dsc_0505

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/letter-wyoming/"></div>This place is so beautiful that it’s going to kill me. I am at Ucross, Wyoming, population 25. It’s a grassy and mountain-fringed artists’ colony that hosts writers, painters, composers, choreographers, badgers, wolverines, great horned owls, nighthawks, ospreys, and wild turkeys. A rich and very generous man named Raymond Plank purchased the land for the Apache Corporation, which is ranked 438th on the Fortune 500 list, and is an oil company. That’s the first thing that the artists learn when they come to Ucross: My second day here, my fellow artists and I sat around in a goddess circle and got read into the oil facts. You are residing in paradise for four weeks in order to make art, and it’s all on account of oil money, one of the residency managers explained to us plainly. I turned and made meaningful eye contact with my fellow creatives in an effort to convey how important it is to be conscious always of one’s own participation in destructive processes that create global warming. Outside, the sun gilded the green leaves of the sumac and chokecherry trees, and a woodpecker rattled away. One day, maybe the earth itself would be a cinder in part because I had taken two planes to come to Ucross and write short stories about the abysmal acid reign of Scott Pruitt at the EPA. But instead of falling backwards in a faint at my own Byzantine or actually quite simple moral structure, I listened to the turkey gobbling out in the buffalograss. Once our initiation was over, I ran out to go find it.
This is not when Ucross started to really get to me, though. That process began about a week and a half into my stay. I woke in the dark to listen to the red winged blackbirds and yellow warblers sing in the trees next to my bedroom window. It was 4:15 a.m. I rose from my bed and went outdoors, to see pink and blue waves flow out across the wide sky, which hosted clouds that looked like huge unreal islands. The pastel glow drifted down on hills and the shortgrass prairie, which bustled with literally prancing white-tailed deer. In a cottonwood nearby, a fluffy adolescent owl flapped its just-molted wings. I felt a rare sensation that used to arrive in my youth when I believed in God, and that still graces me sometimes now during sexual intercourse and when I visit museums: Joy.
It is hard to experience radiant joy in the San Fernando Valley, where I live, because I am so busy angrily recycling and lecturing my students about the legal duties we should owe to the international community of environmental refugees. L.A.’s pollution does make the night sky into a red and bronze wonder, but the Trader Joe’s and Sephoras sprinkled across Ventura Boulevard crowd up into the empyrean and make our exquisite sunsets hard to see. Is the problem also that it is so noisy? I am not going to bash L.A., it is my hometown and I love it. However, in Wyoming I have stopped grooming and every morning I dash out my cabin door at around four a.m., to just look up. I sit in an Adirondack on a porch and stretch out my hairy legs and watch as the clouds begin to catch fire. They streak across my irises like the Monets in the Getty. The white, outlandish puffs drift and shudder through the indigo like Zoe Leonard’s Untitled 1989 series, which are pictures of amazing clouds that I saw last winter at MOCA. Happiness wells up in me like a panic and I keep shaking my head. I have been getting five hours of sleep per night for weeks because when I lay in bed I feel so excited that this scene awaits me just before dawn. That is one of the reasons that Ucross is killing me.
When I get back home I will store the glass in one bin and the paper in another. I will take Uber, pluck my eyebrows, and stop being feral. The traffic will get to me, I will scram around the new openings at the Hammer, and I will prepare to teach world-destroying property law in the fall semester. I will have some light insomnia, not because I’m noticing everything around me but because I will worry about my interpersonal dynamics and productivity. And I think there will come moments when Wyoming will come flooding back to me in L.A., and I will wonder who and where I am. In Los Angeles, my ethics are habits, and the blood-red sky crawls around the cell towers and power cables. In Wyoming I am ecstatically conflicted, my abbreviated dreams are alive with frightened polar bears and cheeping composers, and I think I will have to start popping Ambiens like mints if I don’t soon get out of here.
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Letter From Wyoming

6-26

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/modus-ponens/"></div>Modus ponens is the law of logic holding that if a conditional statement (“if a then b ”) is accepted, and the antecedent ( a ) is true, then the consequent ( b ) may be inferred.
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&#8220;&#8216;These aren’t people. These are animals,&#8217; Trump said.&#8221;
James Oliphant, Trump says &#8216;animals&#8217; comment refers to criminals, Mexico protests, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-mexico/trump-says-animals-comment-refers-to-criminals-mexico-protests-idUSKCN1II2AT" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-immigration-mexico/trump-says-animals-comment-refers-to-criminals-mexico-protests-idUSKCN1II2AT', 'Reuters');">Reuters</a>, May 17, 2018
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&#8220;[Representative Ted] Lieu [D-Ca] asked people watching to imagine how the kids who have been separated from their families must feel before suddenly playing audio of children crying and calling out to parents on the House floor. The heart-wrenching audio played for nearly 40 seconds before Rep. Karen Handel, R-Ga., who was sitting in the speaker’s chair presiding over the floor, called on Lieu to suspend his speaking. Handel said Lieu was &#8216;in breach of quorum.'&#8221;
Eliza Collins, Ted Lieu and Karen Handel argue over audio of immigrant children played on House floor, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/06/22/ted-lieu-karen-handel-house-floor-dispute-crying-children-audio/725937002/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/06/22/ted-lieu-karen-handel-house-floor-dispute-crying-children-audio/725937002/', 'USA Today');">USA Today</a>, June 22, 2018.
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&#8220;&#8216;Just the abuse that they endured, being called filthy and stinky and being mocked for crying,&#8217; [Rep. Pramila] Jayapal [(D-Wash.)] told The Post.&#8221;
Amy B Wang, ‘Mothers could not stop crying’: Lawmaker blasts Trump policy after visiting detained immigrants, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/06/10/mothers-could-not-stop-crying-officials-blast-trump-policy-after-visiting-detained-immigrants/?utm_term=.56feafba40e5" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/06/10/mothers-could-not-stop-crying-officials-blast-trump-policy-after-visiting-detained-immigrants/?utm_term=.56feafba40e5', 'Washington Post');">Washington Post</a>, June 10, 2018
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&#8220;What you have is cyclone fencing and fence posts that look like cages — and they do look like cages&#8217;; he said. &#8216;Then it&#8217;s — I mean, it&#8217;s a — they look like the way you could construct a dog kennel.'&#8221;
Jim Harris, Jeff Merkley: Immigrant Child Detention Center Looked Like &#8220;A Dog Kennel&#8221; <a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/06/sen_jeff_merkley_immigrant_detention_center_looked_like_a_dog_kennel.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/06/06/sen_jeff_merkley_immigrant_detention_center_looked_like_a_dog_kennel.html', 'Real Clear Politics');">Real Clear Politics</a>, June 6, 2018
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&#8220;President Donald Trump cast doubt Friday on wrenching tales of migrant children separated from their families at the border, dismissing &#8216;phony stories of sadness and grief&#8217; while asserting the real victims of the nation&#8217;s immigration crisis are Americans killed by those who cross the border unlawfully.&#8221;
Jonathan Lemire and Darlene Superville, Trump Pushes Back Against Border Separation Uproar: The central piece of Trump&#8217;s attempts to counter-program against the despairing images at the border was to stand with the &#8220;angel families,” <a href="https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/politics/Trump-Immigration-Casting-Doubt-486303331.html" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/politics/Trump-Immigration-Casting-Doubt-486303331.html', 'DFW');">DFW</a>, June 22, 2018
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I am human and they are not human.
They are not human but I am human.
Only humans feel pain.
I am human and therefore am in pain.
But they are not human and so they do not feel pain.
&nbsp;
I am human and they are not human.
They are not human but I am.
I am human and so I am clean.
Humans are clean and animals are not.
Animals are filthy and humans are clean.
Filth must be cleaned.
&nbsp;
I am human and they are not human.
They do not suffer because they are not human.
They hurt me because they are filth and I am a human.
As a human I feel pain.
When they feel pain it is not as humans and it is not pain.
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I am human and they are not.
They are not human and I am.
Pain is something that humans feel.
If a person who is not a human feels pain it is as if a dog suffered.
Dogs can be shot.
&nbsp;
If they are human then I am not human.
But I am human and they are not.
If they are human then I am not.
If they are not human then I am.
They are not human.
I feel the clean pain that is only known by humans.
Their pain is the pain that only dogs feel.
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Their pain is filth and must be cleaned.
I am human and not-filth.
My pain will clean them away.
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Yxta Maya Murray is a writer and law professor who teaches at Loyola Law School.