her lips, and blows. The sound that comes out is loud and shrill. Like sadness, like moaning.
“That’s a cool trick,” he says, and she shows him how to do it.
At 11:45 he says, “Hey, I gotta get back home.”
“Okay.” She shrugs. “Let’s go.”
H e writes and then deletes. Writes and deletes. There are words and then nothing but pure, white space. It’s the technological equivalent of a wastebasket overflowing with balled up pieces of paper. He smirks, thinking how many trees he must be saving. The books he has taken out of the library are stacked precariously at the edge of his desk. He has read them like a child, flipping open to random pages, unable to sit and concentrate on any single book long enough for it to make real sense. But he knows the answer is somewhere in these pages, in the pages he has not yet written. In the words that won’t come.
This is what he has learned so far:
A healthy, properly nourished human being can live for sixty days without food.
Fasting can bring euphoria, heighten the senses.
Hindus fast. Moslems fast. Jews, Mormons, all sorts of Christians fast. People of all faiths feel closer to God when they are deprived of food.
People fast to change the world: English suffragettes, Irish nationalists. Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara. The body can become the battleground for political struggle. Mahatma Gandhi. One’s own life the means of negotiation.
Kafka’s A Hunger Artist inspired a flux of public fasts in 1920s Europe: starvation performances, the body a circus.
There are litanies of medieval women who fasted for prolonged periods of time, refusing sustenance other than twigs, herbs and the Eucharist. This denial was considered a miracle, and the women were deemed saints.
Despite all this, hunger is rarely voluntary. The number of people dying of malnutrition, of poverty related starvation, in the world at any moment is unknown.
In many cultures hunger is cyclical: a balance between satiety and starvation, the knowledge that before feast there must be famine, a hungry season before the rains and the harvest.
Sam does not know what to do with this information. It swirls in his head like numbers used to when he took calculus his first year of college. It is both connected to the world and completely disengaged. When he closes his eyes, he pictures a man. It is winter in Minnesota, in 1944. He is one of the men who volunteered to undergo a controlled experiment. To be systematically starved and refed so that the US government might understand how to revive all of the people who had been deprived of the most basic of human needs. He is tall, already thin, and he can feel the winter in his bones.
Sam stares at the blank screen, at the blinking cursor. He types a sentence, two, three, conjuring winter, evoking snow. But the words are too thin, as fragile and brittle as bones. He hits the backspace button and puts his head in his hands.
M ena and Sam walk toward Effie and Devin’s camp on Friday night, and the loons are cackling on the lake. Mena can see them preparing to lift off from the water, their wings spread wide, their beaks set, certain. She feels her own chin rise up, determined. “This will be nice,” she says.
Sam is inspecting the label on the bottle of wine.
“What does he do again?” Sam asks.
“I think he’s an artist. Assemblages. Like Joseph Cornell. Remember the exhibit we saw at MOCA?”
Sam nods.
“What are we having for dinner?” he asks.
“Does it matter?” Mena asks, and then bites her tongue. “Let’s just try to enjoy their company. It’s been so long since we’ve done anything like this.”
When they get to the camp, Effie is outside and Zu-Zu is toddling around on the large front lawn. Effie stands up and comes to them. She is wearing a long sundress, and her hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail. “Hi!” she says. She embraces Mena, kisses her cheek, and Mena is surprised by this easy
“That’s a cool trick,” he says, and she shows him how to do it.
At 11:45 he says, “Hey, I gotta get back home.”
“Okay.” She shrugs. “Let’s go.”
H e writes and then deletes. Writes and deletes. There are words and then nothing but pure, white space. It’s the technological equivalent of a wastebasket overflowing with balled up pieces of paper. He smirks, thinking how many trees he must be saving. The books he has taken out of the library are stacked precariously at the edge of his desk. He has read them like a child, flipping open to random pages, unable to sit and concentrate on any single book long enough for it to make real sense. But he knows the answer is somewhere in these pages, in the pages he has not yet written. In the words that won’t come.
This is what he has learned so far:
A healthy, properly nourished human being can live for sixty days without food.
Fasting can bring euphoria, heighten the senses.
Hindus fast. Moslems fast. Jews, Mormons, all sorts of Christians fast. People of all faiths feel closer to God when they are deprived of food.
People fast to change the world: English suffragettes, Irish nationalists. Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh and Patsy O’Hara. The body can become the battleground for political struggle. Mahatma Gandhi. One’s own life the means of negotiation.
Kafka’s A Hunger Artist inspired a flux of public fasts in 1920s Europe: starvation performances, the body a circus.
There are litanies of medieval women who fasted for prolonged periods of time, refusing sustenance other than twigs, herbs and the Eucharist. This denial was considered a miracle, and the women were deemed saints.
Despite all this, hunger is rarely voluntary. The number of people dying of malnutrition, of poverty related starvation, in the world at any moment is unknown.
In many cultures hunger is cyclical: a balance between satiety and starvation, the knowledge that before feast there must be famine, a hungry season before the rains and the harvest.
Sam does not know what to do with this information. It swirls in his head like numbers used to when he took calculus his first year of college. It is both connected to the world and completely disengaged. When he closes his eyes, he pictures a man. It is winter in Minnesota, in 1944. He is one of the men who volunteered to undergo a controlled experiment. To be systematically starved and refed so that the US government might understand how to revive all of the people who had been deprived of the most basic of human needs. He is tall, already thin, and he can feel the winter in his bones.
Sam stares at the blank screen, at the blinking cursor. He types a sentence, two, three, conjuring winter, evoking snow. But the words are too thin, as fragile and brittle as bones. He hits the backspace button and puts his head in his hands.
M ena and Sam walk toward Effie and Devin’s camp on Friday night, and the loons are cackling on the lake. Mena can see them preparing to lift off from the water, their wings spread wide, their beaks set, certain. She feels her own chin rise up, determined. “This will be nice,” she says.
Sam is inspecting the label on the bottle of wine.
“What does he do again?” Sam asks.
“I think he’s an artist. Assemblages. Like Joseph Cornell. Remember the exhibit we saw at MOCA?”
Sam nods.
“What are we having for dinner?” he asks.
“Does it matter?” Mena asks, and then bites her tongue. “Let’s just try to enjoy their company. It’s been so long since we’ve done anything like this.”
When they get to the camp, Effie is outside and Zu-Zu is toddling around on the large front lawn. Effie stands up and comes to them. She is wearing a long sundress, and her hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail. “Hi!” she says. She embraces Mena, kisses her cheek, and Mena is surprised by this easy
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