By Nichole Faina

University of Pittsburgh faculty member Peter Trachtenberg is the author of three books, 7 Tattoos: A Memoir in the Flesh, The Book of Calamities: Five Questions about Suffering and Its Meaning and his latest, Another Insane Devotion, an ethics of love disguised as a memoir of the author’s relationship with cats.

Last spring, Peter and I took a trip to see the locally famous murals of Maxo Vanka, housed in St. Nicholas Croatian Catholic Church in Millvale, PA. The murals, painted between 1937 and 1941, draw inspiration from Eastern European folk art and the consciousness-raising political art of Diego Rivera. They are considered unique for their juxtaposition of anti-war sentiment and religious subject matter. In one mural, Vanka painted the ceiling as a sprawling battle scene, featuring an image of a crucified Christ imposed between two bayonetting soldiers. On another wall is the depiction of a bereaved mother weeping over her son who died in fighting World War I.

Nichole Faina: One could interpret Max Vanka’s murals as a protest against the suffering inflicted by capitalism and war. Do you ever see your own work as being in protest of something?

Peter Trachtenberg: Yeah, not primarily, but it’s certainly a theme. Especially my second book, The Book of Calamities. I think my protest would be lodged not so much in the causes of suffering, which are so myriad, but against the explanations we offer for it—in particular, what I see as the oppressive, victim-blaming explanations. It was one of the reasons why, in the first chapter, I write about the Book of Job. I dwelled on some fundamentalist Christian interpretations, which find incredible ways to blame Job for what happens to him.

NF: When God turns out Job, his friends reject him as well?

PT: Exactly. And there are all these kinds of examples I found online. There are various kinds of Christian Web sites that say he was perfect and blameless, but that doesn’t mean he’s sinless. It is all this hair-splitting to absolve God for what is happening to Job. I equate that with the ways in which unhappy people are blamed for their own unhappiness and their own suffering.

NF: In a previous interview, you said that you’ve courted your own suffering. Can you talk a little about that? Your book isn’t just about avoidable suffering, is it?

PT: In the book, I made a distinction about kinds of suffering, because I am a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Most of the suffering that I experienced in my life fell into the ordinary category. I had my parents die, and if you are lucky enough to live long enough, that will happen to you. But everything else was a direct consequence of my addiction, and I went out looking for it in the sense that I put myself in neighborhoods where I got held up. I did substances that made me physically ill. It’s not that I blame my younger self necessarily; I followed the path I had to follow. The thing was, I came from a fairly privileged, sheltered upbringing. My parents devoted their lives to protecting me. And I sort of half-consciously sought out the greatest possible dangers—so what followed was almost inevitable. And I do distinguish that from say Rwandan Tutsi who had grown up with at least an illusion of safety. Overnight, they found that their safety had been shattered and that the neighbors they had been eating meals with a few days before were suddenly trying to kill them.

NF: With that in mind, what was the seed of your last book, The Book of Calamities?

PT: I had two seeds. I would say one was the death of a friend in 1999 . She was the first person I knew my age that died of something that wasn’t drug or alcohol related. She died of breast cancer. She was somebody whom I had always thought of as extraordinarily good. I had been in love with her when I first knew her. She was somebody who, for various reasons, I thought was untouchable. We had a very good friendship. I responded to her death in the most infantile way. It just seemed incredible and outrageous to me that somebody who’d been that good and was still young had died of this disease. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. And then, in 2001, I was looking at the national response to the 9/11 attacks. Certainly, the shock and horror that people felt was perfectly understandable to me. I felt those things too. But the element that struck me as strange and grotesque was the sense that this was not supposed to happen to us. The story people told was that They—Osama bin Laden, al-Quaeda, Saddam Hussein, the whole Muslim world— hated us for our goodness. To me that suggested an arrogance and willful ignorance of history. It seemed like an American myth that nothing that is bad is supposed to happen to you. Particularly, if you are white and middle class. I do know that, along with that, there is a notion that there are certain classes of people whose suffering is just taken for granted; it’s invisible. And I would say that is mostly made up of people of color and poor people.

NF: As a writer, do you ever take on the job of trying to seek justice for those people whose suffering is believed to be, by some, just consequential to their position in life? What is the role of an artist in social justice?

PT: Well, it’s tough. I believe Sam Goldwyn, the movie executive, said, “If you want to send a message, call Western Union.” When I wrote the book, I was torn between the impulse to send the message and the impulse to make a work of art, or at least good journalism. Really, what I tried to do was tell people’s stories, and to stay, at least for most of the book, out of the mix as much as possible. I used a fairly neutral reportorial prose that’s very different from the prose I used in my first book. I did allow myself some entry into the text when I was writing about Job or Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. It was there that I allowed myself to be more a preacher or a lecturer, because I was unpacking texts and looking at what those texts said. So, I was trying to find a balance between those two impulses. I mean, for one thing, if you tell somebody a story with enough attention that allows the subject to speak in their own words, ideally then the reader ends up identifying with that person and identifying with what happened to them. That was the kind of balance that I had to maintain.

NF: As a child of Jewish immigrant parents, what connection do you feel to the immigrants pictured in Vanka’s murals?

PT: It’s very powerful for me. My parents’ experience was very different; they were not imported here as laborers. They were people who really benefitted from the incredible generosity and openness of America. And they came over in the years 1940 and 1941. At that time, Jews were not popular. There were quotas for how many Jews were allowed into the United States. They came here in my father’s case with very little, and they made a living. They weren’t wealthy, but they entered the ranks of the middle class. Just like the children of those people in the Vanka murals, they eventually had really good middle-class lives. There was a window of time in the United States when people who had barely graduated from high school could make a decent honorable living and send their kids to college. That’s gone now. On the one hand, I do not have a strong connection to the people pictured in the murals. I’m not Croatian, I’m not Christian, and I’m not from the working class. But on another level, I completely identify with them. I completely understand the bewilderment and the sense of dislocation that people felt when they came over and found themselves in an incomprehensibly different world.

NF: You were raised Jewish, but on your Facebook page it says that you are a failed Buddhist. How does the word “fail” fit with your Buddhist identity?

PT: Well, I’m a bad Buddhist. I practice. I meditate. I believe in the precepts, but I still want things. I am still often overcome with anger, which is really considered an affliction in Buddhism—so I would say “failed Buddhist” is a really good way to describe me.

NF: Did your spiritual practice influence your writing of The Book of Calamities in any way?

PT: Totally, because in the Judeo-Christian tradition, suffering is considered, particularly in Christianity, the result of a rupture between human beings and God. For example, that’s where death came from. In Buddhism, suffering is just what it is to be human. That’s the first of the four noble truths: Life is suffering. If you really unpack it, it means discomfort, disease, and unease. Buddhism really is a religion or a belief system that’s organized around the study of suffering and the study of ways to be liberated from it.

NF: How does your meditation practice influence your writing? Is writing for you a practice?

PT: It is definitely a practice. Put it this way: I did not want to sit and meditate when I first started doing it. There’s a part of me that really doesn’t want to sit and write. I would rather be watching TV and eating something from a bowl. Or, you know, doing yoga. Although, it’s funny . . . in the last five years, meditation has become pleasurable for me in a way that it wasn’t before. It did a give me the model of doing something regularly, even in the beginning, when there is almost no visible result. I remember when, for me, to sit for three minutes was just a huge effort. And there are days when it is still like that. There are days when it is a huge effort for me to sit at my desk even for an hour.

NF: This idea of dedicated practice is a good segue into talking about your new book. The book’s working title is Another Insane Devotion.

PT: It is a book, on the surface level, that is about the search for a missing cat and in turn about my relationship with that cat and other cats I’ve had. I would say that cats are the first things that I ever loved. Through the cat narrative, I look at a marriage with a woman. I tell this story in a more elliptical way. My real goal is to ask, to examine what loving a cat has in common with loving a human being. What sort of faculties come into play? What obligations arise out of loving?

NF: Tell me about your intentions writing your latest book. Did you first decide what you wanted the overall project to be, or did you first start writing about your love for your cats?

PT: What happened was, in 2008 I was teaching in North Carolina. It was my first full-time teaching job, and my wife was at a residency in Italy. We hired a moron as a cat sitter, the child of friends. Our home was in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley. We had four cats, and one cat was my favorite. She’s named Biscuit. At first, our cat sitter would not return my calls. I would have to call him five or six times before I got him. One day he calls and says Biscuit went out a couple days ago and hasn’t come back. I flipped out. Part of what I was probably feeling also had to do with the sense that my marriage was in the process of falling apart—I was sensing some of the first fractures of my marriage. But the main thing I was focused on was Biscuit. I felt like I had to go and look for her, and at the same time that seemed absurd. She’d been gone three days; by the time I got there, it would be five days. I was broke at the time. I couldn’t afford to fly to New York City and then take a train up to the Hudson Valley to go looking for a cat. On the other hand, I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t look. I went up there, and maybe I shouldn’t say what the outcome was—that’s what I’m doing in the revisions, I’m leaving the reader in some suspense. The fact was, later I asked myself—what was it that made me look for her? What was that impulse? And I realized it was love. And it made me think about what I felt for Biscuit and what I felt about my wife. What did this have to do with my prior history of love? Looking at myself honestly, I don’t think I really loved another being until I first had a cat in my early thirties. Not that long ago I described what I’m doing in this book; the form I’m working in is called an “ethics.” It’s an ethics of love, like what Aristotle does. It is similar to what Plato does in The Symposium and Phaedo.

NF: In your first book, 7 Tatoos, you also write about romantic relationships and love. That was a classic memoir, was it not? Would you call your current project a memoir?

PT: My current project certainly has elements of memoir, but I’m telling the stories in a much more elliptical way. Part of that strategy was that I want to protect the privacy of the wife character. In the book, she is just known as F. At this point, I think of her as a character. Maybe that’s the only way I can have the liberty to write about her. I have a prefatory note saying this is a work of nonfiction except that it contains, the word I use, an artifact. There is one invented thing. It says in my current draft that the first reader to find out what this thing is will get a prize. The prize will be a kitten. Although, then I realize I’m going to have to vet people to make sure I don’t end up giving a kitten to a psychopath.

NF: We’ve just spent the afternoon viewing these beautiful murals. Do any of the images you’ve seen today particularly speak to the work you are accomplishing in your new book?

PT: I would say that overall what I would relate my work to is the way in which those murals try to translate sacred truth or truths into very plain, fleshy images. You see that the women are strong. They’re not ethereal. They are women with thighs and breasts and shoulders with big arms. And Jesus is not an emaciated swooning Jesus. He’s a big, powerful, muscular figure who’s writhing in great pain on the cross. And I think one of the things I was trying to do throughout the book is to try and translate something that is very big and abstract into things that are very plain and ordinary and very material and fleshy. One of the benefits of writing about a cat is that all of its functions are on display. I have a chapter that begins with a description of a cat cleaning her butt. I write that she does it so avidly that I imagine herself vanishing up into herself. And this becomes a recurring trope. The idea of something disappearing into itself. I relate this to the image of the Cheshire cat, and then, of course, it becomes an image of how a loved person disappears from your life and leaves some aspect of herself behind, the way the Cheshire cat leaves its grin.

Things That Are by Amy Leach
(Milkweed Editions 2012)
Reviewed by Amanda Giracca

Everything Becomes Erstwhile

Reading Things That Are, the first essay collection from writer Amy Leach, you might get the creeping sense that these essays are being narrated not by the woman whose photo you’ll find at the back of the book, but by a hoary old man with jiggly earlobes, who repeatedly asks you where his spectacles are as they sit pinched to the tip of his nose. As you crack the book and begin to read, this voice brings you one recondite axiom after another: “First of all, it seems imperative to understand modern bird migration, for birds used to fly to the moon in September and then back in spring.” Or, “The secret to identifying any creature is to note its proficiency as well as its terrain: the same insect, clever on a biscuit, may be stupid in a puddle,” or as he tells you what happens to extraneous beavers “during the periodic population control that beaverocracies exercise.” This imagined old narrator is full of all sorts of information that’s both scientifically fascinating and absolutely absurd. “Beaverocracies…?” you ask out loud. “That’s a word?” (The glossary at the back, while sometimes confounding you further, does not include BEAVEROCRACIES; but some definitions drop hints as to what this book is up to: “VASTY (As differentiated from ‘vast’) has approximately the same meaning as ‘biggy,’ ‘hugey,’ and ‘giganticky.’ Do not let anyone tell you these words are not words; all words are words.”)

You might, as I did, start to feel like a petulant child who has to listen to another bedtime story, or who must be sat down for yet another natural history lesson. Sometimes, you get irritated by this annoyingly benign Winnie the Pooh-like voice. “I know the difference between echolocation and echolalia!” you might want to shout (as I scribbled in the margins). But then as you read on, you start to realize, “Well, I didn’t know that much,” and you are silenced as this narrator, in the essay “The Wine of Astonishment,” begins a long spiel on how whirligig beetles, in a manner similar to how bats use echolocation, “percuss” their abdomens against the water, sending out waves across the surface to locate food.

These essays that make up Things That Are are part encyclopedia entry, part whirlwind tour of a peculiar imagination. Often, they start quite simply. Take, for example, the essay “Love,” which is broken into four sections, each section named for a particular plant: Love-in-Idleness, Love-in-a-Mist, Love-Lies-Bleeding, and Love-Bind. The essay begins with a look three million years into the future, when the “Andromeda Galaxy may collide with our Milky Way. At first this sounds miserable, like a collision of two bird flocks. But galaxy members fly farly, not tip to tip. In a galactic collision the stars do not actually collide—as with crisscrossing marching bands, only the interstices collide.” This is all to picture a future denuded Earth, “having lost its beautiful flocculence, its beautiful freight,” and to imagine, were it to regrow all its life, which “biospherical items might return first.” This leads to a discourse on the properties of the hardy, self-seeding wild viola known as love-in-idleness. These essays often start simply and straightforwardly enough, but nearly each essay eventually escalates into a circus of words, pulling in absurd similes (like comparing the stars in colliding galaxies to clarinetists in a marching band). The love-bind portion of the essay begins discussing how the plant is a rampant vine that can grow ten meters in a season. But the essay quickly abandons sane descriptions, and starts to envision love-bind covering up an entire forest, then covering up every object on earth while trying to vine its way to the moon:

Love-bind turns everything into a dubitable green figure. Once-unabmiguous mangadous, once-dapper pineapple-gadrooned credenzas, once-natty hatstands—all rendered approximate by overrushing love. The love-trammeled are no longer spruce, no longer chiseled, no longer emphatic. Considering a mystical green ectomorph, one might wonder: “Tetzel the tavernboy? Beanstan the barrelstaver? Wictred the twit? Maybe a butternut seedling?” Overgreening love converts the Nest to a Was-a-nest, the Wiliwili to a Was-a-wiliwili, Upholsterers to Were-upholsterers. Everything becomes erstwhile; and in a way this love-bind is like time and obliteration.

This was one of my favorite such imaginings: to picture just a fuzzy outline of various objects, everything covered now in vine, just a shape reminiscent of its former self. For a moment my inner petulant child shut up, and along with our narrator, I enjoyed putting scientific fact to imaginative use: what if? What if these vines were unstoppable?

Another such silencing happened in the same essay. While discussing love-lies-bleeding, the narrator expounds on what we can do forever—bleeding not being one of them. “There are some things you can do forever. Given a deep enough shaft, you can fall forever,” reminding me, of course, of Alice falling into the rabbit hole. I paused for a moment, truly disturbed, really considering what it might be like to fall forever. In that moment it became clear that Leach is directly channeling Lewis Carroll throughout. Half of the book reads like “The Jabberwocky.”

This book renders its readers into Alices—we become baffled, unsure of which side of the looking glass we are on. Is this fact or fantasy? Rooted in scientific fact (as a horticulturist, I can attest to the accuracy of plants’ descriptions, and the facts on beavers, goats, and the planets’ moons all seem easily researchable), the stories of these species are warped with imaginative properties. This book is two-fold in that we can be sure we are gleaning mini scientific lessons—the reproductive cycle of jellyfish, for example—but at the same time given permission to fantasize. What if the wind did blow love-bind out to space and it covered the stars in vegetation? It’s what people in the Dark Ages might wonder if they knew what we know now.

These twenty-four essays are arranged in two sections: “Things of the Earth” and “Things of Heaven.” The first section is essays of plants and animals, the second filled mostly with essays about stars and space. However, the book is bisected with an essay that doesn’t fall in either category. “Memorandum to The Animals” happens in the middle and the essays leading up to it do give a hint to this change about to take place in the book. Two essays before “Memorandum” we get “You Are Going to Fly,” a piece distinctly told from the first person, starting with “Once, a friend and I followed a moth that trudged across a whole grocery store parking lot.” The voice is very different from (although it doesn’t entirely abandon) the hoary-old-man-voice the collection begins with. The essays toward the center aren’t just encyclopedic facts, or myth-like ponderings—they are suddenly distinctly lodged in the author’s experience. And the next essay, the one preceding “Memorandum” perhaps gives itself away with its title: “God.” Again, we are rooted with a first-person narrator here, who isn’t afraid to ponder on the page: “The people say the word repeatedly, and the more they repeat it, the less I can understand it: listening to words I do not understand is like swallowing stones.” No longer is this the confident, schoolteacher voice of pages of yore. It’s as though the book is developing a consciousness. We go from the Earth’s base most inhabitants—from the primordial waters of the beaver swamp—to this voice that’s suddenly aware of itself, aware of a human’s place among these things that are.

“Memorandum to the Animals” is just that. It’s a letter addressed to all species on Earth, except that rather than on the brink of a great deluge, this letter warns of the end of the Holocene: “Don’t you know, Animals, nothing lasts forever,” the letter claims, closing with, “The future belongs to us.” The “us” can only mean humans, although the word Anthropocene is never used—meaning the geologic age in which we now live, having begun roughly 200 years ago, the era’s identifying factors having to do with humans’ impact shaping Earth’s ecological makeup. “Memorandum” opens with the cold efficient language of a termination notice: “Unfortunately, Animals, we are not going to be able to bring all of you with us this time.” It continues, as unconcerned as an IRS audit: “If you are concerned about the devastation of your genetic type, and you do not see your name on the Keep-Alive-List, you might think about clumping some vegetation together into rafts on which to rescue yourselves.”

It’s a cold, heartless, F-YOU to the animals, the jolly-frolicking Carrollian voice all but gone from the page. It’s certainly the most didactic of all the essays, but by this point I’m grateful for a little bit of sanity. Like a whirligig spinning haplessly on the pond’s surface who happens upon a water flea, I’m eager to consume this morsel of take-away. I’m also grateful for the first-person narrator whose presence lingers for a few essays into the “Things of Heaven” portion of the book.

One of those essays, “The Safari,” is actually in second-person, but is told with the same intimate voice, rife with self-consciousness; I still felt the guiding hand of the sane narrator that emerged during “God.” It’s the saddest piece, too, and my favorite in the collection, mostly for the lyrical voice that here has been rendered wistful and elegiac. The essay places the reader in the position of a zoo-goer, the animals also referred to as “memories.” We’re invited to become the viewer, to imagine our memories set free again, allowed to imagine what it would be like to go hunting for them again. Perhaps I like this piece best because it holds, what seems to me, the book’s closest thing to a thesis. The last three paragraphs join together the past, present, and future, holding within them a microcosm of the book overall:

But right before the sun goes down, the light will get more intense, and your memories will rouse and trumpet and stamp and bawl and honk and become whiter-teethed, greener-feathered, browner-furred, sharper-horned, softer and more violent, as if time’s filmy layers had dissipated and your entire past were happening anew—the past as new as the present. Your memories will sting and stain your eyes as this final sunlight is translated into red-gold lions and gilt-orange floating birds with long ribbony tails and yawning wet stump-toothed hippos. …

And then one of your little days, like a kingfisher, will fly over the waters, diving down beneath the opaque golden surface of your mind, where swim your earliest, submarine memories. What is caught is a tiny primeval memory that should mean nothing, a throwaway. Yet when pulled out of the water, gripped in a birdbeak, lashing the air and throwing flashing grapefruit-colored waterdrops from its glittering, tiny perishing silver self, this forgotten, underwater matter will suddenly mean all the world to you—the long lost glittering hour that means more than age, more than logic, more than lore.

Then the sun and its light will truly leave. … There will no longer be any way to apprehend your days; the stars will come out but they will only illuminate themselves. … Sometimes we do not get the type of charity we want from the stars, and then we fault them for being selfish. But what? Would we rather that no thoughtless stars lighted themselves—that our days escaped us in grimmest gloom? … Will the stars, at length, not grant us a firmament of shivery, glinting, white-gold flames under which to relinquish our days?

Shortly thereafter the book resumes its wild romp. In “Sail On, My Little Honeybee” Leach brings the exploration to the moon. The book becomes once again a science lesson wrapped in riddle delight, back to its old rascally ways:

To discover why the Earth acts so central and the Moon so obsequious, let us not measure yards but consider inward differences. The Earth is not gigantic and the Moon is not slight, but the Earth has a core and the Moon does not. Or rather, if the Moon has a core, it is undetectably small and inert, like a frozen mouse. How do we know that the Moon has a mousy core? Whoever really has been a Lunar Interiorist? Here we shall invent a philosophy and call it Imaginative Exteriorism: wherein, by looking at the exterior, we imagine the interior; for the face often tattles on the heart, and an empty surface may bespeak an empty center (though this is not true of alligator eggs).

From past to present, Holocene to Anthropocene, from fantasy to reality—Things That Are leads us through the looking glass and to the other side, even if we’re never sure which side we’re on. It’s part celebration of the Earth’s strange bounty, and part swan song at nature’s dimming twilight. It goes from the bottom of the ocean where tender, sessile jellyfish polyps watch the sunflower stars eat sea urchins, and it leads us far into the night sky where constellations migrate. And for a brief moment in the middle humans are considered, given a brief voice before silenced again. We are but a blip in all of this, just one more thing that is.

I wish I could say this collection is for everyone. But it’s the sort of book you really need to be in the right state of mind for. You must be willing to put away your inner petulant child, to sit still for just a few moments, to turn your attention fully to the narrator, to listen closely.

Amanda Giracca is a third-year Creative Nonfiction student in the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program.