collected stories

A REVIEW OF PHILIP MARLOWE

To celebrate collected stories, The Believer posted pieces from past issues that tied into the themes of each show. The first concert in collected stories, Hero, is paired with Greg Cwik’s review of Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman’s film adaptation of The Long Goodbye (from the May 2013 issue of the Believer).

A Review of Philip Marlowe in the Long Goodbye, Directed by Robert Altman

CENTRAL QUESTION: How does a filmmaker make an outdated character relevant?

Number of times Philip Marlowe has been portrayed on film: ten

Age of Elliott Gould when he played Marlowe: thirty-four

Age of Robert Mitchum when he played Marlowe three years later: fifty-eight

Best Hemingway impersonation in The Long Goodbye: Sterling Hayden, allegedly stoned the whole time

Actor Hayden replaced: Dan Blocker, who died just before principal photography began

Film’s tag line: “Nothing says goodbye like a bullet.”

Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is malleable: literary Play-Doh for the craftily minded. As our sapient narrator, he is a lens through which we see the squalor of modern Los Angeles. We know he’s morally rigid, like an animated slab of unwritten commandments, inextirpable in his personal and political proclivities. He doesn’t take money if he finds a job unethical; he doesn’t respect corrupt police or politicians, regardless of their motivations; he doesn’t sympathize with drunks or wife-beaters; he doesn’t like the rich but he doesn’t weep for the poor. He’s a well-worn scourge of complications and intricacies, his own Osiris.

Howard Hawks and William Faulkner gracefully and loyally translated Marlowe to the screen for The Big Sleep, just seven years after the novel’s initial publication. By 1946, Chandler’s books were growing in stature, and American cinema was suffused with film noir, so the character was already relevant; he didn’t need to be modified. By 1973, though, Marlowe and his hard-boiled kin were forgotten, irrelevant, so naturalist auteur Robert Altman had a few changes to make. If Hawks’s Big Sleepis the archetypal faithful Marlowe film, Altman’s adaptation ofThe Long Goodbye is the archetypal modification: characteristically syncopated and opaque, both satire and homage, poison love letter to a genre and inside joke to its enthusiasts.

REINCARNATION IN EXILE

To celebrate collected stories The Believer posted pieces from past issues that tied into the themes of each concert. The second concert in collected stories, Spirit, featured Tuvan throat singing and Arvo Pärt’s Passio, is paired with Tim McGirk’s essay on Tibetan Monks exposed to the twenty-first century (from the February 2013 issue of the Believer).

WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE TIBETAN BUDDHIST DIASPORA EXPOSED ITS MOST REVERED ADHERENTS TO TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY DELIGHTS

DISCUSSED: A Typical Spanish Breakfast, Exasperated Nuns, Precious Ones, Hip-hop Aspirations, Dilemmas for the Reincarnated, One of the Most Erotic Scenes in Indian Cinema, Mumbai’s Most Notorious Gangster, Divination, Accurate Cricket Match Predictions, A List of Genuine Rinpoches, Steven Seagal, A Delegation of Lamas, Lithium

When I was posted in Madrid as a foreign correspondent in the late 1980s, Spain was still a very Roman Catholic country, which is why a newspaper story in El Pais caught my attention: a little Spanish boy living in the mountains had been recognized as the reincarnation of a famous Tibetan lama. I decided to see the boy and made the mistake of taking along the only photographer I knew, Derek, a paparazzo for the British tabloids.

I knew nothing about Tibet, lamas, or reincarnation. But the story seemed splendidly improbable. This was, after all, Spain, the country that had lent its name to the Inquisition. And the story seemed to show that Spaniards, at last, were shaking off their hair-shirted Catholicism and exploring other means of spirituality. The boy’s name was Osel Hita Torres, and he lived in Bubión, in the Alpujarras Mountains above Granada.

The village was hard to reach. It had snowed the night before, and the road spiraling up the mountains was glazed with black ice. At a mountain inn, Derek and I stopped for a typical Spanish breakfast of espresso and cognac. After downing his cognac in one swallow, Derek reached into his photographer’s vest and, grinning, pulled out a matador’s cap.

I had known Derek long enough to fear the worst.

“We have to make it clear from the get-go that this kid is Spanish. So we pose him as a mini-bullfighter!”

We reached Bubión in late morning, the sun glinting on rock, rushing water, and snow. A villager directed us to two stone cottages that Western followers of the late Lama Thubten Yeshe—Osel’s parents among them—had turned into a Tibetan Buddhist retreat. I heard a child howling. Derek and I got out of the car and saw a young kid tussling with a buzz-cut Spanish nun. They were standing inside a wintry vegetable garden. The boy was in mid-tantrum, and his cheeks were as flushed as his burgundy lama robes. It was Osel, age four.

Exasperated, the nun turned to us.

“He wants to scrape the snow off all the plants before the ice kills them. But look, his hands are blue, and he won’t put on his mittens!” the nun complained.

This struck me as unusually caring behavior for a four-year-old. My own two young sons, left alone in that garden, would have invented some game of gladiators and started flogging each other with the frosted tomato vines. Osel was meticulously brushing the snow off cabbage leaves. His blue hands moved with urgency.

The telephone rang in one of the stone cottages.

“Watch him for me, will you?” the nun said, and without waiting for an answer she dashed up the stony path. The boy’s bawling subsided to sniffles.

“Now! Now’s the chance! While the nun’s away!” Derek urged as he reached into his vest for the matador’s cap. He stalked toward the boy, matador’s cap in one hand, his camera raised with predatory intent. Osel eyed Derek warily.

I was still puzzled by Osel dusting the snow off the plants. It was so un-childlike. So instead of helping Derek snap his cheesy photo, I nudged Osel and said: “Vamos! Come on! I’ll race you!”

He and I ran along the mountain ridge, kicking up puffs of snow. Far below was a valley terraced with almond trees and a church steeple rising through village smoke.

That was my first, and last, experience with a reincarnate lama for many years. War intervened. Flash forward to 2012. After covering conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, and the Middle East, I was exhausted from writing about how people were shot, tortured, and blown up in the name of religion. But I often wondered what had happened to that little laughing boy running over the mountains. By now he was twenty-seven, a young man. Had he fulfilled his promise as a rinpoche (also known as a tulku), a “precious one,” a supposedly enlightened being who continues his teaching from one lifetime to the next?

Along with Osel, there are over a thousand other monks and laymen who are revered as the incarnations of past teachers. Among them, the Dalai Lama stands supreme. Below him are several dozen high lamas, also rinpoches, who are great teachers and whose spirituality is unquestioned. In old Tibet, the rinpoches were powerful men possessing monasteries, lands, treasure, and thousands of followers. Like any system of dynastic succession, this one was vulnerable to political intrigue, manipulation, and mistake; apparently, there’s no easy science for finding one’s reincarnation. The searchers rely on visions, divinations, and clues left behind by the old rinpoche, and sometimes things go awry. Nor do these rinpoches always behave as expected: the sixth Dalai Lama loved wine, carousing, and singing songs to his favorite Lhasa courtesans. He came to a bad end.

By and large, the lineage of rinpoches survived intact for eight centuries, until the Chinese Red Army invaded Tibet, in 1950. It was easier to maintain this system when the “precious ones” were locked inside monasteries ringed by mountains, far from worldly distractions. But in exile, this tradition is fast unraveling. The younger rinpoches are exposed to all of the twenty-first century’s dazzling temptations. The irony is that while Tibetan Buddhism is gaining more adherents around the world, an increasing number of rinpoches are abandoning their monastic vows. Some are having a hard time finding their own path through the complexities of modern society and feel unable, or unqualified, to pass on much in the way of advice. Neither their early training in the monastery nor, supposedly, the good karma of their past lives as teachers is able to shield them entirely from the afflictions that the rest of us experience—desire, rage, attachment, envy, and egotism. The pull of samsara, the flow of worldly existence, can be overwhelming. One Tibetan Buddhist monastery in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas has two tests for graduation: first, monks are sent out onto a snowbank wearing only a wet sheet and told to keep themselves warm bytumo, a sort of heat-generating meditation; second, those who pass the first round are sent to the monastery’s printing house in Old Delhi, a neighborhood that teems with prostitutes and myriad sensory distractions. For young monks, the stint in Old Delhi is the harder test.

After the Chinese invasion of Tibet, many monks followed the Dalai Lama over the Himalayas into exile in India. Not all stayed huddled in Indian refugee camps. The more adventurous among them rode the wave of new-age curiosity about Eastern religions and headed west. Osel’s prior reincarnation, Lama Thubten Yeshe, was outstanding. Known for his boisterous humor and practical advice, Lama Thubten Yeshe stripped away many of the arcane Himalayan rituals of Tibetan Buddhism and drew thousands of Americans, Europeans, and Australians to his dharma teachings. He called himself “a Tibetan hippie” and enjoyed the Australian beaches. And, like his future incarnation Osel, who tried to save vegetables from a frosty death, Lama Yeshe was also fond of gardening. Lama Yeshe’s death, in March 1984, was widely mourned by his thousands of followers. Even after Lama Yeshe’s death, his organization, the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT), which runs over 158 centers and numerous projects in forty countries, remains the most influential proponent of Tibetan Buddhism in the world.

Initially, there were ten children, Western, Nepali, and Tibetan, who showed promise of being the reincarnation of Lama Yeshe, but the signs and the oracles all pointed to the Spanish boy. Osel’s mother, Maria, told me that even before she knew she was pregnant, she had an auspicious dream, rich in Catholic imagery. She dreamed that Lama Yeshe was standing in a cathedral full of Western followers. “We filed up to the altar, where there was Lama Yeshe. He held my head in his hands and plunged me into a fountain,” she recalled. “I felt the water enter my mouth, my nose, my ears—but instead of drowning, I felt blissful.” At the time she didn’t read too much into it, other than that it was comforting to dream of her late teacher. When the Dalai Lama confirmed that Osel was indeed the reincarnation of Lama Yeshe, Lama Yeshe’s devotees were elated; they were counting on Osel to grow up and be their spiritual guide.

Turns out, it hasn’t been easy for Osel. Shortly after I met him, the boy was shipped off to a monastery in Nepal and then to Sera Je Monastery, near Mysore, in southern India. His parents divorced, and Osel ended up leaving the monastery, disrobing, and going to a boarding school in Canada. He now prefers to be called “Oz,” and went on to study filmmaking at the Complutense University in Madrid. He hangs out on the island of Ibiza, has a girlfriend, and has given only one teaching, at an Italian retreat center in April, in which he stunned his audience by proclaiming that he was no longer a Buddhist. “When I was eight or nine,” said Osel, who has a goatee and the pallor of an El Greco ascetic, “I was always saying I was a Buddhist. But then I realized I really didn’t understand what that meant.” He said he agrees with Buddhist philosophy but prefers to think of his belief as “agnostic-scientific-spiritual.” Osel became press-shy after a “sensationalist” interview with a Spanish magazine in 2009, and my requests for a second interview were politely ignored.

Devotees of the late Lama Yeshe are divided over Osel’s unconventional choices, his refusal to assume the burden of teacher and guru. Many drifted away. Some think he was the wrong choice. I spoke to Nicholas Ribush, director of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive. “We don’t really understand the workings of reincarnation, only that there’s a continuity of consciousness. But it doesn’t happen that there’s an identical continuity, and perhaps some of Lama Yeshe’s followers expected that,” he explained. “They were puzzled, disappointed.”

Osel, in one of his few communiqués to the foundation, explained how he fought his destiny. “Some people seem to expect that because this is Lama Yeshe’s reincarnation, then he’s going to be just like Lama Yeshe. But today is not like being in Tibet many years ago, or even when the hippies were in Nepal and India in the 1970s. The world has changed a bit, and so I’m trying to find a different way of communicating.”

He is not the only tulku searching for different ways of communicating. One of Osel’s closest friends is the twenty-third Gomo Tulku. That’s twenty-third, as in twenty-three incarnations. Now in his early twenties, Gomo Tulku, wavy-haired and handsome like an Apache warrior, also talks about seeking a new way of passing on the dharma to Westerners. He has aspirations of being a hip-hop star, and in February 2012 he released a music video in Italy. In a Buddhist context, the video seemed outlandish, a celebration of the ego and the carnal senses. And in a musical context, it seemed clichéd: a blinged-out Gomo Tulku lolls in the back of a limousine, draped with miniskirted bambinas.

For these reincarnate lamas who stray, the dilemma is: how deep does one delve into samsara, the repeating cycle of birth-life-death-rebirth? One young rinpoche, who settled in the U.S. and found himself a girlfriend, told me, “To understand samsara, to teach it, you have to experience worldly existence, with all of its attachments and suffering. You have to enter the current.”

I put this to Telo Rinpoche, who was born in Philadelphia of Kalmyk origin and is considered by his followers to be the reincarnation of Tilopa, an eleventh-century Indian mystic. Telo Rinpoche had also left the monastery and wandered through a succession of jobs as a pizza deliveryman, telemarketer, and construction worker. “Monks say they disrobe to understand samsara. It’s all bullshit,” he told me in his home on the Colorado plains, whose walls are adorned with exquisite thangkas. “I’m not going to lie. I lacked discipline. I screwed up. Only after nearly drowning in samsara did I crawl to shore.”

Today, as a layman, married with children, Telo Rinpoche is following in his previous incarnation’s footsteps, bringing Buddhism back to Kalmykia and Mongolia, where the communists had razed monasteries and temples and executed thousands of monks.

The difficulties that Osel faced had much to do with being caught between a Buddhist monastery’s medieval rigors and his easygoing Spanish upbringing. Osel was not the only Western-born rinpoche. In the 1980s, there was a spate of Western boys, in Canada, the U.S., Europe, and Brazil, who were recognized as past incarnations of Tibetan teachers. But many of them endured crises of identity—and faith—similar to Osel’s. Said Thupten Jinpa, a Tibetan religious scholar, “It was especially confusing when they became teenagers. On the human level, it was a disaster.”

If the clash of cultures is what led to these human disasters, I wanted to track down a rin-poche steeped in the Himalayan traditions and find out how he was coping with his inner conflict between spirit and worldly attachments. In India, I found a rinpoche who had not only taken the plunge into the ocean of samsara but had done a triple-gainer.

Kagyur Rinpoche, a respected Tibetan scholar and teacher, had scandalized the Tibetan clergy by falling in love with a Bollywood movie star, Mandakini. In the mid-1980s, Mandakini was famous for a daring scene in which she bathes in a Himalayan waterfall, wearing a wet white sari that shows her erect nipples (it is an extremely cold waterfall). It ranks as one of the most erotic scenes in Indian cinema, which, actually, used to be far more prudish than the Kama Sutra would have us believe. The glistening young starlet also caught the eye of Mumbai’s most notorious gangster, Dawood Ibrahim, and their “romance” was the staple of Indian film magazines. If any woman could lure a shy and devout scholar-monk away from his vows of celibacy, it was Mandakini.

Born in 1968 to an Indian father and a Tibetan mother, Ajay Thakur began at an early age to speak of his past life “in a big monastery” and kept mentioning the name “Kagyur Lama.” Word reached back to Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s abode in the Indian Himalayas, and two lamas were sent out from Drepung Monastery, in southern India, where the previous Kagyur Rinpoche (who died in 1965) had a connection. No warning was given to the family, but on the morning before the two lamas were to reach the family’s house in Manali, the young child told his grandmother, “Today we’ll have guests. Make something tasty.” The boy supposedly recognized one of the lamas from Drepung Monastery and correctly picked out items from his past life—prayer beads, eyeglasses, a shirt, and a toothbrush—that were mixed in with duplicates.

The lamas reported back to the Dalai Lama, who carried out his own divinations with the help of the Nechung Oracle, a lama who dons an elaborate headdress and goes into ritual trances that, many Tibetans believe, predict the future or can identify a newborn tulku. All signs indicated that the boy with the Indian father and Tibetan mother was the third reincarnation of Kagyur Rinpoche. Ajay’s father, an Indian bank employee and a Hindu, was worried that monks of another faith were laying claim to his only son. The father also put Ajay through a little test of his own: he asked him which team would win the India-Pakistan cricket matches, and the boy was uncannily correct. “He was not happy when the lamas wanted to take me away,” Kagyur Rinpoche told me when we met in New Delhi. “My father wanted me to have a modern education.” The rinpoche is short and dapper, with a shy smile and a hint of Bollywood flash—tan cowboy boots and a striped indigo shirt that looked impeccably crisp in the wilting 105-degree heat. He’s in his forties but still possesses an openness, a childlike grace. I asked him more about his past lives but he said that his memories began fading once he entered his teens. “I can’t say 100 percent that I’m the reincarnation of the old Kagyur Rinpoche. Maybe I was his student. But a strong karmic connection is there,” he said between sips of milky chai at a New Delhi guesthouse.

Once he entered Drepung Monastery, everything seemed to be proceeding smoothly with Kagyur Rinpoche. No one doubted that he was the right pick. Once, during a ceremony, the Nechung Oracle, who had never seen him before, while in a trance picked him out of a crowd of five hundred young lamas. Bookish, he became a geshe, the equivalent of a doctor in theology. He studied at Oxford and gave teachings in the U.S. and Japan. But he felt a malaise. “I felt guilty. What I was saying, what I was teaching, I wasn’t doing,” he explained.

Nearly every Hindi film has a scene set in the mountains where the girl coyly dodges the caresses of the hero as they romp through forest and meadow. Inevitably, an entire troupe of dancers materializes and bursts into song, like a hip-wiggling Greek chorus encouraging or warning the young lovers. With its apple orchards and backdrop of snowy Himalayan ranges, Manali is a favorite location for Bollywood shoots, and Kagyur Rinpoche happened to be visiting his parents when Mandakani was there filming. (Her father is British, her mother an Indian Muslim.) “My mother met her family, and they became friends,” he said. Kagyur Rinpoche couldn’t put the actress out of his mind. “For twenty years, I was a really good monk. I didn’t touch any girl,” he insisted. Three agonizing years went by and, finally, he asked his mother for Mandakini’s phone number, and soon they were talking frequently. “I didn’t know we were falling in love,” he said, “but I kept asking myself why was I waiting so anxiously for her call.”

Then, in a scene out of a Bollywood script, she confessed to the gentle monk that she loved him. Kagyur Rinpoche replied, “Yes, I love you, too! We should get married!” Mandakini hesitated; on-screen, she would have danced shyly behind a tree. But she wasn’t just playing hard-to-get. Mandakini understood the lofty standing that Kagyur Rinpoche enjoyed among the Tibetans and all that he would be sacrificing. Kagyur Rinpoche insisted, and she relented. Two months later, he renounced his vows, and the monk and the movie star were married. And her attraction to him? “She’s very down-to-earth, not at all Bollywood,” he told me. “She liked me because I was a simple monk.”

Now all Kagyur Rinpoche had to do was break the news to the Dalai Lama. “I was very afraid,” he said. “When I entered the room to see him, my head was bowed. I didn’t dare see his face.” But the Dalai Lama hugged him and said: “Don’t worry.” Kagyur Rinpoche burst out crying with relief. The Dalai Lama joked: “All the monks who’ve lapsed are those who’ve gone to the West. But this is a special case. You fell for an Indian woman!” Then, in a more sober mood, the Dalai Lama told him: “You may not be a monk anymore, but you’re still a rinpoche and you must maintain your dignity.”

Next, Kagyur Rinpoche, in civilian clothes, took his new bride to Drepung Monastery. Some monks wept, lamenting the loss of a great scholar. Others, said Kagyur Rinpoche, “understood the nature of samsara.” The surprise marriage was an especially hard blow to Kagyur Rinpoche’s attendant, an elderly monk who had cared for him since he first entered the monastery, two decades earlier, as a child. “He was in shock. He had to be hospitalized for a week, but now he’s fine,” said Kagyur Rinpoche.

As a newlywed in Mumbai, Kagyur Rinpoche leaped into his new life with gusto. This scholarly monk found himself in the embrace of a movie goddess worshipped feverishly by over half a billion Indian men. “For one year, I was flying, not thinking about wrong or right,” he said. He and Mandakini clubbed with other Bollywood stars. “I was fascinated by discos,” Kagyur Rinpoche said. “Dancing, I found out, wasn’t so difficult. You just shake!”

There was the problem of what to wear. Having spent his life in red robes, fashion wasn’t his forte. So his wife chose all his clothes for him. But having stepped out of his robes into disco finery, Kagyur Rinpoche was soon beset with other, more vital worries. As a monk, he had been cocooned from the grueling slog of modern life. The monastery had fed him, lodged him, and given spiritual purpose to his life. For love, he had lost it all. Now he had to fend for himself and his new bride. And all his learning about compassion and kindness didn’t equip him for dealing with Mumbai’s rapacious con men. The “Thirty-seven Practices of a Bodhisattva,” a revered text in Tibetan Buddhism, urges the practitioner to abandon “negative people” and “negative places,” and Kagyur Rinpoche went from a cloistered world of trusting, self-effacing monks to Bollywood, where the sharks sized him up as easy prey. “I trusted blindly, and I was lied to, cheated again and again,” he said, sighing. “So I tried to lie, but I wasn’t a good liar. And when I came home after making a big mistake, my wife would know.”

After the initial rush of freedom wore off, Kagyur Rinpoche found himself facing a string of setbacks. His business ventures flopped. Worse, he felt that he was losing control. “It felt like some external force had taken over my thoughts,” he said. His virtues as a monk—his trusting nature and his “soft-heartedness”—were now handicaps.

Having realized that he lacked business savvy, Kagyur Rinpoche decided to try his hand at directing films. He had written poems and short stories as a monk. “Sitting in a monastery is not enough. We must change our style, our way of teaching,” he explained. He is now working on a screenplay.

Kagyur Rinpoche stared into his teacup and thought back wistfully on his years as a monk. “Those years were the best, the purest,” he said. Does he regret leaving the monastic life? He shook his head adamantly. “No, not at all. My life is richer. I’m more exposed to the world.” He compares being a monk to being a soldier. “A soldier spends years preparing for fighting. You want to see if your skills, what you’ve learned, survive the test of combat.” Becoming a layman, entering into samsara, is akin to a soldier charging into battle, he said. “Sure, I get tense. In Bollywood, there are big egos. All that matters to them is fame and money. But for me, balance is most important. If we eat more than we need, it’s not good. Same with the ego.” He laughed. “Buddhism isn’t an external search,” he explained. “It doesn’t come from anyone but you. It doesn’t matter if you are wearing robes or not, the teachings of the Buddha are something you can always practice.”

After our interview, I walked him out into the Delhi street. A flock of green parakeets scattered through the neem trees, fleeing a dust storm. I offered him a ride, but he didn’t want to inconvenience me, so my last image is of Kagyur Rinpoche in his crisp indigo shirt, one his movie-actress wife had probably chosen for him. He was a tiny figure on the road, bent against the swirling gale of dust, the turbulence of samsara.

The explosion in the number of so-called rinpoches alarms some devout Tibetans. The Tibetans say there are far more rinpoches or tulkus now than when the lamas fled the Chinese invasion of Tibet, in 1959. “Some of these lamas discover they are rinpoches on the plane to America,” joked one ex-monk. “They know it’s easier to attract disciples among awestruck Westerners if they can boast of being a rinpoche.”

Buddhists and Hindus believe that all of us are reborn again and again. What sets apart Mahayana Buddhism, as practiced in the Himalayas, Mongolia, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and a few other places, is the belief that it is not enough for someone to achieve nirvana, enlightenment; he or she must come back over many lifetimes to help all sentient beings. Out of this belief, the Tibetan system of reincarnate lamas arose. Says José Cabezón, professor of Tibetan Buddhist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, “It’s in the best Mahayana tradition, and it’s also a way of coping with the grief of losing a teacher.”

Often, when a well-known lama dies—even if he’s not a tulku—he may leave behind real wealth: temples, property spread across various countries, a treasure of donations. The late teacher’s devotees usually have a vested emotional and, at times, material interest in keeping things as they were. And so they search for his reincarnation.

Many Tibetan monks and scholars say the system is spinning out of control, growing too commercial. “In Tibet, it was more restricted to a monastic context,” said Thupten Jinpa, the scholar. “But now the control mechanisms are becoming relaxed.” No longer are the proper divinations always done, nor does the candidate have to give proof of memories of a past life. Jinpa says that the Dalai Lama has recognized “quite a few” new rinpoches. “It’s hard for him to turn down students when they say they’ve found the rebirth of their teacher.” The Dalai Lama has repeatedly said that inside the monasteries, tulkus should be treated as ordinary monks, without the special attention and perks. Only when they prove their worth, he said, should tulkus be given respect.

Bizarrely, the Chinese communists have also entered the game of proclaiming the discovery of reincarnate lamas. In 1995, the Dalai Lama announced that all the divinations and signs pointed to a nomadic shepherd boy in Tibet being the reincarnation of the eleventh Panchen Lama. The Chinese promptly arrested the boy and his family—one rumor has it that they vanished into a mental asylum—and named their own choice as Panchen Lama. Most Tibetans reject the Chinese candidate.

The Dalai Lama’s office has reportedly begun the task of organizing a list of genuine rinpoches, much like Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage, a directory of the British aristocracy. And just like those tales where nouveau-riche businessmen buy themselves a title and a crumbling castle, every so often rumors crop up inside the Tibetan community that money might have influenced the candidacy of a prospective rinpoche. One jaw-dropping example: in 1997, Hollywood’s scowling action star and martial-arts expert Steven Seagal was declared by a well-known lama to be the reincarnation of a seventeenth-century terton. A terton is a kind of spiritual treasure-seeker, able to find the hidden objects left behind by Padmasambhava, an eighth-century mystic and sorcerer who brought Buddhism to Tibet and who supposedly hid religious objects and texts that were to be revealed, throughout the centuries, at the right moment. Following the uproar over this announcement, Penor Rinpoche, who had anointed Seagal as a terton, had to fend off accusations that he had taken donations from the Hollywood heavy. Seagal, resplendent in a silk jacket embossed with dragons and accompanied by two surly bodyguards, was seen pacing outside the Dalai Lama’s prayer-flag-draped residence in Dharamsala, waiting for official recognition of his new mystical status from the boss. But it never came.

One of the most outspoken critics of tulkus is the Dalai Lama’s youngest brother, Ngari Rinpoche. He has said publicly that the system was a “manifestation of attachment,” a negative concept in Buddhism, and that “some tulkus deliver, but others enjoy the title and get fat.” What made his criticism all the more pointed was that not only was he a rinpoche himself but he decided early on to abandon his vocation. In exile, he joined the Indian army as a paratrooper to fight the Chinese. It wasn’t what you’d expect from the brother of the Buddhist embodiment of compassion.

From Delhi, I journeyed up into the Himalayan foothills to see Ngari Rinpoche. He and his wife had turned an old British colonial bungalow, where the Dalai Lama’s mother had lived out her days in exile, into a small inn. It lies in the middle of a forest where langur monkeys swing along the leafy branches and a leopard occasionally prowls below. There are no signs at the turnoff by a Tibetan momo stand; the inn seems deliberately difficult to find. I had first met Ngari Rinpoche years before, when I was a Time correspondent in Delhi. “Don’t call me ‘rinpoche’,” he said abruptly. “I don’t have the qualities to be a monk or a rinpoche. I’m an ordinary person. Call me ‘T.C.’,” short for his family name, Tenzin Choegyal. Shave off T.C.’s black hair, put him in red-and-gold robes, and he would be a dead ringer for his older brother. His years as an Indian army officer gave him a taste for English cigarettes and a brusque, military bearing that vanishes when he contemplates, as he often does, a piece of mischief.

Music wafted over from the veranda; a Tibetan guest from Alaska was playing a wooden flute, and his song seemed to be choreographing the flight of raptors soaring on the thermals that sweep up from the plains of Punjab to the high white crags of the Himalayas. The musician drifted inside his bungalow, and soon T.C. strolled over from the rose garden. When I said that I wanted to talk about rinpoches, he cut me off.

“Do you believe in reincarnation?” he asked me.

I told him that I’d like to, but that I didn’t have any proof. I had no recollections from my past lives.

“I believe in rebirth,” T.C. said firmly. “But reincarnation, in many cases, I’m not so sure. This recognition of tulkus, it usually comes from lobbying by students.”

Why were so many rinpoches abandoning their monastic vows?

“This is probably a good thing. There’s too much devotion toward them. Blind faith. They’re treated like shamans, with special powers,” he replied. “I don’t like the idea of depending on these ‘special’ people for your own deliverance when you have to do it yourself.”

But isn’t he one of these “special people” himself?

“I was taken hostage at a very young age, two or three,” he said, laughing, enjoying the shock value of the word hostage. “And I became a puppet of the tradition.”

It’s hard to get T.C. to tell his own extraordinary story. He is self-effacing and deflects personal questions. But eventually, over several meetings in his den overlooking the English rose garden, he told me how he was selected as the sixteenth incarnation of Ngari Rinpoche. It was in the late 1940s, and his brother was already enthroned in Lhasa. With the recognition of their first son as Dalai Lama, this humble farming family was elevated to Tibetan nobility. One day, a delegation of lamas from Zanskar Valley, in the Indian Himalayas, came to the family and said they believed that little Tenzin Choegyal, the impish youngest brother of the Dalai Lama, had been their teacher in a previous life. The Nechung Oracle had agreed. And now the lamas wanted him back.

His mother and sister delivered T.C. to a small monastery near Lhasa and left him there with the monks. “It was a bit of a shock. I felt lonely, forsaken,” he said. But his mother would visit once a month, and T.C. recalls many picnics in a meadow where the monks would do handstands, exposing their naked, wobbling legs, which had the boy laughing uproariously. He remembers the “melodious mantras” in the prayer hall and an incident where, ever the mischief-maker, he sewed together the robes of the monks sitting in a row in front of him, deep in meditation. He is still something of a prankster. T.C.’s proximity to the Dalai Lama (they meet often when the Tibetan spiritual leader is in residence in Dharamsala) and his blunt, often caustic impatience with the medieval bureaucracy, and all its intrigues, around his brother has earned him a fearsome reputation among the Tibetan government-in-exile. “My job is broom-sweeper,” he said, chuckling. And taking on the tulkus may be one of his housekeeping chores. Still, when he looks back on his days as a young monk, he said, “I realize that it made me strong.”

T.C. needed the strength for the terrible ordeal ahead. China had fallen to the communists who coveted Tibet. The first communist overtures to the teenage Dalai Lama were deceptively benign. As a boy, T.C. accompanied his brother on a trip to meet Chairman Mao Tse-Tung in Beijing. “He was very charismatic, very big, ” recalled T.C., adding ruefully, “At the time, I adored Mao.” But the promises made to the Tibetans in Beijing were soon broken, and Chinese troops conquered Tibet and overran Lhasa. The Dalai Lama was urged by his advisers and the Nechung Oracle to flee to India, the land of the Buddha’s birthplace. On March 17, 1959, under the cover of a sandstorm, the Dalai Lama and a small entourage slipped out of the Norbulingka summer palace. T.C. was among them. “My mother and sister were disguised as men. We walked across the sandbanks of the river, just three hundred yards away from a Chinese army camp. I stopped to pee and I could see my monastery, Drepung, on the other side of the river. We were in a hurry, but I stopped and did three prostrations to Drepung. I guess I knew it would be a long time before I saw it again,” he said.

For days, they galloped on horseback, trying to outrace their Chinese pursuers. The fleeing Tibetans scaled the high Himalayan passes and descended, exhausted, into northern India, where Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave them sanctuary. But whenever anyone wistfully suggested going back to Tibet and for T.C. to resume his life in the monastery, T.C. was overcome by “a dark paralysis.” He said: “The Dalai Lama would joke that I was the only Tibetan who was happy to leave.”

Back in Lhasa, his family had noticed that T.C., as a child, was strangely attracted to English lettering on the few books and toys that had made their way across the Himalayas to the Dalai Lama’s palace. So it was decided that T.C. would go to St. Joseph’s, a Gothic brick pile run by Jesuits in Darjeeling. It was his first encounter with Christianity. The painting over his cot of a bleeding Jesus nailed to the cross was a marked change from the Himalayan iconography of serene bodhisattvas and tantric couplings. “I loved the uniforms,” T.C. recalled wistfully. “And the senior chaps would give me sweets, pull my cheek, and say: ‘Hello, Reincarnate!’”

T.C. was a good student, memorizing Blake, Longfellow, and Browning, but his psyche was divided between wanting to be a good schoolboy and his Tibetan heritage. That “dark paralysis” that had afflicted him earlier began to surface again and again, accompanied by gusts of anger. Depression would plague T.C. for decades to come. He quit St. Joseph’s in a huff after failing a tenth-grade math final, and decided to return to his religious studies. “But I was too angry to be a monk,” he said. Besides, he had also become interested in girls. “My first girlfriend was Rebecca, a Jewish beauty from Calcutta,” he said sheepishly. T.C. is now married to Rinchen Khandro, a calm and elegant Tibetan who was his college sweetheart and who now runs a program looking after Buddhist nuns who have escaped from religious repression in Tibet. They have an adult son and daughter.

Having decided that he wasn’t cut out to be a monk, T.C. now had to inform the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama’s followers revere him as the incarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, who is represented in statues and paintings with many arms and many faces; most are beatific, but some are scary. Combine this wrathful face of compassion with the respect, and fear, that a youngest brother accords his elder, and you have some idea of the dynamic between T.C. and the Dalai Lama. “He can be stern,” T.C. said. “I was scared to tell him that I wasn’t going to be a monk.” There was no need for him to be scared. “You may have just disrobed,” the Dalai Lama advised his brother, “but you haven’t shredded up your commitment to Buddhism.”

That commitment was a long time in coming.

T.C. traveled to the U.S. in 1971, drank too much, smoked pot, listened to rock and roll. And yet the release from his lama’s vows, which he had long dreamed of, wasn’t living up to its allure. “I thought I was a failure,” he said. His own personal shortcomings were magnified by a larger futility: the world’s refusal to help the Tibetans against their Chinese oppressors. His two lasting memories: seeing wounded U.S. soldiers being stretchered into the Seattle airport from Vietnam, and hearing a popular song by the folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Says T.C., “I very much wanted to leave America on a jet plane.”

T.C. did board a plane—back to India. His anger had found a focus. He thought that if the West wouldn’t take notice of the injustices inside Tibet, it was up to him to fight back. And so T.C., the brother of the Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize winner and the world’s most famous advocate of nonviolence, took up arms. He joined the Indian army. India was wary of China after their 1962 border war, and decided to form a mountain commando unit made up of Tibetan refugees. It was known as the Special Frontier Force. (The C.I.A., meanwhile, set up its own ill-fated Tibetan guerrilla force and then dropped it.) When T.C. volunteered, in 1974, he insisted on undergoing boot-camp training with the other Tibetans, crawling through barbed wire under live fire. The other Tibetans would cry out: “Why are you doing this, Rinpoche?” But T.C. endured the hardship and distinguished himself as a paratrooper and a marksman, and when he tells of shooting a circling vulture (“Quite a lot of showmanship there,” he said), it is with remorse. “My dream,” he once told me, “was to parachute into my favorite valley in Tibet, pissing on the Chinese soldiers as I drifted down. They had done terrible things to my people, and I was angry.”

T.C. was denied that parachute drop. He left the Indian special border force after two and a half years, disgusted by the corruption of senior Indian officers and their unfair treatment of Tibetan conscripts. Dark moods besieged him. “Every now and then, I would yo-yo in and out of depression,” he said. He also admitted that he was “hung up” on people’s high expectations of him simply for being the Dalai Lama’s brother.

Over the years, lithium helped to lift him—and so, eventually, did his return to regular Buddhist practice. This, he says, gave him a glimpse into the nature of the mind, the idea that all thoughts, disturbing or pleasurable, are as insubstantial as a feather floating on the winds of consciousness. “It was only when I began to understand my afflictive emotions that I became interested in spiritual matters,” he explained. This happened when he hit his forties. “In depression, you have a strong sense of ‘I,’ but you have to size it up, examine it, and the more you do, the lighter you become.” Most of our emotional troubles, he said, come from chasing after “egocentric interests.” T.C. explained: “When you can’t get what you want, you get angry—at the world, at yourself—and to overcome that, you become numb, out of sync.”

Slowly, T.C. has resumed his Buddhist “commitments.” Sometimes he gives teachings, most recently at Stanford University, and he has become a kind of sparring partner for Western students of the dharma. For years, T.C. had refused entreaties by lamas to visit his hereditary monasteries in the high Himalayan regions of Ladakh and Zanskar (“That miserable valley,” T.C. grumbled). But several years back, he undertook the daunting drive over the 17,480-foot Tanglang La pass, where the fierce winds and blizzards shred the strings of Tibetan prayer flags into bright rags. The road drops slightly and zigzags its way across the high desert to a forbidden monastery perched on a little hill against a wall of icy peaks. This was T.C.’s destination: Likir Monastery, the ancestral seat of the Ngari Rinpoche lineage. Built in the eleventh century, Likir Monastery has over three hundred monks and an eighty-foot statue of a golden Buddha who presides, with oceanic serenity, over the Himalayan ranges and a single green ribbon of barley that unfurls down the barren valley. T.C. carried out his usual “broom-sweeping,” closing down a monastery whose rituals and practices he thought had strayed into superstition. I can’t imagine that T.C. would encourage his followers to search for his reincarnation when he dies, though the Likir lamas will probably do it anyway, hoping for a more pliable child the next time round.

T.C. may have harsh words to say about the system of rinpoches, but he has no doubts that his brother and other senior, venerated lamas are the genuine article. As for the legions of new rinpoches, he is less certain. He says, “The religious concept of peerage is a dangerous thing. I’d like to change their status.”

But toward the end of the conversation, as the monsoon clouds rolled up the valley and the skies darkened, T.C. began to recant slightly. “I don’t know if that spark is there in these rinpoches. But many of them seem very intelligent. It looks like their bank account has a tremendous asset from their past karma.” He laughed. When I suggested that he might fall into that category, he replied, “I should sue the Nechung Oracle for picking me. But, all things considered, I’ve had an interesting life.”

Tim McGirk, a former Time magazine bureau chief in South Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, has written frequently on Tibet. He researched this story while a Knight Fellow for media and religion at the University of Southern California. He is currently writing a novel and helping to run the Investigative Reporting Program at U.C. Berkeley.

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THIRTY-ONE LOVE SONGS

To celebrate collected stories, The Believer posted pieces from past issues that tied into the themes of each concert. The third concert in collected stories, Love/Loss,  featuring The Uncluded (Aesop Rock and Kimya Dawson), Nico Muhly, Sam Amidon, Iarla Ó Lionáird, and Nadia Sirota, is paired with Rick Moody’s essay on 69 Love Songs (from the May 2003 issue of the Believer).

REDACTING THE MAGNETIC FIELDS’S 69 LOVE SONGS UNTIL THEY SPEAK FULLY AND PERSONALLY TO THE EAR OF THE BEHOLDER

DISCUSSED: Guys Who Winnow the White Album, Neil Young, The Art of Courtly Love, Trademark Pauses, Philadelphia, Singing Homeless Guys, Gilbert and Sullivan, The Human League

It’s the fate of the good work to belong to the public. It’s the fate of the masterpiece to be bent out of shape, to be reimagined, remodeled by its audience. It’s the fate of popular art to be scoured for clues, understood only in part or misunderstood, and this can’t be controlled by the hardworking artist who came up with the work in the first place. The way a book or record or painting or movie thrives in the face of this barrage of refractions indicates its long-term durability. Those endless new translations of The Odyssey and The Divine Comedy, for example. Or what about the film version of The Virgin Suicides,or The Hours?“The Star-Spangled Banner,” wrenched out of its casing by Jimi Hendrix. Joni Mitchell singing Mingus. If something works, it can stand a little misuse.

What about all those guys, and they are mainly guys, who have sat around winnowing The White Album down to a single disc? Well, first you get rid of “Revolution 9,” because it’s too long and too abstract, and then you get rid of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” despite the fact that one admires McCartney more as one grows older; out with “Bungalow Bill,” out with “Honey Pie,” “Martha My Dear,” because it’s about a dog, etc. Before long, you are left with a record that has on it “Dear Prudence,” “Julia,” “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Helter Skelter,” “Birthday,” “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide (Except for Me and My Monkey),” “Cry Baby Cry,” “Yer Blues,” and so forth. In short, you’ve got an unbelievably great rock and roll album. Does it do the Beatlesa disservice? On the contrary. It indicates the bounty of material from which to choose. This is how some people pass an afternoon.

The subject of today’s surgery is 69 Love Songs by the band known as the Magnetic Fields. The Magnetic Fields, as I understand it, began, under various names and permutations, in the late Eighties, in the Boston area, and hardened, more or less, into a group when Claudia Gonson, one of its singers and now manager of the band, was studying at Harvard. The other principals were also living in the area, first and foremost, Stephin Merritt, singer, composer, guitarist, keyboardist, etc. The Magnetic Fields are the closest thing to a traditional band in the multiform career of Merritt, who has any number of other musical entities to which he occasionally turns his attention—the 6ths, the Gothic Archies, Future Bible Heroes. Much of the time Merritt records all the music himself, at home. The Magnetic Fields, however, unlike most of his vehicles, lists a little bit in the direction of the band-oriented idiom called indie rock. (A term I find somewhat repellent, and I expect Merritt would too.) The Magnetic Fields are not entirely electronic. They have two guitar players, Stephin and John Woo. They have a sort of a bass player in cellist Sam Davol. They occasionally have drums—Claudia Gonson can play the drums, that is, as well as the piano. Notwithstanding their denials, and there are many denials, the Magnetic Fields are sort of a rock and roll band. They occasionally play as an ensemble, and they leave their recordings somewhat unvarnished, in the tradition of bootleg, or in the tradition of low-fi, punk, folk, old time, early rock and roll.

Prior albums by the Magnetic Fields were theme oriented. As Merritt himself points out, “Usually we do short records with some theme like travel or escape or Phil Spector or vampires.” However, the concept on 69 Love Songs was much more basic:scale. Initially intended to be a hundred love songs, the album was winnowed down, perhaps in a kind of exhaustion, though Merritt argues that the number sixty-nine was graphically satisfying. Perhaps he ran out of subgenres in which to compose. Perhaps he is saving the other thirty-one songs (though he has said that there are as many as fifty leftover tracks) for an expanded edition. In any event, the album now fits on three CDs, which, as with Guns N’ Roses on Use Your Illusion, or those two Bruce Springsteen records, you can buy separately, if it suits you. The boxed version includes a lengthy printed exchange between Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, who occasionally serves as an accordionist for the Magnetic Fields) and Stephin Merritt, which in some ways forecloses on all possible interpretive responses to the record:

DH: Do you expect people to make tapes of their favorite songs and whittle it down to a smaller size?

SM: I expect some people to hate particular songs.

I have taken these lines as an invitation, and before someone else does it, I now declare that I have made the definitive one disc collection of songs from 69 Love Songs. All others will now have to reckon with my version. I have done it because I love the band. I have done it because I love the album. I love the album as I have loved few pieces of so-called popular music in the last ten years. I love it so much that I am having one of the songs sung at my own wedding. I love it so much that I have given away any number of copies of it as gifts. I love it so much that I am still playing it almost four years later. I love it so much that I can remember the lyrics, the harmony lines, and even some of the text in the exhaustive accompanying booklet. All because I love it.

Before I get to listing the tracks, however, I should admit, in the spirit of a complete disclaimer, that sometime in the midst of my romance with 69 Love Songs, I got an e-mail message from Claudia Gonson herself, aforementioned singer and manager, asking if I wanted to open for the Magnetic Fields on a couple of tour dates they were about to undertake, in Philadelphia and D.C. Open for them? A total shock. Apparently, Daniel Handler had done it, too, on the West Coast, and, according to Claudia, it had gone “pretty well.” This ought to have been a red flag. I knew enough about reading in public to know that rock audiences, with their fickle need for spectacle, eat writers for breakfast; I knew enough to know that belittlement and heckling would be built in to this task, that not having a rhythm section up on stage with me would be the pinnacle of lunacy. And they wanted me to read for forty-five minutes, at first, a preposterously long time, and they wouldn’t put me up in a hotel suite where I could throw the furniture out the window, and they wouldn’t pay me much. I would be on my own recognizances. Like Victoria Williams, who nearly got shouted offstage opening a Neil Young show I saw. Because she was there. In short, it was a nightmare being proposed, probably in front of five hundred or a thousand people a night. I agreed.

It began this way: I walked into this old punk club in D.C., the 9:30 Club, home to many bands that I loved when I was younger. Everybody played there, I think: Black Flag, Big Star, The Replacements. Sort of nerve-racking to walk into an old punk club, and to hear Claudia Gonson approximating the synthesizer line from “You’re My Only Home” on the piano. Because I was already very involvedwith the record. I mean, there was an uncanny quality to it. And here I was, the only person in the audience, during sound check. Me and the guy up in the booth, the Magnetic Fields traveling sound guy. I watched them do their sound check for half an hour. It was great. They had huge ring binders with all the songs in there. There were a lot of songs, of course, so there was a lot of music. I loved the way they fucked with rock show nonsense. Everyone sat, for example. John, the lead guitar player, had to be one of the least demonstrative guitar players ever in popular music. He made Robert Fripp seem like Steve Jones.

When they were done running through things, I nervously made my way toward the stage. This is when I learned what many have noticed before me: talking to Stephin Merritt is one of the hardest things you will ever do in your life. Many assume that it is difficult to talk to him because Stephin is acerbic, laconic, does not suffer fools gladly, etc. And these things, I believe, are true. I was destined therefore to be uncomfortable in the first place. But there is another issue. Which has to do with the pauses. Handler, in the 69 Love Songs booklet, refers to this tendency as thetrademark Stephin Merritt pause. Does it come from a youthful obsession with Harold Pinter? Is it neurological? Is it a leftover expression of Merritt’s childhood epilepsy? All I know is that Merritt takes longer to reply to a remark than anyone you know. He is two or three beats longer in reply than all your hardcore aphasics. You will be tempted to append further wasted verbiage to your initial remark. Do not do this. It will confuse things. Wait patiently. Then, at last, you will get the acerbic, laconic reply.

I was given a couple of minutes to test out the microphone, etc., and then we all went upstairs and ate backstage food. I don’t know what was in the Magnetic Fields contract rider, nothing about M&Ms or vegan fare, but there was some fruit backstage, and a lot of beer. I don’t drink or smoke, so I was in the minority there. I think Claudia is the only person in the Magnetic Fields who doesn’t smoke, so Stephin and John, and sometimes Sam, were all sequestered in the smoking room, so designated by general agreement, where for at least part of the time Stephin was curled into a kind of a fetal ball. Not because he was nervous. He just seemed comfortable that way.

The first night, I was so uncertain about what to expect onstage that Claudia and Stephin and Sam all followed me down the stairs to the very hem of the curtain, murmuring encouragement. They were as worried as I was. Apparently, “pretty well,” Claudia’s assessment of the Handler opening gigs, did not mean, “without difficulty.” I expected the worst. But the audience, when I at last stumbled out and mumbled an exploratory greeting into the microphone, listened pretty well. At least the front third did. Instantly, I was sweating like Richard Nixon during his farewell speech. There were more people standing and staring than I had ever faced down before. And they were there to hear music,pacemaker of contemporary youth, not some guy talking. I couldn’t find a way to recover from my own resistance to the arrangement that night: a reader warming up for a band. Didn’t matter if some of the people down front actually listened or maybe liked what they heard. The seconds passed at a crawl. The clock lurched to a halt. I read short things, but they seemed long; I could hear words coming out of my mouth, but they were muffled and half-hearted. I should have stood there and read like I believed in my form, the form of literature, like they were luckyto be hearing me. But this kind of confidence is not native to me.

And then to scattered applause my job was finished for the night, and I could go be in the audience like everyone else. That’s where lovers of a record belong, in the audience, not backstage.

The next night was Philadelphia. Stephin and Claudia were already spooked by Philly, before we’d even got there. They said they’d never had a good gig in Philadelphia, ever. One of my best friends lives in Philly, though, and my sister lived there for a while, and I know that Eraserhead was filmed there, and I know that Philly used to be the speed capital of the northeast. It has the Mummer’s Day Parade. How bad could it be?

Pretty bad, it turned out. First, the club we were playing was enormous. Called the Trocadero, it seemed to hold thousands, in the upper levels, especially near the bar. Why people would want to pay to come to a Magnetic Fields gig and then just go up to the bar and talk is a mystery. But this is what happened.

For the Philly show, I’d made use of a songwriter friend from the area, Marc Beck. He was my guitar and keyboard accompanist. We were scared shitless, fair to say, partly because of the night before, partly because of Claudia’s admonitions about Philly, partly because fear just seemed like good policy. But having an accompanist made the whole opening act role a lot easier. I didn’t care that the entire back of the room was now talking and drinking, was drowning out the p.a., because at least there was an electric guitar wailing. I wasn’t as naked as the night before. I wasn’t as innocent. And the Magnetic Fields didn’t get much more respect than I did. Claudia tried talking sense to the audience, offering the disclaimer that they weren’t a rock band,etc. And Stephin, who can exude a punk rock onstage irritability when he needs to, was pretty savage. But they played great, and even, as a kindness to me, performed “Grand Canyon,” one of my favorites on 69 Love Songs. By the end of the show, though, everyone was short-tempered. They’d never play in Philadelphia again, it was a hell hole, and so forth.

The experience, for all its terrors, sort of changed my life. There is nothing harder than trying to bring fiction, literature, words, to the mass audience, even as refined an audience as the one that comes to a Magnetic Fields gig. After you have done this, after you have stood in front of a rock audience that just wants you to get the fuck off the stage and shut up, you are never again nervous about a reading. Well, maybe a reading on television. Television is still pretty terrifying. But the Magnetic Fields tamed the idea of the public performance for me, once and for all. Which is not to say that the shows were fun. They were grinding, maddening, harsh. But I survived them, and I was stronger for it.

And maybe survival or something like it was part of the experience for the Magnetic Fields, too. Did Stephin want the audience to listen attentively because that was part of the traditional compact between performer and audience? Because the performer is vulnerable in this moment, is speaking for the audience in an entrusted oratory that is both frightening and burdensome? Was he simply saying that vulnerability merits respect, especially with work as literary as the songs of the Magnetic Fields? In Philly, once the general distraction had been set in motion, Stephin introduced “Book of Love” by saying, “Now I’m going to sing ‘Book of Love,’ and you aren’t.” And it seemed in the moment that he had been abraded, worn down, by the double-trust of performance, vulnerable on the one hand, wounded on the other; hoping, despairing, and then also hardened to vicissitudes, inured.

*

The first principle of reduction for the abbreviated 69 Love Songswe will refer to as the principle of the self-hating bisexual. To the uninitiated, it’s fair to say that one of the really joyful, wonderful things about 69 Love Songs is the fact that it is extremely complicated from the point of view of gender and erotic cathexis. There are songs here about boys loving boys, there are songs about girls loving girls, there are songs about men loving women, and women loving men, and these are sung, more or less, by whoever has the right range. Claudia Gonson and Shirley Simms hold down the upper registers. In the male range, there’s Stephin doing a lot of bass parts (some of these computer enhanced), and there are two other guys, Dudley Klute and LD Beghtol, in the upper baritone and tenor range, respectively.

As Stephin points out in the booklet, 69 Love Songs the album began as a contribution to the world of musical theater. You can feel the traces of this ambition in the finished project, in a number of songs that are closer to show tunes than to popular songs. I’m listening to one of these right now. It’s called “How Fucking Romantic,” from the first disc, and it’s the song in which Dudley sings along with finger snaps and no other accompaniment. The composition is clever, simple, and it rhymes moon with “Rogers & Hart tune.” Who can dispute the mastery of the form? Who can dispute the clean energy of its bitterness? Who can dispute how smart it is? Nonetheless, I resist the song (even though Dudley is devastatingly handsome, as many have observed). Another example? “Very Funny,” from Disc Two, another ditty in which my-lover-is-probably-cheating-on-me to an incredibly beautiful cello part. Dudley works with the upper end of his range, and he has a little of that Marc Almond sexiness. And yet the composition seems more of a genre exercise than, say, “Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long,” which deals with similar material, but which has an infectious groove.

The problem is that I hate show tunes. Not to mention musical theater. I don’t find the American musical charming and funny and full of musical brilliance. I find it embarrassing, overstated, and I resent all the old people filling the sidewalks in midtown on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I wish they’d go back to Long Island. I thought Rent was a debacle, especially the singing homeless guys. I don’t like the vibrato in the conventional show tune voice. I find it cloying. Bernadette Peters sends me screaming from a room. Liza Minelli is appalling, and so was her mom. In fact, I dislike opera too.

Having said this, I did have a past as a boy singer of Gilbert and Sullivan, and my first important experience with crossdressing and festishization of crossdressers occurred when, as a ten-year-old, I played one of the three little maids from school in a summer camp production of The Mikado. The guy playing Yum Yum was hot.Our silk dressing gowns were sexy. Etc. It’s more than possible that my disaffection as regards the show tune, even the arty, insightful, and postmodern show tune, has to do with an attempt to eradicate the legacy of Broadway and light opera from my personality. I’m not proud of this disclaimer, but it is mine. Accordingly, I knew that the tunes closest to the show-tune idiom on 69 Love Songs, the tunes largely sung by Dudley and LD, would likely be first to face elimination.

For some reason, however, Stephin Merritt, cannot sound like a show tune even when he lists in that general direction (on, e.g., “Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits”). So there were fewer, if any, antipathies with his turns as lead vocalist. And perhaps this is because of his gruff, cigarette-enhanced bass-baritone, which is always funny and world-weary. My fiancée, Amy, dislikes a song called “Busby Berkeley Dreams,” because of its Hollywood excess (“I haven’t seen you in ages/but it’s not as bleak as it seems/We still dance on whirling stages/in my Busby Berkeley dreams”), but in this case I would make a strict critical division between the ballad and the show tune. I have no problems with ballads. Ballads are heartfelt and moving, no matter their lyrical content. Show tunes are over the top and sentimental. Stephin Merritt is one of the best ballad singers on earth.

No problems at all with the women singers. Shirley’s voice is incredibly sultry, with a faint Southern twang. And even when she’s singing something arch, like on “No One Will Ever Love You” (“If you don’t mind/why don’t you mind?”), she sounds earnest. Probably the faux-Fleetwood Mac guitar parts by John add to the perception. Or what about the catchy “Washington, D.C.,” where Claudia channels Up With People or the Bay City Rollers, but with an affectionate smirk? It’s hilarious and beautiful, and Claudia can rock as well as anyone in the band. Her voice has a touch of Grace Slick to it. Sort of seductive and hoarse at the same time. If one of the hidden influences here is bubblegum, the songs for women’s voices are the best examples.

However, I didn’t really make decisions on what shouldn’t be on the single volume version of 69 Love Songs. I just made decisions on what should. I just picked the songs I liked. I didn’t say, “Epitaph for My Heart” is just a little too much. What I did say to myself was how I loved certain other songs. It turned out there were a lot of songs I loved. So, at last, I append the list, with the songs stripped off of their original CDs and sequenced at random, in keeping with Stephin’s original design:

1. “Experimental Music Love”
2. “I Don’t Believe in the Sun”
3. “Yeah! Oh, Yeah!”
4. “Reno Dakota”
5. “Come Back From San Francisco”
6. “The Book of Love”
7. “You’re My Only Home”
8. “Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long”
9. “Boa Constrictor”
10. “Nothing Matters When You’re Dancing”
11. “Punk Love”
12. “Wi’ Nae Wee Bairn Ye’ll Me Beget”
13. “Sweet-Lovin’ Man”
14. “The Things We Did and Didn’t Do”
15. “Roses”
16. “When My Boy Walks Down the Street”
17. “Busby Berkeley Dreams”
18. “Grand Canyon”
19. “If You Don’t Cry”
20. “I Don’t Want to Get Over You”
21. “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off”
22. “My Only Friend”
23. “World Love”
24. “Washington, D.C.”
25. “Kiss Me Like You Mean It”
26. “Time Enough for Rocking When We’re Old”
27. “Papa Was a Rodeo”
28. “I Shatter”
29. “Acoustic Guitar”
30. “The Night You Can’t Remember”
31. “Xylophone Track”

Though the organizing principle is nothing other than pleasure, it is possible, retroactively, to notice a few tendencies. Songs with really good piano parts: “I Don’t Believe in the Sun,” “My Only Friend,” “Papa Was a Rodeo,” “Busby Berkeley Dreams”; songs with live drums that repudiate disclaimers about how the Magnetic Fields are not a rock band: “A Chicken With It’s Head Cut Off,” “Punk Love,” “Sweet-Lovin’ Man,” “When My Boy Walks Down the Street,” “Washington, D.C.,” “Papa Was a Rodeo,” “Ferdinand de Saussure”; songs with John Woo playing guitar on them: “Reno Dakota,” “Come Back From San Francisco,” “Boa Constrictor,” “Time Enough for Rocking When We’re Old,” “Acoustic Guitar”; songs with really catchy synthesizer lines that recall the early Eighties, “I Don’t Want to Get Over You,” “Fido, Your Leash Is Too Long,” “Thing We Did and Didn’t Do,” “Grand Canyon,” “You’re My Only Home”; songs with a modernist ambition, “I Shatter,” “Experimental Music Love”; songs sung by Stephin; songs with incredibly inventive lyrics; songs that have a lot of space in them; songs that leave room for the listener and aren’t fussy about arrangements; songs that are full of heartbreak.

Maybe this last quality, in fact, is the quality that draws me most to 69 Love Songs, and I take pains here to point out that the perception of heartbreak in 69 Love Songs is interpretation, not fact. Since Stephin Merritt remarks that he doesn’t “want to say which ones are ‘true’ songs,” there is no profit in going down that byway of pop criticism which insists on seeing songs as extracts from an autobiography. And yet I adhere to the delusion that there’s something heartbroken and truthful and even sincereabout a lot of these songs. Sincere, a word that doesn’t come in for a lot of respect these days. I brought the point up with Claudia, by e-mail, and her response was, “There’s something about sincerity that nauseates me.” I had the same reaction from Stephin himself. I did an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirerbefore opening for the Magnetic Fields, and when asked why I liked the band, I told the interviewer that I thought that Stephin’s songs were, notwithstanding his denials, heartfelt and moving. Then I made the mistake of repeating this to Stephin backstage. His put-down was swift and complete. I can’t recreate it exactly but it was close to words like: “What incredible bullshit.”

But if there’s not something true and sincere about the complexity of human emotions on this record, why bother to keep listening to it? An album rewards attention over four years, or more, because it means something about how people live.That’s why no one really listens to the Electric Light Orchestra anymore. Theirs were impeccably crafted pop songs that meant nothing at all. They were adept, and they were as compelling as sheet rock. People listen to Burt Bacharach not for the tricky metrical changes and major seventh chords, although these are nice, but because of the conjunction of the music and the complicated pathos of the words.

After all, it’s not called 69 Clever Songs or 69 Songs with Extremely Dextrous End Rhymes or 69 Songs in Which a Guy With a Lot of Talent Apes Other People’s Musical Styles. It does say Love Songs in the title, and I take the ambition to be as indicated. The word love is invoked in the title, and it turns up in ninety-nine one-hundredths of the songs—not as a mere signifier of the sort imagined by Ferdinand de Saussure, but because love, the word, the idea, speaks to an important, even exalted way that people interact. When this interaction has been effectively dealt with in the popular song (“All You Need Is Love,” “Shelter From the Storm,” “God Only Knows,” “My Funny Valentine”), it has reached a place that is indelible to millions. To incline toward this word, to incline toward this abstraction, with all the trouble and bliss that it causes, in sixty-nine different ways, is to be preoccupied—centrally, vitally—with what it means to be living here on earth. That we are still listening to the album is proof of its meaning, not proof of its inventiveness. Because inventiveness is not forever. Inventiveness lasts about fifteen minutes.

Remember when Mike Chapman was producing Blondie and he said “If you can’t make hit records you might as well fuck off and chop meat somewhere”? The same could be said of love songs. If you can’t tell the truth about love, then you might as well fuck off, etc. The Knack were clever and shallow, and they were the next Beatles for a few minutes in the late Seventies. And where is Mike Chapman now? Doing some spots for a VH1 program in which he reckons with the fact that the popular taste has passed him by? Why love songs? What is it about love songs? Why all these love songs? Why not songs about war? Why not songs about death (like “Last Kiss” and “Teen Angel”)? Is it simply because these are not affirmations and we would be unwise to spend our leisure on music that recoils from affirmation of any sort? Or is it because music, that incredibly powerful but largely abstract art form, is best and most practically married to subject matter that ennobles? Is desire the perfect catalytic agent for the abstraction of music? Is music itself love, as David Crosby once remarked in song?

The most beautiful moments on this collection of love songs, the most beautiful moments in the history of Stephin Merritt, are the moments when he is somehow alone with his ukulele or his guitar, and there’s a lot of air in the recording, and he’s seducing the listener with lines like “You can sing me anything,” and the equipoise is between a distrust of the love and the faint but stirring hope that maybe it will turn out well this time. The accompaniment, almost always written after the melodies, leaves a hovering uncertainty in the piece, a little bit of echo, a little bit of reverb. Unmistakeable is the sensation that love is a thing of the atmosphere. It could go either way, there could be another dead end of acrimony and disputation, or, and Stephin would deny it aloud, perhaps there could be harmony. Maybe he really does know something about it, even though he would claim instead to be debunker (“Are you out of love with me? Are you longing to be free? Do I drive you up a tree? Yeah! Oh, yeah!”); maybe, even though he’d prefer to allude to a certain bar where he writes while staring off languidly and listening to the Human League on the jukebox, there are these instants when affirmation and annihilation are equallypart of love’s system of uncertain futures. And this is an instant that is best captured in song. He says it right there, in “The Book of Love”: “The book of love has music in it/in fact, that’s where music comes from.”

That’s the Magnetic Fields that I adore.

Thirty-one songs, then, because it’s a prime number, and because it’s the same number as in that medieval classic, Andreas Capellanus’s “Rules of Courtly Love,” which preserves such irrefutable complexities as (#1) “Marriage should not be a deterrent to love,” and (#2) “Love cannot exist in the individual who cannot be jealous.” Like Capellanus, the Magnetic Fields, as preserved here, have fashioned a primer on the complexities of love. They have denied both their affirmations and their heartbreak in the press, sure, and even sometimes onstage, because to be vulnerable is hard, sad, thankless, and costly, as Capellanus has himself advised (#13, “Public revelation of love is deadly to love in most circumstances”). But in their secret hearts they betray how fervently they are lovers. Compare the medieval master in #14, “The value of love is commensurate with the difficulty of its attainment,” with the songwriter, “Well, darling you may do your worst,/because you’ll have to kill me first…” Or Capellanus in #22, “Love is reinforced by jealousy,” and Merritt, on Disc One, “Fido, your leash is too long,/you go where you don’t belong.” Thirty-one love songs, then, because love songs when they are true (“No one will ever love you honestly/No one will ever love you for your honesty”) instruct us in suffering, school us in desire, remind us of our loss, foster in us our enthusiasm.

Of course, now I’m rethinking the whole project, and wondering about the songs that got left off. Maybe I really made some mistakes here. I mean, it’s stupid to overlook “Absolutely Cuckoo,” which just sort of has to start the whole thing, as it does on the official release. “The Cactus Where Your Heart Should Be”? With its great guitar part? But what about the Modern English simulations of “(Crazy for You But) Not That Crazy?” LD’s star turn on “The Way You Say Good-Night?” Or what about Disc Three? Initially it seemed kind of weak to me, but now I’m kind of into “I’m Sorry I Love You,” with Shirley’s harmonies. How could I have been so stupid? And “Love Is Like a Bottle of Gin,” and “Two Kinds of People.” And Claudia singing “Zebra,” the last song. I should have included them all. I should definitely do it over. But I promised a friend next week I’d get Decade down to a single disc.

Rick Moody is the author, most recently, of a collection of essays: On Celestial Music and Other Adventures in Listening (Little, Brown and Company).

THE IMMORTAL HORIZON

To celebrate, The Believer posted pieces from past issues that tied into the themes of each show. The fourth concert in collected stories, Travel, featuring a performance of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage by pianist Louis Lortie, is paired with Leslie Jamison’s essay on the Barkley Marathons (from the May 2011 issue of the Believer).

THIRTY-FIVE RUNNERS FACE HOLLERS AND HELLS, A FLOODED PRISON, RATS THE SIZE OF POSSUMS, AND FLESH-FLAYING BRIARS TO TEST THE LIMITS OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY.

DISCOVER KYMAERICA

To celebrate collected stories, the Believer posted pieces from past issues that tied into with the themes of each show. The third concert in collected stories, (post)folk,  featuring Alarm Will Sound, Alan Pierson, and Jennifer Zetland, is paired with Michael A. Elliott’s essay on the Kcymaerxthaere, the fictional universe created by Eames Demetrios (from theNovember/December 2009 issue of the Believer).

THE GRANDSON OF THE DESIGNERS OF THE MOST FAMOUS PIECE OF MODERN FURNITURE MEMORIALIZES THE SLOW DEATH OF MAIN STREET BY BUILDING AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE.

DISCUSSED: Non-Native Elvish Speakers, The Kcymaerxthaere, Three-Dimensional Storytelling, The Battle of Some Times, The Limits of the Assembly Line, The Parisian Diaspora, Teri’s Threads, The Conditions of an Ideal Spot for Reverie

The brick courtyard was adjacent to the railroad tracks on Atlanta’s industrial west side—and part of a structure that had been transformed from its industrial roots to become the home of a five-star restaurant. I must have taken a wrong turn, because instead of finding the bathroom, I ended up staring at a bronze plaque that had been welded into the concrete abutting the building’s electrical boards. It looked just like one of the historical markers scattered throughout the South to mark every scrape and scuffle of the Civil War.

But this one wasn’t like that. “When the Tehachapi incised the Adalanta Desert with the two great sphaltways,” it began, “a settlement at their junction was inevitable.” On this spot, the plaque explained, a woman named Martha Pelaski built her trading post, the location for a series of historic meetings between people with names I didn’t recognize: Nobunaga-gaisen, Iglesia Guitierrez, Síawm Chd. For a second I thought that the local historical society must have been infiltrated by one of those people who prefer to read The Lord of the Rings in Elvish. I looked around to see if this was a joke, and if there was something else nearby that could let me in on it. There wasn’t.

I had stumbled onto the Kcymaerxthaere.

The Kcymaerxthaere is a vast alternate universe created by Eames Demetrios, a California-based artist and filmmaker who began installing the plaques in 2003. The premise of the project is that the Kcymaerxthaere exists as its own parallel world, but its remnants are often visible in our own, “linear” world—intersections that Demetrios endeavors to commemorate by physically marking their presence.

He has already installed over sixty of these faux historical markers, and hopes to increase that number to seventy by the year’s end. Most are in the United States (that is, Kymaerica), while others dot the globe, materializing in Singapore, Spain, Dubai, and Australia. This August, Demetrios even lowered a plaque onto the ocean floor, under forty-five feet of water in the Garvellach Islands of Scotland. In addition to the plaques, there are lectures, websites, travel guides (including Discover Kymaerica), and bus tours. He funds the project through gallery shows that display photographs of the plaque sites, as well as “texture flags”—dense images of physical objects that he says are carried by the people of the Kcymaerxthaere as their national banners. Demetrios calls the project “three-dimensional storytelling,” and says that he hopes to mark some two thousand sites before he is through.

It helps to know a few key features of the Kcymaerxthaere: The world there is divided into gwomes, cultural groups that bear some resemblance to nation-states, though they are much smaller. (There are more than 5,000 gwomes in Kymaerica alone.) The great cultures of the Kcymaerxthaere were made up of road builders, and Kcymaerxthaere history is marked by several massive migrations—across both land and sea. Central figures recur throughout the story, such as the Nobunagas, a father-son legacy of warriors whose saga extends from Korea to Texas (or “pTejas”). There has been warfare, including the enigmatic but crucial Battle of Some Times, and the less significant if more colorful Battle of Devil’s Marbles, where thousands of warriors fought astride giant, vicious war-kangaroos.

At times, it can be difficult to follow. Demetrios calls himself a “Geographer-at-Large,” and he talks about “research” and “discovery” as though he were mapping the Kcymaerxthaere instead of creating it. Each new “find” seems to generate its own energy, so that the stories constantly threaten to splinter and splay in dozens of new directions. When I reach Demetrios on the phone, he is in Basel, Switzerland, preparing to install plaques in Poland and excited about a future installation in Berlin. “What’s great about the project now is that things happen in certain places. So if I get permission to do a plaque in linear Berlin, then it must tell the story of the Bravenleavanne, because they were the ones who built the Monastery District there.”

“Of course it must,” I say, and Demetrios fills me in on the Bravenleavanne, a cultural group with an intense belief in doing good deeds for their own sake.

“At one point, they were in what we would call linear Norwich, England, but then they became so pleased with themselves that people knew about them, and they realized that they had to fade away from that place. Then they tried again in Berlin, but it didn’t work there, either. And then finally they kind of atomized entirely into the hearts of the inhabitants.”

Demetrios, I gather, talks like this a lot, and there’s a certain pleasure in just letting the strange names and events wash over you. He has compared the project to writing a novel and leaving every page in a different location, but I don’t think that’s the right metaphor. A novel is something that will finally hold together in its binding—that can be mass-produced in neat, identical copies as it rolls off the printing press. Demetrios comes from a famous family of mass producers, but also a family that knows we all sometimes require more than an assembly line can provide.

Eames Demetrios, texture flag from Kcymaerxthaere. Courtesy of the artist.

2.

Eames Demetrios is the namesake of his grandparents, Charles and Ray Eames, icons of twentieth-century design who are best known today for their contributions to modern furniture—sleek, single-shell seats of molded plywood, and the padded Eames Lounge Chair. From airport lounges to living rooms, the Eameses did nothing less than remake the world that we see and sit upon everyday. But the Eameses also experimented in cinema, and as I talk to Demetrios about the Kcymaerxthaere, I keep thinking about Powers of Ten, undoubtedly the most widely viewed of his grandparents’ hundred-odd short films.

The film begins with the camera hovering above a man who peacefully naps in a Chicago park. Science books, a perfectly turned picnic lunch, and an appropriately attractive mate surround his resting body. The camera then pulls back, increasing its distance from the man by a factor of ten every ten seconds, moving from one meter to ten meters to one hundred meters, and so on. The earth appears in its fullness, planets spin by, and eventually we retreat to the edges of the known world. Then the camera moves in the opposite direction, burrowing into the man’s hand, focusing on smaller and smaller distances—skin, cells, DNA, until it arrives at electron clouds that buzz in a subatomic frenzy. The film is a kind of “You Are Here” for the cosmos.

Historical markers, at least the traditional kind, aim to locate us in much the same way by yoking a small piece of the earth to sweeping currents of time that we can’t see. This is why the plaques that Demetrios installs are both so disorienting and so effective. No matter how improbable and outlandish the stories they tell, there’s nothing in front of our eyes to contradict them. Like The Powers of Ten, they tell us how much of the universe we have to take on faith.

3.

Paris, Illinois, seems like an unusual place to find out how much confidence the Kcymaerxthaere can inspire. With a population of roughly nine thousand, the town is bounded by fairgrounds on one end and a Walmart on the other. Its center is a town square that seems to be as much museum piece as anything else. An ornate octagonal courthouse of stone, topped by a bell tower reaching 150 feet into the sky, sits on a plot of grass dotted with war memorials. The chain stores have abandoned Main Street, and what remains are local concerns that barely occupy the expanses of their plate-glass windows.

Paris also happens to be the location of Embassy Row, one of a handful of “historical sites” that Demetrios has commemorated with a more elaborate installation than the usual bronze marker. The story is this: In the Kcymaerxthaere, this town was the center of the Parisian Diaspora, a web of communities throughout Kymaerica that took the name Paris (and variations, includingParris, New Paris, and so on)—names that we still use in the linear world. Sixteen members of this Fraternitee des tous les Paris had offices in Embassy Row. Unfortunately, the entire town was nearly destroyed in a five-day riot sparked by political rivalry.

One of the few structures still standing, ironically, was Embassy Row itself. In our linear world, Embassy Row is housed on the second floor of a former Woolworth’s building facing the county courthouse. Completed three years ago, the installation covers 5,000 square feet—seventeen rooms in all. Some rooms still wear the peeling paint and plaster that comes from decades of neglect; others have been painted in the bright colors of the embassy’s gwome. Volcanic rock is strewn about the wooden floors in careful patterns, and broken windows signal the riot’s devastation.

Each room is carefully interpreted through a series of museum-quality signs, complete with maps, diagrams, and photographs. You can learn about the history of the Parisian Diaspora and its remarkable leader, Amory Frontage; you can read about the various districts (from kNue Llorck to Centucky) that sent ambassadors to Embassy Row; and you can see firsthand where the dispute over certification first erupted into violence. At the conclusion, a glass display case holds artifacts collected from the Parises of our linear world—everything from the insignia of the New Paris, Wisconsin, fire department to the nameplates for “Parris Valley Campers” made in Perris, California. The site mimics the idiom of historic preservation so perfectly that I kept expecting to see a Park Service ranger coming through with a tour.

But I was the only visitor on a summer day—judging by the guest book, Embassy Row doesn’t get many visitors—and the midday light entered at odd angles, filtered by glass that had endured since the turn of the century. The air was stale and dusty, even quieter than the placid town square across the street. After a few moments of walking and skimming with the same mid-level attention I give to battlefields and the homes of great men everywhere, I stopped in the middle of the hallway and felt an odd sensation of, well, plausibility.

I must have driven through dozens, maybe hundreds, of towns like Paris, and passed by thousands of buildings like this one without ever venturing into their upper reaches. At some point in history, real history, these spaces must have throbbed with the heat and energy of bodies at work—clerks, managers, secretaries. Yet now, in an age when Walmart has drained town squares of their vitality, that past seems just as strange to comprehend as the possibility that these offices once served as the meeting spaces for the ambassadors of an intricate political empire.

The store beneath Embassy Row still bustles. Teri’s Threads sells uniforms, silkscreened T-shirts, and other customized clothing. The proprietor, Teri Dennis, explains that she met Demetrios through a member of her family, and soon found herself offering him the second floor of the building, which she owns. A graying, sturdy woman who is quick to laugh, Dennis explained to me that at first she didn’t know what to think about the stories of the Kcymaerxthaere that Demetrios was telling. Now, each fall, she helps to organize a Kymaerica spelling bee during the town’s Honeybee Festival.

As she tells me about Paris, Dennis nods to the patrons entering her store. Like the others who have been involved in setting up and maintaining Embassy Row, Dennis marvels at the passion behind the project. The only trouble comes, she finds, when people want the story of Embassy Row to mesh neatly with the history that they already know. “You can’t fit it into a box,” she says. “You just have to have fun with it.” I soon realize that Dennis understands the Kcymaerxthaere better than I do, and I’m grateful when she offers to make me my very own PARIS, KYMAERICA T-shirt, complete with a toppling Eiffel Tower.

When she’s done, I leave her shop to drive out of Paris and into the countryside, until I reach a dirt road marked as DURKEE’S FERRY TRACE—the first road in Edgar County, according to a green roadside marker. After another half-mile, I pull over at a small walnut orchard to read one of Demetrios’s plaques, which of course tells me something different. This is one of historic migration routes of the Parisian Diaspora, it says, and one of the few remaining examples of the early roads of Kymaerica known as Faerie Traces—faerie being a term that means both “lightness” and “intuition.”

The plaque is nestled near a barbed-wire fence and the edge of a cornfield, and the summer has advanced enough that the green stalks reach above my head. The shade of the walnut trees makes this corner of farmland an ideal spot for reverie, and I begin to wish that I could name the roadside flowers that I see growing. Slowly, I kneel to brush away the grass from the raised letters of metal writing. The bronze is warm to the touch, and I pick up the scent of things growing deep into the earth. I don’t know how long I am there before the quiet slowly gives way to the crunching gravel of an approaching truck, and a friendly voice asking me if I need any help in finding my way. No, I say. I know exactly where I am.

THE LITTLE NICHOLSON BAKER IN MY MIND

To celebrate collected stories, the Believer posted pieces from past issues that tied into the themes of each concert. The last concert in collected stories, Memoir, featuring the premiere of David Lang’s mystery sonatas, and work by John Cage, is paired with Paul La Farge’s essay on the little Nicholson Baker in his mind (from the first issue of the Believer).