The Maenaderie
Writing Sample
We got to the party a while after it started. Maria was flirting with the guy at the door. I recognized him from last time. There were brothers from Epsilon Phi too. I knew them this time, and recognized Ethan, the brother who spilled the drink on me. I felt light and empty. There were so many things coming out of the house, bodies, heat, light, music. Going to a frat party came with an air of celebrity. Freshmen couldn’t normally rush upon arrival, and being part of a sorority meant never waiting in line or having to name drop a brother you knew. The house was enormous and built of dark wood. The first floor was nearly pristine, wood paneled walls and vintage photos of past brothers. I
always loved that feeling, of staring at a collegiate looking room, knowing that beneath our feet was a sea of bodies, swarming and dancing. We went downstairs.
The crowd seemed endless. The corners and walls of the room disappeared. Glow in the dark jewelry crunched under our feet, sliding around the sticky floor. The girls were in a small circle, arms and necks covered in glowsticks, shaking in the dark. The music wasn’t incessant this time, and shook the floorboards lightly, making me feel woozy. The blacklights made everything white glow, shirts and shoes and teeth flashing in the dark purple of the basement. I felt funny, but not in a drunken way– would I have felt that way even if I hadn’t drunk anything? Elbows and knees jutting in the heat. I began to lose the girls, and would tap on a sister’s shoulder only to discover I was mistaken. Faces shifting and swapping, I began to lose myself. I stopped supporting my body, and let the pressure of the crowd carry me. I felt shoulders against my face, matting my hair with sweat and spit. It was a monstrous night. I didn’t remember getting home. When I woke up, my feet felt sore from the dancing, and I lifted the blanket to find them black with dirt.
—
It snowed for the first time. Blair texted me to come over but I hadn’t bought a parka yet, so I
walked to Lambda house in my raincoat. She opened the door hesitantly, and seeing me shuddering, pulled me inside, wrapping a shawl around me.
“You must be freezing!” she said, leading me to the kitchen. The house was warm and full of voices from upstairs. She set out small dishes, laying out cured meats and olives and cheese. I told her I hadn’t walked very far, but she insisted that I eat, and that she had something to tell me. She poured wine and sat across from me at the low wooden table. For a moment I wondered if she was going to mention the night in the woods.
“At the party,” she said, staring at the olives, “one of the brothers-”
She paused, the air in the room grew heavy and dead. I looked at the mirror facing the window. “Ethan raped Ranya.”
—
A few weeks later, there was a giant storm that lasted days.
There were storms that replenished the earth, ones that ripped through it, and ones that reminded you what nature was capable of. But it wasn’t a decision on nature’s part to bring about a storm that would fell pines and erode the soil— it just happened. It wasn’t violent or aggressive, it just was. The rain hit the windows with a sound that reverberated through the entire dorm. If you wanted to leave for a dining hall, you had to accept the fate of being completely wet– umbrellas weren't much help since it came from all directions, the wind blowing sheets of water up into your face. It was only three but the sky was a dark gray. People would talk about that storm for years to come— where they were during the first downpour, not being able to drive because of the floods. But they wouldn’t talk about it as long as they would about the rumor of the severed head— a sophomore girl hearing a disembodied voice below the bridge, speaking in prose about frenzy and terror and dancing girls.
—
A few nights later, we met in the library after classes. I was studying superposition and the double slit experiment for a prelim, working with Henley who was fulfilling her physics requirement. It was easy to wrap our heads around how measuring or observing a particle changes its state, movement, spin– but how did the particle exist in different states before the observation? I couldn’t understand how Schrödinger’s cat was alive and dead at the same time. We were debating particle spin when the loudspeakers announced that the library would close in ten minutes.
The girls, before packing their things, exchanged glances. I hated that they were always hiding something, but I felt like any request for clarification was some kind of betrayal, that if I messed anything up, whatever was happening would stop. I liked it, even if I didn’t understand it. I remember the horror that found me during the days alone. The deer’s wet, horrified eyes, pale powder around its mouth.
After crossing the bridge, I saw Sarah pulling at something under her shirt. It was midnight, and while on the weekends North Campus would still have been alive with students, today there was no one but us on the walk up. Before the hill, Blair turned behind a building that bordered the lake.
“Where are we-” I started, but Henley smiled at me and put her finger to her lips. We trudged down one of the trails that circled Beebe Lake, until we were under a small overpass, surrounded by trees and rocks. They all started to undress.
“We’re going for a swim!” Cassandra said, as if it were the obvious thing to happen. I chuckled a bit, staring at the sisters, and realized they were not joking. It had snowed a few nights earlier, and we were already in parkas. The lake was freezing. Sarah pulled two bottles of unlabeled wine out of her bag, and Melanie decanted them into a small bowl while I undressed too. We passed it around, burgundy dribbling down our naked bodies.
The lake looked like liquid silver, a freezing, mercurial pool. Maria stroked my hair, and the sisters began joking about animals that lived in the lake and the swim test. We dipped in, and suddenly I remembered going to the Museum of Science as a kid. There was a sensory science demonstration, where hot and cold metal prongs were lined up one against the other, and when you ran your hand on them, you couldn’t tell which was hot and what was cold. Stepping into the lake that night, I didn’t feel the cold air. The water didn’t feel freezing, and I don’t remember feeling drunk from the wine. I do remember our hands on each other, wading and laughing into the dark. I remember feeling my shoulders melt, my arms merging with my side, my feet becoming one, my thoughts growing light.
At some point when we were fish, the idea entered my mind. I remember learning how schools of fish know which way to turn and swim based on intuition and sight. No one had told me, but I left the lake understanding: We were going to kill Ethan.
—
The plan was simple. Maria was going to tell him to come alone to one of the hilltops by Cayuga lake to meet her.
“Guys never ask questions if they think they’re gonna get laid.” she said. And as for me, I would be in on it. I wasn’t an onlooker anymore, observing their rites and plans and schemes from the outside. I had entered whatever world they lived in. They said I would feel the way I felt at the party, at the lake, again.
When the day came, I didn’t feel afraid or nervous. I met them behind Lambda House at dark.
I was trodding behind them, unsure of when the frenzy would cover me.
When I felt Melanie's hand in the crook of my elbow, rough and scarred from shears and rocks, a
memory from elementary school came back to me. Rubber mulch on the playground, standing in front of the jungle gym, being yelled at by a boy. He was saying something to the effect of me leaving them alone and going to play house. The boy was yelling at me to leave, spit flying out of his juice-stained mouth. The boys’ gazes seemed like skeptical dares, thinking I would turn in, turn away. I yelled and thrashed at him, clawing at his chest and arms. I had his skin under my nails, and when my parents came to pick me up early, I couldn’t answer questions because my voice was so hoarse. The boy had scratches along his shoulders and neck, and gave me awkward glances in the classroom. No one bothered me about the jungle gym ever again, but no one played with me either.
I remembered what I looked like then, hair ragged from rolling down hills, knees scabbed from falling off the monkey bars. She wouldn’t recognize the girl who entered Cornell, hair pulled back and my gaze turned in. What had changed? Was that ferocity still there, under all those layers of custom, tradition, shame, poise?
Suddenly, I felt something collect in the back of my throat, a cool and thin liquid brimming behind my tongue.
I threw my head back and felt it spill onto the roof of my mouth, into my sinuses, into my brain. I felt my tongue slip out of my mouth, dangling on the side of my face like a piece of spare meat, dribbling spit down my neck. I bent my knees and dropped my hips, my legs further in front of me, shoulders drawn back, and felt my feet breaking through thorns and thistle, blood beading on my shins. I heard the girls around me, twigs snapping and flying in the air, branches flying at my face as Henley ran in front of me.
We ran in circles and lounged in the soft grass. We shrieked, and it wasn’t forceful. Things were coming loose deep inside me. There were more animals than I remembered. Dozens of deer, beetles, small fauna, but bigger things too. There was a bear lying near Ranya, and a bull asleep beside me.
I didn’t have to focus on when Ethan would arrive. I felt him arrive, like a spider feels a bug in a web.
We rushed to him, our shoulders all brushing, feet tripping over one another.
He had a wild look in his eyes, at the sight of our bodies, at the number of us. It was hunger, not flight or fight– he didn't realize he was in danger? I imagined what it looked like to him: girls he knew, dancing naked in the woods. Maybe he felt lucky.
Ranya threw her arm around his neck, digging her nails into his shoulder, and he pulled away, her nails carving skin off his back. His eyes widened, and he looked at us again, fear flashing in them. He ran, but we had surrounded him. His back against the giant oak, he grabbed onto the bark and pulled himself up, his arms straining as he ascended branch by branch. The girls were all staring up, their hair swaying in the breeze, mouths hanging open.
I thought of entropy. The entire universe separating from itself, divided by dark matter, the scale of trillions of lightyears, and of the small chaos, in the unpredictability of atoms, particles, people. Why did physicists always say that the universe would ‘descend’ into chaos? ‘Degrade’ into dark matter?
Chaos was how the universe started, from that single atom. If the universe became chaotic, it would be going home. At the particle level, maybe it was easy to think uniformity was the natural state of things– atoms all lined up, interlocking and vibrating with heat. But zoom in or out, and everything was chaos– quarks spinning in unpredictable ways, the negative space in our universe spreading and splitting.
Nox and The Glass Essay
Writing Sample
Carson approached a threshold of form with The Glass Essay, pushing the boundaries of the lyric essay with incorporations of tercets, quatrains, and abstract descriptions of landscape that trail off into memory. Nox reinvents the form as well– an entire book as one page, collapsed down and housed in a box. Nox was so unconventional that Carson did not consider publishing the work until several years later, after a friend convinced her that the format could be reproduced without sacrificing any of the content. Its content, like its form, is inventive and difficult at times to describe. On one ‘page’ there is a a drawing of a small blob, vaguely in the shape of a human, on the next is a photo of snow, and the reader learns that the shaky drawing was of someone’s silhouette from behind the camera, perhaps her brother’s.
Nox, meaning night in Latin, is a concertina folded book comprised of a single sheet of paper, folded to produce segmented pages, housed in a box. Drawing the book out of its case for the first time, I thought “Ha, nox in a box.” And upon further thought, yes, Carson has housed night– 192 pages of rumination on death, grief, and darkness, enclosed in the dark until you reach your hand in. The Glass Essay begins with the lines, “I can hear little clicks inside my dream. Night drips its silver tap down the
back. At 4 A.M. I wake.” The Glass Essay preceded Nox by 15 years, but when reading them side by side, these lines bring night from an abstract, airy concept– the giant dark sky, the deep dark in a forest– to a liquid entity, one that drips down Carson’s back. One can imagine the page(s) of Nox lying in that silky midnight liquid. Towards the latter half of Nox, Carson writes “And drips (the ancient poet says) in sleep before the heart.” This treatment of night as fluid, in conjunction with the motifs of glass and transparency in The Glass Essay builds an atmosphere of invisibility, of textures and translucencies.
When Carson visits her mother in The Glass Essay, her mother asks about Carson’s seemingly obsessive fixation on the past: “Why hold onto all that?” she probes. “Where can I put it down?” answers Carson. This is one of many questions that The Glass Essay poses. Nox, by expanding Catullus’ elegy for his brother, directly translating individual words, and including photos and transcribed calls, showcases Carson’s fixation on truth and fact, one that is not found in The Glass Essay. This tone of call-and-response is also replicated by the difference in what Carson writes on the same theme. The Glass Essay wonders how we carry our history and pain, Nox offers an answer: “Repent means the pain again”, and “Put the past away, you have to.” These answers do not come directly from Carson- the definition of repent in Latin lends itself to the idea of experiencing the pain again, and the sentiment about putting the past away was from a transcript of a phone call with her brother. He doesn’t say to “leave it behind,” or “forget,” but rather, put it away. Here it is, on paper, sealed in a gray box of night– all of the years of silence from her brother, all of the familial trauma his estrangement brought about– pressed on paper, collapsed into a box.
In The Glass Essay Carson ruminates on feeling like she could almost physically touch time– in Nox, she renders this possible, allowing the reader to pull out a continuous thread of memory and grief. From The Glass Essay: “Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its
days. It is as if I could dip my hand down into time... I can feel that other day running underneath this one like an old videotape—here we go fast around the last corner up the hill to his house, shadows
of limes and roses blowing in the car window.” This is perhaps the most taut connection between the two works, partially because of the idea that a shadow can be blown into a space, like liquid night, but more substantially that Carson, in Nox, has actualized the nebulous and prescient feeling of reaching her hand down into time. Reading Nox after reading this portion of The Glass Essay feels like a metamorphosis– the change from naming something to knowing it. Nox cannot be read unless you physically pull the record of time out of the dark. We reach into the past, just as Carson did when she translated and expanded the original poem by Catullus. She looks into the past, into a different language, and retrieves a new meaning from symbols and texts that are thousands of years old. The difference in mental clarity Carson experiences between the texts is astounding, especially given the histories of the materials– night as a hiding place, glass as an invitation to look– but Nox is a work of stark truths and muteness, whereas The Glass Essay is full of equivocations and disorientation. When she stares in the mirror, her face “has white streaks down it.” She traverses the barren landscape of the Canadian moors– “The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April carve into me with knives of light.” The abundance of light as compared to Nox does not aid Carson in discerning much– perhaps Nox is the result of one searching in the dark for what can be seen, and The Glass Essay is the result of searching in the light for what evades us.
The descriptions of the barren moors are replicated in Nox, where pages are sparsely populated with only an old note, a small drawing, or one page that displays only the imprint of the one before it. Even the images included are often of snow, nondescript shadows, or blurry figures. “He refuses, he is in the stairwell, he disappears,” she says of her brother in Nox. “I am looking along time into the muteness of my brother, It resists me. He refuses to be cooked, a historian might say.” In The Glass Essay, she
names Law, her ex-husband, at the very beginning, and we know he has left her in September. But other than the spare memory that floats up, there is little concrete description of him– “He left in the morning... He moved back...He stood in my living room and spoke.” He is not mentioned after the halfway point, and a writer who conjures memory and character like Carson could surely have brought him to life. We can only assume that Law, like her brother, evades her.
From then on, the essay describes Carson holding her life up to the light to examine it, to see through the glass to something true. In Nox, she coaxes what she can out of the dark, out of the vast blank history that separates her from her brother. It opens with an explanation: “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds, but death makes us stingy.” The last spread, “vale,” the last word from Catullus’ poem, translates to “farewell”. “He refuses, he is in the stairwell, he disappears.” closes the work. If The Glass Essay is full of questions, and Nox of certainties, perhaps we settle on their middle ground, on the answer that is produced when moving from one to the other. From The Glass Essay: “She said, ‘When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them? Why keep watching? Why not go away?’
I was amazed. Go away where? I said. This still seems to me a good question.” This question rises back up at the close of the essay, and the last words describe a ‘collective body’ imagined by Carson: “it walked out of the light.” We are the ones with the question now. Walk out of the light to where? The clarity of Nox answers us: into the night.
Melodrama Profile
Writing Sample
In Green Light, there is a production stem that Lorde refers to as The Forest– a collection of synths, instruments, and vocal interpolations. There is a video of her sitting at a mixing table, pushing up on tiny tabs that pull up The Forest from the rest of the song. The white-hot “ahh, ahh, ahh..and they bite you...” gives way to the lush orchestras of whispers, memories– “The Forest... maybe I made a mistake...when all the doubt is creeping in, all that emotion–” she lifts her finger on a tab- “ then you just snap it back!” and the chorus floods in again. “That house-y bit that comes in feels like ‘I can take it from here’, and you almost don't know why the song goes there, and then it’s revealed to you... kids dance to it, and it’s so intricate in structure but also reads like a pop song.” Melodrama almost immediately begs the question: “Why must we party so much?” What gap in the psyche does a room full of bodies and sound fulfill? These are questions all young people reckon with, knowingly or not. Lorde does not shy away– across the forty-one minutes that comprise the album, she delivers both shrugs and commanding answers, she throws her drink back and stumbles on revelations.
Lorde describes the voyeurism of trying to inspect a party as almost a covert operation– an undercover spy taking notes. One cannot fully understand a mystery religion before being indoctrinated. Across the album, she takes pills, smokes, drinks until she blacks out– “trying to get one last look at the evening, at everything, before it’s gone.” On Sober, she trades swaying with a crowd with a dance with the truth– “I’m acting like I don’t see every ribbon you used to tie yourself to me...But my hips have missed your hips...Will you sway with me? Go astray with me?” This track, following Green Light, sets the foundation for a night built on mutual destruction, postponed heartbreak, frozen feelings. “Bodies all through my house, I know this story by heart, Jack and Jill get fucked up and possessive when it gets dark” Later on the track, “In the morning you’ll be dancing with all the heartache, and the treason, all the fantasies of leaving, but we know that, when it’s over, in the morning, you’ll be dancing with us.” Who is singing? Lorde won’t answer until five tracks later. It comes after the wild night that is Homemade Dynamite, the crown jewel of the party anthems. Her hand under a lover’s shirt, telling “all her best lies”, dancing with her shoes off– everything is “awesome”, the night is endless, and even when she ponders getting into a car with a drunk driver: “We’ll end up painted on the road, red and chrome, all the broken glass sparkling”, nothing can pierce the neon blue bubble of her night. But, if this album is a house party, there is a window open on the top floor, cool air rushing in like memories.
Melodrama takes much of its structure, naturally, from Greek tragedies, but also from films and novels. Like a shot-change to a memory vignette, or a daydream in a novel, we are briefly pulled away from the party and transported to another space and time, one full of hot days and romantic text messages. Lorde would later refer to this quality as a “portkey”: the fictional object from Harry Potter that transports those who touch it to a different place. The Louvre opens with hindsight: “Well summer slipped us, underneath her tongue, our days and nights are perfumed with obsession”. It’s a sprawling guitar love song, one that brings the listener back to the subject of Green Light or Sober, and unwinds the mystery that shrouds this ex-lover. This process– of tracing the lyrics about supernatural love to the guy who lied about loving the beach earlier in the album– makes us wonder that perhaps we are not leaving the party momentarily, but going deeper in. The chronology is not horizontal, but vertical. Up until the last few songs on the record, Lorde transports us in this way, in and out of memories, up and down the floors of the house.
This magic of bringing the listener so vividly into singular moments in time is perhaps most potent on the tracks Hard Feelings and Supercut. Hard Feelings walks us through the last moments with a lover, and Supercut splices together the ensuing heartbreak and memories. Drawing the last seconds of a relationship into an entire song, her heartbeat rising during the verses: “'Cause I remember the rush when forever was us, before all of the winds of regret and mistrust, now we sit in your car and our love is a ghost, well, I guess I should go, yeah, I guess I should go.” We are swallowed up into her mind, the heaviness of their shared history weighing heavy on our ears, falling away with the slow synth of the chorus, “These are what they call hard feelings of love, when the sweet words and fevers all leave us right here in the cold''. During the bridge, abstracted synths that sound like metal clashes build themselves into an abstracted version of The Forest from Green Light, and we hear every memory engulf the other until the air in the room is empty and stark. In this space, Lorde ruminates on solitude, and it is one of the spare places on the record where she is alone– “Three years, loved you every single day, made me weak... Now I'll fake it every single day, 'til I don't need fantasy, 'til I feel you leave... I still remember everything, how we'd drift buying groceries, how you'd dance for me//I'll start letting go of little things 'til I'm so far away from you, far away from you.” The lines unravel like a broken knot.
Hard Feelings takes the film reel and draws out the frames-per-second, and Supercut snips it up and rearranges it. The track collapses time and space until there is only liquid memory from which Lorde delivers lines like, “I play a supercut of us, all the magic we gave off, all the love we had and lost”. The film reels overlap, “So I fall//into continents and cars, all the stages and the stars, I turn all of it//to just a supercut.” The punchy choruses and verses rise and fall, the bridge is punctuated by a scream that silences the composition, and over the building synths, she sings a line that shimmers above the rest: “Because all the moments in the dark, oh, wild and fluorescent in my heart.” If the song is Lorde feeding a composite super-8 film strip into a cinema projector, this line is the singular image that is pushed through by a ray of light.
Both the image of a glowing light and the sense of being weakened by love come back up in both Writer in the Dark and Liability starts with silence, the voice of a man counting down, and Writer in the Dark has the atmosphere of a middle-of-the-night revelation– we are in that room, at the top of the house. Both tracks are sung to a subject, and parallel each other: “Says he made the big mistake of dancing in my storm, says it was poison” from Liability and “Break the news, you’re walking out, to be a good man for someone else”. From there, they expand from the loneliness shot at her by one person to the isolation she often feels from the entire world– “Hated hearing my name on the lips of a crowd, did my best to exist just for you.” and “I’m a little much for e... e-e-e-everyone.” Liability ends perhaps with a long stare out of that open window, as she ponders her disappearance “into the sun”. It is here where it’s important to note that Writer in the Dark comes a few tracks later than Liability, after the night drive of Hard Feelings and hangover of Sober II. This story does not close with Lorde’s quiet resignation into oblivion. Writer in the Dark is a spell of inner strength. She sings about the suffocation of a lover, and the brave world she’s chosen instead. One can listen to Liability as a question, wondering if who she is will push everyone away– and Writer in the Dark as an answer– “I am my mother’s child, I’ll love you ‘till my breathing stops”. In an interview, she says that she is a writer before anything, and that it is “what [she’s] been this entire time, what [she’ll] still be after you leave.”
This journey brings an image of her dancing to mind, pushed around by a sea of bodies, sizing up the gap between herself and the people pressed up against her. One might imagine the intense, artificial simplicity that drunkenness imposes on situations, imagining yourself sober and wondering “what an idiot,” while you do something that will in turn make sober you wonder, “what an idiot.” We can see Lorde, her diamond brain soaked in liquor, pondering her journey. Perhaps she stumbles to the bathroom, stares in the mirror for a second. Liability Reprise is that mirror. Thoughts dart around, on partying, on the initial question of why we bother to crowd together under colored lights, of who people see her as and who she’s always been, and seem to land on who she might be. Her phrases are incomplete, nebulous synths and snippets from the original Liability swimming around, until the only full sentence lands: “But you’re not what you thought you were.” The solitude she shunned on Green Light and the loneliness on Liability seem to coalesce on this track, and instead of a mounting grief, Lorde seems content with not only the person she’s become, but with being alone. The track ends with her warbling voice telling the listener to leave. The first time I heard this track, I felt a hot feeling creep up my neck. Maybe she did too, before stepping back out into the crowd to finish the night off, to the tune of Perfect Places.
In the same way Homemade Dynamite never stepped over the line between hedonism and melancholy despite the mention of a fatal car crash, it seems fitting that an odyssey like Melodrama ends with a dance anthem that calls up her potential suicide. Brimming with the anxiety of the times, “I hate the headlines and the weather”, Perfect Places is a weapon of hedonism. I became a fan of Lorde after her social media hiatus began, but through an archive of her posts I found a poem that accompanies the track: “Where all the boors lie sound and still//And all the pains you’ve tried to kill//When you have said goodbye to grace//Then you are in the perfect place.” This is the part of the night when your friends convince you to do things you probably shouldn’t, when nothing seems that bad because you know you won’t have the privilege of hindsight. Lorde went to a remote island to finish writing Melodrama, and spoke about getting out of the shower to find a black dog in her room. She finished Perfect Places there, and you can imagine her, with her wet black hair, standing ten feet away from a hound like a totem of gracelessness. The party has spilled into the garden, the backyard, someone has run down the street, someone’s throwing up, someone’s blowing the speakers.
Melodrama would go on to accumulate more than two billion streams on Spotify, a nomination for album of the year at the Grammys, a Best New Music certification from Pitchfork, and countless accolades. I never got to see her tour the album, I wasn’t a fan when the promotional materials were circulating, and when I did become a fan, she would leave the public eye for some 4 years. This gave her work an almost classical sense, like staring at an artifact in a museum, frozen in time. Since Melodrama, I have kept up with all of her artistic endeavors– a book about Antarctica, an album about summer, an interview with Hunter Schafer– but none come close to what Melodrama did to my life. Not because her work has declined, but because nothing will compare to being inaugurated into a world where her work exists. The years after I heard it, some of the lines, “We were wild and fluorescent//Come home to my heart” or “But in our darkest hours, I stumbled on a secret power//I'll find a way to be without you, babe” were so limpidly heartbreaking that for a time, they were the only things I could think about. In this way, Melodrama has become as much about the tangible music as its effect on my life– I still rewrite the closure of Hard Feelings in my notebook, on the margins of papers, post-it notes– turning index cards into talismans of personal strength, napkins into a reminder of her layered breath falling away to reveal words that aim straight at the heart.
Fiction, comparative literature, literary review