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No. 1,473: “The Paradox of the Eternal”
This story would give narrative form to what I have in my own mind – until now I haven’t written about it or discussed it with anyone but myself – denominated “the paradox of eternal,” a paradox that, as I have conceived of it, more or less derives from the familiar figure of the monkey sitting at a typewriter (where we presume the monkey is incapable of the kind of sophisticated thought intentional literary creation requires) who, given an eternity during which to remain there, will eventually, and altogether in spite of itself, type the collected works of Shakespeare word for word and in historically accurate chronological sequence, for no other reason than that, given an eternity during which to sit there banging away at the keys, that monkey will eventually type everything in every imaginable sequence. This well-known little parable, of course, is just a way of saying that if time is infinite, all circumstances will sooner or later come to pass. In light of what we know about time and chance, this seems an altogether reasonable proposition, but on further consideration one realizes that accepting it as true necessarily implies (and here lies the “paradox” in this little paradox) simultaneously accepting the opposite as true. What I mean is that if, given an eternity during which to do so, all circumstances will eventually come to pass, then it necessarily follows that sooner or later circumstances that will themselves be of infinite duration will come to pass, and it moreover follows, since we are dealing here with the possibility of all circumstances, that the nature of some of these circumstances will be to prevent other circumstances from coming to pass, such that any such circumstances that have not yet come to pass will, because of the infinitude of the precluding circumstance, never come to pass, even given an eternity of their own in which to do so.
Taking the example at hand, let us imagine that my inability to find a narrative form with which to endow this “paradox of the eternal,” as I have been thinking of it, is itself a circumstance of infinite duration. In this case, even given, like the aforementioned monkey, an eternity with which to bang away at my own typewriter (which is a computer), I would never succeed in giving narrative form to what I have, in my own mind, denominated the “paradox of the eternal.” Of course, one might make the case that, in reaching this point, I have, in fact, just now succeeded in doing precisely that. But this would only prove that my inability to give narrative form to this paradox was, as it turns out, all along a circumstance of finite and not, as I presumed in summoning it as an example, infinite duration.
About the Author
Eli. S Evans used to write for Berfrois.
Postscript
Goodbye, Berfrois, in which I might have published the hypothetical story discussed above if I’d ever gotten around to writing it. Thanks, Berfrois, for publishing some work I really liked, as well as some work that really wasn’t very good, in some cases either because you didn’t read or opted to ignore the email in which I’d written, “On second thought, don’t publish this, it sucks.” And thanks, Berfrois, for not ghosting me the way n+1 did when I gave up on critical posturing, a mode of writing I never really enjoyed, and went back to writing silly little stories, which actually come a lot closer to my admittedly situated understanding of the texture of life. By the way, did you know that 40% of Harvard graduates, if I’m not mistaken, go on to work in finance. As for the other 60%, one might say that finance by any other name … Well, I suppose Berfrois did not turn out to be as enduring as n+1, or, for that matter, The New Yorker, but soon enough the earth will be swallowed up by the sun and from the perspective of the eternity of a different sort that will follow that event, the difference between the length of time Berfrois endured and the length of time n+1 or The New Yorker endured will be merely nominal, and our only compensation for ceasing to exist will be that there will no longer be any such thing as finance. On second thought, finance – and Harvard graduates – will probably survive the end of the world, whereas Berfrois, it seems, will not survive to the end of 2022. Goodbye, goodbye and off to the office of dead links we go.
Images
The image above is Harris & Ewing: Early model of typewriter, c. 1940. The post image is a detail from Rachel Beer: Lost: Leather Glove, 2009 (CC).
The post Eli S. Evans: Is That It appeared first on Berfrois.
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In a Paris restaurant, old-fashioned and poky, a waiter dragged a small wooden table to the window in a space just big enough for her to squeeze in and sit down. In that odd corner, her bags were on her lap, and she craved red wine. An artwork too imposing in size—and its canvas needed cleaning—occupied the opposite wall. Her dining partner, a friend of a friend, gave her a present in a box. It looked like a vanilla-scented candle. The colour was a prestigious aged milky white, like water that has been used to rinse uncooked rice. Water that you could use to lubricate your face. You know the kind of candle: the one you buy in an airport gift section when you are so bored you say to yourself your legs demand to be walked. The kind that women use both hands to hold, giving them an air of coy vulnerability. She smelled this dull safe choice for a couple of seconds, smiling only slightly.
//
Earlier that afternoon, he had waited for a friend of his friend in a bar in a fashionable Parisian neighbourhood that hung art and sold imported craft beer. Beer in hand, he examined the labels on the bottles lined up clinically against a wall. They were uncluttered; easy to access and put back in their place. But there was no old-fashioned scheme. He had previously seen bottles arranged by flavour, country, colour, alcohol content, and alphabet in reverse. Even something called IBU. For what he knew, and he would admit he knew little, the labels were designed to say that the beers weren’t produced by big faceless corporations and that they were young and daring. But there was still an air of predictability about them. For a start, the names tended to be obscure, in most cases unredeemed by witless punning. Maybe he was just lacking humour. Certain typefaces were frequent, while some of the labels’ provocative images would have made for in-demand tattoos. Other than himself, there was only one customer, a woman, whose age was difficult to guess, sitting by the window, which had recently been polished to let more light through. Her table was covered with miscellaneous items as though she had emptied out her three bags, frantically, looking for something.
///
She had a morning appointment with a saxophonist trained at the Paris Conservatory who had offered to discuss her poetry. He said he was middle-aged but what did that mean these days? She thought the answer might be biological or psychological or financial but certainly not numerical. He didn’t look middle-aged, but rather like a gentleman on the cusp of being respectably old and he slowly sipped whiskey neat at room temperature all the time. She wondered if being indecisive was ever a good trait and she remembered she was once upon a time in several cities very decisive when it came to love making: she would plan out her preferred steps. She had fun even though she was almost always overruled. This was the thirteenth poetry session she’d had with the saxophonist, who was writing a memoir in verse about his years wandering in Asia before he became middle-aged. His experience was such a cliche that it might potentially come into fashion again, depending on the audience. He didn’t show off his knowledge and he sparingly hinted at his friendships with other poets. He would never ask questions that might lead to opportunities to boast about his grandiosity. When she arrived with her three bags, she was running out of breath and he was drinking whiskey, the glass reflecting light on the accent table. She sat on the armchair by the open window; the air was somewhat damp, sloppy. Since she had chosen the armchair the first time she came, she stuck with it even though it was really too big for her. Again she saw the photographs on the walls; they were messy, needing curation. She commented on his memoir, which was very near its end. She also corrected those stanzas pertaining to Hong Kong between 2014 and 2022, asked questions about both his life and poetry schools, and suggested a few minor changes. And he reminded her to work on her rhythm, to experiment with different topics and forms, and that she should not wear her heart on her sleeve in writing. In fact, she shouldn’t wear her Cantonese on her sleeve. See, she was doing it again.
Sunday 16 October 2022
About the Author
Tammy Lai-Ming Ho is a Hong Kong-born editor, poet, translator, and scholar. She is the editor-in-chief of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (asiancha.com | chajournal.blog | hkprotesting.com), the English-language editor of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, and an editor of the academic journal Hong Kong Studies. She has edited or co-edited a number of volumes of poetry, fiction and essays, including Desde Hong Kong: Poets in Conversation with Octavio Paz (2014), Quixotica: Poems East of La Mancha, (2016), We, Now, Here, There, Together (2017), and Twin Cities (2017). Tammy’s translations have been published in World Literature Today, Chinese Literature Today, Drunken Boat, and Pathlight, and by the Chinese University Press. Her first poetry collection is Hula Hooping (2015), for which she was awarded a Young Artist Award in Literary Arts by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Her other books are Too Too Too Too (2018), Her Name Upon the Strand (2018), and Neo-Victorian Cannibalism (2019).
The post Using Your Illusions by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho appeared first on Berfrois.
Pamela Colman Smith, XIX – The Sun, 1909
I have the Philosopher’s Stone in my backyard. It resonates at a frequency of approximately 309 Hz.
In flight, the wings of a honeybee beat at 230 Hz. Ventilating workers in a hive produce a frequency of 309 Hz. A piping queen generates a frequency of 450 Hz; the hunger signal of larvae varies from about 120-140 Hz.
Female bees have two parents. Males only have one.
Leonardo da Pisa, the 13th century mathematician also known as Fibonacci, is said to have launched his lifelong obsession with the numerical sequence that gives us the formula for the Golden Ratio over an observation of honeybees. He said: “Someday these numbers will unlock the secret of nature and will explain why a drone has no father.”
It seems he was right.
A single worker bee produces a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. Her lifetime—in a honeybee colony there’s no question who gets the job done. Ninety percent of a normal beehive is comprised of females. Females do the foraging, the cleaning, the ventilating. They raise the young, they are the providers, they are the guards, they are the undertakers. Males can’t even sting. They exist for one purpose: to mate with a queen. Once. Because unlike the human paradigm, mating is 100% lethal for bees. No one does it twice, not even the queen, who on her single mating flight collects enough semen to fertilise as many as 1500 eggs a day for two to four years. My young hive has recently lost its queen without having raised a new one, which is bad news for the colony, though we’re determined to fix it. Yes, we—there’s a “we” now. The crisis is that a worker has attempted to take over the egg-laying gig. Unlike humans, bees can create young from unfertilised eggs. And, unlike human ova, which are female by default unless a Y-chromosome-bearing sperm cell fertilises them, bee eggs are inherently male, and a drone-dominant hive is a doomed one.
Not that I needed the metaphor; kicking the drone out of my own colony didn’t just sweeten my life, it saved it. We’ve got this. I know it can, and probably will, take time to undo the cumulative damage of unforeseen accident and misguided stopgap repairs. It took me a decade.
Call it an upward spiral. Or dumb luck. Or…. Smart luck. I’m not sure. But playing the long game has born literal and figurative fruit.
I waived my ownership stake in The Spouse’s company when I decided I was done with… well, his company. Most of my friends told me I was insane. I’d been a freelance writer and fulltime childcare wizard for over ten years. I didn’t exist financially, my skill set wasn’t software development, and I lived in one of the most psychotically expensive regions of the country. How could I possibly take a risk like that?
Easily. Well, it was an easy choice—the execution was another matter. I took the house as an equalising payment, essentially dividing the assets so that I got possession of the mortgage and he got possession of the income. This involved some Faustian moves including—because I didn’t exist financially—having my father cosign the refinance paperwork and effectively become technical half-owner of the place. The Spouse’s interpretation was, and this is a direct quote: “Your dad took the house away from me and gave it to you.”
“No,” I said, in this new calm voice I was trying out after years of screaming, sobbing, or droning robotically. “My dad kept his grandchildren in the only home they’ve ever known without you having to cash me out. You weren’t coerced, you never acted like the place meant anything to you anyway, and you just doubled your ownership stake in a software company. If you wanted the house, you maybe should have started with acting like you wanted the marriage.”
He didn’t like that answer, but honestly, by that point I had no idea what the hell he ever had liked about me, and I was done trying to earn his approbation.
Divorce plus unemployment created a debt hole it took me eight years to climb out of. When I finally did get a job, it was one to which I was well-suited and had a lot of perks, but the salary didn’t cover the PITI on the ramshackle rancher I now had to keep paid up, so I was in the red before I ever turned the lights on or put food in my kids’ mouths. I sold jewellery, and everything else I could part with. I channelled my pioneer forebears, pretended it was the Depression, and decided that, when the girls were with Dad, I wouldn’t buy groceries. I stretched pantry staples and ate what the garden produced, or not at all.
I learned that if I needed to depend on my garden for survival, I could. Right now, right at this moment, there are peas and potatoes, eggs and salad greens and herbs, blueberries and strawberries, sorrel and celery, carrots and radishes, lemons and blood oranges. Soon, apricots, cherries, plums, nectarines, beans, tomatoes, squash, corn, sunflowers, cucumbers, apples, almonds, pears, olives, figs, pomegranates, guavas, oranges and mandarins.
And honey, assuming we succeed in crowning a new queen before the social fabric of the hive breaks down.
Jon Sullivan: Bee Collecting Pollen, San Diego, California, 2004 (CC)
The initial installation had gone perfectly. A local 4H kid and his mom helped us rig up the hive boxes. They arrived a couple weeks later with a wire-mesh cage containing 10,000 Italian honeybees, and a single mated queen. The queen controls the whole scene with pheromones; the workers consume the sugar and set her free from her separate enclosure, and everyone gets to work, building comb, laying eggs, foraging for nectar and pollen, and manufacturing honey. At the two-week check, all of those things were happening.
My friend pulled out a frame and said “Yep, she’s out!”
“How did you find her so fast?” All I saw was a thrumming wall-to-wall mass of identical, fuzzy, brown and gold striped bodies and iridescent wings.
“Oh, I don’t see her yet. But look.” She holds the frame out to me. “These are capped brood cells. Those have larvae in them. And check it out—you already have honey.”
For some reason I didn’t think anything would have happened yet, but the expression “busy as a bee” didn’t come from nowhere.
The combs are extraordinary—a web of paper-thin wax in perfect interlocking hexagons; some empty, some filled with nectar, some with finished honey, some with grubs. The bees thrum, musical, industrious, and utterly like-minded, even with brains the size of a grain of sugar. Masters of geometry who can communicate with interpretive dance, taste with their feet, see into the ultraviolet spectrum, and fly as much as 8 miles a day for spring and summer foraging.
They are utterly glorious.
My ninth-grade algebra teacher was a Fibonacci monomaniac. There was no context in which the Pisan mathematician and his mystical “series” could not be brought up by this woman. I didn’t get it. Obviously, if you add one and one you get two, and if you add two and one you get three, and if you add three and two you get five, and if you keep adding the sums of the last two answers you get an equally obvious and predictable series of answers. So what?
She’d show us transparencies on her overhead projector. A pinecone. A pineapple. A sunflower disc. A cross-sectioned shell of a chambered nautilus. Da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man. The Parthenon. I saw shapes. I understood she was saying that the Fibonacci series was expressed in those shapes, and that the ratio the series described (1.618) was also known as the “golden” ratio and was represented by the Greek letter phi. I just didn’t get it why she couldn’t stop talking about it.
But it kept coming up. In math, in art history seminars. In a college seminar on non-Euclidean geometry my professor remarked that Bela Bartok had used the Golden Mean as a template for his compositions—I ended up writing a paper about it, and not even that made me understand why it mattered. Later, in a landscape architecture program at UC Berkeley, two things struck me at once: that I wasn’t ever going to be a landscape architect because I wasn’t interested in engineering, I was interested in botany. And that something was going on with that damned series of numbers because geometry was a human construct, but it was pretty hard to say plants were, so why was botany the place where Fibonacci reared his head the most? Artichokes. Cauliflowers. The fiddlehead spirals of fern and cycad shoots.
Then the professor said the words that snapped it into place: packing density. What my ninth-grade math teacher had been nattering about all that time was a natural-world blueprint for optimal productive space and minimum waste.
Bees must consume approximately eight ounces of honey to produce one ounce of wax.
One pound of honey requires the nectar of approximately two million flowers. One colony can produce 50-100 pounds of honey a year.
Bees don’t make honey by pure instinct; it’s a craft that is taught, handed down through generations. Through an incredibly arduous and intensive multi-step process, they turn the ephemeral nectar of flowers into a substance with an essentially infinite shelf life. Archaeologists have found perfectly edible honey preserved in Egyptian tombs for three thousand years. It’s antimicrobial, and a very effective preservative for several reasons including its unique sugar density, its viscosity and acidity, and the presence of bacteria inhibiting hydrogen peroxide. Ancient cultures correctly used it as a wound dressing. Cleopatra reputedly bathed in it. Liquid gold, 100 times as costly per gallon as oil. The Magnum Opus, immortality.
In his work De Agri Cultura, 1st century Roman scholar Varro says: “Does not the chamber in the comb have six angles, the same number as the bee has feet? The geometricians prove that this hexagon inscribed in a circular figure encloses the greatest amount of space.” In reality, wild beehives, constructed in irregular spaces such as cavities in trees, don’t exclusively use hexagonal comb construction: like the “sprung” meter of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, the packing density varies according to the constraints that arise at the intersection of form and idea. Pentagons, heptagons, and probably triangles can occur in a beehive to fill in an irregular edge or seam. But the default is the hexagon, because out of all the tiling polygons it is the most efficient at containing maximum honey with minimal wax.
Some say the sunflower is called a sunflower because it looks like the sun; others say it’s because it’s heliotropic, meaning the flower moves over the course of the day to track the arc of the sun through the sky—devotees of Helios, cheering section for the great flying phaeton. A sunflower seedhead has its florets arranged in interlocking spirals: often specifically 34 that radiate clockwise from the centre or apex of the flower, and 55 that radiate counter-clockwise. Each floret emerges at a 137.5 degree angle from the one before it. Some cultivars have more spirals, some fewer, but the angles are the same, they’re always Fibonacci spirals. The petal structures fringing this masterpiece of architecture are known as “rays.” Sunflowers are composites, with both ray and disc flower structures aggregated into the single structure we see as the flower. Botanically, each of those yellow petals is a unique individual flower, as is each of the fuzzy structures in the spiral that will attract honeybees and ripen into seeds. This construction is designed to optimise space; it provides maximum surface area for the seeds. A sunflower is a triumph of packing density.
Divide the number of female bees in a normal hive by the number of males, and you’ll generally get the golden ratio.
Golden section spirals appear in hurricanes, spiral galaxies, palm trees and diatoms. They are present in human ears, and umbilical cords, and for that matter, the double-helix curl of our DNA.
Look at a tree’s branching structure. One branch becomes two, then three, then five, then eight. Rivers. Coastlines. Cardiovascular systems. Dendrites. Lightning. Everything is always the sum of things that came before it.
This year, I made a six-figure income for the first time in my life—working for myself, as a writer and editor, on my own terms. I’m out of debt. I sent my oldest daughter to an exclusive, artsy college in New England. There was a pandemic, and I survived it. No: much more than survived it. I leveraged it. I’d endured enough isolation to know I could do it indefinitely, and enough therapy for contagion-phobia that my main problem was dealing with the fact that most people around me had apparently never before noticed that they were mortal. I discovered skills I didn’t know I had and embraced skills I knew I had but assumed weren’t “marketable.” They were. They are. After struggling to pay for both food and utilities for several years, I have found myself in a place where I have been able to finally fix the garden. Jacuzzi installed, flagstone surround mortared in place, Cecile Brunner rose set to climb the new pergola. Dead trees culled, the leggy feral lemon balm uprooted along with the rest of the choking weeds. Henhouse raccoon-proofed, vegetable bed enlarged, deepened, and enclosed in a wire mesh cage that keeps out rodents, deer, jays, and my daughter’s cat who enjoys assisting me with “fertiliser.” New irrigation. The date palm has been re-groomed without destroying the crevices where the wrens nest. I’ve put in two dogwoods, a pink hawthorn, a crape myrtle, an apricot and a Pakistani mulberry. The borders are now full of hydrangeas and penstemon, osmanthus and peonies, bearded iris and hollyhocks. Fences mended—the literal ones, at least.
I don’t live alone anymore. I get told every day that I’m beautiful and smart and funny by someone kind who doesn’t lie to me.
“You have a beautiful world here,” he told me, then paused and amended: “You made a beautiful world here.”
I haven’t talked to X in over a year and I don’t miss him; I’ve accepted that you can love someone without needing them.
I talk to CJ now and then, and I don’t miss him either because I don’t need to—he’s with me all the time.
At the moment, things are pretty sweet.
But, from the “Nothing gold can stay” department, Queenless hives are more aggressive—bees don’t like insecurity any more than we do—and the workers are starting to sting. Installing a second queen failed—she was either rejected and killed, or died of other causes before the workers could release her. As I write this, we’re currently on our third attempt, which has meant removing the frames full of drone brood and killing them (by putting the whole shebang in the freezer), and slipping in frames from another, healthy, functioning hive in the hope that the workers will rear a new queen from there. If it works, the monarchy will be back under control in about two weeks. If it doesn’t, we move on to an even more extreme scenario that involves introducing a wild swarm and praying for a successful “pheromone exchange.”
The frames we had to freeze had, in addition to the doomed rows of drone larvae, a modest amount of finished honeycomb, which I put into a fine mesh strainer and pressed down with a jar of pie weights. It yielded about half a cup of honey—light gold, with a hint of citrus blossom, and staggeringly delicious.
I am determined to make this work.
Stewart, The Naturalist’s Library — Bee’s Swarming, 1852
Michael Pollan points out in The Botany of Desire that the classical meaning of the word “sweetness” was not simply the description of a flavour. It meant fulfilment, gratification of desire—it essentially meant perfection. “Sweetness and light,” he points out, were terms Jonathan Swift and Matthew Arnold both used to describe the highest of ideals (for Arnold, “sweetness” meant beauty and “light” meant enlightenment or intelligence), even if over time, the phrase began to be increasingly imbued with irony or insincerity. But what Swift was specifically invoking with that term was what we get from bees: sweetness in the form of honey, and light in the form of beeswax candles. In The Battle of the Books, the satire in which the phrase was coined, there’s a lengthy and quite witty colloquy between a bee and a spider. It’s pretty keenly observed, other than Swift’s gendering the bee as a male.
Summa Perfectionis. The Great Work might or might not be literally forcing mercury or lead to become gold, although we’ve now proven that it’s possible, just dissuasively expensive. Carl Jung believed that the Medieval obsession with alchemy was something much more metaphorical than literal: a personal, internal process of perfecting the spirit; a process of breaking things down, burning off impurities, regrouping. Cell by cell, neutron by neutron, releasing dead weight, grounding volatility, neutralising poisons.
The Medieval alchemists did seem to believe a certain level of personal purity was required for “good” alchemy. But it’s probably safe to say they medieval alchemists were also interested in literal transmutation of literal lead into literal gold.
Why are things the way they are? Do we need to understand this in order to change the substance of reality?
Fruition. Sweetness. Happiness. Attainable. Possible. Can it all collapse in an instant? Of course it can. And you love it more for that, not less. Besides, it’s nature’s nature to rebuild. Scorched earth just gives the sun a bigger, blanker canvas.
The love you liberate in your work is the love you keep.
About the Author
Amy Glynn is a poet and essayist whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Measure Press published her first poetry collection, A Modern Herbal, in 2013; her second, Romance Language, is forthcoming. She has received the Troubadour Prize, the SPUR Award of the Association of Western Writers, Poetry Northwest’s Carolyn Kizer Award and scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers Conferences among other honors. She is a two time James Merrill House Fellow and was the inaugural Poet Laureate for the cities of Orinda and Lafayette, CA.
Publication Details
This essay will feature in Glynn’s collection my empire of dirt, forthcoming in 2023 from Berfrois/Pendant Publishing/Delere Press.
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Ross Sneddon: Loch an Eilein on a Sunday afternoon, Aviemore, Scotland, 2019 (Unsplash)
My evening ritual is to feed a tribe of haughty mallards, stern-faced gulls, wobbly, raucous oystercatchers and a family of graceful but indolent swans who split among themselves the kingdom of a loch next to my current home. The geese are quite picky about the type of bread I bring as an offering. In another life, I want to be born with the chutzpah of a Scottish duck shouting insults at you for daring to throw it substandard white bread after getting accustomed artisanal sourdough. What fascinates me particularly about this collection of mallards is how they decide to group and go for a swim right when the rains are at their heaviest battering. Last evening as the rain-infused winds chewed up the lavender patches, I went to my favourite bench next to the cordoned off barge, umbrella in hand, to feed them. It was a last-ditch attempt to dispel a persuasive depressive spiral that had me in its grip for days.
Just as I thought, the ducks were in full practice of whatever synchronised swimming teams they are forming for the next summer Olympics. Their reflections and movements carved out a peculiar geometry across the loch. I noticed them dip their heads into the water, almost in an homage to ashtanga yoga, and stay feet up for a brief few seconds, follow it up with a complete disappearance inside the water before tipping their whole bodies back to the surface. These creatures amble towards the loch when it is copious, aim for balance right at the heart of the turbulence. They are trusting of the exchange between their little bodies and the gigantic body of water to work out in their favour.
I wish to perform a feat of this contradiction tying simplicity and complexity on a word doc. I haven’t written a poem in 2 years. No, that’s not entirely true. I haven’t written a good poem in 2 years. The pandemic stole several of my anchors. Our anchors. Individually and collectively. It stole the quotidian pleasures that served as a ballast for the increasingly muddled directions we are thrown into on the daily. The DIY poetry readings, walking tours for bargains at the vintage, second-hand furniture and home fixtures shops, midnight kulfi at Marine Drive, a stroll through the local flower market in Dadar; these ordinary ceremonies of connections and communing all but disappeared in those two years. I stopped writing because the urge to create erased itself in the face of unspeakable loss both within and around. To write is to either bring into awareness or bring into existence. Both of those journeys require the presence of possibility; the crucible of a belief that will allow space for distillation of ideas, observations, and allow experiences to transmute on the page in the shape of words. We flail trying to maintain love through approximation.
Ross Sneddon: Loch an Eilein Castle, Aviemore, Scotland, 2019 (Unsplash)
I work as a psychologist and psychotherapist. I sometimes feel that the polarities of illness and wellness are more blurred in my profession than others within the domain of health sciences. The pandemic spilled a denser fog limning the outwardness of this terrain. Learning to live with an undefinable auto-immune disorder in the last two years has thrown me into an antithetical churn of perpetual restlessness and restricted movements. I feel captive to Time even as I have an abundance of it on some days because my body enters its own peculiar civil disobedience. Having lived with clinical depression, I often think of the psychoanalyst Darian Leader offering the lens of looking at the depressive experience as a form of protest. Perhaps the depressed state is as much an act of resistance against the powerlessness encountered due to domination, separation, abandonment and lack of safety. More and more as my to-do lists extend, my focus wavers and my arc of completion lags. The worlds I toggle between can sometimes feel suffocatingly shrunken by themselves without needing an external latch to shutter them into invisibility. Writing is how I try to stretch this margin out into a horizon. But for a long time, I have been unable to see anything beyond the concrete jaggedness of buildings resembling fossils of trees surrendered to petrification. There is grey inside my brain and grey outside my body. Everything has arrived prefixed with an un-: unwilling, unready, undeserving.
Part of the unwillingness stemmed from an increasing failure to concentrate without drifting away. My attention spans have been growing more asymmetrical and distorted. A lot of people in therapy have reported similar experiences since the onset of COVID. I could start writing a simple paragraph for my in-progress manuscript and suddenly get tangled in some phrase or word like a sparrow caught neck-first in the wires of a window net across a Mumbai high-rise. My writing was riddled with syntactical errors I was unable to weed out despite running through each line with a fine tooth-comb. I was still replacing “t”s with “d”s in my words without any specific, conscious recognition of doing so. Someone recommended a battery for ADHD. Someone else recommended medication. Someone else tried to convert me to some new mindfulness app. Every recommendation was added to an endless to-do list.
There is an anecdote that the editor of Novy Mir began to read a prepublication copy of Solzhenitsyn’s ‘One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich’ in bed. And then found himself so impressed that he not only got up but put on a suit and a necktie to finish with what he felt to be the requisite respect. I have experienced similar admiration and ever adoration for the written word. Sometimes the only thing that has got me out of the bed has been a book asking me, even forcing me, to make a cup of tea and continue to communicate with it. It is my most trusted transport. I have carried a book with me everywhere like a compass. Reading to me a form of unconditional regard. Reading has offered me remembrance and forgetting in ways that nothing else could. I dissolve, become simultaneously amorphous and trenchant in my pathfinding. Writing to me is an extension of reading. It is the reciprocity of a mutually caring relationship. Reading offers me joy and I return that joy to reading by writing. When I stopped writing, I felt like I didn’t deserve to read either. It felt like consumption, not companionship. It felt as if this was the final emptying.
Once I entered my 20s, I started viewing depression differently. The pathologies surrounding it seemed poorly constructed and incapable of answering any of the questions I had both for myself and for my therapy patients/clients. The commonly over-arching and frequently regressive explanations about its presence within the realms of both psychiatry and therapy were either infuriating or tiring, or both. My own depressive cycles were more and more a series of (mal)adaptive responses to an increasing burden of helplessness about various overpacked compartments of my life. I felt I was destined to carry these with me as some Sisyphean punishment.
Living with and through depression for nearly 20 years now, what I most easily recognise as the first knock of a depressive cycle is the departure of hope. You become bereft of hope. I notice the ease with which I start declining possibilities of faith in connections and relationships. I start telling myself it won’t work out. It has never worked out. I recognise how early-life betrayal of trust was repeated like a circus act that should be banned in so many of my critical relationships. My inner monologue during an intense depressive breakdown is one of abject hopelessness — I shouldn’t exist because what is worthy of me and what am I worth of. Once it fades, the question of worth ebbs. When it is unforgivingly arm-twisting me into admission, it is a cessation from relational exchanges.
I sometimes think that depression is a type of cruelty I sub-consciously direct towards myself in retaliation to the cruelties and emotional insults I endured from others across my lifetime who were incredibly important to me. I was powerless before a violent partner who choked me or a parent who denied my abuse as a child, continuing to co-habit with the abuser while forcing me to do so as well. I couldn’t inflict cruelty towards them in a way that they did towards me because a distorted attachment style had conditioned me to see myself as lesser being in a violent event. Yet, there is a natural – dare I say “normal” – bend to retaliate and defend, to bite off the serpent’s head even as it is tightening the noose of its body around your neck. That is the knot. Between the innate and the acquired. That retaliation was misplaced and like my first attempt at lighting a bottle rocket at 6 years old, it often gets directed inwards, towards my own home — myself. Depression, in these moments, is anger with its tongue cut out.
It is a form of misguided resistance. It is a resistance to participate in anything and everything outside of me. It is a detachment from the nurture of relationships because there is hopelessness in the aftermath of their culmination. Recently, I started reading “Folkbiology” which analyses the rules and rituals of commonplace biological taxonomy juxtaposed against scientifical classification. It explores people’s everyday understanding of the biological world — how they perceive, categorise, and reason about living kinds. he study of folkbiology not only sheds light on human nature, it may ultimately help us make the transition to a global economy without irreparably damaging the environment or destroying local cultures. In a section detailing Itzaj Mayan folkbiological taxonomy, I was struck by the discovery of how “mushrooms” (“xikin~che’, tree-ear) have “no heart” as per Mayan idiom. They take life away from their hosts and are not counted among the living eve though they are “alive”. Depression is my mushroom. It becomes my “ear” and my “eyes”, it takes over all my sensory experientiality, saps me of my nourishment in order to maintain itself.
Illustrator and writer Mari Andrew calls depression “jet lag of the soul”. Arriving in Scotland several months ago, I slept for 2 straight days barely waking up for meals. Unusual for me who doesn’t experience jet lag generally. I realised my tiredness was something of a legacy burden which I fought myself to balance even if it quite literally landed me with a slipped disc. The pandemic depleted me of my fawning resilience. I was forced to see and feel myself as human. Summer nights in this part of the world remain bright and light-infused till 9:00 PM or sometimes, even later. My “mushroom” was dried out by this heat and light. The geographical distance from the focal point of my life’s most traumatising experiences meant it was no longer allowed to grow roots inside the porous membranes of my sensory perception. I failed my first hike but didn’t find myself collapsing in self-doubt. I realised I can’t do inclines at the same rate as before because my body is simply unable to function in the same way. For the first time, in a long time, I didn’t equate acceptance with defeat.
Walking through a village, picking raspberries with a colleague who pointed out how her teenaged daughter calls a poem “a ruined song” making it open to interpretation and adaptive grace, I realised that all this insistence on life as a collection of “skills” can sometimes be the precise barrier from viewing life as a series of chance encounters where your skills might be useful once in a while but even when they are lacking, the lack isn’t a definition, it is a direction. There is a possibility of return.
My colleague mentioned how she is not a prime candidate for strenuous hikes but her husband and kids love them. She pointed out that her injuries take a lot longer to heal than theirs. It was interesting to think of her perceived “lack of strength” for a hike as an adaptive response to her body’s natural slowness in healing from woundings. It was almost preventive; a type of safeguarding. She was excellent at swimming long distances at her own pace. The water, she murmured, was more forgiving.
In the last writing workshop I conducted, one of the student participants, a 60 years old woman, a farmer with regal silver hair and an affinity for silk print skirts who is now fulfilling her life-long goal of “staying close to the arts” , educated others in the class about why the oystercatchers were noisier during this month. Apparently, their hatchlings had emerged and the gulls were circling them in all their predatory fervour. A group of oystercatchers is called a “parcel” and these parcels are at their loudest best to ward off predators against their little ones who resemble grey balls of fur. The parcel surveys the entire area in order to protect their chicks. Collective responsibility for collective safety. It does take a village, after all.
Valeriya Rozhkova: Loch Muick, Ballater, Reino Unido, Scotland, 2020 (Unsplash)
On a grey morning, I could feel like I was at the brink of a surrender to depression again. I ran to the exceptionally well-stocked library at the University and picked out a bunch of books to browse through. I was convinced my focus would dissipate but I wanted a distraction in lieu of people. My attention held onto the hand rails of those pages. I was still restless, I flipped through pages of 5 different books but slowly a sense of peace started to descend. The books, in the beginning, felt like a parcel of loudmouth oystercatchers. A calculated cacophony. Signalling safety. After a few hours, I moved to the speaking section of the library where some students were ideating their projects, thesis et al. There was laughter, excitement, curiosities and debates. I was a silent witness. My finger rested on a line by Cynthia Ozick where she calls an essay a “fireside thing, not a conflagration or a safari.”
Very often the way out of a depressive episode is conveyed as some explicit door you can’t miss. I have found that this usually not the case with me. Depression taught me to be afraid of my emotional states, to distrust their expanse out of a fear of drowning. To walk through this world with my eyes and ears closed to its existence because my sensitivity was to interpreted as my sabotage.
In Airthrey pond, the ducks fling themselves into the vast emotionality of waters against which their diminutive shapes are like flicked stones. They chart the immensity and turbulence collectively. They have marked the areas in which they congregate with each other, bury their heads in a nest of their own wings and go to sleep without fearing the outside. My person back home writes to me in Hindi –
आजकल तकरीरों से तस्वीरें बनायीं जाती हैं
I leave it (& the rest of my time) untranslated.
About the Author
Scherezade Siobhan is an award-winning psychologist, writer, educator and a community catalyst who founded and runs Qureist — a therapeutic space for social wellness. Her work is published or forthcoming in Medium, Berfrois, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Quint, Vice, HuffPost, Feministing, Jubilat, The London Magazine among others. She is the author of Bone Tongue (Thought Catalog Books, 2015), Father, Husband (Salopress, 2016) and The Bluest Kali ( Lithic Press, 2018). She is the current writer in residence at the University of Stirling & the winner of the Charles Wallace Grant, 2022. Her next book is That Beautiful Elsewhere by Harper Collins in 2023. Send her chocolate and puppies — [email protected]. Tweet at her @zaharaesque.
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Spike: Loch an Eilein Castle, Scotland, 2017 (CC)
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