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In “Holy Gluten: The Righteous Battle Over God’s Grain” Claire Pellegrino tells us that bread and suffering have always been connected, and her essay is about the debates about gluten-free Communion wafers, oat matzoh, and which grains are sacred. The life of a devout celiac is a difficult one, she says.
Morgan Hodorowski’s story about a missing retainer is another take on religious life, specifically about prayer and authenticity. Morgan’s story is a different take on the Confession, made famous in religious literature by St. Augustine. But while Augustine’s story is about a change from sinner to saint, Morgan’s takes a different form. If you were raised Catholic, maybe you remember praying to different saints for different things. St. Anthony was the saint we prayed to when we needed help finding something: "St. Anthony, please look around; something is lost and must be found.” But St. Anthony is also the saint to whom one prayed if they were spiritually lost, or had lost their faith—which, of course, requires that one knows that she is lost. And the idea of praying to a saint if you’ve lost your faith seems odd, at least. Praying to St. Anthony for a lost retainer seems more reasonable. Objects seem more like his thing.
In her book Edison’s Eve, Gaby Wood tells the history of attempts to create life-like objects. But in most of those cases, the entities look or act like living things. But Emily Welty’s nature essay, “This is not a nature essay” is about her toaster. It is also about the ways in which we think about things and about people. And it’s about how we live with people or things whose personalities or politics are troublesome.
The selection from Hugh Raffles’s book Insectopedia is about a related theme: that of language and how we think about creatures that do not speak. While Emily Welty imagines a toaster who speaks and has a personality, Raffles writes about honeybees that don’t speak. In The Lives of Animals, J. M. Coetzee’s narrator asks why it is that animals do not speak. Is it because they can’t? Or because their silence is a form of resistance to anthropomorphism?
In “Conversation with an Iguana” Andy Meisner imagines how one might carry on such a conversation. The narrator starts the conversation knowing three facts: that marine iguanas live in the Galapágos Islands, that marine iguanas eat algae, and that marine iguanas are classified as “Vulnerable” by the IUCN. But by the end of the conversation, the narrator wonders about the things that they think they know, and about what counts as vulnerability.
Thomas Slee’s story “And Colour Shall Set Her Free” plays with a standard thought experiment in philosophy that draws on ideas about factual knowledge and knowledge based on experience: Mary the Color Scientist. In that thought experiment, Mary is a neuroscientist who knows everything about color from a scientific standpoint but has lived her entire life in a black-and-white environment, leading to questions about whether she truly understands the experience of seeing color until she sees it for the first time. Slee’s story is about Mary and her confined life—Slee imagines what Mary thinks about and does when she’s not being shown colors.
Jessica Rowe’s poem “The Path Illuminated” shows how objects might be seen anew: scars can be seen as paths; a body can be seen as the source of lives; paths can be seen as traces of other lives. The poem begins with an x-ray image connected to a cancer diagnosis, and shows us histories and lives in that image.
In “Passages [On Failing to Generate Skimmable Content]” Ceridwen Hall tells us “I prefer swimmable texts—like them to ripple and splash. I want some demands made on my heart and lungs, want to encounter the riptides and rapids of fluid imagination. For this I’m willing to risk treacherous waves, to get a little salt in my eyes, where language is dangerous and changeable as water, reverberant with unknowns.” How does the meaning transcend the paraphrase? How does the process of skimming—and the metaphor of the brain as a translation machine—deal with language that is “reverberant with unknowns”. Anyone who has seen a room of people look up the AI summary of a novel and parrot it back will recognize the problem—it is, again, the tension between knowledge of facts and knowledge from the experience of reading, encountering words not as mere vehicles of information, but as ways of connecting with and challenging readers.
Ceridwen Hall is a poet and educator. She is the author of Acoustic Shadows (Broadstone Books) You can find her at www.ceridwenhall.com.
Morgan Hodorowski is a current senior at Hamilton College concentrating in Literature with minors in Philosophy and Chinese. She is on the editorial board for Red Weather, Suture, and The Continental and works in the Writing Center. She is a lover of medieval hagiography and morning hikes. And, yes, she did lose (and miraculously find) her retainers.
Andy Meisner is an author of fiction and poetry from Iowa City, now living in North Carolina. He likes experimenting with form and constrained writing, e.g. writing author bios that are exactly 200 characters long (excluding the spaces).
Claire Pellegrino is a stand-up comic, humor writer, and food stylist assistant living in Queens, NY. She is currently an MFA candidate at The New School and is known as much for her staunchly held beliefs as for her incredible stench.
Hugh Raffles in the author of The Book of Unconformities (Pantheon, 2020) and Insectopedia (Vintage, 2011), from which this excerpt is taken. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He teaches Anthropology at The New School.
Jessica Rowe is a professor who teaches writing at Western Nevada College. She writes both poetry and creative nonfiction.
Thomas Slee is an engineer and author from Australia, previously published in Aurealis Magazine, The West Australian and (soon to be) Writers of the Future.
Emily Welty is the Chair of Peace and Justice Studies at Pace University and part of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. She is co-editor of Peace and Justice Studies: Critical Pedagogy; Unity in Diversity: Interfaith Dialogue in the Middle East; and Occupying Political Science: The Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the World.
Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy
