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Look at Marshall Allen—the slight, bespectacled fireball with gray hair and kind eyes, his arms stretched to the sky. Look at him saunter across the stage, saxophone in mouth, blasting air through the brass. Look at how he’s transformed by the music, and how the audience is transformed by him. See how they marvel at his artistry, his godliness, his 

. Marshall is 101 years old, and he still harbors the inferno of years past—when, as an integral member of Sun Ra’s ever-changing Arkestra, his urgent wails bolstered the chaos of the bandleader’s arrangements. And here he stands, albeit a little gingerly, his steps more calculated. That smile still radiates, his heart full.

Hear him now. Hear that squeal, the explosion, the anarchy. Listen to how the wind swaddles the band, how the space opens and lets the soul and the funk come through. While Marshall is what some purists would consider avant-garde, I’ve never seen him that way. He’s what freedom looks like, what it sounds like, what can happen when the confinements of jazz are eschewed for greater experimentation. By definition, Marshall is a jazz musician, but he’s never seemed preoccupied with the genre, nor with any notion of what he’s supposed to be. Whether alongside Sun Ra or at the helm of his own band, Marshall has never seemed to care what you called the music—space jazz, cosmic jazz, or whatever—as long as you felt the liberation emanate from it. Because immortality resides on the other side of this courage, it’s people like Marshall and Sun Ra whose work lives forever, despite the confusion their melodies may cause at first listening. That we’re talking about this music now is the mark of its legacy.

He’s what freedom looks like, what it sounds like, what can happen when the confinements of jazz are eschewed for greater experimentation. 

In February, at the age of 100, Marshall released his solo debut album, 

, a stark shift from the vast cutting-edge ethos of his Sun Ra work. Across seven tracks, Marshall and his band—a wide-ranging ensemble featuring several Arkestra mainstays and a standout cameo from Neneh Cherry—opt for straight-ahead serenity over pronounced nonconformity. Abstraction gives way, here, for something more traditional in scope. Where Sun Ra sought liberation through space travel, and believed that Black people would only ever be free on Saturn, 

 feels like what we’d play once the mission is completed. It’s the sound of rest and restoration, of finding joy in the quiet moments. It’s also an overdue appreciation for one of the most faithful stewards of Sun Ra’s mission, whose own voice—more subdued than his mentor, yet no less inquisitive—has come to the fore, right on time, at the start of his 11th decade on Earth.

Marshall was born May 25, 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky and started playing clarinet at the age of 10. During World War II, he enlisted in the Army, and while stationed in Paris with the 92nd Infantry (also known as the Buffalo Soldiers), he played alto sax and clarinet in the 17th Division Army Special Service Band. Once the war ended, Marshall stayed in Paris and studied clarinet with Ulysse Delécluse at the renowned Paris Conservatory, then toured with the saxophonist James Moody before returning to the United States in 1951, settling in Chicago. There, after a few years “jamming around” the city, as he 

 Jazzwise, he met Sun Ra in 1957. He still remembers being transformed by the musician’s 

album. “The stuff they were doing, I’d never heard that before,” he said. “It was far out and [had] different kinds of melodies. So, I went back and asked the guy I bought the record off, ‘Where’s this band? This is a real band!’” The Arkestra rehearsed six blocks away from where Marshall was living at the time. He heard them practicing, came back with his saxophone, and became a regular fixture in rehearsals.

Sun Ra officially brought Marshall into the band in 1958 to join the equally formidable John Gilmore and Pat Patrick in the horn section. Three years later, the Arkestra moved to New York and became part of the city’s underground avant-garde jazz scene. Perhaps influenced by the area’s free-spirited creative mindset, the group’s music got more experimental, and Marshall responded in kind: his playing grew more aggressive and far out, which—along with June Tyson’s emotive vocals and Sun Ra’s high-wire experimentation on piano and synthesizer—further pushed the band’s sound into the deep space they coveted. The Arkestra moved to Philadelphia in 1968, the group’s base until Sun Ra’s passing in 1993. Gilmore took over as bandleader following Sun Ra’s transition. Marshall took it over in 1995 after Gilmore’s death and has led the band ever since. With Marshall at the helm, the Arkestra has maintained the festivity of its founder. When watching them perform, a strong sense of family emerges. The live show is a grand spectacle, complete with flashy robes and ornate headgear, and the music feels big and orchestral. It’s all quite theatrical; walking away, you’re not fully sure what you just saw—but you can’t shake the vibrations you feel.

As a willing steward of Sun Ra’s legacy, Marshall has maintained the fire of its leader, keeping the music edgy and exploratory while putting his own mark on it. On 2020’s 

, the first Sun Ra Arkestra album in 20 years, songs like “Satellites Are Spinning” and “Unmask the Batman” honored the band’s founder with modern flourishes meant to exemplify Marshall’s wide-ranging ear. He peppered these and other tracks with electronic bleeps and bloops that recalled what Sun Ra did with the synthesizer long ago. When heard with 2020s ears and sensibility, 

 sits alongside the music of Flying Lotus, the noted L.A.-based experimental producer, though Sun Ra and Marshall clearly influenced his sound. Based on his recent affiliations—with the bassist Luke Stewart, the percussionist Carlos Niño, and fellow saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, among other younger iconoclasts—it’s clear that Marshall is still searching for new inspiration and partners to board the spaceship. Like Marshall, each of these artists create music not fully aligned with any particular genre. Sure, you can call it jazz, but even within jazz’s broad expanse and evolution, it’s tough to classify these purveyors as anything other than radical. Just like Marshall did in the ’60s and beyond, these artists create with audacity, perhaps knowing that the bravery of their art will last generations (assuming they consider such forecasts). They all make the kind of work you’ll talk about years later, after the critics have finally come around to the brilliance that was always there. When I listen to Luke, Carlos and Immanuel, I hear Sun Ra, which means I hear Marshall.

The live show is a grand spectacle, complete with flashy robes and ornate headgear, and the music feels big and orchestral. It’s all quite theatrical; walking away, you’re not fully sure what you just saw—but you can’t shake the vibrations you feel.

 and everything Marshall does in the studio, the record to turn to for an indicator of what the artist does on stage, where he’s most at home, is 

Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons Live in Philadelphia

, a collection of live sets from the past two years at the venue Solar Myth. For almost 90 minutes, Marshall’s Ghost Horizons ensemble wades through several iterations of jazz, surging over post-bop and swing, drifting through ambient and meditative styles. On “Seductive Fantasy,” for instance, the band leaps into a sharp double-time beat that breaks down and reassembles at the urging of Marshall’s fiery horn blasts, as if prodding the crew to dig deeper and go 

. The next song, “Back to You,” is a contemplative drone: Between the sedative bass loop, indiscernible vocals, sporadic sax and glitchy electronics, it almost doesn’t sound like a Marshall Allen cut, at least not in the way we’d expect. His songs usually have a bounce to them; in a good way, “Back to You” feels fresh and progressive, like something from a sci-fi film or heavy steel floating through the cosmos.

Songs like “Stay Lifted” and “Square the Circle” almost border on rock territory; the former a drum-heavy jaunt with echoed trumpet effects, the latter an ascendant house arrangement that could sit alongside Floating Points or golden era Radiohead on a playlist. I also love “Warn Them” when the mood calls for it: Over staggered drums and what sounds like a playing card stuck in bicycle rims, the song lands defiantly. It sounds dark and agitated, writhing in mud and content there. Blame my ear if I’m speaking out of turn, but I can’t remember Marshall or Sun Ra sounding this dour before, even as they lamented nuclear war or pleaded with listeners to wise up before it was too late. “Warn Them” is blues of a different kind: vocally angry, it’s the type of song you play when you need to lean into anguish. Even as we navigate our collective angst, Marshall’s art balances radiance and shadows, his dexterity showing us the way to stay optimistic. I’m taken by his faith in the craft. Because while Marshall Allen isn’t an eye-popping name in mainstream circles, his work and his intent are acclaimed by those making cornerstone music. His legacy is ensured. And yet here he is still trying to create a new world, knowing the voyage is paramount. Whether or not you come along is on you, but Marshall’s taking off. ♦

Marcus J. Moore is a music journalist, editor, event curator, professor, and author of

 The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America 

High and Rising (A Book About De La Soul).

mus-robur

Marshall Allen’s Infinite Voyage

Is a River Alive?

The Sexiest Thing About Celibacy

The week my daughter was born, I had my first manic episode. She was born in the morning—I’d stayed up all night laboring—and for three days afterward, I did not sleep. It’s not as though I didn’t try; when I lay down it felt as though my eyelids were spring-loaded. In the small hours when my daughter slept, I rearranged furniture, scrubbed at the bathtub grout with a toothbrush, and attempted to remove oily milk stains from onesies the baby would promptly outgrow. The doula chalked all this up to adrenaline, but to me it felt like there was something urgent I was forgetting, and I wandered the apartment at night, searching for whatever it was. I was lucid enough to realize that soon I would have to be hospitalized and sedated. Eventually I noticed that I was trapped in a pattern of reliving each minute detail of the birth. My mind was desperately running the trail of small memories, back and forth, back and forth, to forge a beaten path that I would be able to find again later. And then suddenly, the answer came: I needed to write. The thing I was forgetting—or afraid of forgetting—was my experience of childbirth. Those memories were precious, and if I continued my new life as a mother without pausing to write them down, they were liable to slip away.

That third night, I wrote for hours and hours, filling page after page. (Only later did I learn there was a word for this: hypergraphia, a pathological impulse to write.) Around 4 am, my husband found me sitting on the floor of the baby’s room, laptop glowing in the pitch dark, and I reassured him in the language of the delusional, the self-aggrandizing, and the conspiracy-minded that I had found it, the solution, and everything would be fine if he would just leave me to my work. I was right, though; when I was finished, I slept.

. The long-awaited and -feared threat to my creative life had finally arrived, and my indomitable urge to create was forced to assert itself. This part of me wished to prove that it was willing to sacrifice my safety, my sanity, even risk my survival. And the contemporary discourse around motherhood, particularly within writing circles, had conditioned me to believe all this might be necessary. Like many young female writers, I had ingested a lot of opinions, from panels and editorials, about whether motherhood could be compatible with a writing career. I’d read Rachel Cusk’s 

 and so much Ferrante—memoirs and fiction that made it seem impossible to both write and mother, even as they were themselves evidence of this possibility. I had for years repeated the mantra “book before baby.” But eventually, time went by, and the book did not sell, and I was getting older. I wondered if rejecting the good thing I 

 have the power to conjure was only self-punishment for my powerlessness to wangle that other good thing I wanted (but might never get).

So I had the baby, and a few years later I had another, even as I lived in terror that they might prove the adorable Trojan horse by which failure and unhappiness and doom would be ushered into my life. But now that I’ve crossed the divide, I feel that, for as necessary as the despairing maternal accounts are, lately there may have been an overemphasis on what a writer loses to motherhood, and little discussion at all of what might be gained.

I am far from alone in my anxiety. We’ve come of age in an era that has seen the explosion of a veritable cottage industry of harrowing tales of maternal unraveling. Not so long ago, mother-protagonists were—with some brilliant exceptions—rare. Trust me, I exercise great discipline in not dedicating the rest of this essay to Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Toni Morrison. But there is still something revolutionary in the unsilencing represented by more recent accounts of motherhood, which have tended to foreground deep ambivalence, rage, and often regret. It’s also true that popular portrayals of motherhood remain frustratingly white, cis, and wealthy, limiting our access to varying narratives. Though bygone conventional wisdom held that maternal rage was not interesting or “universal” enough, readers in fact have an enormous appetite for more incisive portrayals of this not-at-all marginal experience, the truths of which were for so long politely contained behind mythic saints and monsters.

notes that the mother figure is antithetical to the classic hero’s journey—she is what the young son must leave behind in pursuit of adventure. And while the novel did feature heroines early on, it was from its inception a bourgeois form intended to morally instruct young female readers. In this tradition, Samuel Richardson’s 

Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady 

(1748) made their marks; the heroines’ stories often resolved either in sexual ruin or marriage. What came after marriage remained obscured, the mother denied subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, in its turn, embedded the perception of the mother as little more than an accessory to her child’s narrative arc. “The Freudian view… was that mothering was the end of growth and achievement for a woman,” Phillips writes. “The psychoanalytic insistence on the Oedipal drama as the origin of both creativity and the self relegates the mother not only to a supportive role but to a predetermined one.”

So I had the baby, and a few years later I had another, even as I lived in terror that they might prove the adorable Trojan horse by which failure and unhappiness and doom would be ushered into my life. 

I can’t help but feel that this conceptualization of mothers was on full display in the first wave of the memoir boom of the aughts, which brought us runaway hits from the perspective of the grown daughter or son whose mother had become monstrous through her failure at this supportive role—Augusten Burroughs’s 

 is representative. Readers gobbled up the private, shameful details of the mother’s failure, eager to offer up for evaluation what Bracha Ettinger called the “ready-made mother-monster,” whose villainy could neatly account for the writer’s neurosis and perhaps also stand in as a proxy scapegoat for the reader’s own dysfunction. More contemporary memoirs of maternal experience can seem almost like a defiant response.

Phillips suggests, in her biographies of writers and artists who are mothers, that Diane di Prima thrived under the discipline that motherhood imposed upon her life, and that Doris Lessing’s strong perspective on power and politics would never have taken shape had she not been forced to observe from the periphery. In telling her subjects’ stories, Phillips reclaims the hero’s journey for them. “Their subjectivity was in their losing and finding of themselves, first in adolescence, then in maternity, then in maturity, confronting their ‘annihilation’ and regaining their power,” she writes. “It’s the story of a central figure who goes on a journey of self-discovery… Someone who descends into the underworld and comes back.” Becoming a mother is one of the most profound transformations that occur in an average life, upending one’s identity and relationship to self and world not just once but, as Phillips points out, again and again. And so it is strange and disappointing that maternity is more often the terminus of narrative than its beginning. Even feminist texts have a way of wrapping up the grand journey of self-discovery with the revelation of pregnancy or childbirth, so that the mother-to-be can exit the stage gracefully, off to occupy the irrelevant territory where she will live out her days.

Whether the mother in question is a subject or the artist herself, we too often fail to see her as a full, dynamic character. This cultural oversight owes something not only to Victorian values and Freudianism but also to second-wave feminism, which often rejected mothers for their perceived complicity in female oppression. The mother was, as Andrea Liss writes in 

, “a silent outcast for many feminists who strategically needed to distance themselves from all that was culturally coded as passive, weak, and irrational.” Liss is referring to visual artists of the late twentieth century when she writes that, in order to be successful, they often felt pressure to “avoid any imagery that would code their art, especially work that dealt with anything female—motherhood being the most debased—as ‘sentimental.’” But it would have applied as easily to writers of literary fiction and nonfiction. Recently I met some elders at an event, all of whom attested that for years they had strained, among art and literary circles, to keep their maternity a secret; this felt necessary if they wanted to be seen as “serious.”

Thankfully, the tide has turned dramatically on this point. The novels of Ferrante, Cusk, and others, as well as the work of queer writers such as Maggie Nelson, Constance Debré, Cherríe Moraga, Carole Maso, and A.K. Summers are dedicated to complicating motherhood, snatching it back from patronizing assumptions of docility, humility, conformity, inevitability.

I have often wondered if our historic squeamishness about the dark side of motherhood might owe in part to our collective determination to uphold the fantasy that we ourselves, the readers, were loved without any trace of hatred or resentment. By now the cat is out of the bag. Lately any time motherhood appears as a subject, it is to provide a stark counterpoint to the pretty picture of contented maternity, revealing instead a gothic inner landscape of anger and desperation. It’s often given the horror treatment, or at least portrayed as a descent into near-madness, in the manner of Rachel Yoder’s 

, and the films “Tully” and “Baby Ruby.” The message—

no longer comes from non-mothers in the form of ideological appeals to female liberation, but from mother-writer-ghouls in the form of dispatches from Hell.

Children undoubtedly make time, money, and deep focus scarcer, particularly for women, but assuming—big assumption, I know—that a writer isn’t too mired in caretaking to continue writing, couldn’t her motherhood also occasion new experiences, perspectives, and depths of feeling that might be conscripted as fresh, powerful material? Might there be such a thing as a “maternal gaze”? To be sure, the term is often used in child psychology, particularly when studying the impacts of a mother’s visual attention and responsiveness on the child’s development. But I am here referring to a way of seeing that is particular, or at least much more accessible, to those who have lived as a mother-figure (of any gender). Indulge me. If the male gaze sees desired objects, and the female gaze sees autonomous beings with desires of their own, the maternal gaze sees something further: those desires locked in a merciless struggle with responsibility to others. 

Whenever critics and theorists are thinking about motherhood, two themes consistently emerge. The first is ambivalence. “It is not a matter of ‘balancing motherhood and work,’” writes Liss. “It is the feminist mother’s admission that ambiguity is often the norm, an ambiguity that constantly tears and heals, between the mother self and her professional self, between the mother self and her sexual self, between the mother self and her own child self.” The mother is a figure caught between love and hatred, self and other, present and future, and often a figure very nearly rent in two by inner conflict. The desire to flee my home for several recuperative weeks alone in a cabin and the simultaneous, irreconcilable desire to wake the children I have finally managed to put to sleep, so that I can be with them a little longer—this, to me, is the essence of motherhood. For many women writers, the ability or requirement to inhabit this both/and mindset begins early, whether or not they ultimately choose to have children. If it did not, we wouldn’t spend so much time agonizing over the decision. From the time I was small, I always knew there was no answer that didn’t involve the terrible grief of thwarted desire. That fraught curiosity is reflected brilliantly in Sheila Heti’s 

a novel composed of questions that are never satisfyingly resolved.

Even leaving aside what they want for themselves, mothers engage in maddening calculations in the attempt to do what’s right for their children. Sara Ruddick notes in 

 that a child’s preservation, growth, and acceptability are “often in tension.” “If a child wants to walk to the store alone,” she writes, “do you worry about her safety or applaud her developing capacity to take care of herself?” When a mother-character is written with any intelligence whatsoever, these competing demands weigh heavily on her psyche. Meanwhile, literally everyone has opinions on how she makes these decisions, and their opinions will contribute to her self-doubt. The practice of motherhood is always aberrant in contrast with the prescribed standards of ideal motherhood, which are contradictory and impossible, and as a result, mothers are relentlessly exposed to the “gaze”—the scrutiny—of others, which makes it all the more outrageous that for so long their own perspectives were absent.

The second theme is sometimes called “intersubjectivity,” or what Julia Kristeva describes in her writing on feminine genius as “a self which cannot be separated from its various attachments to others.” Motherhood is, as Kristeva puts it, a “catastrophe of identity.” A mother often intuits her children’s inner experience and feels their joy and pain as her own, and she carries the burden of her own radical capacity for harm. A mother revisits childhood at close range, remembering her own private dramas vividly but able to make sense, this time, of what she is witnessing, to see the long shadows already being cast. A simple but ingenious application of “intersubjectivity” appears in Virginia Woolf’s 

. Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts are constantly revealing her caretaking impulses, by anticipating her son’s sensitivity, her husband’s bruised ego, her guest’s hurt feelings; Mr. Ramsay thinks primarily of his career. That distinctive, wandering point-of-view is itself reflective of the blurred lines of maternal consciousness. It has taken me a decade or so of intellectual growth, plus becoming a mother, to fully appreciate Woolf’s project—even while she was famously influenced by Freud’s ideas, she recognized, and remedied, his failure to acknowledge the mother as a subject.

Personally, I find it useful to understand the mother-character as a figure implicated not only in a web of complex intimate relations, but also, more broadly, in larger social and political communities. Certainly there are mothers who turn away from the outside world out of fear or a determination to hoard advantages for their own clan, but it’s hard to imagine a mother who, hearing of some disaster on the other side of the world, doesn’t immediately think of her own children. So to my previous definition, I’d add that a “maternal gaze” would necessarily involve a shift in the perception of world events and systems. Ours is a culture that imagines that all violence, neurosis, and antisocial behavior begin at home. “Motherhood is, in Western discourse, the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human,” writes Jacqueline Rose in 

. “It is the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task—unrealisable, of course—of mothers to repair.” The view on society, from this vantage, would seem to be rather important. No one feels the emergency of late-stage capitalism more acutely than struggling mothers, especially those who are poor, of color, undocumented, disabled, or queer. For Rose, adequate narratives don’t leave motherhood “stranded on the far shore of history,” but see it as absolutely central.

In keeping with the maternal capacity to hold two opposing truths, I want to recognize 

 the creative potential inherent to writing through motherhood. The requirement of motherhood that is often blamed for sabotaging the mother’s creative career is what has come to be known as the “mental load.” The quantity of mundane junk that fills the mind—appointments needing to be scheduled, snacks needing to be packed, special outfits required, worries about development or school performance—that might seem at odds with the kind of mental promiscuity required for art-making. Undoubtedly this can be true. But it’s also possible that this kind of attention to detail trains the mind toward a heroic capacity for observation, which does not go unappreciated when it’s time to do the work of character development and scene building.

Since having children, I’ve noticed a differing quality of attention in myself. Even more than before, when I step off a subway car, I can give an inventory of all the people on it—their outfits, their tattoos, their wounds, their moods, their peculiar cargo, their books, their conversations. This one has a large dog at home; that one is battling a heroin addiction. “I felt suddenly older,” writes Rivka Galchen in 

, “even as the puma [baby] also, in her effect on me, made me more like a very young human in one particular way, which was that all the banal (or not) objects and experiences around me were reenchanted. The world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. Which is to say that the puma made me again more like a writer (or at least a certain kind of writer) precisely as she was making me into someone who was, enduringly, not writing.”

Certainly, I feel as though the maternal, as a theme or subject, is in its infancy—we have hardly scratched the surface of what there is to say about it. Vital as they have been, I’m eager to see what will succeed this recent crop of overwhelmingly bleak portrayals of motherhood. Joy is harder to capture. Maggie Nelson’s 

 was one example of a more textured, complex, unconventional, and even expansive account that might give a hint of what’s to come, while Miranda July’s 

a story that claims as its beginning not even childbirth but 

 (imagine!) was the hit of the year because eroticism, self-discovery, and transformation are fixtures of the maternal adventure, too, if rarely acknowledged. But I’m even more interested in the innovations of style and form that might emerge as a response to the challenge of writing the maternal. 

I think of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag” theory of fiction, which imagined a literature made not in the image of the spear, but in the image of the satchel—that other, more feminine technology, which might gather all manner of worldly items to bring home for observation. More academic writers would also include here an analysis of Hélène Cixous and a position on 

, the notion that women do or might or even ought to claim their “otherness” through a writing style that better captures their point of view, which differs substantially and challenges the “phallocentric” tradition, perhaps by becoming more fluid, non-linear, diffusive, circular, plural, simultaneous, or sensory. Fifty years of scholarship are beyond the scope of this essay; I merely wonder if writers who are mothers might imagine their work as a subcategory of 

, which can reflect the particularities of their experience through their use of language.

Already, there are writers who are imagining this literature into being. In the contemporary landscape, I think of Rivka Galchen, Ayşegül Savaş, Kate Zambreno, Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, and Valeria Luiselli. These writers have used clever style innovations, such as copious paragraph and section breaks, non-sequiturs, and tone that verges on the aphoristic to mimic the interruptions and disjointedness of those early years with small children. It often feels as though the writers (or their protagonists) are carving out moments of insight, surfacing briefly from domestic demands to reach for something higher, and then being subsumed again by the diurnal. Some, too, have borrowed from the odd diction of childhood, using language to productively defamiliarize all that which adults take for granted. But I want even more. 

How, I wonder, can language be recruited to the task of rendering ambivalence and intersubjectivity? In how many different ways can a sentence contain two contradictory truths at once? How can form resist the cult of self and accommodate a shared consciousness? How could pacing be made to convey the strange passage of time when in the company of an infant?

Of course, the divisions and inner conflicts are real and inevitable; I feel them even now, as I write this essay and attempt to box out my anxiety about finding childcare for the summer. But I also ask myself who is served by the notion that these things must always be divided. I’ve found surprising pride and confidence in my ability to shift between a multiplicity of identities, and under the pressure of motherhood, I’ve achieved a greater sense of clarity than ever before about what my highest needs are, as an artist and as a person. But whenever possible, I’ve also learned to appreciate the places where the edges bleed into each other—the abundant ways that mothering has made me a better friend, the effect of a lifetime of reading on my perception of childhood and memory, the clear impact on my prose of the playfulness that now fills my days. 

Perhaps it’s worth returning for a moment to the significance of the “maternal gaze” in child psychology. That shared look from mother to child and back again is believed to instruct how the infant interprets emotions, develops language and social skills, and, in short, understands the world around them. But  when my son reaches up to map my face with his tiny hands, I wonder about the reciprocal force of that gaze. I am more determined to write than ever, because the stakes are higher; I write because I have to, but now, in some way I can’t explain, I write for my children, too. To nurture their sense of what’s possible, yes, but also to capture what they are teaching me to see. To signpost the beaten path I began down on those first strange, sleepless nights. ♦

Kate Shannon Jenkins is an essayist and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Believer, the Atlantic, the Drift, the Nation, Gawker, and other publications.

gen-spade-wound

Toward a Maternal Gaze

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The literary takedown is enjoying a renaissance. Every time a new high-profile hitjob leaks, the terminally online literati stop working altogether and join the pile-on—dragging the overrated author or the overzealous critic, sometimes both. What’s the function of this ritual? Have we, as the 

 Joe Bernstein has suggested, transitioned from an era of “tedious structural critique” to one of “petty hatred”? To get to the bottom of this new culture of hostility, 

 Contributing Editor Leon Dische Becker convened a showdown between two author-critics who have been on both sides of the violence: Lauren Oyler and Brandon Taylor. These two merry combatants have written and received tough reviews, and even sent a couple strays at each other over the years—one reason we invited a trained clinical therapist, fellow author and 

contributor hannah baer, to moderate. The packed crowd at 

 was expecting blood. Instead, they got a punchy, funny, and oddly sexy conversation about the sadomasochistic turn in contemporary criticism, writers who “top from the bottom,” and the murky line between a justified pan and a hysterical hit job.

hannah baer

How would you explain an extremely negative book review to a child?

Lauren Oyler

If you wanted to cultivate an appreciation of literature in a child, you would explain that if you become a writer when you grow up, part of your job will be to publish your work. That means people will get to read it and come up with their own opinion. In an ideal world, these people would publish their opinions in a respectful, collegial way. (You wouldn't say collegial to a child.) But sometimes people get really mad about books because they care a lot about them. It doesn't always mean that the book is bad, or that your mommy, the author, is bad.

Brandon Taylor

I'd say that if you're asked to review a book, you're signing up to tell the truth about your experience. Sometimes you have a bad time and you have to tell the truth about that. I’ve never written a bad review out of some desire to file someone down a peg. It's like, "Do you want to review this?" "Yes." And then over the course of reading it, you find that, oh, you don't like it very much, but you've already signed the contract. So what do you do?

You could also use the bad review as a lesson in the importance of intellectual honesty and bravery, and not being afraid of how you'll be received. If you write a book that is negatively reviewed, you should be able to take it.

When I started writing reviews, people would say, "oh, you cannot write a takedown. You'll ruin your career. Everyone will hate you. Then when your book comes out, people will say bad things about it. You have to be nice." And I find that to be a shallow way of thinking about literary culture.

The first time I wrote a big flashy takedown, I was 24 years old, and I remember a few of the writers who said nasty things about me online were older than me, around the age I am now. Those people had children at the time. It is sort of uncouth, I think, to participate in the social media ecosystem past a certain age.

When you're writing a negative review, to what extent do you think about the feelings of the author? Do you think there's an element of sadism in extremely negative criticism?

I don’t think much about their feelings. When I’m reviewing a book, I'm more focused on understanding it for myself. I’m trying to put my own feelings on trial: what is my reaction, and why? I want the author to feel that I took their work very, very seriously, that I read it carefully, even if they feel harrowed by what I’ve written.

Sometimes when you're in the middle of writing a review that's going really badly, you become aware of moments where the rhetoric has gotten a little hot. In those moments, I ask if it’s necessary for the review itself, or if I should try to scale down, and that's true in any essay writing I do.

Why would you try and scale down a hot sentence in a normal essay?

Well, because I'm Protestant. Sometimes when I feel that I’m killing it, I try to put [myself] on trial, so I don’t get carried away.

Ah, so that’s the problem. Let's move away from BDSM and towards Protestantism. If I'm reviewing, I don't think about the author’s feelings. I don't want them to feel bad. I honestly would prefer it if they didn't read it, and I’d recommend that they don’t. But of course, everybody does. When I’m reading a bad book, I often feel like the author hasn't tried hard enough, that they don’t care enough.

So much of literary criticism is based on an overwhelming feeling of deep care for literature. I think it's really good that I care so much. I'm a hero.

It's often a question of purpose. Is literary criticism journalism? Is it meant to explain the books that exist, and what they’re about? Or is it a service, which is to say, a recommendation engine? As a critic, your allegiance is more to the literary public than to the individual author. If we're talking about sadism in a BDSM context, usually the object is getting something out of it. There are probably lots of public figures and authors who humiliate themselves in public on purpose. Maybe from that perspective, I'm cracking the whip in a sexy way, but it's not my goal.

Is there a masochism to appearing in public in general, and in a way where you might elicit a harsh negative reaction?

1000%. I call it the engagement plantation, where people post rage bait—intentionally annoying things—because they know they'll become a subject of discourse. There are people who get off on that. Some people genuinely think that’s what it means to be a public intellectual—a person who is constantly starting a conversation.

I would prefer everybody to love me and agree with me. I'm not one of these free-speech warriors; I would just prefer that books be better. 

You don't tweet anymore, but I do think you have posted saucy things for that purpose. Is that incorrect?

I'm deactivated as of right now, but I have 30 days to change my mind. What happens is I take a lot of Benadryl.

I never really feel honest when I'm like, “Oh, it's good that people are talking about this. I've generated discussion.” I would prefer everybody to love me and agree with me. I don't say things just to say them. I'm not one of these free-speech warriors; I would just prefer that books be better.

It does feel tacky to be talking so much about social media, because there's supposed to be a division between it and literary publications. But actually so much of this takedown culture is about getting attention.

There's a slightly different feeling from someone writing a studied, thoughtful criticism of your work. I'm thinking about Sartre's five-volume diss track against Flaubert. It's hundreds and hundreds of pages of fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. And it's kind of amazing, versus a Twitter pile-on, which has an obviously different feeling. A thoughtful critique can be kind of loving, or devotional even.

You think LeninLuvr69 is doing something different from Sartre? Have you read that 

, which inaugurated an anti-takedown culture in literature? She’s writing 20 years ago about exactly the problems we consider a result of social media: the kind of gleeful wagon, circling and identifying a common enemy out of thin air. And then the cycle moves on.

She was saying there's a vitriolic type of long-winded negative criticism that is fundamentally focused on the author's career and not on the book. And yet, sometimes you do have to justify the presence of a negative review by explaining why the person you're talking about is important or worthy of discussion. You have to say, "so-and-so is a 

 writer praised by the X and Z,” because otherwise it's like, 

why are you talking about this random woman in the LRB for 5,000 words?

 But on social media, people are projecting weird identities onto everyone all the time.

Yeah, there’s a lot of projection. You could have written a perfectly studied negative review and published it, and people would still act as though you've just walked into the author’s house and killed them and all their pets. I think there's this presupposition that if you write a negative review, you're doing it for a whole host of careerist or antisocial reasons and not because you just didn't like the book. 

, and I thought maybe five people would read it because it came out a bit late. But people cared quite a lot, and they had a lot of thoughts about why I had written it. They called it my "attempted takedown of Rachel Kushner." But I wasn’t trying to write a takedown of anybody or anything. I just didn't like the book. Had I gone into it with some desire to destroy one of my literary forebears, then it would've felt very cathartic to have written that review. But it was actually really miserable. I felt like I had Lyme disease for two weeks.

Because people were coming for you, for coming for her?

Writing the review was miserable, but what came after was really miserable, too. I'm curious if this happens to you, Lauren, but I had people sliding into my DMs being like, "That was a very brave thing to have written." And I was like, "Was it?"

I actually thought that review was quite sexist.

Yeah. Sometimes you refer to the works of women as “little”—you did this to me as well—and I thought it was quite offensive for you to say, about this well-published woman in her fifties, "Use your human mind!” I think that's why everybody got mad about it.

I think that's a fair read of the text. I can't disagree with your feelings about the review. I mean, the phrase “use your human mind” is a phrase that I use. There were parts of that book that felt deeply silly to me. I would've used that phrase with a dude, but I didn't review a dude. Weirdly enough, I very seldom get asked to review men.

Well, this is related to a question I was kind of thinking about, which is about punching up or down. I'm curious how power dynamics in terms of fame, visibility, and identity play into the choices you make about who to critique.

It's all about perceptions of fame, which is connected to perceptions of wealth. You’re making these tedious market calculations in your mind about other reviews they’ve received. And there are some people who I choose not to review, because I don't think they can psychologically handle it.

There’s a writer who may have a book coming out in the next 18 months or so, which I was asked to review. She’s in my range of career success but I don’t like her work. Every time I read something she’s written, every word indicates a profound paucity of imagination and a bitterness about the world. The worldview expressed in her stuff indicates that she’s not psychologically capable of receiving this review from me.

Yes, and I do think that is a strategy. It’s been quite trendy, I think, certainly during the Trump era, for authors to place themselves (or avatars of themselves) in their fiction as victims. It's a defensive shield so that you can't be criticized because so many bad things have happened to you. To return to BDSM, people are “topping from the bottom.” It creates a sense that you’re hurting them by writing a negative review, even though you write a book because you want it to be read.

I would've gone with “victim complex,” but “topping from the moral bottom” is so astute.

People are hungry for the overthrow of old regimes. They feel there's been an excess of politeness, and that violence is always honest.

Do you guys have personal favorite takedowns written by other people?

I mean, mine's sort of boring, which is that 

. Someone once accused me of thinking I was the Renata Adler of looking at your phone. I was like, "What's bad about that? She's awesome."

Somebody implied that I thought I was Andrea Long Chu and said, "more like Andrea Short Nipple.” But my favorite takedown is that Patricia Lockwood review of Updike, 

. It made me see Updike differently. Your reviews, Lauren, are really funny to read. They're often really scathing. But I also feel like I see books differently after I read your thoughts about them.

Thank you. I'm having a bit of a joker moment as of late. When I’ve written reviews, I’ve always held back from being too mean or cruel. But since my book came out, people have said such nasty things about me that I would’ve considered beyond the realm of serious literary criticism. I could have been nastier, but maybe it's just not in my nature. Maybe I'm actually really nice.

Things have gotten really nasty, and they've gotten really personal. When I'm writing a review, even if it's negative, I try to keep it quite textual rather than supposing what's going on in the author’s life. In some of the reviews I've read lately, there have been a lot of assumptions about the author's intention or their psychology.

I don't find it fun to read. I like gossip, but no one ever has real intel. They’re just like, "she thinks she's better than everyone else." There was better gossip in high school.

I will say that it's quite difficult to review essay collections or nonfiction that use personal elements without it becoming ad hominem, because those personal stories become the content of the text. It's not something you’ve assumed about the author—they've told you.

In the era of autofiction, this differentiation becomes more challenging, because people are jamming their subjectivities more closely into their writing. But it's interesting to hear that both of you are invested in holding that line to some extent.

Yeah, but where is the line? With autofiction, the tendency is often to slide into assuming all of it's true when it obviously isn’t. Memoirists will call it a cop out because you can hide behind non-truth claims. But I don't know why there's anything wrong with that. To quote David Shields, there is a general reality hunger, and it is a bit gossipy. People want the novel to be true so that they can learn the prurient details of the author’s sex life.

I refer to those moments in auto-fiction as “Google traps,” where the reader puts the book down to Google if something is real. I have no patience for them. But sometimes that feels like a work’s organizing force. It's meant to deceive more than it's meant to deepen.

There's also a dilemma around people writing because they care about writing, versus if they just want attention. It seems like part of that Google trapification is about maximizing that attention.

hannah baer is a writer and therapist based in New York. Lauren Oyler is a critic and the author, most recently, of 

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels 

mus-french-typewriter

I'd Like to Report a Murder

 In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram.

For centuries, these words about how God made the heavens and the earth—you probably know them better in English—were accessible only via those who claimed to speak for Him. Painstakingly copied by monks in the most beautiful lettering, the scripture of the Catholic Church spread across Western Europe in Latin, a language not understood or read by the masses in thrall to Rome’s power. It wasn’t until the 1440s, when the Gutenberg press allowed for the spread of translated and mass-printed copies of the bible, that the Vatican’s grasp loosened enough for God’s words to fall into people’s own hands.

The printing press’s advent set off a revolution of mass communication, one that arguably enabled those wanting to demystify Christianity to post and spread their own beliefs. In 1517, the story goes, Maarten Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. Though it remains unclear whether nails or church doors were actually involved, Luther’s ideas were reprinted, translated, and spread throughout Germany and Europe, their publication retroactively heralded as the birth of the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s words diminished the power of the Catholic church, while solidifying the power technology has over us. 

The Mariënburg chapel in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, was built at the cusp of this Printing Revolution in 1431. Nearly 500 years later, the Dutch semiconductor company, Philips, opened its first factory a mere stone's throw away. For six weeks late last year, the chapel housed 

, an experimental exhibit on the birth of a technology that, half a millennium after the printing press, set off another revolution of mass communication: the microchip. 

A former Catholic chapel may seem like an odd place for a microchip exhibit. Religion and science tend to be positioned at opposite ends of the human experience: one pointing towards a higher meaning of life, the other to its earthly realities. Yet both are born of our desire to make sense of what exists beyond us and what resonates within.

Curated by Florian van Zandwijk and Martijn van Boven of 

a non-profit collaboration between NXP and the 

 department at ArtEZ School for the Arts, the 

 exhibit sought to bring the history of microchips to life through a multifocal lens, using never-before-seen archival documents, stories of former Philips/NXP employees, and contemporary works of art. Returning to the physical place where Philips/NXP helped birth the international semiconductor industry, the exhibit invited visitors to contemplate how a technology that can seem invisible became integral to nearly every social process in contemporary life, penetrating the very fabric of society—from geopolitics to art and aesthetics, to how we understand our very selves.

In this holy space, the microchip’s history and meaning were recontextualized, widening the lens to include a more philosophical exploration rather than a mere technological one. 

We invent things then we invent meaning, then we forget we invented anything at all. The new thing becomes the rule, and the rule becomes law.

After all, over the span of roughly five decades, the microchip has reached its smallest physical iteration yet, while attaining an undeniable omnipresence. It is a testament to the fact that the miniscule and expansive can exist in the same space, one begging to be opened up and explored through the lens of human wonder.

The exhibit opened by unearthing, as it were, the technology’s most basic element: sand. To be precise, an incredibly quartz-rich sand found in only a few places. One of which is the town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina.

Closed off to outsiders by gates, guards, and protocols, endless miles of sandy white mines etch serpentine lines through the sides of the Appalachian Mountains. The quartz-rich sand mined here is what integrated circuits and semiconductors are made from. On a big screen near the exhibit’s entrance, a YouTube video titled “

One of America's Most Significant Mines - Unimin - Spruce Pine NC

” played on loop. In a heavy Carolinian accent, local enthusiast Tony Lee Glenn offered a rhapsodic digital tour of the mines, stringing together Google Maps satellite images, heavily zoomed-in videos shot during his lunch breaks, and screen recordings of the mining company’s website.

“I don’t want to overstate this,” Glenn began before divulging a slew of facts, “but I just want people to understand, this is like a crazy cool mine.” He went on to talk about the microchip-making process, his father’s years at the mineral research lab, and his own stint crushing barrels from Spruce Pine during college. Using technologies ultimately made possible by that mine—satellites, computers, the Internet—Glenn virtually brought visitors from the Dutch chapel’s exhibit to his hometown 4000 miles away, offering a birds’ eye view of the microchip’s place of birth.

In highly sterilized laboratories, the mined sand goes through a 

. First, it is refined and melted into 99.9999% pure silicon ingots, which are then sliced into paper thin wafers. These wafers are polished, cleaned, covered in a thin layer of nonconducting silicon dioxide and photoresist, printed with ultraviolet light through various patterned plates or “masks,” and then etched into ever smaller rectangular segments that form the basis of the chips they will become.

Pulled apart into disparate elements and displayed under a glass case—a heap of sand; ragged chunks of silicon; masks in hot pink and deep blue; wafers the size of a human hand; chips the size of phalanges adorned with copper, gold, and silver—this intricate process yields a wide range of relics. Each forms an essential section of what is now a nearly invisible and mysterious source of immense power, yet appears strangely sterile and ordinary by itself: a piece of jewelry, a silver plate, a scoop from a sandbox. It is through a process of technological 

 that these disparate parts attain relevance. After all, a robe is just a robe, a toe simply a toe, until it's understood to hold the power to bring us closer to the divine.

 was never to subscribe saintly powers to the microchip, but rather to strip some of its established power away. Returning to the beginning serves to demystify the now: to re-establish the microchip as a physical object created by human hands, not a mysterious and unworldly thing that connects us to the cloud. 

It is exactly this human touch that has become so painfully absent over time. The artist Ingrid Burrington, in her essay titled, "

," contemplated this dynamic: “For all the alchemy and labor that make iPhones appear untouched by human hands, at the end of the day all digital devices are just a bunch of slowly accumulated rocks, refined with chemicals and petroleum.”

The microchip’s physical origins are replete with traces of human touch, even human failure. In the chapel, shining silicon ingots, cast in the desired state of 99.99999% perfection, lay side by side with off-cast versions fading from futuristically smooth to amusingly grotesque. Awash in ridges and fault lines, they cast oily rainbows off of their ragged surface. There is beauty in these mistakes, in missteps made in the search of perfection. But in a process aimed at erasing human faultlines, errors fall to the wayside, are discarded and ultimately erased. They are sacrificed for the sake of creating instruments that in form and function are as predictable as they are “pure.”

A large part of Stichting Link’s collection is sourced from items deemed by former Philips employees to be too interesting, too special, too visually appealing for the trash can. Instead, they took this detritus home, displayed it in their living rooms as art, or simply kept it safe, sensing its value might be reconsidered at a later date. Looking at these pieces now, taken from employees’ homes and now lovingly displayed in the exhibit, they take on the quality of mid-century Dutch art. Framed and elegantly layered in order of size, a collection of wafers becomes an original Bauhaus; plastic sheets or “masks” in magenta, teal, yellow, and blue used to map out different layers to etch on silicon wafers become a technicolor Mondriaan; and a black-and-white blueprint of a semiconductor from the 1960s becomes a satellite view of the stream-lined modernist architecture by 

It is no coincidence that the Catholic Church constructed lavish buildings and filled them to the brim with gold, jewels, stained glass, sculptures, and paintings, and that the Protestant Revolution initiated a wave of iconoclasm intent to destroy it all. Art can bridge time and space by actualizing the invisible. The Sistine Chapel was meant to return Rome and the Catholic Church to its former glory in 1482. Its ceilings, 60 feet over the chapel’s floor, continue to cast their spell over 25,000 daily visitors who are perhaps less impressed by Michelangelo’s art than by the knowledge that man created it. 

Artistic genius ultimately manifests in the fallible human body, one that bends and strains to reach the farthest edge of the mind’s imagination. Michelangelo, who refused to paint lying down, spent four years straining his head and hands on a curved scaffolding of his own making to paint the chapel’s ceiling. He later recounted the experience, writing “my haunches are grinding into my guts. My spine's all knotted from folding over itself. I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.” 

I recalled these words while standing before a 5.6 x 16 foot construction drawing in 

, which depicted a segment of a 100 Hz television 'Octoplus' microchip from 1982. The drawing was made by Harry Veendrick and Leo Pfennings with felt tip pens, colored and graphite pencils, and pressure-sensitive tape.

In a nearby black-and-white picture, Veendrick and Pfennings knelt on top of the unfinished drawing. A cigarette lighter and a pack of fresh tobacco lay next to a 1960s coffee thermos, its circular stains still darkly dotted across the squiggly pencil lines and numbers on the actual sheet, forever indicating where new connections should be made and circuits placed, some half erased or scratched out, recalculated or corrected. 

Hung at the center of the Mariënburg chapel, in the exact spot where the pulpit would have been, the paper became a stained glass window, a religious tapestry, that intuitively pulled the gaze up to its figurative and literal magnificence. Only an eighth of the full design, it is a testament to the human labor behind the microchip’s development. It is also, most likely, the last item of its kind. This fragility underlines how, before the microchip was a thing made of sand and metal—pressed and polished, etched and cut—it was a thought, an idea. It was then shaped, sharpened and patented in the U.S., in 1959, by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyse, two engineers in Texas who dubbed their invention the 

miniaturized electronic and silicon-based integrated circuit

Kilby and Noyse’s idea quickly spread and found fertile ground on foreign shores, including in the Netherlands, with Philips. Founded in 1891 by Frederik and his son Gerard Philips, the Philips company set out "to manufacture light bulbs and other electro-technical articles, as well as to trade therein," as it noted in a local gazette. Sixty years later, its midcentury owners suspected this new electro-technical article could offer Philips a shiny future, and they opened their first semiconductor factory in Nijmegen in 1953. But as potent ideas also always do, they also required people and labor to become reality.

 (2023), artist Alina Lupu took black-and-white photographs from the Philips archive and allowed visitors to connect to the people who first made the microchip personally, placing the ones that spoke to them most onto a temporary wall.

Aside from an obvious tale of technological development, these photographs also tell the story of the social and professional advancement that the microchip made possible. Philips offered its employees a generous pension plan. The plant hired hundreds of women, who weaved the chips’ delicate metal connections with nimble hands. Employees were offered in-house training and education, allowing young working class employees to expand their knowledge and climb the corporate ladder. Even before it took over the world, the microchip changed people’s lives.

But as the microchip grew physically smaller, its business grew bigger, with jobs increasingly automated, and many of these people literally disappeared from the picture.

In Lupu’s work, smiling office workers at parties and picnics mingling with their bosses—or rows of women streaming out of the factory or sitting behind long white tables—seamlessly bleed into close-cropped images of disembodied gloved hands directing metal constructions, or masked faces staring into black screens, until all that is left are abstract pictures of machinery.

Lenses that could trace lines and mistakes at microscopic levels replaced fallible human sight. Pixels replaced pencils, simulations replaced sketches. Female fingers that once knit metal wires together were replaced by robotic ones. Progress equates replacement, until all that remains is the memory.

“In the beginning there was nothing,” an elderly Dutch man recalls. Weaved together by artist Oscar van Leest in the audio installation 

Tot 1 GHz kan ik horen (I can hear up to 1 GHz) 

(2023), the recollections of eight former Philips employees who helped develop the microchip tell the story of the technology’s early years. Despite experiencing the moments they describe decades ago, their voices still contain the boyish enthusiasm with which they began their jobs as 19 and 20-year-olds in the 1950s and ’60s. “You could do anything you could think of and pull anything off the shelves that you wanted,” one remembers, his amazement still tingeing his words. Another admits to taking items home so that he could keep tinkering: “I’d still be working on things on Sunday, 2 am in the morning. I was completely possessed.”

But despite their immediate recognition of the microchip’s potential, none of these men realized this technology would revolutionize the world. They weren’t driven by a desire to be remembered as pioneers, or to change the future. What kept them going was the sheer joy of creating, learning, and expanding on what was considered possible.

Contemplating how the microchip had evolved since his career’s start, one of them even confessed that he cannot fathom how the microchip has evolved over time. The processes he helped design had become so complex, and advanced so rapidly, that not even his hands or mind—present at the microchip’s creation—could continue to grasp them.

It was in 1965 that Gordon Moore, the co-founder of the Fairchild Semiconductor laboratory and of Intel, observed that technological advancement and capitalism together seemed to generate a doubling of an integrated circuit’s transistors every two years, while the cost of those circuits halved in that same timespan. And sure enough: 16 Bit became 32 bit became 64 bit became 128 bit, and the observation of one man became the market’s expectation, which became known as Moore’s Law.

The microchips that run our computers and phones today are the size of a fingernail; the billions of transistors that cover their surfaces are smaller than a blood cell or a 

. And companies continue to reach towards the limits of Moore’s law, creating technologies to go even smaller, even faster. The question of how small we can go has come to overshadow other questions, such as how we got here in the first place, and at what gains and costs.

Creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin, no matter how small that coin becomes.

A Dutch company named ASM International, now ASML, joined with Philips in 1983 to take on microchips’ growing market and to realize the capital and technology required to produce ever-smaller semiconductors. By then, Philips’ headquarters had moved to the Dutch city of Eindhoven. ASML’s first employees worked begrudgingly from wooden barracks next to Philips’ offices. Today its tens of thousands of employees, from all over the world, go to work each day at ASML’s sprawling headquarters, close to where those wooden barracks stood, and 45 miles from where the first Dutch microchip builders began their enterprise.

As microchips decreased in size and multiplied in their potential at immense speeds, the production process sped along with it. Along with dreams of what the microchip could do—and the money that could be made—all scales turned global. Production quickly outgrew the initial factories’ boundaries, as well as the cities and countries in which they stood. The microchip’s future was debated in new languages, in offices and boardrooms across the world. It brought nations together and split them apart, as the origin of the microchip became less compelling than what it promised to bring.

Microchips brought us color television, portable calculators, computers, hearing aids, mobile phones, GPS, video games. They launched rockets into space and missiles into homes. They enabled wars, coups, and genocides that now pass swiftly beneath our fingers with the same ease, the same strokes, the same format as updates on the weather or a note from a loved one.

Today’s battles for the future of microchips, we’re often told, pit the U.S. against China. But as a crucial player in their manufacture, ASML still wields great power in this race, using extreme ultraviolet light to fashion circuitry on nanoscale. Like the microchip itself, the company’s power is more felt than seen. But the history of the microchip, which continues to run through the Netherlands in key ways, remains a human one. 

By returning to that history’s beginning, we’re reminded that creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin, no matter how small that coin becomes. Moments that alter our present tend to silently disappear in the future’s shadow. They hide in the folds of eras that precede and succeed them, growing increasingly out of focus, ultimately assigned to the wrong person or date. As technology seeps silently into ever-more corners of our lives, it blends in with what we deem natural. We connect ourselves to machines to disconnect from reality, or alternately to record it, share it, and make sense of it.

The closer we are intertwined with the microchip, the less we attempt to understand it. And while its applications expand beyond our general comprehension, we shape our fear of uncertainty into dystopian imaginings of the future, in which microchips are involuntarily implanted into our bloodstreams or its technology gains unprecedented control over us.

Sometimes, we must return to the start—the sands we rose from—to regain our sense of control. After all, everything we create contains a human scale, one that allows us to connect with our surroundings, both visible and invisible. In revisiting the microchip’s origin, we peel back its layers to find patterns of meaning, beauty, play, connection, construction, destruction, and dreams. We discover our own humanity. Returning to the beginning of things takes us from the cloudy heavens back to earth, letting us watch the seed curl back into what it once was—materialized potential, small enough to fit in a human palm.♦

 is a journalist from the Netherlands, with a penchant for stories on niche communities, odd histories, and small-town idealism.

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