I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about sentences. I have been sentenced to this fate, you might say, which is both a bad pun and also the truth; between writing, teaching, and reading, I can’t escape sentences.
The sentence contains the entirety of literature in miniature. Individual words hold their power through context and placement; phrases carry their meaning through juxtaposition. Paragraphs are often too thick to memorize: a mindful, more than the mouth can manage. Sentences linger on the tongue and echo in the room. You can still hear, years and yearnings later, the sharpest sentences of our life.
The idea that life in the past was better is, of course, not new, extending at least as far back as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage. But the 20th-century version of the primitivist thesis can be traced back to ‘The Original Affluent Society’, an essay by the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. It is one of the most famous, and controversial, essays in all of anthropology, assigned in virtually every class in the discipline. It is the essay that redefined how we think about hunter-gatherers – and ourselves.
When it comes to teenagers, Ginni and her friends are pretty typical. They love watching boys, they’re embarrassed by their parents, and they think it’d be cool to start a band (though truthfully, none of them really have any interest in music or practice). Ginni’s crush is an albatross named James. She likes him for his extremely impressive wingspan, and you can often find her sitting in a nearby tree with her friends Ramil and Ivy watching James gracefully fly over the water. At night, Ginni likes to leave James small food offerings near his nest from her family’s share of the universal worm, occasionally making hyperbolic declarations of love to him out of earshot. “I want him to peck out my eyes. He’s so handsome,” she swoons.
That’s just what life is like for teenage birds living on the moon. Or at least, that’s what life is like for the teenage birds living on the moon in Michael DeForge’s latest comic, Birds of Maine (2022). The book, which is a collection of DeForge’s webcomic of the same name, might at first seem like a simplistic—albeit humorous—imagining of bird life, but it quickly turns into something much deeper. DeForge’s birds are not your typical avian brethren but rather a complex and sophisticated ornithological unit that have taken up residence on the moon after fleeing the Earth and its population of corrupt humans. DeForge renders them and their world in a style that feels like Charley Harper’s geometric birds have been dropped into a Wassily Kandinsky landscape, and the narrative reads like a futuristic tale reminiscent of Olga Ravn’s The Employees (2020) or Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In short, these birds are on another level. Still, there is something remarkably familiar about them.
Over all of these days and months, I’ve been reading the new poetry collection by John Freeman, Wind, Trees (2022), likewise a lesson in the elements, including fire and ice, fear and trembling, with turns, too, on emigrant plants, difficult breathing, the love of a good dog, and a “four o’clock dark beginning like a rumor.” In winter, it gets dark early where I am too.
As a rule, I try not to read this way, toward identification. But it’s happened in this case; there’s no point denying that. After all, I see myself and my own comfortable life and my own comfortable habits in Wind, Trees: the possibility of calm domesticity during quarantine, dog walks through nature, daily toast with preserves. Reflected in these poems is the wherewithal and interest to look back on a life from middle age—to say, Freeman writes, of love lost, “the body inside my body turns over, / the one that remembers not being yours,” or to recall taking up boxing in “the waning days / of those years in London”—when some of what’s there to look back on is adulthood already behind us, when life has been long enough for us to have called other places home. (For me, this was New York City.
In August sun I blister in the promise
that married us last year on this island
of mice who claim the dark corners