Words by Tania Azhang PZ ’25

Graphic by Ash Dirks SC ’28

“What does this piece evoke for you?” asked our museum guide Solomon. We were looking at Alison Saar’s painting “Lethe,” depicting a Black woman whose body is partially underwater while her head hovers above the surface. 

I recently visited the Benton Museum’s “Black Ecologies in American Art” exhibition. We were evaluating works by Saar and other Black artists for my American Studies seminar.

In Greek mythology, Lethe is a river in the Underworld that induces spirits to forget their past experiences before reincarnation. In Saar’s painting, there are huge rings around the woman’s neck where it met the water — to me, it looked like the rings of a tree stump, or a noose. 

Ignorance is bliss. In Dan Erickson’s “Severance,” characters are given the choice to forget. 

The show centers around a neurological procedure that wipes a person’s memories of particular experiences based on their physical location. Employees of a biotech corporation named Lumon have chips implanted in their heads that wipe their memories of time spent at work, effectively creating a new personality that only exists on the office floor. Work-life balance is the name of the game. 

Mark Scout (an at-turns sassy and eager-to-please Adam Scott) is our eyes into this world. He is a forty-something ex-U.S. history professor who got severed to deal with the grief of his wife’s untimely death. 

In the first season of the show, we spend most of our time with Mark’s office “innie,” who is markedly less depressed than his “outie.” The second season toys with the idea that innies have pure souls — Christopher Walken’s character severs in the hopes that innies have a better chance of getting into heaven if their outies have sinned. 

This is a puzzle-box show in the same vein as “Lost”: What is the severance procedure? What is Lumon really up to? What are the Macrodata Refiners refining? What’s with the baby goats?

Luckily, “Severance” has learned from “Lost” that emphasizing the emotional currents of the story from the outset is more interesting than answering any of these questions. 

For innies, their outies have damned them to hell for perpetuity. They have no memories of the outside world, have never breached the surface of Lumon’s fluorescent-white ceiling to see the sun. 

But in this hell of endless hallways, innies live severed from the pain of the outside world. The tree bark is unmarred by rings. 

The most interesting question “Severance” asks is whether we’re better off living free from the pain of experience. The answer might seem obvious, but the show looks at the finer nuances. 

In season two, the outies begin envying their innies: Dylan’s (Zach Cherry) innie is motivated and self-confident at work where outie Dylan never found his vocation; innie Helly (Britt Lower) is brazen and self-assured where outie Helena is awkward; innie Irving (John Tarturro if you could believe it) experiences love where his outie never did. 

They are all deeply lonely. Life on the severed floor is a second chance.  

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, one of the Benton Museum curators of the “Black Ecologies” exhibition, expanded on Saar’s “Lethe” in the Benton-published book “In Here: Conversations on Solitude.” 

“I like to think Lethe’s rings represent the limits of memory,” she wrote. 

In the context of the African American freedom struggle, memories and knowledge of trauma are not only limiting but a heavy burden. Saar’s painting suggests that the answer is complicated: knowledge is bearing the burden of trauma, but being ignorant of one’s past experiences poses its own dangers. 

If taken in this context, innies are simultaneously prisoners of Lumon and emancipated from the oppression of memory. “Whatever this life is, it’s all we have,” innie Mark tells his outie in the season finale. 

Even though innies are destined to live a half-life, they find ways to make it whole. And Hell has its perks.