Natural History of My Drapetomania

Text and Art by Krista Franklin

"Drapetomania #2", Mixed Medium, Krista Franklin

*   *   *

In 1851 Lousiana physician Samuel A. Cartwright introduced America to a theory that he thought would serve to explain the aberrant behavior of black slaves “absconding from service.”  He called the “disease” of those who sought to flee captivity drapetomania and outlined the symptoms and treatments in his essay “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race.”  Dr. Cartwright suggested reinforcing the subservience of the black slave to his white slaveholder to treat the disease.  He prescribed treating the black slave like a child and by delivering sound beatings only in the cases of those persistently afflicted slaves as the cure for this pesky mental ailment—the desire to be free.

Nearly 130 years after Cartwright kicked the bucket, a cracking, black and white photograph of my 18-month-old mother falls under my gaze.  The picture, small and curling at its white-bordered corners, shows the back of my tiny mother barely walking, moving away from the camera, the hem of her baby dress haphazardly tucked into the top of her diaper.  One foot hovers precariously off the ground; she is in the throes of movement.

“This is the day she ran away from home,” my grandmother says, giggling at her first daughter’s blossoming desire to escape.

*   *   *

Not nearly as advanced as my predecessor, around eleven I begin to push my body against the neighborhood’s borders, roaming into woods along paths past thickets. Even as fear rides piggyback and my nostrils flare like a deer’s at the scent of the unknown, I press on across fallen leaves; errant branches scrape my arms, a phantom sound, someone behind me.  I spend minutes like I spend money, squatting at the creek’s edge watching minnows swirl each other in their watery dance.  When I go home, my Zips are caked in mud.  I smell like grass.

Around this time, at a church picnic the pastor asks me to get her nephew, who is also my age, a hot dog from a nearby table.  I tell her “I’m not in the service.”

This is a story that my grandmother also relishes.

*   *   *

The radio is a bad influence, lures me further away, summons me to Salem Mall, through its heavy glass doors to feast on the hallucinogen of consumerism.  Here garments beckon me to try on, be transformed, but Camelot Records spins a sticky web, offers a hundred shrink-wrapped escape plans begging to be bagged.  I leave sweaty-palmed with something to take home, my allowance pick-pocketed by the record industry.

When the needle drops, I’m drawn outside myself.  My scalp tingles.  The sounds spin revolving doors I walk through in my mind.

Like the countless Negroes who used their skin as their disguise, passing as white to spin the yarn of a life, I master the art of a malleable identity.  Music is one of the places I learn: 1) how to speak like a white girl from the Valley, 2) how to walk like an Egyptian, 3) how to be, when the occasion calls for it, off the wall.  I try on identities like jeans.

By the time I’m thirteen I spend approximately 65% of my waking life  putting on “whiteness,” because in some crude, unarticulated way, in my mind “whiteness” is equivalent to “freedom.”

It’s been said that the human brain hasn’t reached its full development until a person is in her mid-twenties.  Whether this has anything to do with me eventually relinquishing that ridiculous arithmetic around that age is unknown to me.

*   *   *

Once during my adolescence my mother told me, “Children are like tiny anchors,” and asked me through a series of elaborate questions, did I like being free?

*   *   *

At the university I practice late-night-slip-outs like I should be memorizing lines from textbooks to pass tests.  Side roads and alleys become familiar.  I visit unfamiliar bars, hide out in the movie theater, hop in my car and skip town.  For one week straight I forget that I’m enrolled and spend days in my pajamas watching television, reading books I checked out from the campus library, and refusing to answer the phone.  Classes are an afterthought.

*   *   *

The last time I held a full-time job I had to be prescribed anti-depressants.

*   *   *

As a child I used to have a recurring dream where I was running across the freakishly deserted, green campus of my elementary school being chased by a man whose face I can never see.  Once he almost caught me, but I woke up.

*   *   *

"Wanderlust Wonderland", Collage, Krista Franklin

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Krista Franklin toils in Chicago, rubbing her hands fiendishly plotting her next great escape.

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Notes:

“A Natural History of My Drapetomania” is part of the Natural Histories Project. Click here to learn more >>

You can find out more about Krista Franklin at kristafranklin.com and the Tres Colony website. And you can find more of her images online at CultureServe.net and  delirious hem.

The collage “Wanderlust Wonderland” first appeared in the MiPoesias.com issue guest edited by Evie Shockley.

Journeys: Fronts

The noted house for paper bags.

E. Price.

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Shop fronts East of Liverpool Street Station, London.

A Natural History: Laura Marchetti

The Natural History of O.P.A.L.

Art and text by Laura Marchetti

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The window was open this morning, swamp air filled the living room.  I woke up on the couch, which reeked of mildew and last night’s cigars. My friends, passed out on the floor, appear as flipbook ghosts jerkily moving back and forth as I open and close one eye at a time. First one eye, then the other.  No one wakes up from my mental prodding, so I make coffee and smoke a cigarette.  Church bells are ringing in the distance, but then I realize there are no real church towers left here.  What I’m hearing is the new speaker system bought by the First Baptist Church downtown.  This techno call to worship sounds flat, but it manages to stir up a longing within me I thought died years ago, or was possibly never born.  I imagine putting on a dress. I imagine walking up the steps, the pastor knows my name and greets me with a practiced nod.  My hair is long, curled at the ends.  My high heels click gracefully as I find my pew.  I know all the songs. My teeth are white in light pink never-swollen gums.  The hot water whistled and pulled me back to the moldy carpets and still-drunk friends.  “We will find something to believe in,” I thought solemnly as I bit into buttered toast.

Do you know how hard it is to research abandoned buildings?  Night explorers are more committed to recording hauntings, glowing orbs, supernatural sightings than street names.

Nice Bright Orbs at one of the main entrances

Red energy at the top right along with some Orbs and what appears to be Ecto

Nice multi-colored orbs!

Huge Orb to the left surrounded by smaller yellow Orbs

Sunland Boy Scout Troup (1967)

Cribs in Sleeping area (1967)[1]

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I went looking for Sunland Hospital for the first time in August, 2003.  I sat on the floor of the van, picking out twigs and weed stems from the carpet and placing them in separate piles while the band tried to scare each other.  We’d only heard stories about the abandoned mental hospital, how dead children played in the hallways.  It was a site of negligence, an unsightly blemish on Florida’s not-so-pristine history.  Chris was pouring over a hand-drawn map of the place.  That was how this whole thing started.  Some acne-covered kid gave it to him at the end of their set; I’m not sure why.

The drummer, Avi, loved those ghost hunter shows you see on tv.  Couldn’t get enough of them.  He would always make us watch them late at night; I was the only one who was ever scared by it.  Since I couldn’t stand to watch another episode, fulfillment was the only way I could see to end Avi’s obsession.

The Ocoee Paranormal Ass-Kicking League (O.P.A.L.) was formed.  We started small: cemetaries, schoolyards, abandoned shacks in the lower swampland.  But soon we heard about the chain of abandoned children’s mental institutions known as Sunland Hospitals.  It was only a matter of finding the Orlando location.  I became the cameraman, since I owned a camera.

“Orbs are for amateurs, we got to scare out some real ghost shit, you know?”

Built in 1952, Sunland Hospital in Orlando, Florida, was originally W.T. Edwards Tuberculosis Hospital.  It was never a treatment center, at the time tuberculosis was without cure.  It was a waiting facility; the end of the line.  An entire side of the main building was windows, as it was a commonly held belief that sunshine and fresh air were agents of healing for the t.b. patients.

“Once lodged on a given ward, the patient is firmly instructed that the restrictions and deprivations he encounters are not due to such blind forces as tradition or economy – and hence dissociable from self – but are intentional parts of his treatment, part of his need at the time, and therefore an expression of the state that his self has fallen to.”[2]

Dust pushed up out of the dirt as our van slid to a stop a block away from the Fence.  We followed the map’s instructions, and were as discreet as drunk kids can be.  I looked at the pale, greenish faces floating around me.  Not ghosts, just my friends, scared shitless.  I took a breath.

“Let’s fucking do this already.”

This wasn’t like the tv hunters, and I was ready.  We made our way quickly to the hole in the fence, guided by that map, the anonymous voice of a scrawny hardcore kid.  The hole was small. Chris and I made our way through easily. Avi, Abe, and Dylan took more squeezing, but we were in.  I brushed my jeans off and sucked in a breath quickly.  A large field sprawled before us, the building rising up out of the middle of the earth perversely.  It looked like a person caught in the middle of exhaling, its collapsing middle parts soaked in years of rain and neglect.

Theories for the Sudden Abandonment:

1. Asbestos

2. Fire Hazards

3. Neglect and Abuse

We walked the perimeter of the hospital, I snapped photos without looking.  Teenagers and explorers had ripped open windows and smashed doors, beams and concrete chunks fell together to form haphazard cathedral arches.  Letting my eyes adjust in the main lobby, my flashlight scanned over the wreckage.  Overturned wheelchairs closed in around us and graffitied hallways grasped at the light.  These floors hadn’t seen electricity since 1983, and were thirsty for the grand fluorescence of their past.  We stood unsure, felt watched, as Chris nervously opened the map.  The basement.

Two of the following:

1. Delusions

2. Prominent hallucinations (through-out the day for several days or several times a week for several weeks, each hallucinatory experience not being limited to a few brief moments)

3. Incoherence or marked loosening of associations

4. Catatonic behavior

5. Flat or grossly inappropriate affect

6. Bizarre delusions (i.e., involving a phenomenon that the person’s culture would regard as totally implausible, e.g., thought broadcasting, being controlled by a dead person)[3]

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Originally, the basement was a unglorified burial chamber for those t.b. patients.  Five round chambers line one wall.  To the right, large piles of firewood, crumbling and mold-furry.  “The crematorium of the damned” is scrawled in red paint in one of the furnaces, written by someone more brave than us.  It all feels too fresh, and the stories I read on the internet about missing disabled children and this place pull at the tingly place where my neck meets my back.

According to official records, the crematorium has not existed since 1962 during renovation.

Tap tap tap tap tap

We all freak out, I point my camera towards the corner of the room as Chris prepares to bolt. I take a picture, the flash illuminates a malnourished rat.  My first ghost.

1997: Keith Murdock fell three stories down the elevator shaft and his skull cracked open like an orange.  We were warned of this incident by the map, with what appeared to be blood spatters drawn hastily around it.

We climbed to the third floor, the door was locked.  This is where the map ended, with a skull and cross-bones drawing.  Chris sized up the door before pulling the rusted pins out.  The record room.  We read that the medical records were intact, that blood samples and pills scattered the floor.  But none of us had believed it, and then there we were.  An index taped to the inside of photo album devoid of pictures:

Arrival of the first eighteen children

Beauticians at W.T. Edwards Tuberculosis Hospital

Birthday party at Sunland 1964

Hospital Pet therapy at Sunland Center Hospital

Disabled child in the swimming pool of the Sunland Hospital

Sunland patients out for some air

Ward at Sunland Hospital

Activity room at Sunland Hospital

Residents brushing their teeth at Sunland Hospital

Boy Scout patients of Sunland Hospital[4]

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The excavation continued for hours, these obscure histories scoured for abnormality or signs of a hidden agenda.  Like holy men studying ancient texts, we read the case files.  I bent down and picked up a once-orange bottle, full of sand.  It was time to leave.  I took more pictures, the sun was coming up.

At all four corners of the main fence, you should look out for security guards.  It is a Federal crime to trespass on this site, so don’t get caught.

In the early morning, we sat in the van, getting high to balance out our now senseless paranoia.  Everyone swore to encountering a ghost; I flipped absently through the photos while Avi pointed excitedly at asbestos orbs.  Those same faces, full of terror only moments ago, were now elated.  We had touched the void, maybe.  I drank a beer as the sun rose over the boys’ sleeping bodies.

1. ingestion

2. absorption into the blood

3. transport to the brain via circulation

4. penetration into brain tissue through the membranes that protect it from many chemicals that might disturb it (i.e. the brain-blood barrier)

5. association with the proteins whose function they control  [5]

Arrival of the first eighteen children. It does not matter if they left or not.  The thin high building was now haunted by the living; by inebriated teenagers in search of the mystical.

---

[1] Panhandle Paranormal, “Sunland Hospital.”   6 June 2004.

[2] Goffman, Erving.  Asylums; Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. Chicago : Aldine Pub. Co., 1962.

[3] Rosen, Deborah. Mental Geography. Deborah Rosen, 1983.

[4] Panhandle Paranormal, “Sunland Hospital.”   6 June 2004.

[5] Rosen, Deborah. Mental Geography. Deborah Rosen, 1983.

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Laura Marchetti is still learning to love oatmeal. She is better at loving sky colors while driving on the 101, making up jokes with a certain 3-year-old, and reading comic books.

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Notes:

“A Natural History of O.P.A.L.” is part of the Natural Histories Project. Click here to learn more >>

Laura Marchetti was raised in Ocoee, Florida, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She makes paintings and sculptures about growing up steeped in Southern Baptist rituals and linguistics, asking the viewer to consider the residual aspects of indoctrination. She binds books, curates shows, and makes comics. She graduated from California Institute of the Arts in May 2009, with a BFA in Art.

Journeys: LTown

Near Samuel Johnson’s house.

A note left near The Angel.

“Fuk this area” – found near the Regent’s Canal path.

The Southwark Bridge.

Public bench near Highbury Fields.

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From walks around London.

A Natural History: Devin Corbin

A Natural History of My Static Electricity

By Devin Corbin

Touch the steel file cabinet first, then the keyboard. Winter has finally come to Wisconsin, and with it lessons in physics. Dew point:  -18 °F. In this hibernal dryness, my body sloughs electrons like dead skin, the day’s subtle frictions (my shoulder sweeping past curtains, my arms sliding from the sleeves of my jacket. . . ) buffing me to an ionic polish.  Our furnace greets Orion with a sigh, and I imagine myself growing faintly luminous, like the starlit snow beyond my window.  Polyester yearns for me.  I can feel its elfin fingers teasing the hair of my arms, can feel much of what surrounds me, in fact, as a jumble of nudging and straining, a crowd of competing desires. No more puling about sub-zero weather, please. Please. This is winter as I love and remember it, animate and magical with cold.

Here is summer in Wisconsin:  A cloud of gnats orbits a person’s head.  Then another person approaches, and the cloud stretches to meet the newcomer, including her; when she leaves, some of the gnats will go with her.  In winter it is the same, only instead of gnats it is electrons.  Matter draws near to matter, and electrons change rides.  Some people attract more gnats than others, I have noticed, and certain materials, too, trump others at drawing electrons.  The result is that meeting and parting produce electrical imbalance, what physicists call “triboelectrification”:  electrification through rubbing.  Electrons are always pulling free, of course, but in summer one doesn’t notice.  Humid air allows gnats and electrons alike to roam freely, so charges quickly dissipate on the static breeze. Come winter, however, moisture freezes from the atmosphere, making the air a better insulator. The result is a world of impromptu batteries, of bodies and objects suddenly able to carry a mounting glut (or dearth) of electrons until a suitable conductor approaches and—snap!—electrons funnel into a gust of heat and light, restoring electrical balance.

Over two hundred years ago, a Swede named Johan Carl Wilcke, whose exposure to cold northern winters may be of note here, published an influential study of static charges, including what is now known as the first “triboelectric series,” a list of sundry materials ranked according to how likely they are to lose or gain electrons through contact with other substances. Many such lists have been generated since, and they are typically organized with materials that most easily lose electrons placed at the top and materials that gain electrons at the bottom.  The farther two substances are from one another on the list, therefore, the more potent the charge they will generate when rubbed together.  Mischievous children take note.

There is something delightful to me about these lists—the way seemingly disparate materials land next to each other via the arcane logic of atomic bonds, the way each list reflects the material culture of its historical moment. From Wilcke’s original list, for example, we learn that a writer’s quill tends to lose electrons to paper.  Or consider this triboelectric series from the Smithsonian Physical Tables, published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1921, in which asbestos precedes rabbit’s fur:

According to this table, rubbing a sheet of asbestos with “indiarubber” should produce the best static charge; I can’t recommend it.

Amber, item #24 on the Smithsonian list, appears in most triboelectric series, thanks to the ancient Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, who found that amber—called elektron in Greek—took on a charge when rubbed.  This discovery may have been less random than it seems, for amber, a fossilized plant resin long used in jewelry, would often have been rubbed to give it the high gloss that best reveals its rich, honey-colored translucence.  My Chambers Dictionary of Etymology explains that the word elektron itself derives from the Greek word elektor, which translates to “the beaming sun.”  This is a reference, no doubt, to the material’s lambency as a polished gem, but it’s also a pleasant fortuity given amber’s role as the etymological root for electricity.  Imagine:  ancient globs of resin burnished into little suns charged not only with light from the same old star that created them but also with electrons filched from a jeweler’s flannel and hands.

* * *

Just before bed, I shuffle into our upstairs bathroom to brush my teeth, the house already steeped in the long darkness of a boreal winter’s night.  In the gloom, my hand misses the switch on the small fluorescent lamp over the sink, my fingers instead brushing the bulb itself, and for an instant the glass tube flickers under my touch like a guttering candle.  I am befuddled, then pleased.

Later, in the bedroom, I pull off my thermal shirt with a sound like fire moving through pine boughs, then strain my eyes to make out the delicate whorls of my sleeping wife’s ear.  When my lips draw close enough, there is a glint, an electric pinch, and my wife starts.  “We are touching now,” I whisper.  “If we don’t let go, we will be fine.”

Notes on Sources

what physicists call “triboelectrification”: A. G. Bailey, “Static Electricity,” McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology 10^th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), 367; Lawrence B. Schein and G. S. P. Castle, “Triboelectricity,” Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 574.  Etymology from the entry for “tribo-” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, 2002.

a Swede named Johan Carl Wilcke. . . the first “triboelectric series”: J. L. Heilbron, “Wilcke, Johan Carl,” Dictionary of Scientific Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1976), 352–353.  Heilbron notes that another of Wilcke’s major scientific contributions was the discovery of latent heat while trying to use hot water to melt  snow from a courtyard (353).

organized with materials that most easily lose electrons placed at the top: For information on the organization of a triboelectric series, see Schein and Castle, “Triboelectricity,” 580, and the entry for “triboelectric series” in McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms, 2^nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).

a writer’s quill tends to lose electrons to paper: Heilbron, “Wilcke, Johan Carl,” 353.  In the centuries since Wilcke, triboelectrification has only become more central to writing technology; its primary industrial use is currently in laser printer and photocopier technology, wherein charged toner particles are drawn to their proper places by an electrostatic template.  See Schein and Castle, “Triboelectricity,” 575.

this triboelectric series from the Smithsonian Physical Tables: Table 395 from Smithsonian Physical Tables, ed. Frederick E. Fowle, reprint of 7^th revised ed. (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1921), 322.  Accessed electronically 5 January 2010 through Google Books.

Thales of Miletus: Bailey, “Static Electricity,” 367; Peter J. Nolan, Fundamentals of College Physics, 2^nd ed. (Dubuque, IA: Brown. 1995), 517.

translates to “the beaming sun”: Robert K. Barnhart, ed., “electric,” Chambers Dictionary of Etymology (New York:  Chambers, 1988).

“We are touching now,” I whisper.  “If we don’t let go, we will be fine”: Okay, actually I didn’t say this.  I think I just laughed and hopped into bed.  But maybe I should have said it.  I mean I kind of wish I had, but perhaps my wife would only have found it strange.

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Devin Corbin is in and of northern Wisconsin, where he takes care to ground himself at the gas pumps.

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“A Natural History of My Static Electricity” is part of the Natural Histories Project. Click here to learn more >>

Journeys: Road

Ohio, probably.

Can’t remember where…

Saw this as we passed him.

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Images from the road between Gary, Ind., and Pittsburgh, Pa.

A Natural History: David Masiel

A Natural History of My Exophoria

By David Masiel

When I was growing up, I had to work to see things the way normal people did.  If I relaxed my eyes, I’d see double, or sometimes, during bouts of extreme fatigue, I would come to realize that my right eye was looking in an entirely different place than the other.  I played catcher on my baseball team and could sometimes see the runner leading off first base without taking my other eye off the pitcher.  I thought this was a neat trick, and I’d do it as often as I could.

At the time, my older brother was fond of reminding me that he could do anything I could do, only better, so I said, “No you can’t, I can see around corners.”

My brother was used to this.  I was always claiming to have memories or visions of things that were impossible.  I told people that I could remember being born and that I could even see atoms, which drew reactions ranging from disgust (my father) to lengthy explanations of atomic physics, perception, and the anatomy of the human eye (my teacher).

In the case of my latest claim, my brother merely rolled his eyes.

“You can’t see around anything, punk.  You’re just wall-eyed.  It means you’re a freak.  It means when everybody else is seeing out into the room, you’re looking at the wall.”

I asked my mother for confirmation, and she informed me that the appropriate term was exophoria.  “Does it mean I’m a freak?”

“No, dear, it doesn’t mean you’re a freak.  It just means you have a weakness in the muscles that control your eyes.  They call it lazy eye.  You’re hardly wall-eyed.  And your brother is just trying to get your goat.  Ignore him.”

My mother was an operating room nurse, so I trusted her opinion even if it did seem that my brother had my goat perpetually tied to a chain of his own devising.

Shortly thereafter my mother took me to see the eye doctor, who sat me in a big contraption of a chair and asked me to stare at his pencil.  Rising from the eraser was a needle with a lady-bug impaled on the end of it.  It was a plastic lady bug, but it seemed real enough to me, shining red with black spots, reflecting a light that shone under his desk.  I could see the world in that lady bug.  He drew it closer to my nose.  “Hold on as long as you can.”

My eyes crossed, vision blurred, and I got a headache.

Then the doctor covered one eye with a black spoon and told me keep staring at the lady bug.  When he removed the eye covering, I felt it—the eye spun outward for a moment before acquiring its target.  “I see,” he said.

“What do you see?”

“A medium degree exodeviation.  ”

I couldn’t even say the word.   All in all, “exodeviation” sounded worse than exophoria, which at least sounded happy.

“A tendency of your right eye to deviate off center, to drift outward independent of your left eye.”

Then he put eye drops in my eyes, yellow stuff that made my eyelids stick closed, and my vision go blurry.  I remember complaining that I couldn’t see and how somebody—my mother or the doctor or the receptionist said, “Oh yes, that stuff blinds you.”

Blinds you!   Now it was official.  I was not only a freak, but a blind one.

Fig. 1 - Diagram

I drove home with my mother, keeping my eyes closed against the onset of blindness and the ongoing headache, devastated that I’d now end up like Mike Henderson who lived two doors up, a blind kid who walked past our house daily with his white cane and braces on his legs.  Blind!  I wondered if the braces went along with the blindness.  I had seen plenty of kids with braces on their legs and theirs was a horror unlike any I could imagine—not being able to run and jump.  Then I guessed that being blind meant you couldn’t run or jump either. The thought made my head rock from side to side, like Stevie Wonder, in preparation for the inevitable darkness.

I imagined Mike Henderson and I becoming friends.  We’d be the only two blind kids on the block.  He’d finally have a friend (his house was devoid of them), and I resolved to go visit him as soon as I got home—he would be the only person who could understand my tragedy.

I would miss playing baseball.

Before I had the chance to visit Mike Henderson and proclaim our brotherhood, my mother explained that the effects of the eye drops were temporary, and that I would not be going blind.  Grateful, I settled into the exercises that would strengthen the muscles of my eyes and keep me from being wall-eyed.

But secretly, I still practiced the wandering eye maneuver.  I liked seeing the first baseman without looking or the wide receiver going on a sideline route when the rest of me was looking over the middle.  I would perform an eye trick for people at school, making my right eye flare off to the upper right and wiggle around.  Girls would shriek and jump up and down and put their dresses between their legs.  They’d laugh and come up to me and say, “Do the eye trick, David, do the eye trick.”

I rarely got attention from girls.

That summer I got caught looking out of my right eye when a fastball blew in from the left, slapped the tip of my catcher’s mitt, and flew against the back stop.  Runners advanced.  I vowed to stop my first-base gazing.

I did my exercises faithfully until I didn’t see double anymore.  I forgot all about my exophoria and no girls ever asked to see the eye trick.  It wasn’t long before I couldn’t do it at all.  I tried once, at a school dance in the sixth grade.  I was bragging how I could make one eye go off on its own, causing several girls to gather around for a look, but when I tried, nothing happened.  It might have moved a millimeter.  “I guess I saw a little bit,” someone said.

I couldn’t see around corners anymore, or see the runner leading off first base without turning my head, or see the stars out my window at night without rolling over to look.  But maybe it wasn’t such a good thing to be able to do all that, what with runners advancing and all.  Now I saw just like everybody else, and that wasn’t a bad thing.  There was great comfort in knowing I wouldn’t be blind or wall-eyed.

Fig. 2 - Sartre

Later, in high school—12^th grade, World Literature with Mr. Hewitson—long after I’d stopped playing baseball and started writing stories, I saw a photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre on the wall of our classroom, looking like he was blowing a kiss at the camera or exhaling imaginary cigarette smoke.  Then I really knew what wall-eyed meant.  Mr. Hewitson was talking about Existentialism and Herman Hesse, while my classmate Glen McClish—future professor of rhetoric—was telling me about the open marriage between Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.  While Hewitson and McClish lectured, one in one ear, the other in the other ear, I kept both eyes glued on that poster of Sartre, figuring only a wall-eyed freak could have come up with Existentialism, and how I sort of  wished I could see first base without looking and do the eye trick still and have the girls giggle and say “freaky!”

That night, writing an essay on the topic of “existential anxiety,” I kept trying to get my right eye to drift, to see my name at the top of the sheet while watching the pen make its marks on the page, but my eyes jetted around in unison, and in the end all I got was a headache.  I suppose I wrote a decent enough paper, for a high school kid trying to be a writer, anyway.  But in other ways I thought maybe I was already finished.  My exophoria had died an unceremonious death, and needless to say I had very few original thoughts on existentialism.

Fig. 3 - The Author Trying to Recapture His Youthful Vision

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David Masiel is currently teaching his students how to see double.

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Notes:

“A Natural History of My Exophoria” is part of the Natural Histories Project. Click here to learn more >>

David Masiel was born in Oakland and grew up in Richmond, California.  He
has worked as tugboat deckhand, longshoreman, golf instructor, and high
school English teacher.  He is the author of 2182 kHz, a New York Times
Notable Book, and The Western Limit of the World (both Random House).  His
work has appeared in Outside Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and The
Washington Post Book World. He teaches in the University Writing Program at
U.C. Davis.

N.B.: New Novels in Three Lines

A few writers I know are using new technologies to write very short stories. I like to think of them as new versions of Felix Feneon’s Novels in Three Lines. A small sampler from Twitter feeds below. -JMT.

New Novels in Three Lines (or Fewer)

Sunshine, smartest kid in pre-K, screamed, “FUCKYOUBITCH!” Lead teacher told me: “Lock her in the closet when she gets like that.”

–Stephanie Soileau

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They tore down my friend’s grandma’s house and built a new credit union. Otherwise Tombstone’s pretty much the same.

–Justin St. Germain

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Snowing in New Orleans for the fourth time in twenty years.

–Pia Z. Erhardt

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When someone 15 years my junior flirts with me I feel like throwing up and wonder if part of their fantasy is me puking on their shoes.

–Gabrielle Calvocoressi

*

The sound of a toddler violently puking at the departure gate is ominous indeed.

–Alicia Jo Rabins

Journeys: A Butterfly and a Fox

Butterfly Wing, Costa Rica.

A fox’s eyes, North London.

*

Two critters in two continents, day and night.