Tag: england

Born Into a Spoiler Alert: Notes from a Macbeth Descendant

Today is December 7th, 2025, the day after my mom’s and brother’s birthdays, and I’m back in one of my favorite places: the Marriott Library. I got my lucky spot, the exact one I used to sit in, like it had been waiting for me. In terms of lucky coincidences, things like this happen more than they should.

My mom used to say, “A golden cloud follows you around.” However, other sayings exist too, like: “She’d lose her head if it wasn’t attached to her body.” The combination captures the polar quality of my luck—weirdly good, and then a pendulum swing to weirdly bad.

Before I get too far into family legends, I keep thinking about a recent piece I wrote—“Fairytales We Tell Ourselves: The Utah Pantages Theater and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona”—and about my friend Michael Patton, who works under the name Michael Valentine. Michael is a direct descendant of General George S. Patton, a fact he acknowledges with a mix of irritation and resignation. He chose “Valentine” as a protest against war culture, a way of stepping sideways out of the mythology he inherited.

Good Luck / Bad Luck: Growing Up in the Shadow of “Greats”

It hit me while writing that earlier essay that both Michael and I grew up with blood-soaked ancestors—his, the general who carved his way through Europe; mine, the doomed Scottish king whose story ends in a battlefield death every time it’s told. There’s an odd magic to that, the kind that looks enviable from a distance but comes with expectations no one volunteers for. Patton and Macbeth: two figures shaped by violence, ambition, and myth—men who loom so large that their descendants end up negotiating not just lineage, but full-fledged Western narratives.

In the Pantages essay, I wrote about how spaces like that theater hold our personal myths in place—how they give people like Michael, and honestly people like me, a place to set down the stories we inherited and pick up new ones. The demolition of the Pantages in 2022 felt like a symbolic rupture: a place where stubborn idealists once found refuge was flattened, and with it went the kind of civic imagination that makes room for oddball lineages and myth-haunted people.

All of this is to say: some of us are born into stories much louder than we are. You spend your adult life deciding which parts you’re willing to keep.

Call Me Locks: Lady Macbeth Was My Grandmother!

All the relatives on my mom’s side are McBeth or MacBeth or some variant of the name. The eccentric streak runs deep enough that the spelling seems to shift with personality, era of life, or whatever the family mood was at the time. You can see the whole taxonomy laid out in the Payson, Utah graveyard where my ancestors are buried.

It’s always interested me that some cultures routinely give their kids names tied to frightening or controversial figures. Not because people secretly want a little villain in the family, but because naming a child something heavy forces them to reckon with it early. Kids will tease them, question them, make them explain it long before they’ve even learned the history behind their own name. Maybe that’s the point: you get all the shadow-work done in childhood. You learn early not to flinch at darkness, not to identify with it. Sometimes you even outgrow the propensity for villainy before you’ve had a chance to try it on.

Maybe because of that, I always had a low, reflexive cringe around the overbearing, over-ambitious persona of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. When I lived in Cambridge, I’d occasionally end up in small Shakespeare chats with baristas or grocers, and some of them made truly awful faces when the play came up. I’d laugh and tell them I didn’t actually read it until college—and did end up liking it—but for a long time I avoided English literature altogether because it felt too on-the-nose; almost like declaring myself an English major would read as a horrible gimmick.

And yet, despite all my attempts to outrun the melodrama of the name, I somehow drifted straight into the territory I thought I’d avoid—history, archives, Scotland, the whole ecosystem of stories that orbit the Macbeth myth. It’s ridiculous, but also very “family legacy” in the mythic, Oedipus kind of way: the more you sidestep something, the more directly you walk into it.

Because of that, I have a deep sympathy for celebrity kids and for anyone saddled with a complicated or suddenly loaded name. Think of people named Isis, who now share their name with a terror organization, or girls named Katrina who were born before the hurricane. In the era of the internet, your name becomes a label that precedes you everywhere, a magnetic force field you never asked for. While I love memes and jokes and occasionally peeking into gossip culture, I have a complicated relationship with what it means to be defined—lightly or heavily—before you even arrive.

The Worst Cringe I’ve Ever Felt

Perfectionists learn to metabolize embarrassment early. You practice smoothing over mistakes, pretending nothing happened, moving on. Yet as you get older and more competent, the mistakes grow sharper teeth. They wait for you in the places you least expect, like tiny traps set by the universe just to keep you humble.

I loved ancient languages and museums, so I applied for a master’s with the full, naïve conviction of someone who has no backup plan. I didn’t scatter applications across a dozen programs; I chose one, gave it everything, and hoped. Getting accepted was one of the happiest moments of my life. Even with the bare-minimum funding, I packed up and moved to England in 2013 with a kind of reckless gratitude. I had arranged a student room, memorized the streets on Google Maps, and rehearsed my own arrival like it was a scene in a film.

Before I got there, the university assigned me my email and login credentials. Seeing the “@cam.ac.uk” address made everything feel both official and impossible. There I was: walking off the train dragging my 80lbs suitcase over the uneven pavement, unlocking the rented room I’d only ever seen on a screen, and feeling—briefly, miraculously—like the version of myself I’d always hoped I would become. Even the silence of the first night, sitting on the narrow bed with the radiator clanking to life, felt like prophecy coming true.

I glanced at the autogenerated email username; apparently, there were quite a few students with my initials who came before me—so many shoes to fill! I thought. The number embedded in my unique Cambridge identifier was the number 33. I like multiples of 11. November baby. Grew up near 3300 South and St. Mark’s Hospital (I almost got a winged lion tattoo; maybe I still will). This gemmatria-esque-hippie-numerology detail registered as a tiny wink from the universe; everything is sure going my way, I thought.

For weeks, I floated. I went to induction sessions, bought my first British groceries, tried not to look like an overwhelmed American. I signed emails automatically with my new Cambridge address, barely thinking about the random “33” tacked onto it. It was just another institutional quirk, like the fact that no one ever explained how the dining hall seating worked.

Then—months later, at the Hughes Hall bar, half-drunk with a pack of French classmates—the brakes hit. Someone asked a simple question about how Cambridge generates its usernames. I answered without thinking, rattling off mine and mentioning the “33” as casually as noting the weather. The reaction was immediate. A full-body groan from one side of the table. Explosive laughter from the other. Someone actually slid off their chair.

Only then did they manage to explain to me—between gasps—that “33” is used as a white supremacist code. And that “HH,” the abbreviation for Hughes Hall, is another one. I stared at them while they howled with the kind of laughter that makes strangers turn around. I was actually holding back tears of horror.

I replayed every email I had ever sent. Every form submitted. Every professor addressed. Me, earnestly signing off with a digital calling card that, out of context, looked like a secret handshake with the worst people alive. It was—without exaggeration—the purest cringe of my adult life. Thankfully, Cambridge changes your email when you graduate. I shed the cursed numerology and emerged simply as hannah.mcbeth. A clean slate; a merciful reset.

In one of my favorite films 500 Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character asks Summer (played by the immortal Zooey Deschanel) if she ever had a nickname in school. She deadpans: “They called me Anal Girl because I was so neat and tidy.” He spits out his drink.

I think “Hitler Girl” might even be worse.

On Luck, Names, and Everything We Don’t Choose

Sitting here today in my old lucky spot at the Marriott Library, I keep thinking about how wildly inconsistent luck can feel when you grow up inside a name, a story, a family mythology you never exactly signed up for. Some people inherit money or land or a family business; others inherit legends, curses, punchlines, or—if they’re especially unlucky—an email address that accidentally signals extremism. The older I get, the more I realize the shape of your inheritance matters less than the way you learn to carry it.

Some of us get the blood-soaked ancestors, the melodramatic surnames, the oddball reputations that precede us into rooms. Some of us get the tiny mortifications that knock the wind out of us in foreign bars. Some of us, if we’re really paying attention, also get the golden-cloud moments—the quiet return to a library desk that feels like a portal back to the versions of ourselves we’ve been building, fleeing, or reinventing for years.

Maybe that’s the real trick of growing up in the shadow of “greats,” whether real or imagined: eventually you stop trying to outpace the story and start editing it. You keep the parts that still feel alive, you leave behind the parts that were only ever projections, and you learn to laugh—properly, deeply—when life hands you the kind of cringe you’ll be telling forever.

Names, myths, coincidences, curses, blessings: they all get folded into the same narrative eventually. Somehow, here I am again, in December light, at the desk that always seems to be waiting for me—proof that sometimes the pendulum swings back toward the good, weirdly and without warning, just when you need it most.

December 7, 2025
Eleanor Rigby Weather
I genuinely cannot be in a bad mood when Monty Python starts whistling at me. “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” is somehow powerful enough to override both rejection emails and Utah politics. Two notes and I’m cured. It also happens to be sung by men being crucified, which feels like an appropriate motivational model for writers.

I try to remember that feeling when a literary magazine informs me—very politely—that I am not among the anointed ones (I am, unfortunately, not Brian). But unlike most magazines, Strange Pilgrims did something humane: they told the truth. More than 7,481 submissions landed at their virtual doorstep.

That’s not a slush pile; that’s a full-scale literary migration. Entire ecosystems of poems, essays, experiments, and genre-adjacent apparitions. The editorial equivalent of having 7,481 feral kittens suddenly show up on your porch, each insisting it’s special. No one can read that many pieces without caffeine, spreadsheets, and a durable spirit. The breakdown:
- 46% Short Stories
- 29% Flash Fiction
- 16% Creative Nonfiction (my corner)
- 9% Flash CNF
I’m one bright dot among thousands of people writing through whatever strange seasons they’re in—grad school recoveries, heartbreaks, quiet epiphanies, late-night typing fits.

Because today arrived wrapped in steady rain, Salt Lake City drifted into an accidental British mood. On days like this, almost without thinking, I reach for British things—Beatles albums, Monty Python sketches, small scraps of comedy that work better than meditation apps. The rain, the rejection, the nostalgia: they braid together and pull me back toward the younger versions of myself who hadn’t yet been asked to have a future.

Drifting Toward Whatever Color Glowed Brightest

At seventeen I watched Yellow Submarine for the first time—unwrinkled, teenage-thin, balanced at the threshold of everything unnamed. My sense of self then was more of a faint outline than a shape. “Me” was still in beta. No degrees, no acceptances, no promotions. I was essentially an amoeba, soft and curious, drifting toward whatever color glowed brightest.

Me as an amoeba.

The film hit me the way certain things do when you’re still mostly potential: a psychedelic cartoon, strangely beautiful like fine art. I remember showing my boyfriend the “natural born lever-puller” scene—a joke that works on a few different levels if you notice the wordplay. The Beatles are from Liverpool, which makes them Liverpudlians, not lever-pullers; John delivers the line while literally pulling a lever on the submarine, grinning in a way that makes the implication unmistakably physical (to my hormonal teenage brain).

And then came the Eleanor Rigby overture, with its lonely drawings of Liverpool rendered in muted grays and anonymous faces, the whole city walking beneath a private weather system. That rich animated sequence became my internal shorthand for England, more than landmarks, more than anything literal. The only other thing that captures that mood for me is “Kathy’s Song”, the way Simon sings about moving through rain and realizing that love, or longing, or some interior truth is the only thing that holds steady.

<br />

On this rainy day—when my unemployment is hanging in the air like a stalled pressure front—I sit by the window and watch raindrops slide down the glass. The Wasatch Range disappears into fog and for a moment the valley feels like I’m at a different latitude.

The Long and Winding Road from Reviewer to Artist

A moment of clarity in the British drizzle reminded me of this: for six months I’ve been writing every day and learning new ways of making art. Some of that work has helped me understand my own life; some of it feels like it might matter to others who are trying to make sense of theirs. I keep writing about Utah artists and musicians because they deserve more light than they get. It’s the work that feels worth doing, and the hope that it might ease someone’s path the way other people’s art has eased mine.

Being a magazine reviewer and corporate writer has meant most people don’t think of me as an artist. But in terms of writing, what I do is a kind of reduction and abstraction—paring language down, stripping away the unnecessary, following something like Hemingway’s discipline and something like what Dan Evans does visually in his cut-paper work (read my profile for 15 Bytes here). My writing isn’t really “content” anymore; it has form, created from writing, rewriting, and using words and semiotic chains like a material you can shape and manipulate.

I didn’t expect visual art to open up for me during this unemployment stretch. AI video, especially—something about pairing music with moving images unlocked a kind of emotional processing I hadn’t been able to reach through writing alone. It feels closer to fine art than anything I’ve ever made: color, timing, rhythm, atmosphere. I can take the grief, the weirdness, the nonlinear memories, and shape them into something that moves—literally moves—in a way prose can’t. I’ve started thinking about these pieces the way I think about essays: structured, intentional, built from feeling rather than performance. It’s strange to say, but for the first time, I actually feel like someone who makes art, not just someone who writes about other people making it.

A video animation created with AI based on original artwork

Because I’m trying to hum on the bright side of life, I can admit this: I’ve made more progress in these months—more growth in understanding how I write and why—than I ever managed while employed. I’m finally submitting to magazines like Strange Pilgrims. Finally imagining myself as someone allowed to be there. Even if it feels like showing up scandalously late, something essential has shifted in how I make things.
December 2, 2025
Can’t Step in the Same River Twice
On Blue-Light Rooms & Other Gateways

There’s a kind of current that runs through the blue-light rooms where things are made, the backstage corners of plays, the band rooms humming after hours, the improvised studios where people gather around something still taking shape. It’s the same current that moves through any space where people are building worlds together, whether out of plywood, choreography, fabric, or light. These places feel rare, almost set apart from the rest of life, and the people drawn to them are often those who never quite fit the usual shape of things. They feel most themselves in the charged, half-chaotic atmosphere of a room in the middle of making something new.

A Place Built Without a Nightlife Vocabulary

Growing up in Utah, I gravitated toward the rooms where things were being made—the art classrooms, the wings of the stage, the band rooms buzzing after dark. Those were the spaces that felt alive. But as you grew older, the world around you encouraged a kind of narrowing. Creativity was tolerated in childhood, yet adulthood was expected to look settled, orderly, and suburban. There wasn’t much of a tradition of going out dancing or spending time in bars, and alcohol made so many people uneasy that some wouldn’t attend a wedding if there was a bartender. It always struck me as ironic in a religion built around a figure who turned water into wine.

In Utah—or at least the version I grew up in—not everyone avoided play, but there was a strong puritan reflex that regarded vigorous dancing, costumes, and nighttime gatherings with suspicion. Dressing up could be dismissed as childish or inappropriate. My father was convinced for years that Halloween had demonic origins and refused to celebrate it.

That way of thinking leaves little space for adults to experiment with identity or enjoy even modest forms of theatricality. The cultural instinct tilted toward self-containment rather than expression, toward seriousness rather than imagination.

Discos & Study Abroad

When I think about my first real encounter with dancing, I always return to that scene in Hanna, the Amazon series, where the girl who has grown up hidden in the woods ends up in a tourist disco for the first time. She isn’t scared; she’s fascinated and a little stunned people get to live this way.

When I went to study abroad in Madrid when I was 20, I’d never been into a bar before, but Spain operated on a completely different logic. Kids start drinking at 16, so the whole culture around bars and discos is less anxious and more woven into everyday life. People danced because the music was playing or because their friends pulled them into the rhythm, not because the moment was supposed to signify anything. Flamenco classes, crowded bars, and late-night discos slowly demystified it for me. A drink or “chupitas” helped, but what really changed things was watching people move without apology or self-surveillance. Movement made sense there in a way it never had before, and for the first time, dance started to feel like an essential part of who I could be.

The Quiet Rebellion of Fancy Dress

England added another layer I didn’t expect. After Spain, I assumed the ease around dancing and nightlife might be tied to Southern Europe, but then I moved to another very Anglo, very orderly country and found that a different kind of playfulness lived there as well. I first heard the phrase “fancy dress parties” and imagined formal clothing, only to learn that in British English it simply means costumes, usually chosen with enough enthusiasm to make the whole thing feel delightfully absurd. Someone would announce a theme, people would make quick charity-shop runs, and by evening the bar would be full of whatever interpretations they could assemble. During my master’s year those nights became a kind of punctuation between lectures and libraries — small, collective acts of imagination that gave the term “student life” a broader range.

Fancy dress is a faint descendant of older revels and masquerades where people were given a little room to slip outside the roles they held during the day. The modern version doesn’t carry the weight of those older traditions, but the instinct is the same: a simple, generous permission to become someone else for a few hours. Creativity and imagination need small departures from the everyday. Being someone else for an evening, or even just exaggerating one aspect of yourself, has always lightened the existential load. It creates a pause in the linear story of your life, a moment where you’re allowed to play rather than perform.

The instinct behind fancy dress — that willingness to step outside yourself for an evening — extends into festival culture, but in a different register. Glastonbury is the version most Americans have heard of. For a few days, ordinary life expands. People build temporary worlds in fields by hauling in scaffolding, generators, speakers, tents, sequins, and a small nation’s worth of waterproofs.

Crossing Back to the Western Desert

The jump from that environment to the western United States is a kind of cultural whiplash. Once you’re back in Utah and Nevada, the landscape is huge but the places where you can actually move in public shrink to almost nothing. Spain covers about 195,000 square miles (505,000 km²) and holds roughly 47 million people. Utah and Nevada together span almost the same area—about 210,000 square miles (543,000 km²)—but have fewer than 9 million people combined. It creates a strange paradox: two states the size of a European country, but with almost no public spaces where adults are expected to gather, move, or experiment with identity. Outside a few country bars, and the singular outlier of Las Vegas, there isn’t much of a nightlife vocabulary across all that space.

Electronic dance music, house, bass—anything with a subwoofer and a color palette beyond beige—triggers immediate suspicion. And not the vague moral kind. In a culture that is otherwise intensely materialistic, the suspicion turns strangely supernatural. In Mormon thought, “Satan” isn’t a metaphor; he’s a literal figure whose primary task is to lure people into drugs, sex, and what gets categorized broadly as “bad choices.” Unfortunately for anyone who likes a kick drum, electronic dance music falls neatly into that category. Add strobe lights, fog machines, or—heaven forbid—darkness punctured by red lighting, and the entire scene reads as a recruitment center for degeneracy.

The irony is that the desert is perfect for building temporary worlds. Salt flats, canyons, old mining land, vast empty valleys — the West is designed for large-scale gatherings. But mainstream Utah culture treats underground dance events the way small towns treat UFO sightings: something is happening out there, and it’s definitely not good. (But I mean, how can you blame them if you know anything about “alien cattle mutilations?”)

I’m not tracing the full socio-cultural circuitry here, and don’t even get me started on aliens — that can wait for another essay — but this section needed grounding. England showed me that dressing up and being out at night doesn’t require a moral preface; it’s simply part of how people live. And historically, when a government or an authoritarian religion feels threatened, the first reflex is always the same: impose a curfew. Control the hours, control the movement. The underlying question doesn’t change: Who gets to be out after dark?

That became obvious during the pandemic, when a statewide shutdown and a curfew — for a respiratory virus you couldn’t catch outside, of all things — sparked a ridiculous, primal urge to leave the house. One night I grabbed my friend Lamb, a skateboarder with no interest in rules, and we ran around the empty playground at Liberty Park like kids who’d slipped the perimeter. We climbed the tops of the tower slides to scan for cops. It’s still one of my favorite memories from those years. Here I am “hanging out” in a hammock illegally in Liberty Park during lockdown, 2020.

Utah taught me how many people think the answer to “who gets to be out at night?” should be tightly controlled — and how intoxicating it feels to ignore that for even ten minutes.

The Edge of the Known World

If there’s a thread that connects Utah art rooms, Madrid discos, English fancy dress, and the temporary worlds built from plywood and light, it’s novelty. I’ve always been drawn to the moments when something unplanned rises up and changes the temperature of a life, when you feel more awake simply because you weren’t expecting what arrived. When I was little, that feeling lived in stories. Pocahontas was the one I returned to again and again, not for romance but for the idea of a girl who stepped toward change rather than away from it. She moved into the unknown because it lit up something inside her, something the familiar world couldn’t reach.

There’s a shot of her standing at the cliff’s edge, hair blown sideways, looking out at a world she doesn’t fully understand but wants anyway. For a certain kind of girl — the restless, the observant, the ones born into cultures that value obedience over curiosity — that image is a blueprint. It tells you that stepping outside your prescribed path might be the only way to find out who you are.

The Color of a Moving River

Heraclitus said you can’t step into the same river twice. The river moves; so do you. It’s the simplest description of what novelty feels like when it lands: a shift, a current, something that interrupts the default settings of ordinary life. That runs through the creative rooms I loved as a kid and the dance floors I found later—the sense that you’re stepping into a moment that didn’t exist ten seconds ago and won’t exist again.

Novelty isn’t decoration. It’s a physiological event. Wonder tightens the chest; surprise pulls the breath in; adrenaline flickers at the edges of perception; the world you thought you understood rearranges itself for a moment. Creativity depends on those physiological rearrangements. So does joy.

Novelty interrupts routine and reminds you that the world is wider and stranger than the narrow structures you were handed; it opens doors in the mind. For people who never felt entirely at home inside the expected structures, novelty is the moment where you remember that change is not only possible but natural, and that moving toward the unknown has always been where the story becomes interesting.

But novelty is only one face of change. Most of the time change arrives without excitement: jobs shift, people leave, landscapes alter, seasons tilt. What you crave in one moment—movement, unpredictability—becomes something you brace against in another. The same current that delivers the jolt of possibility also carries away what was stable a moment before. Heraclitus wasn’t describing thrill-seeking; he was naming the underlying condition. Whether or not you want it, the world is already moving.

On Arising and Passing Away

Early Buddhist thinkers approached the same truth differently, not as an argument but as a quality of experience. Things arise, change, and pass—not tragically, not triumphantly, simply because that is what things do. Hesse’s Siddhartha takes this and turns it into a story, letting the river become a companion rather than a symbol. From here, the ideas meet in color.

Blue is the shade most often given to water in motion—not because rivers are actually blue, but because the mind recognizes the mix of depth, shadow, and reflection as something that can’t be held. Blue is a color defined by scatter and movement. In painting, in stage lighting, in the natural world, it is the hue that recedes even as you look at it. Theaters rely on that property. Blue backstage light is meant to be seen without being noticed. It reveals just enough for the next action to take place while allowing the rest to fall back into near-invisibility:
- Audience visibility: blue falls off quickly over distance, so the audience can’t see backstage movement even as crews work a few feet away.
- Night vision: blue interferes least with the eye’s rod cells, which lets stagehands keep their sense of darkness while still navigating safely.
- Cues and markings: spike tape and backstage markers glow cleanly under blue without disrupting what’s happening onstage.
There’s a quiet philosophy in that. Change often announces itself the same way—low-intensity, peripheral, easy to overlook until it has already rearranged the edges of things.

And then there is the river’s color, which isn’t really color at all but the result of light passing through depth, sediment, air, and constant motion. The blue we assign to rivers is a metaphor we keep returning to because it captures something about impermanence better than language can. Blue is the visual form of transience: the distance inside the present moment, the shimmer between what is and what is becoming.

You can’t step into the same river twice, not because the river has changed or because you have changed, but because the meeting point is always new—the water, the light on its surface, the air moving above it, the moon tugging at every tide, including the ones inside your own body.

The Blue Flower of Enlightenment

There’s a plant I keep on my windowsill with the cultivar name Hana Aoi. The name simply means “blue flower” in Japanese, a phrase that has appeared for centuries in poems, paintings, and seasonal imagery. In Buddhist art, the blue lotus—the utpala—carries its own long history. The Lotus Sūtra notes that the Buddha’s radiance is “blue as the utpala, fresh and pure,” a color linked to clarity and the difficulty of awakening. In later iconography the blue lotus is often shown half-open, a form that suggests insight arriving gradually rather than all at once. It is a flower you glimpse rather than grasp.

Japanese poetry adds a quieter note. Edo-period poet Chiyo-ni (加賀千代女, also known as Kaga no Chiyo), wrote around the 18th century:

朝顔や
つるべ取られて
もらい水

asagao ya / tsurube torarete / morai mizu

Morning-glory blue
has taken the well-bucket—
I ask next door for water.

Chiyo-ni’s poem turns on a small domestic moment: a morning-glory vine has curled itself around the rope of the well-bucket, and rather than tear the bloom, she simply walks next door for water. The haiku isn’t symbolic in the Western sense, but its clarity comes from the way it treats a minor inconvenience as something worth accommodating. The blue morning-glory is held in place for a single interval between dawn and heat, and the poem catches that brief suspension—the stillness of a flower that won’t last, and the world adjusting itself around it. It’s an image of transience without drama, the kind of quiet impermanence that sits beneath so many Japanese seasonal poems.

Across these traditions, the blue flower echoes the same intuition found in rivers and backstage light: things change shape, appear and vanish, and part of their meaning lies in that movement. It is not a symbol of permanence, but of passage—a reminder that the world doesn’t hold still, and that our lives don’t either.
November 28, 2025
Image Gazing

Sometimes when I get overwhelmed, I stare at images. I think a lot of art historians secretly like to do this. A few minutes stolen from the day to look at something aesthetically balanced, proportioned, harmonized—something that happens, almost mysteriously, to be tuned to one’s own internal frequency, whenever or wherever the image was made.

I keep a lot of photographs of the rural villages and small churches I loved in England—especially around Walsingham, where I did my field work. One church in that religious-architecture-dense village is the Church of the Holy Transfiguration. It was one of the first places where I encountered the idea of an ikon, despite having studied art history as an undergrad. Their website describes it simply: “Ikons are, for Orthodox Christians, windows into the eternal dimension of reality. They are not realistic depictions or even works of art, but are a means by which Christ and his saints are made present to us.”

Walsingham sits in Norfolk, that green, shaggy corner of England facing the North Sea, a region shaped by the old Norþfolc—“the north people.” The county looks outward toward Normandy, and after the Norman conquest of 1066, it became one of the first areas drawn tightly under their rule. You can still see the imprint of that history: earthworks softened by centuries of rain, hamlets that feel older than they appear, and Walsingham itself, a place formed by centuries of crossing and return.

The Chapel of St Seraphim isn’t especially beautiful as “a building,” but there’s something about it—something I always felt drawn to. Then again, I’m biased; I’ve always had a soft spot for red brick. It almost looks like the house I grew up in.

Another image I return to, struck by its emotional impact, is of Mount Kailash. In the traditions of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, this mountain is seen as a celestial link between earth and heaven—a gateway to the divine. Its names carry some of that meaning, too. The Sanskrit name Kailāśa is likely derived from kelāsa, meaning “crystal.” And the Tibetan name Gangs Rinpoche (གངས་རིན་པོ་ཆེ) combines “gang/gāng” (snow peak) and “rinpoche/rin po che” (precious one), often rendered as “precious jewel of snows.”

There are also references that place Kailash inside Buddhist cosmology. One source notes: “It’s central to its cosmology, and a major pilgrimage site for some Buddhist traditions.” Taken together, the names and descriptions sketch the outline of a mountain regarded by many as sacred, even before you ever see its shape.

Praise to Buddha Shakyamuni
O Blessed One, Shakyamuni Buddha
Precious treasury of compassion,
Bestower of supreme inner peace,

You, who love all beings without exception,
Are the source of happiness and goodness;
And you guide us to the liberating path.

Your body is a wish fulfilling jewel,
Your speech is supreme, purifying nectar,
And your mind is refuge for all living beings.

With folded hands I turn to you,
Supreme unchanging friend,
I request from the depths of my heart:

Please give me the light of your wisdom
To dispel the darkness of my mind
And to heal my mental continuum.

Please nourish me with your goodness,
That I in turn may nourish all beings
With an unceasing banquet of delight.

Through your compassionate intention,
Your blessings and virtuous deeds,
And my strong wish to rely upon you,

May all suffering quickly cease
And all happiness and joy be fulfilled;
And may holy Dharma flourish for evermore.

— Geshe Kelsang Gyatso Rinpoche

My Image as Seen by Others

When I was in Europe, I experienced a variety of different types of prejudice. Class is very important there, so my class was known and felt immediately. But I benefited from the “celebrity” implications of my American accent as well. People were interested and invited me places – I tried not to step on toes, eat too much, talk too much, or annoy anyone. I failed on every count almost every month, but Cambridge is a remarkably forgiving and welcoming place, and I was lucky enough to call an international college, Hughes Hall, home.

Even still, the person who hurts us most is always closest. Some of the worst American stereotypes applied to me were from my long-time French boyfriend. The one that hurt most… he told me: You’re a walking hippie stereotype. No one had ever called me that. I had almost never encountered other “hippies” in my life, although I’d written my high school thesis on the Beatles and Tom Wolfe. I think it was obvious it was only a matter of time until I fell for the Grateful Dead, but not before I’d spend years curled up with Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin. I’d been to San Francisco only once before I flew to England (the same summer in 2013, in fact), but other than that, I’d been raised around traditional, respectable, be-khakied people in the far-off land of OOTTAWW, as I had to mouth slowly for the French. Although my mom was born in Marin Hospital, my grandparents were more beatniks-turned-respectable.

I fell in love with Buddhism in England, actually. Making my weekly stop-off in the Tibetan store across from Kings, I gasped when I walked in at the same time as the owner. “Did you really meet the Dalai Lama?” Excuse a girl for having a naive sense of wonder (about everything, but especially about Buddhism).

I don’t think I ever totally felt comfortable with my boyfriend after that, seeing myself in that way so denigrated in my sincere beliefs. I’d worked on an exhibit at the MAA called Buddha’s Word, which was the first exhibition of Tibetan material in Cambridge, and the first time in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s history that its Buddhist collections had ever been presented together. It was developed in partnership with the Mongolia and Inner Asia Research Unit, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Frederick Williamson Memorial Fund, and drew on collections from across Cambridge — the MAA, the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, the Fitzwilliam, the University Library, even Emmanuel and Pembroke Colleges.

It mattered to me. The project mattered, the materials mattered, the scholarship mattered. Buddhism wasn’t a phase or an affectation — it was part of my intellectual and spiritual life, tied to real work I was doing inside these institutions. So when he reduced it all to a stereotype, it wasn’t just a careless comment; it was a small betrayal of how deeply I cared about something he never bothered to understand.

Pareidolia: The Velvet Knife of the Unbothered

Speaking of image gazing: Pareidolia is the tendency of the human mind to perceive recognizable forms — especially faces — in random or ambiguous stimuli. In American intellectual history, the concept has appeared in several distinct contexts. During the 19th century, writers associated with Romanticism often referenced pareidolic perception when describing heightened imagination, seeing symbolic meaning in nature, or interpreting landscapes as expressive. In medical and psychological discourse of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, pareidolia was sometimes discussed in relation to certain mental-health conditions, particularly those involving misinterpretation of sensory information.

In popular culture, it has repeatedly surfaced in narratives about “seeing signs,” spiritual imagery, and the interpretation of natural forms. Across literature, psychology, and journalism, pareidolia has functioned as a descriptive term for how people project patterns, meanings, or emotional significance onto otherwise neutral visual cues.

If Europe taught me anything, it’s that mis-seeing can also be an art form, and a particularly glaring one in some university contexts. Not always intentional, not always cruel, but pervasive — especially among the confident, the class-assured, the ones who glide through rooms believing their interpretations of others are simply facts.

Pareidolia isn’t just seeing faces in clouds; it’s assuming before they’ve spoken a full sentence. My grandmother used to say, “to assume is to make an ASS of U and ME.” To criticize spirituality has become the reflex of the elite and unbothered: a velvet knife disguised as scientific clarity. However, there is, as we saw in the last post about Surrealism, the unconscious, chance, and AI, a level of hallucination required to see something special in an image, an ordinary building, or in general. Maybe we art historians really are all crazy.

November 15, 2025