We are not the horse.

We never were.

That's the point. (22/22)

This poem is in the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. It is dedicated to a Hiroshima survivor. Levine didn't call it "The Horse at Nagasaki." He just called it "The Horse." He trusted us to know what he meant. He may have been too generous. (21/22)

Philip Levine. "The Horse."

The horse would never return.
There had been no horse. I could
tell from the way they walked
testing the ground for some cold
that the rage had gone out of
their bones in one mad dance.
(20/22)

The horse in Isfahan doesn't exist yet. That "yet" is the only space we have left. (19/22)

I don't want a poem about a horse in a museum in Isfahan 20 years from now. I don't want a professor assigning it to students who weren't born yet when we looked away. I don't want another twisted tricycle. Another dedication. Another quiet title hiding the unnameable thing inside it. (18/22)

The twisted tricycle is not metaphor. The horse is not metaphor. We did this. We are the aggressor. We are Plath's Daddy. We are the toddler's parent who left the gun on the table. (17/22)

We don't get to forget the horse existed. We put it there. We are in the portrait and there are no annotations. No footnotes explaining our intentions. No asterisk next to our name marking us as one of the good ones. (16/22)

The professor visits Japan. Feels the awkwardness of being American in that museum. The aggressor in the room. He goes home to Katie and buries the twisted tricycle. His answer: "Sometimes it's best to forget the horse ever existed." I understand why he said it. I don't think he was right. (15/22)

There's a professor who assigns "The Horse" as the first poem his students read every semester. He asks them what Levine means when he says there was no horse. One student uncrosses his arms long enough to ask: "You're not going to tell us they just made up that stupid horse, are you?" (14/22)

He said it out loud. On television. "We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong." Not the worst thing said this week. Not even shocking anymore. That's the spike. The air freshener. Us. (13/22)

There's no dramatic scene this time. No Mattis resignation letter. No adult wrestling the controls in a back room. The seat is empty. The machine is running on its own momentum now. And the wrecking ball is mid-swing over the Strait of Hormuz with nobody to call it back. (12/22)

We tell ourselves the good Germans story. That we would have been different. But comfort is participation. The blindfold too. Even the schadenfreude is participation. We don't get to speak from the portrait. I don't get to explain myself to the people on the other side of what happens next. (11/22)

We can scroll the comments for schadenfreude. We can lift the blindfold slowly. We can say we chose the other guy. None of it changes the outcome we are all living inside. Complicity isn't measured by intent. It's measured by what happens next. (10/22)

Plath has a line from "Daddy" I can't shake. "Every woman adores a Fascist." Every boy too, I can't help adding. Some part of us wants to watch that wrecking ball swing. The fantasy of the crane with nobody at the controls. (9/22)

There's a theatrical rule: if you hang a gun on the wall in the first act, it goes off by the third. No exceptions. The audience knows it. The characters know it. The whole play is just the dread of waiting. We hung the gun. We're in the third act. And the toddler found it. (8/22)

Tullock was right that it would work. He was wrong about forever. Humans are extraordinarily good at normalizing the danger closest to them. We accommodate. We adjust. Eventually we decorate. My wife would never have hung anything on that spike. I'm not sure I can say the same. (7/22)

Gordon Tullock's thought experiment: people would drive much safer if you mounted a spike on the steering column, pointed at the driver's heart. No abstraction. Pure consequence. It works. Until people forget the spike is there. Until they hang their air freshener on it. (6/22)

I figured someone famous had said it first. The search AI suggested "glutton for punishment." I thought there should be something with more metal in it. That's when the algorithm dropped Gordon Tullock in my lap instead. (5/22)

Found my gem. A stranger on Reddit, schadenfreude fully intact:
"They wanted a wrecking ball, and then they were shocked that it didn't come with a steering wheel."
I closed the tab. Kept the quote. Went looking for where it came from. (4/22)

Without my usual filters today, the internet handed me everyone's anxiety at once. r/politics. CNN voter regret headline. Less regret, more schadenfreude. Predictable but I go to the comments like I go to used bookstores. Not expecting much. Sometimes you find something worth carrying. (3/22)

There's a bad version of that same blindfold. The one you wear when the world feels like it's spinning out. Every morning lately it's the same question before I open the news: is it still there? Did something break overnight? This morning. Still there. Barely. (2/22)

I buy lotto tickets when the jackpot crosses a billion. Never check them that night. I want eight hours of maybe. My wife thinks this is insane. She checks immediately. I've had to start hiding them. She sees things clearly. I'm not always ready for that. (1/22)

Cover of Philip Levine's New Selected Poems, 1991 edition. A muted landscape painting with fields, a distant treeline, and pale sky. I found this copy in a used bookstore in California at 28. The first poem I opened to was "28." I don't think that was an accident. Levine was likely 56 when he wrote it, looking back at 28 the way you only can from the other side. I am 56 now. I understand the looking back. I also understand, maybe for the first time, the looking forward. If you are 28 and you find this thread: the loops are worth it. Stay in them. Your voice is in there somewhere. This is mine.

We Are Not the Horse.
#BerkelyTapes #BookSky #ShortRead 🧵

Mira's eyes found Ben's across the table. The particular stillness of someone who has just had a word translated into a language they already spoke fluently.

Ben closed the laptop.

"Chloe," he said. "The code for the Bancroft door." (19/19)
#BerkeleyTapes

"Attention. Doe Library is closing for unscheduled maintenance. Exit through the North main doors. Have your IDs ready for scanning. Do not use the side exits."

Outside: undergraduates groaning, packing up. "Seriously?"

Nobody in the study room moved. (18/19)
#BerkeleyTapes

The PA system clicked.

Old feedback. A system not used in years jolting back to life. Four bodies went still at exactly the same moment.

The silence between the click and the voice lasting just long enough to understand that whatever came next was not going to be good. (17/19)
#BerkeleyTapes

"Chloe. The pass-through to Bancroft, is there a keycard or..."

"Keycard and a code. But I know it. The Reading Room guy made me log it. Said I was the only intern who returned materials in the right order."

A sound from Sam. Almost a laugh. Brief, hollow, gone. (16/19)
#BerkeleyTapes

Around him the room continued.

Sam taping his arm. Mira's voice back in its tactical register. Chloe with her camera.

The words were right there, fully formed. Mira. I led them to him. I'm sorry.

He looked at the log. The log looked back.

He didn't say any of it. (15/19)
#BerkeleyTapes

David's phone had been the highest-priority node.

They didn't read the messages. The thought had a quality of falling. They just looked for the brightest light and walked toward it.

Eight seconds. 400 people.

He had built a vault and taped a flashing sign on the door. (14/19)
#BerkeleyTapes

Axiom hadn't attacked the network. They didn't need to.

A broadband RF sweep. Cheap radios mapping every active MAC address in the crowd.

Looking for the loudest node. The one routing the most traffic.

Ben had designed it that way.

Of course he had. (13/19)
#BerkeleyTapes