“Everything in here was found in the dumpsters,” Jason Bischoff-Wurstle says, pointing to a blown-up image of Dimitri Rimsky’s art studio. In the photo, a mustachioed man in a fedora pokes his head past the edge of a convex mirror, casting his expectant gaze across a room strewn with a joyous excess of furniture: a disco ball; a bamboo plant; a microphone; several barbershop chairs. This is a photo of the inside of the New Haven Clock Company Factory at the corner of St. John and Hamilton Streets, east of Wooster Square, taken sometime in the 1980s. The image hangs on the orange walls of Bischoff-Wurstle’s FACTORY exhibit at the New Haven Museum.

The exhibit takes visitors through the history of the factory, from life to afterlife. To say the factory has an eventful history would be reductive. Clocksmith Chauncey Jerome, who helped turn clocks from luxuries into everyday consumer goods, built the factory in 1842. It was bought by the New Haven Clock Company in 1853. In the early 20th century, it came under the direction of Walter Camp (better known for revolutionizing American football) who launched the factory into the production of wristwatches. Half the factory was destroyed during New Haven’s urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s, when much of the surrounding housing was razed and population displaced to make room for a highway. 

But when the Clock Company went out of business in the 1950s, the building’s activity didn’t cease. After a couple decades of holding companies leasing individual rooms, Tony Yagovane, a New Haven resident, bought the building in 1980. Here the building was born anew: out of a deteriorating semi-vacant space arose a lively home for artists and weirdos of all stripes.

Yagovane offered the space to people on the cheap (Dimitri Rimsky reports paying 100-200 dollars a month for 1400 square feet) as long as the occupants took care of installing gas, water, and electricity. The low rent attracted an eclectic mix of tenants. Yale School of Architecture students hosted an annual “sex ball” in the factory, complete with murals of intersex people. A mime troupe (Rimsky’s “Petaluers”) worked there, as did Paul Rutkovsky and Beverly Richey’s Papier Mâché Video Institute (a dissident activist art group). Brick ‘n’ Wood (an R&B club) and Kurt’s (a gay bar) also operated from the building.

In later years, the Bad Ass White Boys (a white supremacist biker gang) took up a wing on the second floor, and a cockfighting ring sprung up in the other wing. Traffic slowed through the 2000s, especially in the wake of Yagovane’s death in 2005. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street’s New Haven branch briefly considered taking over parts of the factory. The last official tenant (a strip club) was finally evicted after a court battle in 2019. These last few years, according to Bischoff-Wurstle, are the longest the building has ever been vacant.

Listing the history of the factory building like this usually elicits interest, but it’s a rather boring way to tell a story, as Bischoff-Wurstle well knows. The challenge, he says, was to find a way to bring out the history vividly without devolving into chronological narration. Bischoff-Wurstle worked urban renewal and the factory’s history as, well, a factory, into the exhibit. But he designed the exhibit to celebrate the factory’s afterlives. He dug up images of the factory, documents from the urban renewal period, and artifacts from the various inhabitants, and by interviewing Rutkovsky, Richey, and Rimsky at length: an attempt to move the factory’s more recent (and more off-beat) stories into the realm of official “history.” 

What is displayed in museums has been deemed worthy of exhibition. In a way, museums, by assembling records and lending institutional weight to what they display, decide what is and is not history. The factory’s post-clock history isn’t all that old, but Bischoff-Wurstle thinks that by bringing it “into the canon,” it will prevent this “weird nexus place” from being lost forever. Bischoff-Wurstle described the factory as a “place of encounter” and “accidents.” The exhibit, though curated, sought to capture the factory’s spirit of spontaneity, which Bischoff-Wurstle feels has slowly drained from the world we live in. 

Photos by Etai Smotrich-Barr

Bischoff-Wurstle is the Director of Photo Archives at the New Haven Museum. He began arranging the FACTORY exhibit in 2018 in collaboration with Gorman Bechard, who helped found the NHDocs documentary film festival, and Bill Kraus, the owner of a firm that focuses on redeveloping historic buildings. Kraus has worked in commercial real estate for over three decades, primarily dealing with rundown buildings that haven’t delivered on their economic potential. The exhibit, which opened in February 2020, was supposed to be the last of three major factory-related projects spearheaded by Bechard, Kraus, and Bischoff-Wurstle. Bechard and Kraus were jointly working on a yet-to-be-released documentary about the factory and its afterlives. At the same time, Kraus was working with the Oregon-based Reed Development Corporation to turn the space into affordable housing for artists.

What exactly “artist housing” meant was a bit of an open question. In the early 2000s, Kraus spearheaded the conversion of an old department store in downtown Bridgeport into 61 “affordable artist live-work” units, which, he said, has been the “catalyst for a renaissance in downtown Bridgeport,” drawing in “hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in follow-on development.” It’s not public housing—it’s the “private market with public subsidies.” At the time, this kind of reuse project wasn’t in fashion: cities preferred to clear the sites and build something entirely new. But Kraus, who had nearly a decade of experience restructuring failed real estate projects at Citicorp, understood that these old buildings have potential: he saw economic potential where others saw impediments to economic development. But, Kraus explained, it’s not just business: “I fell in love with old buildings when I was 10, and it’s stayed with me as a passion,” he said. “My mother was a preservationist. I do this in part because I love these buildings and all these stories.” When Kraus came to New Haven and learned about the factory, around 20 years ago, he saw similar potential. He found that the factory had both the right historical significance and physical dimensions to be his next project. 

Back in the museum, Bischoff-Wurstle vouched for Kraus: “Bill’s not full of shit,” he said. And indeed, Kraus has probably been more committed to seeing the building through the next phase of its life than anyone else. After the death of their father, Tony Yagovane’s daughters sought Kraus’ advice in doing “artist live-work as an homage to [Yagovane].” Kraus described Yagovane as an “outgoing and fun kind of guy” who had been aiming to convert the building into something like artist live-work housing since the 1990s. Yagovane’s dream, and the work he’d started in 1980, was to create horizontally organized spaces cared for and lived in by artists free from institutional pressure and high rent. From the start, Kraus was a believer in preserving that legacy of the building as much as the building itself. Over the years, he’s tracked down the former residents of the factory to figure out coolness. Kraus is largely responsible for reconstructing its latter-day history based on the memories of the Yagovane children and on physical artifacts found in the building. 

After determining that a redevelopment project was feasible, Kraus conducted a survey of artists to gauge interest in living in the converted factory. The survey, distributed by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven and the New England Foundation for the Arts, among others, received 300 respondents. Kraus called it the “biggest, most successful artist survey [he’d] ever done.” 

When looking at the survey results, however, Kraus was surprised to find that only ⅓ of the respondents were artists of color in a city with a population that was ⅔ people of color. What Kraus found is that New Haven’s established arts institutions, often affiliated with Yale, were alienating to artists of color. “There really is a lot of racism in New Haven around arts and culture, which was a surprise to me because I had not encountered that elsewhere,” Kraus said. He envisioned targeted outreach to artists of color to secure housing for and promote visibility of the non-white arts scene in New Haven. The goal was for the area and its eventual residents to make themselves known as an alternative to the New Haven arts establishment. “No one,” Kraus said, “[would] ever…be able to say ‘we don’t know where the artists of color are.’” They would be in the factory.

To understand why people live where they do, it is helpful to look at histories of local development. The area around the clock factory didn’t used to be a distinct neighborhood. In the 19th century, Wooster Square was a broad term that included both sides of what is now I-91. The area around the central green, what we now call Wooster Square, was home to several businessmen and shop owners, including James English, a major financier of the clock factory. Wealthy and influential men like these lived in homes designed by prominent New Haven architects like Henry Austin. Because it was convenient to have labor near the factories, Italian and Irish immigrants were housed in the area when they came to New Haven. As wealthier residents moved away to escape what had become New Haven’s industrial center, Wooster Square transitioned into a fairly dense “little Italy.” By the mid-20th century, it retained its architectural heritage—but not the wealth that came with it. When urban renewal became the order of the day, highway construction was imagined as a way to connect New Haven to a new commercial network and to revitalize the city in the face of industrial collapse. Faced with this supposed imperative, New Haven had to decide: which areas would be sacrificed on the altar of economic progress? Where would the highway be built?

When the area was slated for clearance after World War II, residents began to organize around Wooster Square’s architectural heritage. In the late 1950s, Ted DeLauro (father of Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro) worked with Yale architecture students and the newly formed New Haven Preservation Trust to make a case for Wooster Square’s historical value. The NHPT succeeded in routing federal funding for urban renewal into home repair in Wooster Square. That is to say, “redevelopment” money that had for decades been used to clear housing was used to maintain and renew the older townhomes. The townhomes on the other side of I-91, as both Kraus and Bischoff-Wurstle said, were often no different from the majority of the ones in Wooster Square. In the 1971 form nominating Wooster Square for the National Register of Historic Places, the delightful homes on Court Street were described as “tenements which were the worst housing in the area.” But because wealth was inscribed architecturally in the homes of men like James English, the residents of Wooster Square were able to move the highway a few feet east, and spare their own neighborhood.

Because the homes on the wrong side of I-91 were razed, they never got the chance to become “historic.” While what gets deemed historic (as opposed to say, shabby and expendable) in the housing market has everything to do with profit, these designations emerge from a historical process that unfolds along class lines. If the exhibit and the documentary use the language of historical preservation, then, so too does the housing market. Pointing to a picture of the neighborhood around the clock factory before urban renewal, Bischoff-Wurstle identified a row of now-destroyed homes as a place that today would be deemed “historic” and make the landlord a pretty penny.  “Who picks what a slum is?” Bischoff-Wurstle asked rhetorically. “The banks and the government do.” 

This is a short and simplified version of events. It can be read as a victory: the Preservation Trust modeled the economic potential of saving rather than destroying old buildings. But ultimately, what was demolished and what survived is telling. “History” is associated with wealth. Historical preservation is also self-perpetuating: when Wooster Square was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971, part of the reasoning named this very historical preservation effort as a reason Wooster Square was a historically significant place. 

One of the only other things to survive the clearances of the 1950s and 1960s was a public housing development known as Farnam Courts. Farnam Courts was built by the then-newly established Housing Authority in the 1940s with money from the federal government. This form of public housing began “as a big housing production program post the world wars,” said Karen Dubois-Walton, the Executive Director of the Housing Authority. “It was supposed to be federally supported middle-income housing,” until the federal government shifted tactics and began pushing for suburban housing. 

The result? What was at first a nominally racially integrated development with hot water and built-in community space saw its better-off (and often white) residents leave for West Haven and Hamden. The construction of the highway right next to Farnam cut it off from what had been its neighborhood and left it as some of the (if not the) only housing between I-91 and the Mill River. As the federal government pulled more and more money away from traditional public housing efforts like Farnam Courts, they fell further and further into disrepair. In 2012, the Housing Authority, through the nonprofit Glendower Group, relocated the residents and began tearing down Farnam Courts to rebuild it as the mixed-income Mill River Crossing. 

Kraus argues that the practice of tearing down old buildings is counterproductive. Not only does it destroy something of historical value, it also stymies further economic growth. “These [historic] buildings are the engines of development,” he argued. In this sense too, Kraus is seeking to restore the factory—if its first life was as an industrial economic engine, its next one can be an economic engine as a housing development. 

But Kraus’s vision of affordable housing for artists of color fell apart a few years ago, as Reed Community Development and its affiliated holding company, Taom Heritage New Haven LLC, began to neglect the site. A 2016 report found that the factory had unsafe levels of radium  attributed to the paint used in wristwatches during the Walter Camp era. Connecticut’s Brownfield Municipal Grant program has set aside $700,000 for cleaning up the factory site. In 2018, the city of New Haven approved a redevelopment project with money for environmental cleanup and a tax abatement for construction, but since then, the city has claimed that Reed failed to pay what taxes it did owe and allowed the site to fall into further physical disrepair. In August of 2023, the city agreed to buy the foreclosed property from Taom Heritage. 

Now, the city has passed the site to the Housing Authority of New Haven, which is hoping to recover the site with “most of the remediation done.” Karen Dubois-Walton, Executive Director of the HANH, is eyeing the site for conversion into up to 100 units of mixed-income housing. Dubois-Walton explained that the present-day model of housing began in the late 1990s with the demolition of Elm Haven, then the oldest public housing development in the city. Elm Haven was replaced by Monterey Place, a mix of market-rate, partially subsidized, and low-income housing. 

This mixing, Dubois-Walton said, creates “more vibrant” communities and “doesn’t just segregate poverty” in the same way traditional low-income housing like Elm Haven and Farnam Courts does. Crucially, mixed-income housing is easier to get funding for. “Lower income public housing ties the Housing Authority’s hands on funding,” she added, noting that you can’t raise capital via federally backed mortgages for these developments—the federal government will not back projects that are composed solely of affordable housing. 

In an astonishing reversal from the urban renewal period that saw highway construction and home demolition as an economic winner, today’s vision casts housing as the catalyst for community development and economic growth. Dubois-Walton described the process as a sort of spillover effect—when housing gets built, it can “spark and spiral out and pull in other investments,” according to her. The clock factory site sits diagonally across from Mill River Crossing, a 2018 HANH development of just under 100 units-cum-retail space. Dubois-Walton is hopeful that connecting the new factory housing with the existing Mill River Crossing can create “synergy” and turn “one product into so much more.” 

New Haven needs more housing—according to Dubois-Walton, the city faces a severe “underproduction of units”—but the institutionalization of housing and its centralization under a government agency seems to run counter to the ethos that Yagovane and then Kraus sought to implement. Instead, issues of plausibility and financing dominate discussions and low-income housing tax credits and historic restoration tax credits cover the costs. Kraus admits that if he “could have waved a magic wand, what he would have liked to do, what the family would have liked to do, is create artist condominiums…and sell them so it really belongs to the artists.” But we’re short on magic wands, and so all that’s left of the vision is “millions and millions of dollars” in the red column on the balance sheet. If the “dream” was artist-owned co-op-style housing, it was always, given the need to create a well-financed sustainable project at-cost, impossible. 

At this point, everyone’s hoping the building stays standing. “Time beats the hell out of these things,” Bischoff-Wurstle said, and he’s right. Parts of the building that were functioning businesses five years ago are now crumbling brick walls with giant holes. The building has survived improbably, impossibly, even when there was no one to defend it. The factory, as both Kraus and Bischoff-Wurstle have it, played host to the best days of some people’s lives. The latter spoke bleakly of what he called the “ouroboros,” the snake eating its own tail, the process by which coolness springs up in shady places, hidden from power—only to be consumed by wealth, time and time again.

Separating history from wealth is a difficult task. But for Bischoff-Wurstle, that’s the point. The factory is a weird, skeevy, unsanitized place, a “place of innovation and fermentation,” and it is that spirit of innovation and irregularity he wants to preserve. It is the spirit of hiding the bed in the wall when the fire marshal comes by because you couldn’t have residences in an industrially zoned area. It is the spirit of being able to make art without worrying about paying the bills: as Bischoff-Wurstle said, “New Haven has been called the cultural capital of Connecticut. If people can’t afford to do culture, what are we?” It is a spirit of youthfulness, instability, care, and spontaneity. But all of those things, at least in the context of the factory, are history now.

The post CHANGING HANDS: The New Haven Clock Factory and Urban Development appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Take a look at Mark Rothko’s Untitled (1968) – the blue background displays a deep sapphire shade that, although obstructed by large black blocks, nonetheless hypnotizes and radiates an overwhelming, solitary gravity. The colors wash over and swallow the viewer. The work draws the gaze in, appearing as a diveable well into the infinite and unknown. One feels empty, subsumed by the void before them.

At least I feel that way, but maybe the blue doesn’t do it for you. Maybe you think Rothko’s color fields are just a bunch of paint blobs. Or maybe he’s just one of the many great abstract expressionists. Many, if not most, view Rothko in these latter ways, not leaning towards a more emotional interpretation. It makes me question if I invented my interpretation from nothing, and if my experience is legitimate. Since Rothko’s color-fields reduce two-dimensional art to its most fundamental elements – shapes, textures, and, crucially, colors – his works are the perfect basis to explore the effect of color in its most primal form, as simply the shade, the pigment. Can color, specifically blue, because I find its depth uniquely powerful, limn the ecstasies and tragedies of life and elicit real, justifiable emotions? Or am I playing a trick on myself, divining something out of nothing? Am I just unbearably pretentious?

“Blue” is what we say to refer to 450 to 495 nanometer wavelength light, sandwiched between “green” and “indigo”. It appears occasionally in nature: in certain minerals, hydrangeas, and the iridescent rings on a blue-ringed octopus, but it’s rare. For things in nature to appear blue, an organism’s cells must absorb longer-wavelength, lower-energy light, which demands more energy from the organism; only niche evolutionary paths can produce an organic blue.

Early humans didn’t employ blue at all, with primeval cave paintings only marked by charcoal blacks, and clay reds and yellows mixed with fat and fire. Ancient Egypt made the first-known blue, “Egyptian blue,” from mixing copper, sand, and calcium in a furnace. Out of that crucible came a glassy material of copper silicate, which, when ground up, gave the new power of a previously-unattainable pigment to the surfaces of the world. Blue became part of the human palette.

Egyptian blue, however, would be lost between the exchanging hands of history, as the Romans didn’t know how to make it. They used alternative methods: ancient sources detail a week-long process of mixing efflorescent copper-mash, violet petals, fat-based soap, and urine to obtain “azure-blue,” which can be purified by adding lime, other flowers, or sealing it in a process similar to wine fermentation. New shades of blue popped up in the human lexicon.

Until the 19th Century, these intensive copper-based methods persisted. Blue pigment would cost artists and patrons greatly, while people throughout the ages sought finer and more efficient methods. Semi-precious minerals, azurite and lapis lazuli, were the other primary sources of blue pigment, demanding significant labor and cost to extract and make usable. Azurite was relatively common and contained dark and light-blue specks, with a greenish hue. Lapis lazuli, on the other hand, bore a deep, weighty blue that waxed purplish. More expensive than gold, lapis lazuli, also called “ultramarine blue” (a deeper blue than the sea), was highly valued for its luster and pure deep-blueness. Ultramarine was found in the Ajanta Caves in India, decorating the colossal Buddhist monuments. In Renaissance Italy, it was almost exclusively reserved for depictions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. This blue, the deepest blue, was only used in religious and regal imagery due to its rarity and cost. It’s rumored that Michaelangelo left The Entombment unfinished because he couldn’t procure the funds for ultramarine pigment. Blue maintained a lofty, opulent quality that projected an august gravity.

The 19th and 20th Centuries brought new techniques for pigment synthesis, which brought down the cost of color, especially blue. Synthetic ultramarine and a new “Monastral Blue,” another deep shade, began to be industrially produced. Blue of all kinds was no longer only for kings and Christ. Blue can be found from Monet’s plein-air impressionism to Rothko’s color fields. No longer exorbitant and widely unusable, it could become and mean anything.

The Yale University Art Gallery offers blue in many flavors and fragrances, particularly with their modern works. We have Braunes Mädchen (Brown Girl) (1921-3) by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, an oil painting of a glancing girl wearing a brown headscarf, almost shrugging (is she diffident or indifferent?). Brushes of blue occupy the tilted walls in the background, and the shades of blue reach over to her cheeks and eyes. 

Rooms by the Sea (1951) by Edward Hopper shows the interior of a lonely sea-side room: the threshold at the left hints at a living room with velvet couches and an obscured photo, and the right opens up to the sea, as if the room were in the middle of it. The sapphire water contrasts with the muted blue of the sprawling shadows. When I saw it, the solitude desolated me, as if I could be swallowed by the sea, menacingly edging into view.

Untitled (1954) by Rothko – not to be mistaken for the 1968 one – is brighter, mostly orange and red, but a faded field of sky-blue sits on the bottom third. It’s a monolith, ninety-three by fifty-six and three-sixteenths inches, and the lightness of the blue held me for a while: the shade was in its dissipating moment, and if I looked away for even a second, it would be gone.

Modern blue can be the shadows on an oceanside inn, the walls and air surrounding that encapsulate us, and even a formless field, marking a revolution in color. Were modern artists conscious of this revolution? The historical record offers nothing specifically, but modernist movements obsessed over the use of vivid colors. Picasso had a “Blue Period,” then a “Rose Period,” largely referring to his palettes during the respective eras. Matisse had his Blue Nudes, made shortly before his death, lithographic cutouts of abstract women in classical poses, colored ultramarine against white backgrounds.

Interior at Le Cannet (1938) by Pierre Bonnard could offer a commentary: vivid lapis flowers sit at the compositional center, as if the blue constitutes a distinguished rarity, but it subtly lies elsewhere throughout the painting: in the floor patterns, on the walls, in one splotch in the top-left corner. Maybe Bonnard was being satirical: this once-revered pigment is now everywhere, profaned. Did modernity profane blue? Once rare and elevated, it now signifies nothing concrete or specific, almost at risk of entirely losing meaning – are we just to derive sadness or solitude from looking at the pure blue of a Rothko? Perhaps blue possesses its own meaning, somewhere between 450 to 495 nanometers, or maybe we killed it.

“Depth, trust, loyalty, sincerity, wisdom, confidence, stability, faith, and intelligence” is what comes up on the first website (supercolor.com) when you Google, “what does blue mean.” “The color blue represents both the sky and the sea and is associated with open spaces, freedom, intuition, imagination, inspiration, and sensitivity,” continues supercolor.com. But, doesn’t the sea also represent danger and peril as in, for example, the Odyssey? Blue can mean cold, since it’s the color of ice, but fire, when extremely hot, becomes blue. So can’t blue also mean hot? Essentially, the invented symbolisms of blue are barely inherent to its hue.

The site claims that blue “calm[s] and release[s] feelings of tranquility,” which enters the world of chromotherapy, a practice which posits that colors inherently have therapeutic and even medical applications. Chromotherapist Samina Yousef Azeemi offers that simply seeing colors can treat “cancers, SAD, anorexia, bulimia nervosa, insomnia, jetlag, shift working, alcohol and drug dependency.” It should be well noted that scientists believe that chromotherapy is pseudoscience, with any emotional effects from color likely placebos, though color does elicit basic reactions for most people. If the inherent symbolism of blue is undefined, then certainly its visceral effects (which I felt with the first Rothko) are even more doubtful.

It’s easy to feel the awe of God in the Sistine Chapel or intense agony in an El Greco painting, as faces and scenes we see as our own are present, but, in a modernist world, when elements of art become abstracted, when forms and components no longer have the firm anchors of traditional realism, color itself may not fill the vacuum of meaning that traditional and realist art left. I worry that we lost emotion in pre-modern art, and that we cope with modern art, especially the more abstract, through inventing loftier, more erudite (and even more elitist), and less relatable concepts with which we nonetheless attempt to relate. I sometimes think that I feel about the 1968 untitled Rothko the way that I do because Rothko is “important,” and I should be feeling something more than what’s on the canvas. Perhaps the ultramarine blue captivates me only because I wish to be captivated.

But I won’t ruin Rothko for myself. Maybe blue doesn’t have any inherent meaning, and it has to rely on human-made cultural contexts: it must be rare to feel special, and it must only be used with Christ or Mary to feel divine. But, what if “meaning” and “interpretation” are besides the point? What if we allow ourselves, in spite of the instinct to glean validating “meaning,” to simply feel the work and embrace whatever comes up? I say go to the YUAG’s Modern and Contemporary Art section and pick out a work that’s interesting (it doesn’t have to be blue). Don’t read the blurb next to its description, and just look at it for as long as it keeps you. Let the experience be for you. Indulge in it.

I mean, consider the Ancient Egyptians. They didn’t need to invent Egyptian blue – there was potentially no precedence for the synthesis of blue pigment. But, the shimmering blue of the Nile and the deep sheen on the shells of scarabs must have called forth something deeper within them, the recognition of something that so perfectly limned aspects of their being not yet depicted or even depictable. They had to make it for themselves.

The post FEATURE: Sort of Blue appeared first on Yale Daily News.

 The student employee slid the book over to me. 

“Thank you,” I said and walked away. How strange, I thought, that I spend so much time here and yet never think about it. The rows of bound pages seemed to make themselves known at that moment— as if I had never truly seen them before. It was one of those instances where the beautiful absurdity of the everyday pronounces itself without explanation. The complexity of a space we infrequently question, where the terrestrial becomes the center of extraordinary purpose, where you can ask for a book and 48 hours later it appears at a desk. The absurdity of so much learning yet so much silence. 

I brought my thoughts on libraries up with my friend Hannah Szabó. I told her I find libraries a little existential. They are monuments to a scale of knowledge no single person can ever hope to grasp. Libraries stand at the nexus of temporality and knowledge, as guardians of information I know I will never fully realize. They taunt me. Perhaps it is this paradox, the ability to access some of the knowledge in a library but never being able to access it all, that truly stand out to me. 

Hannah added that libraries are spaces where we students go to be surrounded by knowledge, even if we don’t access that knowledge directly. Often we study in places dominated by books, but most of us never actually pick one up. And the ones we do access usually come from a request, not from impulsive inquiry. Again I couldn’t help but feel a sense of curiosity in it all. An inspiring sense of finitude, of ignorance. It filled my mind with questions. 

Hannah supposed that there is a level of paradox about the way most students interact with libraries, but that is part of what makes a library a library. She said that being a person, especially one who engages with learning in the way Yalies do, is in some way to be able to access an encyclopedic level of knowledge. Hannah believes that people desire a vast body of information that is already organized, making the unimaginable accessible. “I think that’s one of the things that makes me feel most alive. It [helps] make life feel most meaningful because without that we are kind of swimming in ignorance.”

She also drew my attention to libraries as more than just physical locations. As a native New Haven resident, Hannah grew up studying in different parts of Sterling Library. She looks back at these moments as integral to her current relationship with education. She noted that she finds “Sterling a very important landmark, not only to the university but also to the city. And I think it does a great job straddling the line between a public monument and a private space for study.”

Hannah’s words helped me understand libraries as both physical structures and symbolic institutions. So much of ‘the Yale experience’ is tied into libraries. It is impossible to separate the various libraries from Yale as a monolithic institution of higher education. I had never thought about the way the libraries had influenced others until they began to influence me. I was filled with a sense of wonder at the power of four stone walls, endless rows of books, the papers written there, and the truths revealed by a library only when one stops looking at its contents.  

But, if I was going to understand the way libraries entrench themselves in our daily lives while simultaneously being spaces of extraordinary purpose, I had to know the system going on behind the scenes.

In an interview with Barbara Rockenbach, the Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian, I learned that libraries see themselves as serving two primary functions: “the preservation of materials and [being] a space where people come to learn.” Rockenbach explained that libraries are designed to help students and faculty with their research, while also being a space of community. She noted that post-COVID the driving force for people to engage with the library, may not be books and journals, but rather the space itself. This is why libraries are a place of community.

I think Rockenbach’s notion of ‘community’ is similar to the way Hannah expressed the importance of libraries to members of Yale and New Haven at large. Libraries are the manifestation of people’s desire to unite in their curiosity for knowledge. Not only are libraries physical locations that enable people to learn, but they also stand as reminders of the great history of people who have devoted themselves to the same effort. They combine the task of learning with a sense of historic grandeur. They combine the importance of the everyday with the powerful abstract. 

Equally important to the community libraries foster are the books they hold, but strangely enough, the majority of the books owned by Yale aren’t held in any single library. Instead, they are kept at an off-campus warehouse, the Library Shelving Facility (LSF). According to Yale’s digital records, the LSF is “an off-campus complex, comprised of an 8,000 square foot processing area, as well as six modules containing 63,810 square feet of shelving space.” LSF comprises “twenty-eight aisles, containing over 50,000 shelves, and currently houses approximately seven million items.” 

Michael Bell, the Associate University Librarian for IT and Administrative Services, corroborated this in our interview: “[LSF] functions like a large warehouse. The stacks go up 30 feet high. A library employee will go up on a kind of forklift to grab a book and then transfer the item from LSF to a library truck. These trucks then move these items all around campus.”

It’s not just the scale of the LSF that is astounding either. The facility has enabled library spaces on campus to be used for more than just storage. Because the LSF houses more than twice the number of books as Sterling, the buildings on campus have more room to make collaborative and private study spaces. Both at the LSF and on campus, there is a lot of invisible labor that goes on behind the scenes. The Yale library system employs over 500 people across campus and is the single largest employer on campus. 

Yale libraries are far more than just physical buildings too— they are also digital repositories used for accessing a different form of knowledge. As technology comes to dominate much of the way education functions, so too is it impacting the institutions that hold knowledge. Rockenbach noted that “librarian work has changed because technologies have changed. Gone are the days when we would pore over print catalogs and make decisions one by one.” Now, libraries have rebalanced that time to collections of service. Individual librarians now have more time to go out and talk to students and faculty.

I learned that in the past few years, there has been a strong push within the Yale libraries to advance technological access to information. There has also been an increase in the university’s acquisition of digital resources such as online publications. This has made it possible for students to request digital copies of books or ask library staff to create digital scans of material. 

However, the role libraries play in accessing knowledge doesn’t end there. Rockenbach expressed the paradoxical transformation libraries have undertaken in the last few years because of widespread access to internet search engines. “The issue used to be a scarcity of information, you went to a library to find information. Now the problem is abundance, there is simply too much.” 

Originally it was the scale of libraries that prompted my inquiry, but I learned that libraries offer a reprieve from endless pages of information online. How could it be that libraries feel so inaccessibly large when they provide much-needed order compared to everything online? Perhaps it’s because the internet is intangible. Because we are unaware of the volume of content within the internet it feels smaller, reduced to the various screens we allow it to inhabit. Whereas a library is a physical structure that proclaims its grandiosity from its inception; after all, it takes a lot of space to house millions of books (as demonstrated by Yale’s LSF). Perhaps this makes libraries another kind of paradox: they reduce the quantity of information into one physical location for easier access, but by instantiating this knowledge libraries make it feel even less accessible than it did before. 

This would, in some sense, explain why the library pronounced itself to me in that unremarkable moment in Bass. Only when one begins to think about the paradoxes of a library does the library itself come to one’s attention.

Let us return to the physical nature of libraries. Unfortunately, even when books are scanned digitally and multimillion-dollar warehouses store books off campus, the issue of space remains. Libraries are forced to decide what information is valuable and worth preserving, bringing libraries into conversations about access to knowledge more broadly. 

When Yale gets rid of books it’s called “deaccessioning.” This most frequently takes the form of donating such books to local libraries or other universities around the country. While some books have become outdated, there is still a sense of obligation to this knowledge. Rockenbach noted that deaccessioning may occur “in the case of duplicates, but we are really careful about getting rid of books. What we are trying to do is think about this idea of ‘access not ownership.’”

Yale libraries don’t exist in a vacuum, but instead in an intricate web of electronic databases shared across several academic institutions. The most prominent is the Borrow Direct system, which unites all the Ivy League as well as MIT, Stanford, University of Chicago, and Johns Hopkins. Over the past decade or so the Borrow Direct schools have moved to reduce the number of copies of books each holds and instead make digital versions of these items more widely accessible. Rockenbach summarized it best when she expressed that “libraries have come to realize that space is a finite thing, so the answer is to decrease the number of print books but ensure we have access to them.”

Daniel Dollar, the Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources, noted that “collections are a service, but they are also a network in terms of trying to preserve bibliographic diversity.” Dollar stressed that libraries exist to ensure people have access to a diverse range of knowledge. This diversity is only made possible by combining the resources of several universities and investing in the infrastructure to maintain it. Bibliographic diversity is part of what defines libraries, and it enables “our stacks to hold up the building,” Dollar said with a wink. 

Bell added, “An important role of [libraries] is preservation. We are in the cultural heritage space as a part of Yale. Just like museums and art galleries.” While preserving physical texts in a building is one thing, preserving that information online is an entirely different struggle. Bell emphasized that it is the libraries’ “role to preserve what we can in a world where preservation outside of libraries is not considered, if at all. It is essential because there is so much out there and most for-profit companies have no reason for preserving things.” 

Bell noted that, compared with the space issue, the topic of digital preservation “is a bigger challenge because the electronic and digital are largely ephemeral. The electronic is subject to change.” When a book is placed in a library it is incredibly hard to change, but electric versions are much easier to alter. Not only does the alteration of digital texts pose an existential threat to the mission of libraries, but it also threatens the integrity of these places as monuments to history. 

Part of my fascination with libraries began with their seemingly eternal essence. The prospect that libraries— serving an important role in a digital sphere— are in some way unable to continue their mission of preservation was deeply frightening to me. Bell reassured me that the Yale libraries are fully equipped to deal with these issues, however, the thought still nagged at me. I suppose that as finite monuments to history libraries choose what history to store and what not to. Therefore, my fear that this history may get lost or distorted is also contingent on larger decisions made by librarians as to what history is worth remembering in the first place. 

The endless rows of books at the LSF now seemed darker in my imagination. Not that they had lost their value, but that the truth of their value was revealed to me as contingent— not eternal. This is a fact that I had known all along, yet refused to confront. A final paradox contained within the beauty of a library’s mission: in striving to preserve knowledge for as long as possible, libraries reduce the transcendental nature of knowledge to a series of finite, pragmatic, and unremarkable decisions. We would be lost without libraries, yet we may never know what we have lost because of them. 

What all started in Bass when I grabbed a book was really a struggle with something I believe all people contend with. Beyond libraries, there is an impasse within our minds when attempting to grasp both the scale and depth of any topic. We can focus on the far-reaching relationships of something, on the way it connects to so many other parts of our lives. Or we can focus on its impacts, the casual and effect it creates, following the chain of events down into the hypothetical. But we can’t do both, not at the same time at least. Libraries stood out to me because at the moment I questioned their depth— how they work— I could no longer see their scale. And when I tried to realize just how many parts of my world libraries came to affect, I could no longer understand the system going on behind the scenes. The library was a reflection of my ignorance, my own paradox. 

Libraries are beautiful reminders of this human truth. They are the center of the extraordinarily mundane that must be celebrated. They stand as monuments to the limits of human knowledge by promising us that we can surpass it. They are the manifestation of paradox and absurdity. They are a mirror of endless pages that invite us to reflect on the truths we take for granted, and the ones that we have yet to discover.

The post FEATURE: Invisible Stacks appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The award that would finance the sneakers celebrated a career dedicated to chronicling the personal and collective stories that make up the Americas. Over two decades, Alarcón has covered, among other topics, Salvador Allende’s cybernetic ambitions (in Spanish, with the Radio Ambulante podcast team), the COVID-19 pandemic in Ecuador’s capital (in English, for the New Yorker), and the aftershocks of political violence in Peru (in English again, throughout his first two books). Alarcón’s work spans and crosses genres, mediums and languages. This Pan-American range takes the shape of his life, one spent navigating the cultural codes embedded throughout the Americas, South to North.

Alarcón was born in Lima in 1977, the year the Maoist group Shining Path decided that it had enough cadres to start a “popular war” against the Peruvian government. Two years later, as the country entered a large-scale armed conflict, Alarcón’s parents, both doctors, left for Alabama. Indoors, speaking Spanish with his family, Birmingham was not so different from the country he had just left—but outside, where he was one of the few Latinos in the area, the distance was indisputable. At eighteen, he moved to New York to study anthropology and creative writing at Columbia. After graduating, he lived in Lima, Iowa, and California before moving back to the largest city on this continent. The hemispheric scope and cosmopolitan tint of Alarcón’s work— they come from this itinerant background.

At least I had that suspicion when I read him for the first time. Back then I was in high school and obsessed, for some reason, with American nonfiction—its novelistic thrust, its heedfulness. Back then I passively believed that the New Yorker was a very well-written website; only months later, after subscribing for the tote bag, I realized that it had been a magazine first. I spent my nights trudging through the Harper’s website, wondering occasionally if it was common for Latinos to write for them, if someone on those websites had written about my country and city with the same exhaustive, delicate detail.

During one of those nights I discovered Alarcón’s eight-thousand-word essay about election night in Lurigancho, Lima’s largest prison. The next day, I listened to Radio Ambulante, the podcast for which Alarcón is the presenter and an executive producer, for the first time. The episode was called La concursante. Near the end of it, the mother of the protagonist begins to sing. The Andean lilt of her voice was the same as my grandmother’s. I was seventeen years old then and had been living outside of my country, alone, for the first time. Over those first months abroad very few things made sense to me. But that voice, its cadence—I understood them instantly.

I don’t say this to Alarcón when we speak over Zoom, but the topic comes up anyway. “When I was your age,” he tells me one morning in November, “all I wanted was to be part of the conversation. I came from Alabama, which is the most random place you can come from in the United States, and before that, I came from Peru, which is the most random place you can come from if you’re in Alabama.” As a teen, his heroes were musicians, painters, poets, novelists. Art made him understand that the world had, somewhere, a space reserved for him. Hence a career dedicated to depicting the personal and historical forces that define our time. “When I was your age, I looked at art as the key to understanding this world we live in. There were things that I read that made me feel less alone. I wanted to be part of that.”

***

In January 2011, Alarcón was writing his most recent novel, At Night We Walk In Circles. He had been working on it for five years, and didn’t seem to be making much progress. “The draft of the novel that I finished was terrible. It was a moment of panic about my talent, my future, and my abilities. And I was like, well, why don’t I try something completely different?”

He and Carolina Guerrero, his girlfriend at the time, had been thinking about starting a radio project. Their podcast, inspired by radio shows like This American Life, would be called Radio Ambulante. It would combine narrative journalism and investigative reporting; crucially, it would be one of the first projects to do so in American Spanish-language radio. Neither of them had significant audio experience, but that didn’t deter them: as Alarcón told The Rumpus in 2014, reflecting on those first days, “Not knowing what the fuck you’re doing is always exhilarating.” 

Alarcón became the host and the executive producer; Guerrero, the CEO. The next year, in 2012, they got married. Instead of a wedding registry, they asked their friends and family to donate to Radio Ambulante’s Kickstarter. (They also fundraised by holding a bake sale in their neighborhood for a couple of days.) By July 2012, these campaigns had yielded about $46,000. Recorded from Valparaíso, California, Tamaulipas and El Callao, the show’s first season put into practice an unifying principle: the three Americas are a single cultural region connected through the Spanish language. 

Early on, some doubted the viability of this pitch. As told by Alarcón in a MELUS interview from 2014, executives at outlets like Univision told him and Guerrero that there was no shared market for a show that compiled stories from across Spanish-speaking South America, let alone Central and North America. A Cuban residing in Miami, a mother in Cuzco, a student activist in Buenos Aires—they all have different backgrounds, convictions, lives. Does it really matter that they speak the same language? 

Alarcón and Guerrero believed so. Yes: Latinos comprised a vast, complex range of stories. But neither Spanish nor English-language media in the U.S. made space to explore these narratives with the thoroughness each one demands. Opening up that space, teasing out the singular, local circumstances that framed each story—that was what Radio Ambulante would do.

As Natalia Sánchez Loayza, an editor of the show, told me, “We’re producing for everyone who speaks Spanish—everyone, everywhere, which is a lot.” Alarcón was aware that this was an ambitious undertaking from the outset: as he said in that same MELUS interview, it would be enough to capture the attention of an interested niche of listeners. Radio Ambulante did not need “to have a massive audience.”

But three years after the bake sale, in 2015, the show hit over 1.5 million annual downloads. The following year, it was being distributed by NPR. Luis Fernando Vargas, a senior editor for the show, told me that when he joined in 2016, the team consisted of six people; now they are 32. And this November, when Spotify Wrapped released its data, Radio Ambulante was in the top 1% of the most popular podcasts on the platform globally.

For most who came of age in the 2010s, podcasts have come to be associated with a certain form and milieu: sour advice (Call Her Daddy), political polemics (The Joe Rogan Experience), or terminally online cultural commentary (Chapo Trap House). But Radio Ambulante has less in common with them than it does with, for example, a magazine like The Atlantic. Their approach to episodes is delicate, rigorous, nearly artisanal: between reporting, outlining, drafting, editing, copyediting and fact-checking, it might take anywhere from five weeks to two years until a story is ready for publication. 

While the exhaustive editing process means that every episode has many contributors, Alarcón’s presence is nevertheless crucial. In the words of his colleagues, his vision and attention elevate every story. “Daniel is the most artistic part of the team,” Vargas tells me. In the newsroom, he brings “the one phrase” that pierces through the team’s vision and “recontextualizes everything.” The result of this collective work is a tight 40-minute episode singular in its detail. The stories move, week to week, from a personal narrative about a love for karaoke to the dizzying street system of Costa Rica or the Venezuelan immigration crisis. They all bear specific, local marks — accents, words, historical notes — of the place they portray. Spanish, here, is deployed with care and attention: not as the dry language of books, but of families and city streets. Suffused with history, refined by its speakers, here the language is spoken as it is lived. 

***

Before the podcast, Alarcón was an Associate Editor at the Lima-based magazine Etiqueta Negra. For the uninitiated, Etiqueta Negra is perhaps best described through Alarcón’s fiction. Near the end of At Night We Walk In Circles, his 2013 novel, the nameless narrator takes a job at a nameless magazine of literary journalism. “At the beginning, we did everything: the writing and editing, the layout and design. We were the accountants, which explains why bankruptcy loomed each month; and we were the custodial staff, which explains why the office was in a state of constant disarray.” 

The similarities to Etiqueta Negra are not coincidental. The job was, in Alarcón’s words, his school: “My education in journalism. I teach a master’s degree in journalism now, at Columbia, but I didn’t get a master’s.” It was at the small magazine that he learned “to report and to edit, learned to be part of a team, to work with other journalists.”

He worked for about ten years with Etiqueta Negra’s small team, producing longform journalism — though longform is a vulgar translation for what may be better understood as marathon journalism. A more apt word might be crónica, a genre that mixes investigative journalism and the literary voice of novels. The crónica, of course, has a long legacy in Latin America. As Yale professor Anibal González-Pérez explains to me, writers Rubén Darío and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájara first shaped the crónica before writing the poetry that would make them central figures of the Latin American modernist movement. Etiqueta Negra, however, was also conscious of American New Journalism — it was equally indebted to the literary tradition of Latin America and the elegance of American writers like Truman Capote.

Eliezer Budasoff, managing editor of the magazine between 2014 and 2016, calls his years working for the magazine both “hellish and full of joy.” During his two-year tenure, he recalls pulling all-nighters before every issue was sent to the press. “Our ambitions were so high and our resources were so low — one usually pays for the difference between those two things with one’s body.” Sánchez Loayza, who interned there from 2014 to 2016, tells me that the magazine taught her “to have high standards.” Alarcón speaks in the same effusive tone: “The people who published in those pages are some of the writers of my generation (and younger, and some older) that I admire the most.”

It was rare to start a magazine of such a high caliber with so few resources. It was more unusual to start it in a young democracy like Peru, which was recovering from the two decades of armed conflict that prompted Alarcón’s parents to migrate, followed by eight years under Alberto Fujimori’s antidemocratic government. That this magazine was also able to publish texts from Martín Caparrós, Susan Orlean, Joaquín Sabina, Jon Lee Anderson, and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa alongside many other young writers from across Latin America—it’s almost surreal.

In a note posted in n+1 in 2008, Alarcón wrote that “Etiqueta Negra has been called (not by us) the finest magazine in the Spanish language.” (In the next line he added, “we’ve been called other, unprintable things as well, but this isn’t really the point.”) When we spoke, Alarcón recounted those years with reverence: he calls its impact in Latin America “legendary.” Even now, referring to one’s time at Etiqueta Negra carries its own gravitas. “It’s as if the New Yorker had died at some point,” Sánchez Loayza tells me, “and you say you used to work for it.”

Some view that comparison as inadequate. Budasoff, raised in Paraná, an eastern province of Argentina, told me he grew up reading the New Yorker online but had never seen a copy in the flesh. After he arrived in Lima to work for Etiqueta Negra, he held an issue of the American magazine for the first time. Immediately he was disappointed. “Many people used to explain what Etiqueta Negra was by saying it was the New Yorker in Spanish. But at that moment I said ‘fuck, no.’” He laughs. “‘Our magazine is much more beautiful.’”

Etiqueta Negra alumni speak about their publication in the past tense, but often the present tense slips in. Listening to them, one gets the impression of an insular, mythical world, now extinct—especially given that when the magazine closed in 2017, it left no official website or online archive. People my age learned of its existence through certain preeminent texts, photocopied and shared in classrooms or reposted in blogs. I have memories of going with friends to the historic center of Lima and wading through large bins of old issues of National Geographic and People to find a second-hand copy of the magazine. In a sense we were in love. The stories in Etiqueta Negra fascinated us; they were like nothing we had read before. Or, we would admit, they were like the stories we had found in the English-language websites. But they were better, we would say to each other. Because they were written in Spanish, and they were about us.

***

In high school, at Indian Springs, Alarcón was classmates with the novelist John Green. They both wanted to be writers and shared, as Alarcón said in 2014, “a seriousness about it that wasn’t exactly normal for adolescents.” While working on his first novel, Alarcón told The Creative Independent in 2018, he would wake up at five in the morning every day to write for a couple of hours. While writing on his latest novella, he moved into his friends’ home for two weeks just to be able to finish the book. In that same interview, he was asked how he managed the responsibilities of his four jobs. “My solution,” he answered, “is to work until I’m dead.”

People notice. In the words of Vargas, the Radio Ambulante editor, “the man is crazy. He works like crazy. And somehow he always finds a way to pick up his son Eliseo from school.” Sánchez Loayza tells me in December that while Alarcón was supposed to be taking a break from Radio Ambulante, “he’s never truly on sabbatical.” And Elda Cantú, a former editor of Etiqueta Negra and current editor for the New York Times, tells me that when she and Alarcón worked together, she noticed he was deeply absorbed by his reporting. “He was always very curious about the people he met. By talking to him, you could just witness the way he was thinking about the story, how he was shaping it throughout a day of reporting.” 

I ask Alarcón if he ever had any pragmatic doubts about becoming a writer. “I don’t think I knew how precarious existence would be—or could be, because I’ve been really fortunate.” Even if people had told him, he adds, he wouldn’t have believed them. “I had that young person’s sense of invincibility. I just assumed that things would work out.” 

He tells me that his first job out of college was as a public school teacher. “I would get up at six, be at school at seven thirty, teach all day, grade papers, walk home, make dinner, then write until midnight, then do it again, every day, every day. My friends were living in New York and they were going out, and partying, and some were making a lot of money, and some were simply having much more fun in a traditional sense. And I was like, ‘Well, but I want to write a book.’”

“It’s not like I was a shut-in or anything. I had a life and I had friends. But, you know, if that was what I wanted to do, I was really happy to do it. I knew that it was going to be hard but, well, I grew up watching my parents work. I was never scared of working hard. That wasn’t really an issue.”

Julio Villanueva Chang, the editor-in-chief and founder of Etiqueta Negra, tells me he does not remember exactly how he met Alarcón. But he remembers Alarcón’s first story for the magazine: a piece about the Mall of America. “Dani traveled to Bloomington, gifting us his time and money, but above all his intelligence, generosity, and eagerness to learn.” Alarcón had already graduated from college and was working as a teacher in Lima, in the district of San Juan de Lurigancho. Later, he returned to the United States to work from San Francisco as an associate editor for Etiqueta Negra. “Dani was our chancellor in the United States,” Villanueva tells me. “I was impressed, from the beginning, by his desire to help and commit to a community, even in an adventure of uncertainty like the magazine.” 

A couple of minutes later, he shows me a picture of Alarcón. The writer is wearing a black shirt that reads LATINO-AMERICANO and bright red cleats. He is crouching down over the grass, surrounded by other men in black or bright sneakers, squinting in an expression of mock seriousness. The picture was taken during a lightning football match last October. Alarcón’s team was called Etiqueta Negra, Villanueva Chang tells me. They had just won the game. “A personality like Daniel’s can be misleading,” he adds. “He can be very calm in an earthquake and very euphoric in football. The same happens, I believe, in his commitment to work.”

***

Two of Alarcón’s books and several of his stories take place in an unnamed Latin American city that he describes as a version of Lima — Lima in the eighties, marred by political violence. “The news in the late 1980s and early 1990s never failed to supply a somber, cautionary anecdote starring families just like one’s own, now mired in unspeakable tragedy,” writes Alarcón in At Night We Walk in Circles. “Men and women disappeared, police were shot, the apparatus of the state teetered.” 

My classmates and I were born after the conflict, though nearly everybody in our generation has inherited a story of the war from the adults in their lives. As a teenager, if the lights went out in her neighborhood, Barrios Altos, my mother knew that the guerrillas had blown up a light tower. One of my teachers remembered that, as a child, he only understood the scale of the conflict when, upon turning on the shower, he was covered in both water and feces. 

I have no trouble recognizing the country of my parents in Alarcón’s stories. It’s a strange feeling for someone like me, who spoke only Spanish for the first half of my life and still writes almost exclusively in that language. Alarcón’s novels contain some of the best prose about Peru that I have ever read. But unlike most other descriptions of the country, his works have not come to me in my first language or in translation from it. Alarcón’s English is fluid; it belongs to him the way it belongs to a native speaker. And it’s strange, deeply strange, to read in English about a country that I can only imagine in Spanish. 

It is a curious time to read Alarcón’s fiction. Let me explain. I spent the holidays back home, in Lima, and two days before Christmas I met with Sebastián, my best friend. We had dinner and then walked around Miraflores, an upper-middle-class neighborhood nestled over a seaside cliff. Outside of its commercial center, the streets are placid and cold. Sebastián and I spent the night walking; we had met because he was migrating to Spain soon and we didn’t know when we would see each other again. 

As we walked he told me, laughing, about the time he visited some of his cousins in Italy. Their parents, like Alarcón’s, left Peru as the war started. In Italy the cousins spoke to Sebastián in a Spanish frozen in the eighties. “They called me ‘chochera,’” he said. “I was like, man! Nobody in Lima says ‘chochera’ today!”

I laughed with him. “Do you think they are Peruvian?”

“I feel more Peruvian than them,” he replied. “But I don’t know if I’ll feel like that for much longer.”

A thin, warm drizzle started to fall. I told him that I felt the gap would only widen for me too. But a country needs to be seen from many points of view, inside and out; wherever you are, that’s where you should speak from. “But then maybe I wouldn’t have said this when I was younger. When I was in high school I just wanted someone to listen to me. And sometimes I think that I only say these things, speak from where you are, because now I am the one who lives abroad. Now people can listen to me. And I need to explain why they should.”

We turned left then, through Malecón Balta, toward a red tile park at the edge of the cliff. Fifty meters under us, taxis and cars moved north to south, south to north. Beyond them was the sea. I asked Sebastián if he thought that many young people were leaving the country or trying to leave. He said yes. We walked some more. “Actually, I don’t know the numbers. Maybe everyone has always been leaving.”

A year ago, Peru endured one of the largest episodes of political violence since its civil war. More than fifty people were killed by the police during protests following Pedro Castillo’s autogolpe. The government that murdered them remains in power. Alberto Fujimori, the dictator who oversaw a series of extrajudicial killings in the nineties, was released this December from prison against the request of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. And the Peruvian economic miracle, long impervious to the country’s political crises, has ended; last year, the country faced its worst recession in two decades.

And some people, it’s true, are leaving. According to a poll published last September by the research center Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 60% of young adults say they have plans to leave the country in the next three years. Last November, Americas Quarterly reported that in 2022, close to 400,000 Peruvians left the country and did not return—a four-fold increase from the 110,185 who did so in 2021. 

One wonders if countries, like novels, have themes. It’s a strange time to read Alarcón’s fiction because the questions he asks — about violence, migration and the tension between past and present — have reemerged with unusual force in the last few years. They are the questions every young person in Peru has had to ask themselves when confronted with a country sliding, slowly, down the edge of a cliff. 

When I asked Alarcón about the current democratic crisis, he said he saw Peru’s situation as symptomatic of the current crisis of this continent. “My concern is that the democracies, the precarious democracies, of Latin America did not fulfill their promises to the middle and working class. We’re paying the price now.”

He continues, “we — ‘we’ being people who believe in democracy — and the political elites did not prove to young people that democracy was in and of itself something valuable, worth saving. And so now you have an entire region that is tilting towards populism and nihilism. It’s scary and frightening and dispiriting.” 

“But I hate opinólogos. Take this with a grain of salt.” I nod, looking at the clock — in less than a minute our conversation has to end. He’s a busy man. I stop recording and switch back to Spanish to talk about our plans for the week. I joke that I’ll spend the rest of the day thinking of how to translate ‘opinólogos’. Alarcón laughs, and then replies “pundits”—with the swiftness of a reflex, without missing a beat. 

The post FEATURE: Daniel Alarcón’s Americas appeared first on Yale Daily News.

When Charles Childress and Orisade Awodola were small, their grandfather Merritt Hicks told them stories about their great-great-great grandfather James W.C. Pennington. 

“He ran and ran and ran until his feet were raw, and he could run no more,” their grandpa narrated. “And he was a blacksmith, so his hands were aching. And he kept running for freedom, for freedom.” 

“Well, what happened?” the kids asked, scared.

“Well, finally he got to a place where he had to swim across the river,” their grandpa continued, and on and on, until the kids, antsy, wanted to play. But he made sure they heard the full story. Pennington outran slavery. Then, Pennington went to Yale.

On September 14, 2023, Reverend Pennington received his degree from Yale University, 186 years past due. The graduate had long since passed away, but his portrait stood proudly at the back of Battell Chapel. Next to it was a portrait of Reverend Alexander Crummel. The two men attended Yale Divinity School from 1834 to 1837 and 1840 to 1841, respectively, but were prevented from matriculating or graduating because they were Black. At Yale, Pennington was allowed to sit in classes as a “visitor,” but was not permitted to speak.

On stage at the ceremony, Noah Humphrey DIV ’23, who lead the campaign to get Pennington a degree, read Pennington’s words from an 1851 address, his booming voice filling the silent chapel: “I could not get a book from the library, and my name was never to appear on the catalogue. After submitting to this, will anyone tell me that I know nothing of oppression?” 

Pennington had been an early pastor at the first Black church in Connecticut. Now, the congregation of Faith Congregational Church arranged a bus to take themselves to the ceremony. 

Their pastor, Reverend Cleo Graham DIV ’12, stood at the podium and began to speak. “Imagine being a runaway slave and your only possessions were wet clothes, worn shoes, a few stones in your pocket and trust in God… What if your eyes, feet, prayers, and a North Star were your only assets?” Some audience members uttered “Amen.” She felt like she was preaching. 

Tawanda Johnson-Gray sensed the spirit of her great-great-great-great grandfather Reverend Pennington. “Did you feel him?” she would later ask her other relatives. They answered, “Yes, I felt him too.”

After the ceremony, Noah Humphrey returned, tired, to the Omni Hotel. When the elevator opened, inside was a man who introduced himself as Charles Childress— the great-great-great grandson of Pennington. He thanked Humphrey for healing his family. Humphrey broke down in tears.

“I hadn’t had time to process any of this. And I still haven’t,” Humphrey said. “This was the first time that I was able to open up myself, and I was just like, ‘it was a lot,’ and he comforted me, ‘no, trust me, you did such a good job.’” As Humphrey cried, Childress began to cry too.

Reverend Pennington was a minister, writer, civic leader, orator, activist, and abolitionist. He campaigned with Fredrick Douglass against slavery. He aided the return of the Amistad captives to Sierra Leone. He wrote the first textbook on African American history in 1841 and a memoir titled The Fugitive Blacksmith in 1849. He formed the Legal Rights Association in New York and successfully challenged the segregation of city streetcars. He was the first Black student to study at Yale, completing all four years non-matriculated, and later went to Heidelberg University in Germany, which awarded him an honorary doctorate degree in 1849. Why then, student and community activists ask, did it take 186 years to get Pennington a degree at Yale?

Pennington’s descendants have preserved and passed down his story for generations. The family elders, or “griots,” are history keepers. Dr. Orisade Awodola started thinking back to the stories told by her elders in college, when she came across a pamphlet about Reverend Pennington. Wasn’t that the man who her grandpa, Merritt Hicks, had told her about as a kid? 

She visited her great aunt Helen Eula Hicks Pennington Howell, who brought out an original copy of Pennington’s memoir The Fugitive Blacksmith. Howell instructed Awodola to start recording the family’s oral history. In 2001, Dr. Awodola, by then a journalist and ancestral healing practitioner, published the stories of her elders in a book titled Ancestral and Racial Healing: An Umbilical Crisis. 

“It started with me in 1984. There was no ancestry.com, none of that. My aunt made me sit down at her table on her stationary, and write these things in pencil,” Awodola said. 

At the Yale Divinity School, activism to honor Pennington began in 2014, when Vice President of the Black Seminarians Lecia Allman DIV ’16 started cataloging Black alumni as part of Dr. Reverend Yolanda Smith’s “Been in the Storm So Long” project. At the time, the question was not yet if Pennington should receive a degree, but instead if he had attended Yale at all— he was never documented in any official Yale records. It was through her research that Reverend Pennington’s attendance at Yale was established.

By the fall of 2015, campus was abuzz with conversation about Pennington. In the spring of 2016, Allman circulated a petition calling on the Yale Corporation to grant him a degree. The petition gained 509 signatures— to no avail. In October, after continued student activism, YDS Dean Greg Sterling named a classroom and scholarship after Pennington. 

Dr. Elijah Heyward III DIV ’07 served as an alumnus on a committee to commission an oil painting of Pennington in 2018. When he was a student, he had studied the pictures of past graduating classes on the Divinity School walls.

“I would look for the faces that looked like mine, so you might imagine, finding out that James Pennington existed was a remarkable revelation that transformed my view of myself in the larger landscape of the institution,” he said. 

When Humphrey came to the Divinity School in 2020, he saw the painting of Pennington. He was curious. When he discovered Pennington had never received a degree, he was shocked. He started sending out emails, inquiring why this was the case. 

On October 11, 2021, Humphrey received an email from Associate Vice President for Institutional Affairs Martha Schall: the Yale Corporation Committee on Honorary Degrees “would not be open to considering” Pennington for a nomination. The reason? They did not grant posthumous degrees. 

Humphrey pointed to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who passed away before receiving his degree. Schall replied that the “only exceptions” were the “sad circumstances” in which a person “died between the acceptance of the invitation and the Commencement date.”

The response “lit a fire” in Humphrey. He was going to find a way to get Pennington a degree. “I knew I needed to be the force,” he said.

Around the same time, Reverend Graham—who joined Faith Congregational Church as pastor in 2020, drawn to its history and connection with Pennington—started reaching out to Yale administrators regarding the degree. “We don’t give degrees to dead people. That was kind of the cryptic message I was hearing. And it disturbed me. I couldn’t stop there,” Graham said. 

Graham felt an affinity with Pennington. Her own ancestors had been enslaved. She was interested in history and genealogy, and had visited the plantation where her family was enslaved in South Carolina. Under the hot sun, she had tried to pick cotton. She felt like she could picture herself with Pennington, taking off at age 19, sleeping under trees while snakes crawled nearby. 

“And then to have the nerve to end up at Yale University?” Graham said with awe.

Graham grew up in New Haven, and saw Yale as the “cream of the crop.” It was like a “Wizard of Oz kind of place, like this is the castle,” she said.

In February 2022, she was connected with Humphrey, and the two bonded. “Keep up the great work!” Reverend Graham wrote in one email to Humphrey, “You’re making good noise.”

A few blocks away from Yale’s campus, the congregation of Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, where Pennington was the first Black pastor, was invested in the effort too. Reverend Dr. Frederick “Jerry” Streets DIV ’75—their senior pastor and first Black chaplain at Yale—had become a mentor to Humphrey. In worship on Sundays, he would announce any updates on the degree campaign to the congregation.

The fire that had been lit inside Humphrey roared. He began to organize. Over the next two years, he wrote op-eds for the Yale Daily News, messaged and met with administrators, circulated a petition signed by 1,224 people, conducted protests during events, and worked with student groups like the Black Men’s Union and the Black Seminarians. 

“I was considered a black sheep,” Humphrey said. “I was fighting entities that could easily push me away from jobs, push me away from certain opportunities.” 

It was in January 2023 that Humphrey formed the Pennington Legacy Group and reached out to the Graduate and Professional School Senate and the Yale College Council. Then-president of the GPSS, Dr. Nic Fisk GRD ’23, was frustrated that the administration seemed to not “even seriously consider” the calls made by Humphrey. Fisk started studying the Yale Corporation bylaws, which prevented posthumous honorary degrees, and meeting with administrators. 

“There was a sense that people thought this would be a good thing to do, but it didn’t seem like anyone had the stomach to push against the specific route of doing an honorary degree proper, or that they just flat out didn’t think it was going to work, so it wasn’t worth their time,” Fisk said.

On February 23, the GPSS unanimously passed a proposal requesting Yale University retroactively grant Pennington a Bachelor of Arts or Master of Divinity degree, or an honorary degree, calling on the Corporation to amend their bylaws. For its own part, the GPSS formally inducted Pennington as an alumni member of the Senate, and commissioned a portrait of him to be displayed in Gryphon’s Pub. On March 1, the proposal was sent out to the Yale Corporation. 

On March 29, President Peter Salovey attended the annual GPSS Senate meeting. According to Fisk, Salovey said an honorary degree would not be granted to Pennington. Hearing this, Humphrey addressed the senate. 

“When are we going to be the Lux et Veritas? When are we going to be the truth and the light?” Humphrey asked as President Salovey looked upon him. “When I leave here I expect that degree, in some type of way, some type of form, because it means something to me. And if it doesn’t mean something to you? That one, the first Black, student at Yale, has still not received his degree. When we preach education is a path, education is the truth?” 

On April 3, YCC leadership sent an email to President Salovey and Vice President Schall supporting the GPSS proposal. On April 21, the GPSS met with the Board of Trustees for their annual meeting. One of their primary topics was granting Pennington a degree. Fisk said that the trustee they spoke with, Carlos Moreno, was receptive, and something seemed to switch. 

Three days later, on April 24, President Salovey announced that the Board of Trustees had voted to confer the M.A. Privatim degree—awarded in the nineteenth century to individuals unable to complete their studies due to special circumstances—on both Reverend Pennington and Reverend Crummel. 

Although activism to this point had focused on Pennington, research dating back to Lecia Allman’s project in 2014 uncovered Reverend Alexander Crummel, too. He was a priest, scholar, founder of the American Negro Academy, and another Black student who attended YDS but did not receive a degree. Proactively, and to students’ satisfaction, Crummel was awarded a degree alongside Pennington. 

Asked why it had taken until now for the degrees to be granted, President Salovey wrote in an email: “The board of trustees’s decision benefited from the research conducted by the Yale and Slavery Working Group. We do not know of university records that mention the Rev. Pennington and the Rev. Crummell, but the working group was able to bring together published works and other sources that document their studies at Yale.” 

For all those who had been working on these efforts for weeks, months, and years, the announcement was both a surprise and a great relief. 

When the news reached Reverend Graham, she felt like she could finally take “a deep breath, and say hallelujah, this was done, thank you God.” The members of Faith Congregational Church and Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church rejoiced. The day was jubilant.

What made it real for Johnson-Gray was when she saw Pennington’s name on his degree at the ceremony. “It makes me emotional,” she says, choking back tears. “Because he didn’t get to experience that. And, there’s no reason why he should not have been able to.” 

At the reception in Schwartzman Center, after the ceremony, the servers were almost all people of color. Those asked said they were New Haven or West Haven students in high school or college, and worked part-time at Yale. They wore tight black pants, white shirts, black ties, carried black trays, and were for the most part silent. 

One server, a first year at the University of New Haven, said she would have liked to see the honorary ceremony, but, at the time, was setting up for the reception.

“Walking into such an extravagant, opulent space filled with extremely educated, influential people being served by the very people they are claiming to celebrate, it just felt very performative,” Makda Assefa ’26 said.

“It shows that New Haven is a workforce for Yale,” Humphrey said. 

Salovey, in an email, said Yale Hospitality has an “initiative to hire residents of New Haven, which is a diverse city.”

Assefa, who checked coats at the reception, said that all of the Yale students who also worked the event were Black. She was reached out to individually, but most students were hired through the Afro-American Cultural Center. She said she wasn’t told beforehand what the event was, but wished she had known because she would have wanted to attend the honorary ceremony.  

Director of the AfAm House Timeica E. Bethel-Macaire ’11 said a colleague from President Salovey’s office contacted her wanting to offer the employment opportunity to AfAm House staffers first. She said staffers were told the nature of the event before signing up.

The ceremony “felt like a Yale event, not a New Haven event,” Reverend Jerry Streets said. Beyond the churches, according to students involved in the planning process, there wasn’t extended outreach inviting the New Haven community to attend. 

Johnson-Gray said there had always been a “gap” between her family and the Yale community. “We always knew he went to Yale, but we never heard he graduated from Yale,” she said.

After the reception, Johnson-Gray went to The Yale Bookstore. “Because he couldn’t,” she said. She bought pins and mugs and shirts and hats and notebooks and pennants and a license plate and a little silver Yale pendant. This, she now wears every day. It reads: “Lux et Veritas.” 

The post FEATURE: Past Due appeared first on Yale Daily News.

—Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

Suppose you have a chair. Suppose that, whenever you sit in this chair, you experience uncharted levels of rest. You find an inner peace that extends into all areas of your life: your anxiety subsides, your muscles loosen, your relationship difficulties fade, your concentration sharpens. Picture a chair that assures you that, despite the chaos of the outside world, inside you lies an untouchable ball of purity. Picture a chair with all but magical powers. Wouldn’t you sit in it?

For Gail and Richard Dalby, the directors and principal instructors at the Transcendental Meditation Center at New Haven, this chair exists. Or, rather, that is the analogy that Richard frequently employs at Transcendental Meditation (TM) introductory meetings. “Just think of it this way: we’re giving you a technique where every chair you sit in could be that chair,” he explains to his attendees, usually over Zoom meetings on Mondays and Wednesdays. “You don’t have to carry it around with you, you don’t have to haul it when you move. Wherever you are, wherever you can sit with your eyes closed, you are in that chair.” 

I cannot afford the chair—even with a student discount, the four-session Transcendental Meditation course costs 420 dollars. I ask if there are any other options. Maybe I could start off with just one class? Gail says no. I never attend the full course, though I do try to meditate once on my own, in my room, following instructions from an article on the internet. But it doesn’t work. It just feels like sitting. So I spend a month wondering to myself what the secret is. I watch a Youtube video called “David Lynch explains Transcendental Meditation.” Lynch says that, since tasting “the sweetest nectar of life” that is pure consciousness, his negativity has receded. Had I bought the course, would I have felt the same way? Would I have understood all that Richard and Gail say about clarity and bliss? 

Gail and Richard Dalby are two of more than 40,000 certified Transcendental Meditation instructors in the world who—after having completed a residential course, the TM-Sidhi program in advanced techniques, and an in-residence Teacher Training Course that lasts several months—are officially certified to teach pure consciousness for a living. There are 180 Transcendental Meditation centers in the United States. All are branches of the Maharishi Foundation USA, a nonprofit organization named after its founder, Maharishi Yogi. His given name was Mahesh Prasad Varma; his chosen name, Maharishi, is Hindi for “great seer.” The website of The Global Country of World Peace remembers him as a “a cosmic figure caring for the well-being of all mankind.” David Lynch dedicated Catching the Big Fish “To His Holiness.” 

At the introductory zoom meeting, a picture of Maharishi sits at the top left corner of Gail’s screen background. She asks us all to introduce ourselves and talk a little about why we’re here. A woman with four children and six grandchildren seeks refuge from her stressful life. She says that she wants to take care of her mind as well as her body; she’s concerned about her heart problems. One man has trouble thinking straight at work. Another says he’s just interested in “spiritual stuff.” He’s working towards getting a real estate license but is ultimately interested in film—he’s writing a script. “Hopefully,” he says, “something will come of it.” I say that I’m here for David Lynch. Gail tells all of us that we have come to the right place.    

Gail also says, “Let’s just dive right in,” which later proves to be a double-entendre. Transcendental Meditation, she explains, is an effortless technique that brings the mind to increasingly subtle levels of awareness. It involves sitting comfortably in a chair for 20 minutes each day and repeating a mantra without meaning attached to it. That, they emphasize to us, is really all there is to it. 

But if the technique is simple, it still requires highly precise instruction. Richard likens Transcendental Meditation to diving. Diving, with the correct angle, is completely effortless: gravity is what pulls your body into the water. Transcendental Meditation is just the same: under the right conditions, your mind gravitates towards what is charming and pleasant.  I suppose that under the wrong conditions you may as well just be sitting on a regular chair: “If you learn meditation from anyone who’s not a certified TM teacher,” the TM website emphasizes, “you’re not learning the authentic technique.”

I learn through a New York Times article that the first session of a Transcendental Meditation course goes like this: you walk into a quiet room, you meet a qualified professional, and that qualified professional assigns a mantra, in Sanskrit, that is specific to you. They urge you not to tell anyone else your personal mantra, in order to preserve its purity.   

Throughout the introductory session, Richard and Gail tell us more about mantras. Meditators reach a state of pure consciousness, they explain, by listening to the sound rather than the meaning of a mantra. Unlike meaning, sound value is flexible, since “you can experience it quietly, loudly, quickly, on different melodies,” as Richard puts it. He thinks of a mantra as the most comfortable vehicle one could have—“it’s like a Rolls Royce.” Instead of driving you to work, it transports you to the innermost location of your soul. 

Gail and Richard explain pure consciousness in a multitude of ways, which makes me think that it is the type of thing you might just have to experience for yourself. Gail calls it “that field of intelligence which underlies, controls, and constructs everything in the physical universe, including us.” She adds that it is “more of our identity than this is,” this meaning our physical self. Richard says that it is a type of awareness that is even deeper than philosophical thinking. Gail agrees: “meaning is stagnant.” 

Later, when I ask again, they call pure consciousness “our full potential.” 

“But you don’t have to believe any of what we are saying,” Richard says at the end of the meeting—he assures us that the results will speak for themselves.  

In addition to managing the TM center at New Haven, Gail and Richard are national leaders of TM retreats. They have led over 600 retreats over the past 40 years, they tell me, with groups ranging from six to 420 people. The weekend before our interview they held a retreat at a Catholic facility called Our Lady of Calvary in Farmington, Connecticut. For seven years they had a house of their own, a 30-room mansion in Lancaster, Massachusetts. “It was great fun,” Gail says. 

Now they’re looking to build a new bedroom retreat facility in Hamden. They have already figured out the permits, the zoning, and the design—all that’s left is to raise the money. The layout is based on Vedic architectural principles that, as Gail puts it, “take into account a myriad of things.” The site of the house must have the correct slope and proximity to water. The house must be aligned with cardinal directions, and rooms should be placed according to the circulation of the sun. If a home is built correctly, these principles suggest, its inhabitants will enjoy prosperity both in their minds and their bodies. Gail adds that they “take a stand against electromagnetic toxicity,” so their home will not have Wi-Fi. 

“It’s a glorious gift to be able to build a building according to these principles,” Gail says. “And to have our retreats in a building like this would be heaven on earth.”

Gail and Richard believe that there is nothing out there quite like Transcendental Meditation. In fact, they distinguish between not two but three main types of meditation: concentration, mindfulness, and TM. What they do merits its own category. Other practices, Gail thinks, are too “surface-y.” I ask her if she has ever tried another kind of meditation. She says no.

A week later I speak with Milan Nikolic, a 47-year-old software engineer who has been practicing Zen meditation for about 20 years. He is a resident at the First Zen Institute of America, where he sometimes helps with basic meditation instruction. In meditating he has experienced—just as do many practitioners of TM—a kind of happiness that transcends his material conditions or his emotional tendencies. He has found, as he puts it, “a sense of inner freedom.” 

Zen meditation, Milan tells me, “puts a real premium on bringing the mind to a stop and seeing what’s there. Kind of turning the consciousness inward and not projecting a sound or thought or visualization, but just the mind itself, which is Buddha.” I wonder if this state is similar to pure consciousness. Milan believes that Zen meditation “guides us back to our original mind, our true nature, and the essence of who we are.” When I asked Richard about mantras, he said something very similar: they “allow the mind to follow its own nature.”

But Zen meditation, Milan thinks, operates on a fundamentally different philosophy than the one that Gail and Richard subscribe to. He tells me that Zen Buddhism emphasizes the importance of finding answers to life’s important questions on your own in order for those answers to be meaningful. A teacher cannot give those answers to you even if they know them themselves. TM, Milan feels, is different: “TM is saying: I know a secret and you don’t. Give me money and I’ll tell you.” He sees their approach to mantras as proprietary. “It’s like your own special formula, your own special secret sauce, and, you know, you pay for that.” 

Still, if Transcendental Meditation often has a consumeristic, transactional undercurrent, the benefits of the practice are not necessarily lessened by that fact. I ask Sumi Kim, the Buddhist chaplain at Yale, if she sees a problem with meditation often being marketed as a self-help product, and she says no. “I have not found a single case of someone becoming interested in meditation for superficial reasons,” Sumi says. “It is always coming from a place of trying to heal pain or address something that is bothering them. Usually from a place of suffering.” 

Sumi adds that she considers no form of meditation to be superior to others. She has practiced both Zen and Vipassana meditation, and finds both rewarding. She extends that sentiment to religion. “They’re all at a basic level aimed at helping us to be released from the grip of our self-centeredness,” she says. Whether it be through prayer, meditation, or pilgrimage, Sumi reasons, every robust religion offers a path towards transcendence. 

Both Sumi and Milan tell me that TM is a synthesis of other ancient practices. Transcendental Meditation practitioners “have tried to create an optimal system,” Milan says, “by taking things that work from various traditions and crafting them in a way that’s more palatable to a Western audience.” Sumi notes that there is a long tradition of Hindu Yogic practices where the sounds of Sanskrit invoke different vibrational levels, or different kinds of attainments. A book I come across in my research, The Transcendental Meditation Movement, describes TM as “an obscure form of Neo-Hinduism.”

When I ask Gail about Transcendental Meditation’s relation to Hinduism, she is already shaking her head. “We don’t ascribe to anything particularly Hindu,” she replies. “As a matter of fact, Transcendental Meditation allows every single person of any religion whatsoever to fulfill the goals and tenets of that religion.” Gail, like Sumi, believes all religions to share the same purpose: to, as Gail sees it, “elevate ourselves as human beings.” Transcendental Meditation serves that purpose. In evoking a state of pure consciousness, this simple and secular technique introduces meditators to their inner self.

Gail tells me about a time she went to a Bible class and experienced a sudden moment of spiritual clarity. She had realized that Transcendental Meditation is essential to understanding the Catholic scriptures she follows. “And I’m looking around the room thinking—no one here is getting this. Nobody in this room is understanding the true meaning of what he is saying.” 

That is, when Christ declared that “the Kingdom of Heaven lies within,” Gail believes that the kingdom he was referring to was pure consciousness. After all, pure consciousness is nothing if not the deepest level of bliss within each person. Gail adds to her interpretation: “that means that fulfillment of all desires comes from developing the inner self,” she proclaims, eyes wide. “And that’s precisely what TM has done.” 

Gail is not the only person who has found that TM has put into practice what she has previously only known in theory.  She has heard people from other faiths, such as Judaism and the Baptist denomination of Christianity, report experiences like hers. Bill Wilson, Co-Founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, is reported to have said to his instructor that “I didn’t fully understand the 11th step until I started TM.” The 11th step of AA—to improve conscious contact with a power greater than ourselves through prayer and meditation—is often the most confounding for those in recovery. Bill must have felt that pure consciousness, in some sense, brought him closer to God than he had ever been before. 

Accounts like his suggest that Transcendental Meditation does not merely improve relaxation, health, or quality of life. Rather, the experience of pure consciousness proves to many people that fulfillment does not have to be arduously fought and searched for. If there really is a cosmic order to the world, then it makes sense that every person should take part in it. Gail’s Kingdom of Heaven, which encompasses all, exists within the bounds of your own soul. I figure that, regardless of your religious affiliation, that must be an incredibly powerful message to hear. 

Gail hopes that my article will inspire Yale to cover the price of Transcendental Meditation for all its students—especially, she emphasizes, since our student body produces future presidents and doctors. She says that she has met before with the head of the pulmonary department at Yale, to convince Yale to “get on this road,” but they did not listen. “That’s to Yale’s grave detriment,” Gail tells me. “And you can quote me on that.” Yale students are the most stressed people she has ever worked with. The pressure we are under has turned us into “walking zombies.” We are, as she sees it, caught at the surface of things and in desperate need of transcendence. Gail feels that humanity’s greatest tribulations may be linked to a disconnect from the self, and Yale students are no exception. “How are they supposed to learn,” she asks, “if they don’t know who they are?” 

I ask Gail what she thinks the world would look like if everyone practiced TM. Gail says that there would be “no cruelty, no poverty, no disease—or way less disease.” She pauses here to think. “Certainly no wars, certainly no environmental pollution, because when one is connected to the environment they understand that it is nothing other than yourself. Maharishi would call it Heaven on Earth.” 

Gail’s model for collective bliss, I notice, does not require any work, cooperation, or compromise. She likens peaceful individuals to green trees. Just as a collection of green trees makes up a green forest, a collection of peaceful individuals makes up a peaceful community. If every Yale student practiced Transcendental Meditation, the university would prosper. If every person in the whole world achieved inner peace, world peace would result as if by some sort of additive law. 

The togetherness Gail envisions relies on a concept of universal human nature. Each of us can be broken down to the same bare component: pure consciousness. Once you reach into this essential state of being, you ascend to collective understanding. At that point, unity is effortless–effortless, that is, after you have paid the course fee.

The post FEATURE: On the Brink of Pure Consciousness appeared first on Yale Daily News.

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After an initial psychiatric consultation, David, who spoke to the News on the condition of anonymity, was immediately sent to Yale-New Haven Hospital. This was his very first interaction with mental healthcare.

Three days later, he was released from the hospital with the expectation that he would enter longer-term, out-patient care—such as therapy—through Yale Health. Instead, David spent weeks on the waitlist for a talk with a therapist he ultimately never received. He was told his situation was “not that urgent,” he recalled.

David was, however, assigned to a psychiatrist.

He had long suspected that he had bipolar II disorder, a condition characterized by oscillations between hypomania and severe depression. His psychiatrist agreed. “That was basically the extent of the real service [he] gave me,” David said, chuckling.

His psychiatrist recommended he take Lamictal, a popular medication used to treat bipolar disorders, but he warned David about one potential side effect: a “deadly skin rash” called Stevens-Johnson syndrome. Worried, David asked his psychiatrist if there were any genetic predispositions that might put him at greater risk.

“He would just Google these questions in front of me. I kid you not, he would literally go on WedMd,” David remembered.

His psychiatrist suggested a genetic test to allay David’s fears. At their next appointment two weeks later, when David brought up the medication, his psychiatrist suggested the genetic test again, as if their last appointment never happened. Two weeks later, the same conversation, yet again. The test was never ordered by the psychiatrist.

For more than a month, David’s bipolar disorder—a condition which, when untreated, dramatically increases the risk of suicide—was left unaddressed and unaided by either talk therapy or medication.

And when David’s psychiatrist finally prescribed him medication, his symptoms only worsened.

THROUGH THE CRACKS AND ONTO THE PHARMACY FLOOR

A growing number of American college students use psychotropic drugs—drugs that affect the brain’s chemical activity. This group of drugs includes mood stabilizers, antidepressants, and anti-anxiety medication, which are common interventions for mental health issues. Between 2007 and 2018, there was a nationwide increase in the use of nearly every class of psychiatric medication, with the rate of antidepressant use increasing from 8.0% to 15.3%. According to Paul Hoffman, Director of Yale Mental Health and Counseling (MHC), approximately one third of all students who sought treatment through MHC requested to meet with a psychiatrist, roughly 11-12% of the Yale University student body. It remains unclear how many students are actually prescribed psychotropic drugs through Yale Health. Yale Health’s Director of Pharmacy, Bryan Cretella, did not respond to request for comment.

In recent years, Yale Health has been criticized for failing to meet student demand for counseling and therapeutic services, leaving students like David on long waitlists. If they do manage to get off these waitlists, students are often given short and sporadic appointments. The problem is mostly insufficient staffing. With just over 50 employed clinicians and 5,000 students seeking treatment, each therapist would have to see almost 100 students in order to meet current demand—a workload that rules out effective or quality care.

In sharp contrast to the long waits for therapeutic counseling, Yale Health’s psychiatric services move eerily quickly. A survey of 175 students conducted in November 2022 reported that over 60% of Yale students “somewhat agree” or “agree” that it was “easy for [them] to receive a prescription for psychotropic drugs.”

When asked what compelled him to seek psychiatric medication, Michael ‘20, who spoke to the News on the condition of anonymity, cited limited access to therapy as one of the reasons. “Spots are so limited, and time is so limited because so many students are ill. I just [felt] like I needed an additional supplement,” Michael said.

Pressure on Yale’s Mental Health and Counseling services reached a peak in late November when two current students and the mental health advocacy group “Elis for Rachael”—formed after the 2021 suicide of Rachael Shaw-Rosenbaum ‘24—filed a lawsuit against the University, claiming discrimination against students with mental health disabilities. While Yale remains in settlement negotiations, the University announced dramatic changes to its medical leave of absence policy in January. Among the changes was a simplification of the reinstatement process for students on mental health leave.

Still unnoticed, however, are the thousands of struggling Yale students driven to psychiatry by a desperate desire to feel better—to feel happy—only to be met with little support or care from their providers. Students are prescribed serious medications, only to then be inadequately listened to and improperly monitored. Students like David, who need medication for their own safety, but struggle to feel safe under Yale Health’s care.

RELATIONSHIP TROUBLES

Robbie ‘22, who spoke to the News on the condition of anonymity, was first assigned a psychiatrist during their sophomore year. They struggled to figure out how to pair this psychiatric treatment with talk therapy. “Ghosted” by the first therapist they were assigned by Yale, they saw another licensed social worker on an “emergency basis,” Robbie recalled. After their first meeting with a psychiatrist, Robbie received a prescription for Lexapro, an antidepressant.

This, however, runs counter to what many psychiatrists consider to be best practice. Dr. Yann Poncin, assistant professor of clinical child psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, argues that—although there are exceptions—a young patient should only consider pursuing psychiatric medication “[if a] good two, three months of quality therapy is not leading to change.” Though medications can be effective without therapy, Yann argues, there are often issues driving symptoms that are worth exploring first.

Many Yale students would consider themselves lucky to see a therapist for two to three months. For students like Robbie and David, psychiatry became an inadequate substitute for psychotherapy. Robbie’s psychiatrist doubled as an “awful” therapist, they recalled, who would “start meetings late, end them early, [and] open a can of worms.”

David never received a therapist, even while coping with his bipolar diagnosis. “It’s critical to see how far therapy can go before medication comes into play… even just dealing with the side effects of medication requires help,” he remarked. “That’s a journey in itself.”

For students like Claire ‘22, who spoke to the News on the condition of anonymity, who are fortunate enough to receive both a psychiatrist and a therapist, the two professionals often fail to work hand-in-hand, to the detriment of the patient. “Frankly, [it] seemed like my psychiatrist and my therapist weren’t in conversation with each other at all, at any point,” Claire recounted.

Research shows that collaboration among healthcare providers can improve patient outcomes and prevent adverse drug reactions. Some experts believe it is, in fact, essential. Dr. Linda Drozdowicz, a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital, said that collaboration “is something that all mental health professionals should strive to do, since not communicating well can lead to suboptimal care.”

In addition to reporting uninformed and disjointed treatment, some Yale students—such as Sasha Carney ‘23—felt that their providers were apathetic and uninvested. “He was very detached and removed. When he… tried to get me to talk about my feelings, I got the impression that he really did not want to care about them, and I felt no desire or comfort with sharing,” Sasha said of their first-year psychiatrist. “I would often miss my medication or fall behind on my medication because I hated spending time with him, I hated setting appointments with him.”

This sentiment between patient and mental health care provider can have disastrous consequences. The Family Institute at Northwestern University reported that patients who rate their relationship with their provider poorly are more likely to drop out of treatment.

Other students felt that their psychiatrists almost dehumanized them. “Yale psychiatry and medication in general was reductive and not too holistic and healthy in viewing me as a person. They kind of view you as a little chemistry equation,” Michael said.

Students, like Anna ‘24, who spoke to the News on the condition of anonymity, experienced suspicion and distrust from their psychiatrists, which prevented them from being transparent about their symptoms. “When I was trying to get accommodations for my classes, my psychiatrist told me that he wasn’t able to do that…because we could be lying about our symptoms. These were the same symptoms he was prescribing me medication for,” she said. “It was jarring to hear that I could get all these drugs from him, but I couldn’t get medical accommodations for my classes.”

Jaclyn Recktenwald, Program Coordinator of Student Wellness at the University of Pennsylvania, believes these concerns highlight a failure of one of the fundamentals of student psychiatry. “For folks to feel seen and heard, they have to feel like the person they are talking to respects them—trusts that their pain is real,” Recktenwald said.

When psychiatrists fail to listen to their patients, they place lives in danger. In the fall of their sophomore year, after experiencing a traumatic incident during a summer abroad, Robbie’s psychiatrist suggested Lexapro to address severe panic attacks. Almost immediately, Robbie began to feel unsettling symptoms. “I was struggling to swallow, and my tongue was swollen. I thought I was going crazy, but as I kept taking it more and more, it kept happening…and those symptoms were in addition to the rampant anxiety I was feeling from the meds,” Robbie recalled. Robbie’s psychiatrist refused to listen to them, dismissing their concerns and claiming that the medication just “wasn’t at a therapeutic dose.” With no support from their provider, Robbie’s anxiety continued to worsen.

Soon after, they ended up in the hospital.

“ONE OF THE WORST POSSIBLE MEDICATIONS”

Given his concerns about Lamictal’s potential side effects, David’s psychiatrist instead prescribed him Abilify in the spring of 2018. “That really messed me up,” David confessed. “It made it impossible for me to move my body.” Unable to function over his spring break, David called Yale Health, seeking approval to stop Abilify. He struggled to get a hold of a professional, in large part because his psychiatrist was only in-office three days a week. Eventually, after repeated attempts, the on-call psychiatrist authorized David to get off Abilify.

“The moment I got off, I was just unbelievably unstable. I was having the worst manias, the worst depressions of my life. I was in real danger,” he said. The on-call psychiatrist failed to tell David’s psychiatrist that he had been taken off Abilify, so David suffered through the effects of what he believes was withdrawal without an alternative medication.

Eventually, David’s psychiatrist prescribed him the antipsychotic Seroquel to address his paranoia. “The psychiatrist I saw later, after I went home, said that [Seroquel] was probably one of the worst possible medications he could’ve given me,” David recalls. “I was very unstable and the Seroquel probably made it worse,” David said, likely because it exacerbated his anxiety. As his condition worsened on Seroquel and psychotic symptoms emerged, David knew he had to be hospitalized, but was afraid to tell anyone—even his psychiatrist. He finally made the decision to withdraw from Yale.

Because of attention issues during ‘zoom-school’ her junior year at Yale, Claire ‘22, who spoke to the News on the condition of anonymity, reached out to her high school therapist, whom she had previously spoken with about her attention difficulties. Hoping to obtain medication to help her focus through Yale Health, Claire asked her former therapist to write her a letter confirming she had ADHD symptoms.

The letter was enough to get Claire a prescription for Adderall, which derailed her mental health completely. “There would be days where I just wouldn’t eat at all. And I was also having a ton of difficulty sleeping…sometimes I would go multiple days with a total of about six hours of sleep,” she said. “I would be taking two or three shots [of alcohol] a night in order to sleep.

Claire’s worsening symptoms eventually brought her to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “They thought that a lot of the mental health crisis I was in was because I was being completely incorrectly medicated,” she remembers.

A private psychiatrist later told Claire that being placed on a stimulant like Adderall with bipolar disorder is very dangerous—which is why stimulants should never be prescribed without a psychiatric evaluation.“[A letter] doesn’t count,” Claire recalled her psychiatrist saying.

When asked to comment on Claire’s story, Dr. Victor Schwartz, Senior Associate Dean for Wellness and Student Life at CUNY School of Medicine and former chief psychiatrist at the NYU Student Counseling Service, wrote in a March 8th email that, while a new psychiatrist might feel comfortable relying on a patient’s history to continue a treatment, they should “still meet the student and do their own assessment.” The only exception, he continued, is if a patient has been prescribed a particular medication for a long time and is running out. But this was Claire’s first time on Adderall. 

These dangerous errors and lack of standardized procedure may arise from the very structure of Yale’s student psychiatric services: providers are often residents—recent graduates of medical school— who are still in training. Dr. Schwartz wrote in a December 3rd email that “residents are trainees, so by definition less experienced, but often, they have more time to do in-depth assessments too.”

According to Paul Hoffman, Director of Yale Mental Health and Counseling, the program has 12 psychiatrists on staff and 5 advanced psychiatry residents. “MHC sees training the next generation of psychiatrists as vital to its core mission of helping our students,” he wrote in a March 10th email.

For Michael, however, the problem lies not in experience, but in residents’ shorter tenures and, thus, higher turnover. “[O]ver three years—my sophomore year to my senior year—I had four different psychiatrists,” Michael remarked. “With every replacement of a psychiatrist, you would sort of start over with this person and build a relationship.”

Paul Hoffman upholds that Yale’s psychiatrists undergo “weekly clinical supervision, clinical rounds, and clinical teams.” This brings into question, then, how David or Claire faced life-threatening emergencies due to errors their providers made—errors private psychiatrists could recognize immediately.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

With SSRIs—selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most common class of antidepressant—the most precarious time for a patient is the first few weeks on the drug, also referred to as the initiation period. While antidepressants are associated with having a protective effect on suicide attempts overall, in younger people there can be an increased risk of suicidal thoughts or behaviors during initiation of the medication. Because of this risk, Dr. Drozdowicz says, “the standard of care is to check in…in some way at least weekly for the first month,” when adolescents and young adults are first prescribed SSRIs. But when Michael ‘20 was first prescribed Prozac in 2017—after a brief, 30-minute appointment—their Yale Health psychiatrist only checked in with them a month later. At that appointment, when Michael expressed that their symptoms had not improved, their psychiatrist upped the Prozac dose and added Wellbutrin. “From there, it just kept… incrementing upwards,” Michael recalled.

Dr. Schwartz considers this “incrementing” a common problem within psychiatry. “With SSRIs specifically… the therapeutic effects take a while to happen and there is a tendency to try and push the dose up in order to get it working. The problem with that is it can actually increase the risk of side effects as well,” he explained.

The incrementation Michael underwent made them feel emotionally blunted—flat. “I could actually wake up and go do things… but I’m not like ‘happy.’ I’m not, like, excited to wake up but I can exist, I can function,” they described. Michael conveyed these emotions to their psychiatrist, who dismissed them. “Apparently that was enough of a justification to keep upping the dosages basically… as long as I was a working subject within the university, I guess it was fine,” they recalled.

While hasty dosing can cause unnerving side-effects like emotional blunting, abruptly stopping antidepressant medication can make a student’s condition even worse. “Some medications I describe as… like wearing glasses. You can put them on, put them off—you see or don’t see,” Dr. Poncin explained. “Other medications [are] in your system to make changes, more like muscle building and to come off of them, you have to go more slowly.” Antidepressant withdrawal may lead to “Antidepressant Discontinuation Syndrome,” which causes flu-like symptoms, according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. Worse, withdrawal can cause a relapse—or even an escalation—of depression.

For some students, these dangerous withdrawal effects were not their doing—but the University’s. When Anna withdrew from Yale in 2019 on a medical leave to address her mental

health, she lost the insurance coverage that helped her pay for her psychiatric medication and the provider who prescribed it. At that time, students who withdrew were prohibited from enrolling in any affiliated healthcare. “I called [my psychiatrist], and I said, ‘I think I’m going to withdraw’ and he basically said ‘Yeah I think that’s a good idea.’ It was literally a two minute phone call. There was no discussion of how I was going to continue my medication or how I was going to phase them out,” Anna said. Without a new provider, Anna had to stop her medication.

“I noticed pretty immediately that I was having some sort of withdrawal… and a friend [said] ‘Yeah you’re not supposed to just stop Prozac’… and I was like ‘Oh, nobody told me about that,’” she explained. Her symptoms were severe. “It was a lot of suicidal ideation… very very different from how I’d experienced that kind of suicidal ideation in the past,” Anna described.

Yale has since altered its healthcare policy. “All students on medical leave may continue with Yale Health once they take a leave of absence if they have been on Yale Health Hospitalization/Specialty coverage,” Hoffman wrote on March 10th. The Yale Health Specialty Coverage plan starts at $2,756 a full term for enrolled students and skyrockets to nearly $8,000 for students on a leave of absence.

However, even when students are fully enrolled, they are often able to stop medication while flying completely under the radar of Yale’s psychiatric department. When Michael halted their medication cold-turkey, there was “just an assumption” that they were okay, they recalled. “I didn’t pick anything up from the pharmacy, I didn’t email my psychiatrist for refills. Obviously something was wrong. And I was on pretty high dosages. I was on 80-100 Prozac and 150 Wellbutrin… it was interesting that there was no contact,” they said.

The dire symptoms of sudden withdrawals also raise questions about the safety of students—particularly those who rely on the University for health insurance—once they graduate from Yale. “In the case of first-generation, low-income students or undocumented students… it’s kind of like a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure and Figure it Out’ after you graduate,” Michael said.

However, Paul Hoffman sees health care access as far less precarious. “If a student comes from an FGLI background, it is possible that their health insurance may be paid for by Yale College. If a student is newly graduated, they remain on Yale Health coverage through July 31st, ensuring [they have] ample time to arrange appropriate follow-up care,” he wrote.

Despite this safeguard, Michael has seen a number of friends panic about losing their prescription due to financial concerns or impending graduation. “Access to medication shouldn’t be confined to timetables or income brackets,” they said.

A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW

When he was hospitalized at Yale-New Haven for severe depression in 2017, Quinn ‘19, who spoke to the News on the condition of anonymity, was told he was “too much of a liability to the University” by the former director of Yale Mental Health and was asked to withdraw for a year. “She told me that verbatim. It was a two minute phone call,” he said. Within days, his ID was deactivated. Movers were hired to pack his stuff. His dean told him that if she saw him on campus, she would be forced to call the police on him for trespassing. For Quinn, the situation exemplified what is so wrong about Yale Mental Health and Counseling.

“They don’t actually care about making you feel better. They don’t care about making your life better. They just don’t want a liability on their hands. There is never a why that’s asked,” he said, referring to the roots of mental health conditions. “It [is] a very deterministic, chemical thinking.” In the eyes of Yale Mental Health and Counseling, Quinn argues, students are meant to be stabilized, not supported.

Students who struggle to connect with their psychiatrists, build trusting relationships, or receive adequate care deserve proper recourse—an avenue to voice their concerns about the performance of their psychiatrists, for example. But when Quinn met with a Yale College dean to discuss his complaints about Yale Mental Health and Counseling, the dean failed to follow up—or even take notes, he recalls. Paul Hoffman contends that feedback mechanisms are already in place, noting that “students may provide feedback by calling our main phone line and asking to speak to the clinical manager or by clicking on the ‘Provide Feedback’ link on the MHC website.” None of the Yale students interviewed knew these options were available.

Not all students who make use of Yale psychiatric services have negative experiences like Quinn’s or Michael’s, which is perhaps what is most frightening about the system. Desperate for relief, students must take a chance on an unreliable system that could just as easily fail them. “It really comes down to a coin toss of who you happen to get assigned to. Which is just depressing and weird,” Sasha said.

After Robbie was hospitalized, they received a new psychiatrist at Yale, who “went above and beyond” for their health, they said. She was responsive, attentive, and worked to get Robbie on the right medication. “If I didn’t find her I wouldn’t have graduated,” they admitted.

For Robbie, that coin toss worked out. For others, it won’t.

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