Love

I remember the day when I visited your open studio someone walked in and exclaimed, “it’s echoes of your memory!”

Stewart

I remembered that too because I thought it was such a great way of putting it. My paintings aren’t direct memories. They’re built up, day by day, moment by moment, year by year. Something had to happen once, right? And then, there are outward rings from that moment. Our memories do echo for a while. I’m not painting the actual place where the memory happened. It’s different but is able to hold the memory. Through the painting process it becomes something else.

Love

Are you traveling backwards and forwards at the same time?

Stewart

Yeah, I think so. It’s kind of like the two are married—the past and the present. And the memory is directing the painting. It has to show me something.

Love

What do you mean by that?

Stewart

These are great memories, but I’m compelled to paint them, make something present, make something visible. I think there is something else going on. The memory is driving something and helping me to find meaning today.

But the painting, in the end, it’s more than the memory. It brings something invisible and makes it visible. Something about who I am and who my voice is. It feels good to be able to find that in the painting.

Love

What do you think it is about paintings that makes the invisible visible?

Stewart

I think there’s something I can only find in the process of painting. I’m with these paintings for a long time. They take months. Some of them take years. So I’m really getting to know their internal structure. These decisions about symmetry, these decisions about color. How do we expand the space to a world inside them?

Love

Would you say that your paintings take a series of mundane gestures and turn them into something grand?

Stewart

That’s how it started. The technique is based on a natural arm movement—something that the arm does easily. There is something interesting going on with the layering of the lines. Every time you make one mark of a line, it opens up space around that line. Each mark, for some reason, opens up space. And I love that shallow space in a painting that I can kind of inhabit.

The repetition of the swooping lines in my work speaks to me about the continual feeling of the passage of time.  Or the continual movement of time.  Something that is always present, and the work, through my daily process documents that.

Love

Do you associate your paintings with people?

Stewart

This brown painting here. My dear friend who is also a painter, Riley, wears this big brown coat in the winter. The name of that painting is Brown Bear. Whenever I think of that painting I think of Riley and his brown coat.

The little green painting, whenever I look at it, I’m reminded of an ex-boyfriend that I had. While I was painting it I needed to get over that relationship and forgive him maybe, forgive myself. That was processed while painting that.  

Love

Do you associate your paintings with the time you spent working on them?

Stewart

They’re a record of that period of my life. That makes it hard to part ways with them.

Love

How do you know when you’re finished?

Stewart

It’s really hard to know. Especially with paint because it takes a while to dry. And my paintings are so light sensitive and delicate on the surfaces. I can have a painting and think, that’s it, it’s done! But I’ll come in a week or a couple days later, when the paint has dried in, and think, what happened? That happens all the time. So I’ll keep painting.

I’ll have a painting that could be done, but I kind of know that it isn’t quite where I want it to be. So I keep going and going and going, almost to the point of questioning—what am I doing, this is crazy, why would anyone paint this way? And then finally the painting won’t let me do anything else. I feel it in my core that some paintings are done.

The post Echoes of Memory appeared first on Yale Daily News.

He cannot explain why he chose birds. He credits his undying passion to an “amorphous nerdiness,” but by that logic he could have easily dedicated his life to trees or airplanes. “Birds,” he admits, “were sort of random.” And yet, 50 years into birding and 40 years into academic ornithology, Prum has never considered doing anything else. “It’s what I live for,” he tells me.

I met with Prum in his office on a rainy Friday afternoon. The office had the frantic energy of an artist’s studio, cluttered with tea boxes and pictures of birds. Prum spoke about his life with the composure and rhetorical ornamentation of a man who has been interviewed many times, and leaned forward in his chair when he spoke about something particularly interesting. I admittedly did not learn very much about birds themselves, but Prum showed me what it might be like to love them.  

Prum keeps a collection of orange notebooks in the right hand drawer of his office desk. The notebooks chronicle the birds he has seen, what he noticed about them, and the places he went to find them. 

The oldest notebook we look at is his “life list,” a numbered record of all the birds he has ever encountered. He thinks he started it in high school. 

“And then I stopped,” Prum says, “In the middle of grad school. Why did I stop? There was just so much going on in life.” The last number is 1,158. 

“You’d be a top EBirder,” I offer, proud to showcase my knowledge of the popular bird-logging platform.  

“Well, surprisingly not!”

Richard Prum is now close to having seen 5,000 species of birds in his life. He has abandoned the notebook, but he maintains a life-list on a database where he can alter the taxonomy at his leisure.

He writes more detailed observations in his birding and field journals, which read almost like diaries. Prum does not remember birds in isolation from their environment. A notebook from July ’85, for instance, focuses on manakins but also recounts the trains he took and contains drawings of the town. 

“This is last March,” he says, flipping through some more pages. “I’m in Sepilok, Borneo.” Though he means that he was in Borneo, I wonder to myself if he feels, in some sense, transported back to his research trip. 

Prum stars birds that he has seen for the first time: these are “lifers” and “have a certain kind of status.” He cannot always identify the species of the bird at first glance. For this reason, he describes birds with detail, to reference later. 

“Large, tan below, tan and brown above. Long dusty brown tail,” reads one description. 

“A little green fruit pigeon. Tree top male. Brown wings, orange breasts, and a gray head,” reads another.  

“A lot of the time, I can look at these notebooks like, oh, I remember that bird!” Prum tells me. “I can see that bird. I can see the rock it was sitting on. I can see the branch. And that goes back to the 70s.”

“Time travel,” I say.

“Yeah! That makes it worthwhile.” 

A lot of birding is waiting. Birds do not just appear when you want to see them. Sometimes they hide. I read Justine E. Hausheer’s  article on nature.org, “The Lessons of Epic Birding Failures,” and learn that it is possible to leave an intricately planned birding trip having done very little more than sit, silently, staring at nothing. The author finds this frustrating. “This was my one chance to find the trogon,” she writes, “and the stupid bird wasn’t there.” I gather that the birdwatching life demands an unusual amount of mental stamina.

Prum has plenty. After a long day of observing birds and their behavior, he will sometimes go out and wait for owls for another three hours.

“You are in this state of sensory focus,” he says. “You want to hear that bird. You want to see that bird.”

“For three hours?” I say, knowing that the longest I could possibly last in a state of sensory focus is about five minutes.

“I mean, yeah! You’re not gonna see that owl if you don’t try. You’re not gonna see it back in your bed.” His wife, he adds, doesn’t like owling as much as he does. “Not much at stake for her. She doesn’t live and die for this. If I haven’t seen it, I’ll feel shitty. Just like a disappointed 12-year old kid. It doesn’t go away.”

Prum grew up in Manchester, Vermont, which had enough birds for bird watching but not quite enough birds to satisfy his increasing appetite for adventure. He once saw an Ethiopia Airlines advertisement that contained a beautiful illustration of a sunbird and that read, as he recounts it, “There are 45 species of birds that you will never see until you come to Ethiopia.” He was thrilled by the romance of that invitation. But he also remembers feeling intimidated; with an awareness of the scale of the world and its offerings comes a sense of impossibility. 

“There were a lot of birds that I dreamed of seeing that I couldn’t see because I was in this little landlocked, wooded valley,” Prum says. 

As a kid, Prum spent a lot of time learning about the birds he couldn’t see yet. He memorized bird calls by listening to educational records put out by companies like Cornell and the Peterson’s Field Guide—records that, he tells me, contained 350 to 400 bird songs each. On one side a voice would introduce Prum to the names and locations of singing birds. On the other side a bird would sing alone.

“It was like a quiz!” Prum says. 

Over time, he accrued a small collection of birding books. During our interview, Prum speaks about his childhood collection as if it were right next to him, to the right of his chair.

“There was a couch. And there was a desk here. And there was a box. Inside the box, there were a bunch of books, sort of like this,” he says while demonstrating shapes with his hands. “Spines up. Organized.” If he needed to know something, he’d pull out a book, browse until he encountered a question that could be answered by a different book, and look at that book instead, “around in circles until bedtime.”

Prum tells me he was a dorky kid. His classmates associated him with all things nature and would tease him for it. They named him “Ranger Rick” after the raccoon mascot of a kids’ magazine put out by the National Wildlife Federation. And they would go up to him and say, “ever eat a pine tree?” quoting the Euell Gibbons Grape-Nuts commercial. 

He scoffs. “As if bird-watching is related to natural foraging!”

When he didn’t find like-minded peers at school, he formed friendships with local bird-watchers. A group of mostly retired women would pick Prum up on the weekends, spend the day birding, and drop him back off at home. These were his “birding buddies,” Prum tells me—they took him seriously.

Prum has now followed birds all around the world and likely has more birding buddies than he can count. Both a MacArthur Genius Grant recipient and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, he has led a stellar career by any standard. But whether he is reconstructing dinosaur feathers or breaking down binary concepts of biological sex, Prum’s work is driven by the same obsession that made him a peculiar child. He is crazy about birds. He will do what it takes to see them, hear them, understand them.  

“Birdwatching is like a hunt,” Prum says, “only you are hunting for cognitive trophies: the experience of seeing and identifying that bird.” But birds are more than objects of human curiosity; they are living, breathing agents with experiences of their own. I ask Prum if he takes an ecocentric approach to studying birds. He replies that, if he hadn’t always consciously thought about ecocentrism, he has always taken birds seriously, which necessarily “reframes your relationship to the world.”

Prum tells me about a study done on brain recognition, where researchers performed a series of tests on bird experts and airplane experts. They found that the bird experts recognized birds with the face recognition module of the brain. 

“This is the same place that you use to recognize Abraham Lincoln, or Jennifer Aniston, or the myriad of faces that you know,” Prum explains. “Becoming a birdwatcher is training your brain to treat these natural objects as recognizable individuals.” But for this recognition to happen, you have to care. “If you don’t care, then Jennifer Aniston and Abraham Lincoln just look like a myriad of other beautiful people and wrinkly guys.”  

Birding, Prum suggests, would not exist in a world where birds are trivial. Nor is it possible to watch birds intently without beginning to care for them. A person might embark on a birding trip from a place of personal ambition, but must ultimately exercise patience and empathy in order to succeed. Birds require you to love them on their own terms. 

In 1987 Prum had what he calls a “fascinating summer.” He followed his wife to Senegal, where she was making a documentary film, and found time at the end of her project to go birding at the Mauritian border with a friend. He remembers attending a riveting concert the night before his flight home and going to sleep with buzzing ears.

When he woke up the next morning, the buzzing had grown into “explosive roaring” and he was “catastrophically dizzy.” He was eventually diagnosed with idiopathic hearing loss in his right ear, where he could no longer hear above 1500 hertz. For an ornithologist, that range of sound is especially significant: “up there,” Prum tells me, “is birds.” 

Over the next decade, Prum’s hearing problems worsened. He developed Meniere’s disease in his left ear. He tells me that the disease makes you feel “seasick in your own body” and he remembers having to leave suddenly during dinner to throw up in the bathroom. The experience was lonely. “No one knows what you went through, and what you’re able to do out of that problem.” 

Today, though Prum is functionally deaf, his latest hearing aids allow him to transpose frequencies of bird songs that he can no longer hear. “I can hear the blackburnian warbler again,” he tells me. “But it’s not the way it’s supposed to sound.” He compares his attempts to identify transposed bird sounds to trying to differentiate between a flute and a piccolo playing at the frequency of a bassoon.

“That is such a deep loss,” Prum says to me. “Just talking about it now, I can feel it, it’s with me everyday. But I had to figure out a way to stay connected with what is obviously my life’s work.”

He resists the impulse to find beauty or opportunity for growth in adversity. “Suffering is suffering. Loss is really a loss. But I do feel that my connection to birds and biology was rich enough to find new and productive areas of research.”

Neurons still fire in Prum’s brain, he tells me, when he thinks of bird sounds. He is able to conjure up the bird records he listened to as a kid by memory and listen to them in his head. But he cannot hear any new birds; the sounds are artifacts of an unrecoverable past. Any future encounters he has with birds will have to be silent. 

I ask Prum if he has a favorite bird; he says no. (“To me that’s like answering who’s your favorite child.”) Still, some birds are special. They carry special memories. 

He loves cotingas for example, and the velvet asity birds that he studied in Madagascar. He remembers manakins with particular vividness because of the long hours he spent watching them in South America in the 80s. “These are little birds,” he tells me, “and you’ve got to spend days with them to learn anything.” He learned that manakins are frugivores who receive no paternal care and whose mothers have only two babies in a nest to avoid predators. His observations on manakins later contributed to theories of aesthetic evolution, but he wasn’t thinking about that at the time. He was only watching.

Prum breaks meaning-making into steps. He begins with the simple drive he’s retained from his childhood, which he summarizes with the phrase, “wow, I’d really like to see that!” From there “you try it, and maybe you fail, and you try it again.” And then, finally, “someday you see.”  

I wonder if Prum means to say that dreams become important in our attempts to realize them. He tells me that he associates birds not only with the time and place he encountered them, but also with the broader mission that they were a part of—with all its shortcomings, limitations, and failures. Had Prum been able to see every bird instantaneously, none of those birds would have stories. 

The post PROFILE: Richard Prum’s Great Search appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The room, they remembered, had three bike stands and a small work table. 

“Did you know you have a bike shop?” Sirianno said they asked Maria Bouffard, Franklin’s assistant director of operations. Bouffard explained that it had been sitting vacant since the COVID-19 pandemic and that there was no one to run it, but that Sirianno could do so. 

Sirianno accepted the offer. 

Together Bouffard and Sirianno gathered the necessary funds, put together a group of student volunteers and officially opened the Justa Sanchez Bike Shop — named after donor Linda Sanchez’s father — in March 2023.  

“It has been a huge success,” Bouffard said. “The bike community at Franklin and Murray has really blossomed.”

Sirianno now runs the shop with two paid student aides — Jhan Setthachayanon ’26 and Vivian Whoriskey ’25 — from 4 to 6 p.m. every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. They offer free bike repairs and advice to anyone who walks in. Setthachayanon said the trio usually gets about four to five people stopping by a day, many of whom are regulars. Some people, Sirianno noted, just come to talk. 

The bike shop and its basic supplies are funded by Franklin’s budget, but the materials are largely recycled. The shop makes use of abandoned bikes that Yale Facilities picks up around campus, as well as tools that Sirianno brings in from his home shop. They sometimes put loose parts together and build what Sirianno calls “Frankenstein bikes.” 

When bikers require a more comprehensive repair — one requiring materials the bike shop does not have — Sirianno, Setthachayanon and Whoriskey direct them to buy supplies online. 

“We’re like consultants, almost,” Setthachayanon said. Still, he expressed hope that the bike shop will develop a small inventory of essential parts so that people can be relieved of having to fix their bikes with their own money. 

Setthachayanon emphasized that the bike shop is a cooperative and educational space. He said that he, Whoriskey and Sirianno help their customers understand what is broken, how to fix it and how to take better care of their bicycles in the future. They said they often remind people to keep their tires inflated to avoid a pinch flat or to degrease their chain to prevent shifting problems. 

“We’ll show you how it’s done,” Setthachayanon said, “and we’ll do it together.”

Both Setthachayanon and Sirianno said they see the bike shop as a space to encourage Yale students to seek out more experiences in the New Haven region. 

For that reason, they said they often ask newcomers, “How do you get to the beach?” 

“It’s another way of saying, you should get out more and explore, and a really fun and easy way to do it is with bikes,” Sirianno explained. 

Sometimes the shop hosts group rides to places around New Haven such as West Rock or Edgewood Park. Sirianno recalled a time that he took a biking group to an ice cream shop, only to find that no one had wanted ice cream — they had just come to enjoy the ride. 

For Sirianno, the bike shop is not only a great resource for Yale students wanting to get out more, but also a first step in fostering safe and equitable communities. Car-centered cities, he said, are in many ways built to enforce segregation. He said that he believes that a resurgence in bicycles might help to transcend those barriers and integrate communities. 

“Bikes build community,” he explained. “Cars are inherently isolating devices.” 

Sirianno said that he hopes that Yale students who attend the bike shop will implement what they have learned into their lives post-grad.

For example, he offered, these students might now consider commuting options that are not car-based and fossil fuel dependent. 

“You guys are gonna build the future,” Sirianno said. “Think about bikes while you’re doing it. Include bikes in that plan.” 

Benjamin Franklin and Pauli Murray Colleges opened to students in 2017.

The post Bike shop in Franklin and Murray has been gearing up to help students  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.

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Within the first few pages of her second novel, Motherhood, Heti shatters this image. A loosely autobiographical protagonist complains of a boyfriend who insists that she must choose between having fun in New York and staying home to write. She thinks to herself, “I’m not the sort of writer who sits in her room and writes.” Reading this, I was baffled. What other kind of writer is there? 

I entered the interview with that question—what kind of writer is Sheila Heti? Heti, who spent last semester as a Visiting Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center, has penned ten books, among them Motherhood, How Should a Person Be?, and Pure Colour. It was clear by the end of our conversation that Heti, despite writing in her room, is, in fact, not the kind of writer who sits in her room and writes. Of course, she writes a great deal, and her writing is serious. But Heti doesn’t write to observe the world passively—she writes to live better. 

—— 

Heti did not write very much during her fall 2022 semester at Yale. She spent much of her energy adapting to life in Niantic, a town about 45 minutes outside of New Haven, where she stayed with her dog. She has always wanted to live by the sea and was happy to find a place on the shore. In Niantic, she went on walks, learned where to shop for groceries, and collected some notes for her next book. 

It is normal for Heti to pause work for weeks or months at a time. When she is excited about a project, however, she can work all day. She writes according to where she is and what she is thinking about; she does not have rituals. As a teenager, she read interviews in the Paris Review to learn how authors write, but the only consensus she could find was that there was none. While all writers center their lives around writing, that center may take endless forms. 

That is not to say there are no patterns to her craft. Heti prefers typing on a computer. After having written on one all of her life, the computer “feels like a part of [her] body.” Her raw material comes out in short, sporadic bursts that last no longer than an hour or two. “I mean, you kind of empty yourself out!” she explained. “Or, at least I feel like I empty myself out and need the day and the night to sleep to fill myself back up again and have something to write about the next day.” 

She edits more than she writes–it’s her favorite part. It’s like cleaning without having to “move around the house and get your hands dirty.” In our conversation, I added that the pleasures of a well-structured essay may correspond to those of an orderly room. She agreed. 

Knowing that Heti thinks of her computer as a third limb, works in short, intuitive bursts of creativity, and needs to “fill” herself back up again before returning to her work, I had to wonder—is writing something of a natural process for Heti, one intuitive as breathing? When I asked her about fears of loneliness surrounding the profession, she said that the concern of solitude had never occurred to her; being a writer has allowed her to prioritize doing the thing she loves most. 

Heti has written plays, compiled an anthology on fashion called Women in Clothes, alphabetized her diary entries for the New York Times, and collected and published her dreams about the 2008 Democratic primaries. In her novels, her narratives oscillate from meditations on the pursuit of the truth to accounts of kinky sex. Her passages regularly alternate between polished prose, streams of consciousness that last for several pages, and pure dialogue. 

Critics have classified Heti’s writing as autofiction, memoir, theology, and everything else in between. But if you ask Heti herself, the answer is simple: she is a novelist. She may not be the most conventional one, but her books are essentially novelistic in that they follow characters moving through time and space. “I think I want to write a conventional sort of narrative,” she confesses, “but I just don’t. I probably don’t believe in it…You can’t really write what you don’t believe in.” 

Heti has found a form that, in declining to follow the structure of a traditional story, transcends it: “In the missing of the mark,” Heti reasons, “the literary interest happens.” She makes a distinction between the books that imitate the novel and the one that imitates life itself. Her own novels, I think, belong to the latter category. 

—— 

The seminar that Sheila taught during her semester at Yale, Fate and Chance, included a scene from RuPaul’s Drag Race in its syllabus. In the episode, the contestants were tasked with making an outfit out of garbage. Ultimately, the winner was not the drag queen with the most high fashion, but the one whose design retained a resemblance to trash. The class came to the conclusion that, as Heti recounted to me, “somehow transforming [the material] utterly, so that it no longer shows the trace, is not as beautiful or interesting as those transformations which retain the trace of what it was.” 

Later, I realized that this must be true—the past gives us dimension. Maybe that is why Heti’s books often make reference to their own processes, capturing a series of motions and experiments leading up to their product. These experiments are, in themselves, substance. 

Heti’s novel, How Should a Person Be? recounts both conversations between Heti and her friend Margaux and the moments when Heti sets out to record those conversations. In Pure Colour chronicles the divine creation art writ large. In Motherhood, she involves the reader directly in her artistic decisions, tossing coins and asking questions. She wonders if the book is good, if art requires an audience to make it worthwhile, and if it even matters in the grand scheme of things. 

—— 

All of Heti’s books follow her as she works through something specific in her life—the question of what life is and what it means to be a person. “At different ages,” she explains, “that question can center on different problems.” It might have to do with a desire to be famous, the meaning of womanhood, or what one owes to one’s friends. But these issues all circle back to that same, central, notorious conundrum. 

Around the time she wrote How Should a Person Be? Heti was especially confused about her duties as a person.

“I just feel like I didn’t understand any of that,” she told me. “I didn’t, no one taught me or something, or maybe no one knows. But I felt like there were some things about living that other people took for granted that I couldn’t, I didn’t, for whatever reason.” 

One thing Heti has found difficult to understand is love. She used to think that love was like an exercise. She assumed that the success of any given relationship was by who a person was, rather than who they were with. You can love anyone if you are a good person, she reasoned. 

Heti’s understanding of love has changed, but still she maintains that there is something mysterious and impossible about it. “I haven’t heard firsthand of a lot of experiences of love that overflow the heart permanently,” she remarked. She asked me if I had. I hadn’t. Love, as she described it to me, always leaves some part of us unfulfilled. In her books, though, as gritty and confusing and difficult as the central relationships are, there is never a point at which the characters give up on love entirely. 

——

Heti convinces me that writing isn’t a radical sacrifice, nor are writers fundamentally separate from anyone else. Art is just one way, among others, to live and learn. The wisdom she imparts to her readers, though often brilliant, is not resolute. When I asked her if she had hopes for what readers would take away from her writing, she replied: “I don’t have that feeling.” 

Writing carries Heti through the challenge, confusion, and beauty of her own life. As she moves on from her semester at Yale, she will doubtless pursue new sites of disorientation, interrogation, and discursive engagement. This is all part of Heti’s process. As she puts it, “I’m not looking for answers. I’m looking for resting places.” 

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“Matters of Color/Colors Matter” was a first-year art history seminar with only nine students that offered a survey of color across various Yale libraries and special collections. Liam says that it showed “what was available, giving you the skills to then implement it if you would like.” 

“I think this one is particularly beautiful, because of the theme,” Cynthia Roman, who co-taught the class with Jae Rossman, notes. “It’s colorful, the objects are beautiful.” 

At the end of the course, the professors suggested that students in the class apply for the student-curated exhibit program. All three students applied in the winter of 2021 and were accepted in the spring of 2022. Le shared that they initially thought they were only planning half of the hallway, but were surprised to learn that the entire exhibit was theirs. This is the first time a student-curated exhibition at Sterling has had a three-person collaboration. 

Mirroring the structure of the class itself, the exhibit embodies “a spectrum from technical to conceptual,” according to Le. It begins with a scientific explanation of color theory and ending with more symbolic examinations of color. 

“We tend to think of science and art as two very different stories,” Toutenhoofd said. “But I think that the color is one lens into how much overlap there is between the disciplines.” 

The first section, “Matters of Color,” sums up 200 years of research on color, including information on how our eyes work, Albert Munsell’s color system, and selections from former Yale professor Joseph Albers’ quintessential book “Interactions of Color.” Central to Albers’ work is the idea that color is relative — his color studies reveal that the meaning of a color changes depending on what colors it is next to, and that sometimes the effect of a color cannot be conveyed by that color alone. 

Other items in the exhibit reflect students’ particular interests in and personal relationships with color. Hannigan was most excited about the political cartoons they included, which show how color can be “an identifier of reality, but also personhood.” 

Le chose to include “Shades of White,” an artist book by Jessica Walker that, in Le’s words, “talks about how whiteness can be considered invisible in our daily conversation, and kind of unpacks how we talk about race and color through words.” The work depicts a box filled entirely with white crayons with various humoristic labels — it alludes to Crayola’s “flesh” colored crayon, which was actually just pale and has since been changed to “peach.” The piece, as Le puts it, shows that “it’s important how we refer to colors by term.” 

All three students emphasized that they benefited from all having different “niches,” a fact that, as Toutenhoofd puts it, “made for a much more interesting exhibition than if there had been just a single curator.” Le, the most science-oriented out of the group, is most interested in conservation and textiles. Hannigan favors art history and curation. And Toutenhoofd is a practicing photographer. She took their headshots for the exhibit, and Jen noted that “We all matched, which was really cute.”

Working on the project made them more conscientious of color in unexpected ways. 

Le, who works at the Davenport pottery studio, has noticed that her work has become more colorful, and has been experimenting with how different color glazes react with each other. 

Hannigan remarked that “what it’s done is forced me to actually look at the object in front of me. I know that sounds funny for art, but you can often get stuck into an artist’s biography or the history of something without actually looking at the thing right in front of you. But when you’re focusing on the color, you really do have to look.”

Ultimately, “Matters of Color/Color Matters” invites its viewers to think more deeply about color in their own lives. “Color maybe has a bigger effect on us than we are conscious of,” Jennifer says. “It isn’t just something that’s contained within art and art history, but something that leads into other fields and aspects of our life”

Both Roman and Rossman encourage students to check out the special collections — where much of the art for the exhibit came from — and see art like this in person. 

“They’re for you,” Roman emphasized. “Don’t be afraid to use them.”

 She added that exploring library collections early can set the foundations for more serious research.

But it’s not just about academics. “We believe in the magic of the objects,” Roman said. “And I hope we converted some students.”

“At least three!” Rossman responded.

The exhibit will be on display through Spring 2023.

Correction, Nov. 11: A previous version of the article referred to Whitney Toutenhoofd ’25 as both an art historian and a practicing photographer. However, Toutenhoofd is just a practicing photographer. The article has been updated to reflect this.

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