Memoir

The House as Metaphor

Elina Ansary

Last fall, shortly after I started my Master’s degree in visual art at Cornell University, the bloody, genocidal chaos erupted in Gaza. College campuses across the US became the battleground for a ferocious debate. It was a discomfiting time to be a Jewish Muslim Afghan American in a university setting. All of my artistic research centers on my heritage and how it shapes my perception of reality and time, compounding my sense of having nowhere to hide. And then one morning, I woke up to the news that Trump had been re-elected.

In 2023, shortly after I started my Master’s degree in visual art at Cornell University, the bloody, genocidal chaos erupted in Gaza. College campuses across the US became the battleground for a ferocious debate. It was a discomfiting time to be a Jewish Muslim Afghan American in a university setting. All of my artistic research centers on my heritage and how it shapes my perception of reality and time, compounding my sense of having nowhere to hide. And then one morning, I woke up to the news that Trump had been re-elected.

My graduate school experience put the ongoing chaos of the world into sharp focus. One fact stood out clearly: we live in a framework constructed from violent hierarchies that relegate us into separate categories of varying privilege. Our unsinkable human survival instinct has bred into us, mechanisms that enable each of us to stay alive within this flawed framework. The paradox is that our survival tools depend on the framework, and by trying to survive, we also participate in it and thus reinforce it.

Audre Lorde’s short essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, explores that paradox. She contemplates what it means to be welcomed as an under-considered afterthought into a white feminist academic conference, urging us to develop new tools in favor of upholding a framework that wasn’t built to take care of us. She says, “Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference–those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older–know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.”

Those of us who have been forged in the crucible of difference – these words resonated for me, a person built from paradoxical combinations. In a world where our differences determine our room assignments, I hover in hallways, ducking from room to room, unsure where to place myself when my primary defining feature is my contradictory identity.

Zooming out, I see a divided and polarized world where our differences have sorted us into teams, and the teams are tearing everything apart. When you play for multiple teams, the fight loses its logic and unravels. That day, watching the 2024 election results rolling in, watching the whole middle of the map swell to an angry red, it looked like the unraveling was gaining speed. I saw myself, huddled in the blue cluster in the east, my parents across a hostile sea on the west coast, my sister adrift in Florida.

Where can we possibly go from here? The prevailing feeling is that our system is broken beyond repair, and it’s time to rise up. I agree wholeheartedly with that, but I wonder what ‘rising up’ actually entails, and if it has to be a complete dismantling.

Let’s think about the metaphor of a house. The house, in this metaphor, is our society, our civilization. perhaps our world. We all live in the same house but we see different corners of it. The few who sleep in the master’s quarters see the comfort of their four poster beds, the silk drapes. Those of us shivering in the attic know the house needs a major renovation. But how do we fix this house?

It feels like we’ve been renovating for years, refinishing the floors only to rip the boards up again, painting the walls until chunks of plaster come raining down on our heads. It won’t work to simply switch bedrooms–that still places some people in the attic. And besides, people who sleep comfortably don’t take kindly to their duvets being ripped from their beds.

I think many people can only imagine revolution as a complete dismantling. I can understand that. At a certain point, a house may be so rotten that the only pragmatic thing to do is demolish it and start from scratch.

But the problem is, if you tear the house down, you have nowhere to live. And furthermore, there are people sleeping in the attic: the elderly, the sick, the children, the refugees. If we set the house on fire, they perish with it.

We know we can’t fix this house through a thousand tiny repairs, not when the structure is crumbling. And it’s not enough to walk around pointing out the cracks in the foundation.

We know we need a house where every room has a comfortable bed, and where, downstairs, there’s a table laden with food, and there’s a seat for everyone. A house with leaders and caretakers, not servants and masters. But how do we build that house without creating rubble, without sacrificing the most vulnerable among us?

I ask this question because I know what happens when the whole house comes down; it’s what happened to the house my father grew up in, in Kabul. When that happens, you’re left with rubble. I have only seen my grandfather’s house through shaky camcorder footage recorded 38 years after my father left Afghanistan. There was no roof, and children dressed in rags were living under the crumbling stairs.

From the rubble, it wasn’t a phoenix that rose, but a monster with the haunted eyes of those children, all grown up and forged in the crucible of ruins.

Let me offer up another house as metaphor: the house in which I was raised.

When my parents bought what would become my childhood home, it was a real fixer-upper. They bought it for a song, and they had no more money left, so my dad renovated it with the help of his carpenter friend. They soon discovered that termites had infested the house’s very bones. They found this out when my father put his hand on a supportive beam in the basement and it crumbled into dust.

What a disaster! They’d sunk every penny into a house about to topple over. They had a young daughter (my older sister) who would have nowhere to live if this house fell down. But the carpenter had a plan. He built a whole new joist system alongside the old one from a type of wood impervious to termites. Only when the framework was firmly in place would they remove the infested, crumbling beams.

Finally, the day came to remove the old joists. My father was terrified, “Are you sure it’ll work?”

The carpenter shrugged, “No. I’ve never done it before. But I think it will. Now– when we remove the joists, listen for a rumbling sound or a creaking. If you hear anything–run.“

So, they took a leap of faith. They had rebuilt the house from the inside out, feeling around in the dark, imagining it into existence, and thus managed to save the house without knocking it down. Thirty-eight years later, the house still stands.

Now, in my metaphorical house—my society, my country, my world–the broader framework seems to be rotting a way all around me. Today, I will go to my studio and lock the door. Art is the best tool I possess to help conjure a new framework from the void that surrounds us now. I hope you, too, will pick up the tool you wield best, and start the work alongside me.

When I go to the studio, I remember the words of my great great great great grandfather, an 18th-century sufi mystic buried in the earth beneath that land of rubble:

Know that if you launch, you will arrive
Attempt, and you’ll reap bounty
Play your part: aspire
The cosmic soul will notice your desire

–Sheikh Sa’duddin Ansary
(Translated to English by Tamim Ansary)

One Day at Pelton Dam

Tamim Ansary

One day in the summer of 1973, I found myself wondering how my experience of life would have been different if I had been born 40,000 years earlier. It wasn’t the first time such a question had popped into my head and it wouldn’t be the last; but in the summer of ’73, I was approaching my 25^th birthday, and that date felt important. At the time, actuarial charts calculated the average life span of an American man to be 75 years. In a few months, therefore, a third of my life would be over. It felt like this next birthday would mark the end of one stage in my life and the beginning of another. The end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood. A dim perception stirred in my subconscious then, that after the second stage there would be a third stage. I’m in that stage now.

Science tells us that modern humans evolved at least a hundred thousand years ago. So the people putting those amazing paintings on the walls of caves in Europe and Asia 40,000 years ago were just as human as you and I: physically they were indistinguishable from us; their language was just as sophisticated , their emotions just as nuanced, their social relationships just as complex. So I coudn’t help but wonder: if I were living back then, would I have felt just like me now?

I remember the occasion vividly because a group of us had gone to eastern Oregon that weekend, to a place overlooking the Pelton Dam reservoir. There were nine or ten of us on the outing. Glenn and Claudia were there, as I recall. Viki was there … David? Margo, maybe? Teya…I don’t remember who all else but we were close, those people and I. We thought of ourselves as family, sort of.

The terrain around the Pelton Dam reservoir wasn’t a state park or anything. It was just undeveloped terrain, maybe BLM land. There was no paved road to the place. We drove down a dirt road to get there, two or three cars worth of us. There was no parking lot. We just stopped and got out, and there was the lake, a mighty reservoir created by the dam, and surrounding it was Eastern Oregon pine forest and grassland right to the horizon on every side. We were the only people there. No other cars, no other people to be seen. In 1973, spots like that weren’t hard to find. There were fewer people on Earth back then.

We’d come to Pelton Dam that day to take peyote. We sat next to the lake, and drank the water we’d soaked the peyote buttons in and then consumed the buttons themselves. They tasted foul, but we consumed as much as we could hold down without retching. That’s how it was done. When the peyote was gone, we just hung around together and chatted and enjoyed the perfect temperature, waiting for the effects to come on. They came on so subtly, we didn’t notice the transition. Some of us drifted away from the group, and then more of us drifted away, and then more of us until there was no “us”. The group had dissipated into the woods and shrublands. Each of us was alone and on our own now.

Around mid-afternoon, I found myself high on a slope overlooking the lake. At first, I thought the world was perfectly silent, but after I had been sitting there for a while, and my attention had calmed down to near-total stillness, I realized there were actually many threads of sound woven into this silence.

The air was in motion, and the faint breezes raised rustling sounds when they moved through the grass in open patches between the trees. If I had been here 40,000 years ago, my experience would have been the same. There were birds making their bird sounds, not continually but sporadically. They were letting out little bits of music as they went about their business. For them, it was just another normal day. And it was just a normal day for the insects too … beetles busy with their work…occasional crickets springing out of some shrub and making a dry whistle as they flew to other shrubs…

It struck me that the world surrounding me had a sort of harmonious singleness to it. All these little details—the breezes in the leaves, the crickets, the birds, my own breath, the lake—all of these details added up to some single picture. It struck me that no one else was seeing this picture. No one else ever had or ever would. The picture needed me there to exist at all. Some other day, after I was gone, someone else might come to this exact spot and a picture would exist here again, but it wouldn’t be this picture. It would be their picture, steeped in their sensibilities, threaded with their memories, situated within their life story…

Then another sound caught my attention. And when I say “caught”, I mean snagged like a hook snags a fish. The entire universe of sounds I had been noticing blurred into a single background against which this new sound stood out. The new sound was a series of taps. It went like this: Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap.

This wasn’t just a sound. Read it aloud and you’ll see what I mean. This was a sound only another human would be making. Therefore, this was not just a sound. It was a message. In this case, of course, given the set-up, I knew that the human in question was one of my friends, but that’s not the important thing. What’s important is the way that sound instantly transformed the Big Picture that was the world in which I had been alone. Now I was in a universe that contained another human—and that made all the difference.

What I did then was pick up a stone, find a tree, and start tapping; except, I altered the rhythm. I said to this other human: Tap-tap Tap/tap/tap Tap-tap Tap/tap/tap

The other person responded: tap/tap tap/tap tap/tap

And so it went. I heard a message. I tapped a message. It was a reflex: the automatic human thing to do. We could perhaps have developed a system for sending messages with content if we’d kept at it, but for that moment, we both knew what message we were sending each other: I’m here. Are you there? I’m here. Are you there?”

And it felt to me like that was the fundamental first message we instinctively impart to other people. As soon as we detect another human on the scene, we start beaming out the message: HUMAN HERE. HUMAN THERE? HUMAN HERE! HUMAN THERE? We want to find each other.

As I write this, I’m reminded of the thing dogs invariably do. You see some guy walking his dog, let’s say a fluffy little thing the size of a rabbit—it’s trotting along obediently and happily behind its owner—then, suddenly, here comes a lady, with an English wolfhound 15 times its size—the dogs spot each other. Whoa! Instantly! For both those dogs, the whole cityscape and us humans within it blend into a blur of background against which the single most important thing can stand out: DOG HERE! DOG THERE? As soon as they’re released to follow their urges, those dogs run toward each other and do what dogs do, confront, circle, sniff butts, wag tails, whatever.

That fundamental message can get more sophisticated of course, but fundamentally “Hi, I’m Mike, I’m a Scorpio, what’s your sign?” is first of all that fundamental message: HUMAN HERE! HUMAN THERE?

Eventually that day, after drifting about, aware of one another in these woods, we drifted together again, me and my friends, drifted together until we formed, once again, a group. We built a fire then, and we heated up the things we had brought to eat, and we had a picnic, and we lounged about enjoying the beauty of that spot and chatting, and I probably told my friends about realizing that nature was full of noises, and someone probably said they saw a hawk from remarkably close, and someone else chimed in with some experience they’d had, and we all leaned in to listen to our various accounts of our various experiences that day.

And that’s when I got to thinking: what if this were 40,000 years ago and we were a group of humans living in some spot just like this, somewhere in the world? At some point in our typical day, we might very well have done some version of what our little group was doing now. We would have dispersed earlier on to hunt and gather and explore, and then at night we would have gathered with the rest of our tribal band to pool whatever food we’d obtained, and we’d tell one another what we’d done and seen. And as we chatted, we’d have been preparing our food: pounding it, peeling it, mashing it, cutting it up, roasting it–whatever food preparation involved at that time. Then we’d have gathered around the fire to eat our food and share our stories.

Of course our version of this basic activity was different than theirs would have been in superficial ways. I don’t know what they would have been wearing, but our garments would certainly have been different : they didn’t know how to make things like shirts and pants and shoes; these were all inventions, which came later. And if they built a fire, it would have been an elaborate task: they didn’t have matches. Their food would have been raw and unprocessed. They would not have had bread. Bread had not been invented yet.

But other parts, deeper parts, of this experience we were having in 1973 might not have been so different from the one our ancient human forebears would have had. For example, that sense of camaraderie we shared, sitting around our fire: that would probably have felt much the same. In 1973, when I looked at the people I was with that day, it stirred in me a warm sense of “these are my people.” I didn’t parse that feeling to identify what features we shared, what made us part of the same Our-People. I just felt it and I liked the feeling.

But I know that in my case, at least, that sense of belonging to some shared us-people was illusory. The little band of folks who were with me at Pelton Dam that day remain warmly remembered friends, but I haven’t seen most of them for years; some of them I haven’t seen for decades. If this were 40,000 years ago, the people around the fire sharing stories with me would have been people I had known from birth, would have seen every day of my life, and would know until the day I died. That’s one way, a big way, that human life is different now than it was 40,000 years ago.

Death on the Installment Plan

Tamim Ansary

Recently, someone asked me what books have had a big impact on my life. I went blank for a moment, even though, until I was in my 20’s, I inhaled books the way speed addicts snort coke. Then a novel popped into my head: Death on the Installment Plan, by Louis Ferdinand Celine. I read it the year I moved to San Francisco and started working for an outfit called The Asia Foundation, my first real job.

The novel is about a young boy from a very poor family in Paris whose parents are desperately trying to equip him for life by placing him in some situation that can grow into a career. Ah, but he’s a scamp, oblivious to his parents’ desperation. He just wants to run off and play, and what can you expect? He’s a little kid, that’s how little kids are: it’s the Pinocchio syndrome. And so we follow this kid through a series of circumstances his parents put him in, each one more hectic and awful than the last.

All of these episodes follow a pattern, but the one I remember best is when the little boy’s parents apprentice him to a man who publishes a magazine about inventions. It’s a bustling enterprise with a wide readership, because it’s the early 1900s, a boom-time for technology, and lots of people are fascinated by inventions. When our hero is given a place there as an errand boy, his parents feel like, phew! Finally, they’ve found a niche for him! Here, their little boy can learn marketable skills and become employable. What he’s got his foot on is the first rung of a ladder, and all he has to do now is climb that ladder, rung by rung, climb and climb: eventually he’ll be in a position to earn a living as a respectable member of society.

But a crucial portion of the magazine’s money, it turns out, comes from a contest it runs periodically for inventors. People send in blueprints of gizmos and gadgets they’ve invented, and the magazine picks a winner. They publish an article about this winner and give him a prize. The magazine has some status, so winning the contest confers prestige on the winner and gives him a leg up on securing a patent and getting investors interested.

But it does cost a little money to enter the contest. Not much, but a little. The magazine gives out only one cash prize, a sizable one, but the magazine rakes in tons of money, because most of the would-be inventors competing for the prize are kooks, basically, and there are tens of thousands of such kooks in France in this era. Eventually the kooks realize that 99.9% of them have no chance of winning the prize, and were never intended to, and they begin to picket the magazine. The pickets turns into protests, and soon mobs of kooks are closing in on the offices of the magazine. The publisher and the boy escape with their lives, and the boy goes back to being just another penniless urchin with desperate parents.

Later in the book, the parents get their son, now a young man, a job with a private school in England. He’ll be earning a salary, learning administrative skills, and picking up English, which will land him translation jobs in the trading sector when he gets back to France. What his parents don’t know, however, is that the school is coming unraveled. Its buildings need repairs, it owes money, some of the teachers have left. The school officials can’t let any hint of their troubles leak out to the parents or to anyone else really, because the school’s survival depends on the tuition money flowing in. That money will keep coming as long as the parents think the school is still running and their kids are actually getting an education. So the school officials keep publishing ads, keep sending out report cards, keep giving the parents and public a rosy picture of the learning environment—while in actuality, they’ve lost their buildings and property, they’re living in tents in the parks, and the remaining faculty and students have devolved into a horde of petty criminals foraging through the neighborhoods like feral creatures.

This book is embedded in my memory because as I was reading it, I saw that Celine was illustrating a profound truth about social reality—its existence depends entirely on belief. As long as everyone believes a social institution exists, it does exist. All the enterprises Celine dramatizes operate on the belief of others that they are what they say they are, and as long as the belief is solidly there, the enterprises do just fine, they can keep going. As soon as the belief starts to fade, the enterprise begins dissolving into an illusion.

As I mentioned, I was working for The Asia Foundation at the time: it was my first “real” job, by which I mean it was the first job I had that was appropriate for a person of my supposed credentials and social background. I was born into a family that enjoyed respect in Afghanistan on account of its intellectual traditions. I came to America where I was a curiosity from an exotic place that nobody had ever heard of at the time. Somehow this was a plus on a college applications. This distinction was the one real asset I brought to the table, but with this chip, I was able to get into some well-respected schools: first Carleton College, and then Reed, from which I graduated with a B.A. in literature. Presumably, this gave me the tools to make something of myself; but I didn’t know how to make any actual thing of myself. For the first six years after graduating college, I had lots of jobs but none that required the college degree I had earned. I was an assembly worker in a furniture factory, then a warehouse clerk, then a postal worker, then a waiter.

The only thing I really knew how to do was read books for edification and enjoyment; so the only thing I could think to be was a writer. The works I liked to read were short stories and novels, both literary and commercial. So when I sat down to do what writers do, I wrote short stories and novels. I sent the former out to magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly; then to literary magazine such as the Paris Review and Ploughshares; then to eccentric little literary magazines such as Jabberwacky and Briccolage—oh, you haven’t heard of those? Well, that’s my point. Even those magazines, which paid only in contributor copies, usually sent back form-letter rejection slips. With those rejection slips, they sometimes included subscription forms.

Sometimes, these magazines which paid zilch also charged money for reading your work. If you wanted to submit something for consideration, you were welcome to do so: you just needed to include a check for ten dollars and a stamped, self-addressed return envelope. Sometimes, some of these magazines ran contests. The winner got a cash prize and a credit to tout when they went to publishers with their novel.

Such was the world I saw around me the year I was reading Death on the Installment plan and working at the Asia Foundation. Celine was describing both the Asia Foundation where I was working and the world of literary magazines that I was trying to push my way into.

And what was The Asia Foundation? It wasn’t something that existed in objective reality as a material fact. It was an idea that existed in the social landscape only because many people could see it. We told the world we were an entity that sent people to poor underdeveloped parts of Asia, places like Afghanistan; there, our people looked for interesting projects that needed just a little money to get over some hump; and we gave them that little bit of money. Wherever we did this, seeds sprouted and good things grew. By making this case, we convinced people who had money to give us some of that money so we could do this wonderful thing that we did.

Were we really watering seeds that grew into lush gardens? Well, you know, nothing’s perfect. As long as people believed we were doing it, the money kept coming in. We all got salaries. We paid our rent. We bought groceries, we went out to eat. We took vacations. Belief was the fire we had to keep feeding, in order to keep our enterprise going.

Let me interrupt myself to note: The Asia Foundation actually was busy trying to do what it said, and it did have some good projects, and it might have been doing them too, for all I know. But what did I know: I was in San Francisco, the projects were in Asia. The point I want to press is this: whether or not we were successfully doing what we said, we would have said we were, because our existence depended on saying it and on people believing it to be true.

As soon as I saw this about the Asia Foundation, I could see it in everything around me: because the landscape I lived in most significantly was not the physical world but social reality. Social reality felt as solid as the material facts of the physical universe I could see with my eyes and touch with my fingers. Yet its fundamental substance was nothing but a fabric of belief shared among a crowd of people. Clubs and countries and corporations, fellowships and foundations and communities—they all felt like they existed in the same way as rocks and rivers and clouds, but actually, they existed only as incarnations of belief. Mountains are something we see because they are there. Countries by contrast are there because we see them. This was the idea that emerged for me out of Celine’s novel Death on the Installment Plan, back in 1978, when I was working at the Asia Foundation, laboring to be a writer who would, I assumed, not be appreciated until long after he was dead.