By Stuart Mitchner
Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.
I’ve made some New Year’s resolutions. The first, strictly minor one was to find a place for this quote from Franz Kafka’s Diaries, 19 June 1916, which I’ve been holding in reserve all through 2025. Seven days into the new year, staring at the empty room of 2026, I’m putting Kafka at the top of the column.
My major resolution is to read Thomas Pynchon’s 773-page fifth novel, Mason & Dixon, and to do my best to write something of value about the experience. Feeling out of my depth (between the science and the 18th-century prose), I gave up a third of the way through in May 1997 when the book was No. 4 on the New York Times bestseller list. Since the publication was announced in 1996, I’ll think of this as a 30th anniversary commitment.
“Stranger Things” Is Over
Last week I erroneously stated that the finale of the Duffer Brothers’ hit Netflix series Stranger Things would stream on New Year’s Day. Given all the tearful farewells flooding social media, it’s clear by now that everyone who wanted to stream the New Year’s Eve series finale has seen it. Having grown up in the real-life town of Bloomington, Indiana, which has a direct connection to Hawkins, the fictional setting of the series, I have no doubt that the strangest thing that happened on New Year’s Eve/Day — stranger even than the destruction of the Upside Down — was when the historically hapless Indiana University football team routed the historically dominant Alabama Crimson Tide 38-3 in the Rose Bowl.
Eleven’s Fate
The most important character in Stranger Things is the girl called Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), who enters as a soft-spoken 12-year-old in the first season. While it’s diverting to watch her topple trucks with her mind, catapult small boys out of deadly falls, and humiliate bullies, the wonder of El has less to do with her superheroic gifts, which come at a cost (nosebleeds and exhaustion), than with the multiple dimensions of her character (she’s cute, she’s pretty, she’s weird, she’s a he, she’s an it, she’s a monster, she’s a victim, she’s sorrow incarnate, she’s heartbreaking). Imagine someone who contains depths of vulnerable ET-like alien innocence as well as Svengali-hypnotic intensity, who after reducing a bully to a laughing stock with a look wipes the blood of the effort from her nose with the cool of a gunfighter holstering his weapon. In nearly every scene in Season 1, she has that special quality, the mixture of pathos and power, thanks to the eerie, endearing gravitas she communicates, gently, firmly, sweetly, even when she quietly ponders the possibility that she’s “the monster.”
In subsequent seasons, including especially the fifth and final one, her appeal has been compromised due both to the extraordinary success of the series and to the constraints and demands forced by the almost 10 years of the show’s run, which began in summer 2016. The 12-year-old is now in her early twenties and looking worn down, glum, troubled, and embattled, as if she herself were pondering the problem of her fate, which, predictably, is up in the air somewhere between the destruction of the Upside Down and whether or not she died with it. Inevitably, a doubtful prophecy gives viewers the false hope that she’s survived and is enjoying life somewhere, perhaps as, who knows, a surprise guest in a future season of White Lotus. Despite the heroics she performs in, for example, Season 3, when she vanquishes the Mind-Slayer and saves a soul, she’s had to deal with the loss of her powers, most depressingly in Season 4, where she undergoes the nightmare of life in a California high school, helpless in her innocence, before the incessant taunting of a gang of bullies led by the demonic Angela, who finally drives her to an act of violence with the only weapon at hand, a mere roller skate.
A Girl Named Jane
In 2016 when the series opened, I had no idea that Eleven was born Jane Ives in my hometown Bloomington, where her mother Terry was a student at Indiana University before becoming a 1969-1971 test subject in Dr. Brenner’s Project NKUltra. While the idea that Bloomington might be the model for Hawkins is absurd from the get-go (the series is filmed in Georgia after all), the adventures of Mike, Lucas, Dustin, and Will nevertheless brought forth memories of some “stranger things” from my Bloomington boyhood, which began at age 5 above a downtown insurance office haunted by a creaking stairway and nightmares inspired by the time I was chased across the adjoining park in broad daylight by a boogieman straight out of the scariest movie I ever saw, The Mummy Returns. Our next home was a top floor duplex near the IU campus with even more creepily creaking stairs and a backyard of haunted creaky swings that telegraphed the reality of death to a 7-year-old who was meanwhile victimized by a gang of older kids called the Costume Boys who dressed up as Batman, Robin, Superman, and Captain Marvel. Also in the neighborhood were University buildings devoted to the sciences where it was said cadavers were dissected by unhinged medical students.
El Becomes a Poet
Smith, the captain of her loyal and beloved sibling army, vanquishes bullies, communes with the king of tortoises, and searches for sacred silver pennies.
—from the jacket copy, Bread of Angels
Call it a Memorable Fancy, after William Blake’s “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” which allpoetry.com describes as “a journey through a dark and threatening underworld, symbolizing the speaker’s exploration of the darker aspects of human nature.” My vision of an afterlife for El is really no more outrageous than the one El’s boyfriend Mike proposes by way of Kali, El’s dark sister from the Hawkins Lab. If there’s a living being in the world today that I can imagine the first season vision of El growing into it’s the author of Bread of Angels (Knopf 2025), which I began reading on Tuesday, December 30, Patti Smith’s 79th birthday. Early in the memoir, Smith says that she was due on New Year’s Eve, but “arrived in the center of a huge blizzard, a day early, ruining my mother’s opportunity to receive a promotional New Year’s gift of an early freezer prototype.”
Smith shares her birthday with the novelist Paul Bowles, which she discovered by chance in 1967, as she recounts in her previous memoir M-Train before describing her visit with Bowles in Tangiers 30 years later, “He sat propped up in bed, wearing a soft plaid robe, and appeared to brighten when I entered the room.” When she told him they shared the same birthday, “He smiled wanly, his haloed eyes closing. We were approaching the end of our visit.” As to what the next paragraph describes, Smith leaves it up to the reader — “Everything pours forth. Photographs their history. Books their words. Walls their sounds. The spirits rose like an ether that spun an arabesque and touched down as gently as a benevolent mask.”
This rush of images didn’t truly land for me until I started thinking back on my reading and listening experience of this very special poet, photographer, and singer songwriter, with her Midwest roots, as herself possibly a home for El’s wandering spirit. The paragraph that made it happen, however, comes on page 85 of Bread of Angels, where Smith recalls “A sudden shaft of brightness containing the vibration of a particular moment… The unsullied memory of unpremeditated gestures of kindness. These are the bread of angels. The pen drops. I touch phantom wounds…. By the time I was fifteen the face of another pervaded my furtive fantasies.” That was the face of the young poet on the cover of her stolen copy of Illuminations.
When the “angels served a new portion,” it was Arthur Rimbaud. In my quest for the young Eleven, a character worthy to share a story with Peter Pan, I found her spirit sister in Patti Smith.