Worlds, words, here and there
“When I smashed my knee, and had to lie around,” he said, “I decided there was no use living without delight.”
After a silence she said, in a dry tone, “Bliss?”
“No. Bliss is a form of VU. No, I mean delight. I never knew it on the ship. Only here. Now and then. Moments of unconditional existence. Delight.”
He is Luis and she is Hsing and the ship is where they used to live, a spaceship built to carry humans away from earth, to a distant planet which may or may not be habitable. Here is the planet, because this is already the end of the story. The story is Ursula Le Guin’s Paradises Lost.
I have not forgotten, though, just a few pages ago, they were all hugging the side of their lander, blinded by the light, terrified to leave what was once a world. A terrifying, violently unpleasant, humiliating moment. Defeated, in this moment of victory.
The ship was made to carry four generations, because that’s how long it took to leave a world and arrive at another. Long enough for a couple of generations to not remember, to live and die with only one intermediate world in their hearts. Long enough for some to not want to leave, to forgo delight for Bliss. Bliss is religious ecstasy. VU is virtual unreality, a form of entertainment, a learning tool, a place to go. A thing that no longer exists, here.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Nautilus, the curious sperm whale and the underwater spaceship
When I was in the deepest depths of being locked down, I watched videos from the Nautilus exploration. EV Nautilus is a research ship that sends live-streaming underwater vehicles, called ROVs, to explore what I think of as the abyss. The ungainly movements of the ROV, accompanied by the disembodied voices of its controllers, the patch of light on the ocean floor, the darkness around, make me think of it as a spaceship. Exploring the dark.
The bottom of the sea looks like the night sky. While not being another planet, precisely, the ROVs seem to encounter aliens. Another planet would imply landing, arriving, grounding. This vehicle seems to float in space. They introduce us to creatures, like The Googly-Eyed Stubby Squid, The Octopus that Hides Inside Its Own Tentacles, and the beautifully-named Mysterious Purple Orb. I wait for the encounter with The Thing.
My favourite video is of the Curious Sperm Whale. The team of talkers seems awed, hushed, amused and slightly hysterical as a gigantic alien creature encounters the ROV. In something like a waltz, it circles, approaches and retreats. Eventually a great eye seems to peer right into the heart of the ROV. When this happens, I find myself stunned. Shaken. Like I had met Curious Sperm Whale and he/she had looked right at me.
Image: Priyadarshini John
On another kind of video, I tried a meditation to reduce anxiety. Crushed under the quelling weight of the ocean, blinded by the darkness of the seabed, I followed the instructions very carefully. Take an elevator down, she said. This was easy. All the way down. Yup, I’m there. Now the doors open. Yes, they do. You see a huge library, rows of shelves, books everywhere, cluttered, messy. No I don’t. I see a blue/black/grey amorphous space-fog. I see the sea, the dark sea that has nothing to do with the surface. While the other listeners are clearing up the library and arranging shelves, I look out for a spot of light from an ROV, a sight of a shy purple alien that has no interest in daylight.
Strangely, this works. When I surface, I feel better. Sometimes, I actually do see a spotlight and a patch of colour.
Sea storms, tsunamis, tornadoes and other very big waves
In contrast, I spent the rest of my time watching storms. It started with big waves, knocking beach-goers off their feet and making them laugh and scream. Then, cameras fixed on merchant ships, showing the great prow rising and falling, lifted by great billows, like hills, dunes. Next I moved onto tsunamis. Water sweeping over walls, across roads, rushing through the shore, fast, so fast. Then for awhile it was tornadoes. Tornado chasers are a bit of a cult, in a way that there will never be a tsunami cult. It didn’t matter, because I watched all of this on mute. I wasn’t looking for excitement.
There was another kind of tidal wave sweeping over the world at this time. I didn’t follow up on that at all, but it was so big that I could actually see it, out of the corner of my eye, while I watched a tornado form like a spiralling tentacle growing out of the sky, stirring up the earth until it rose to meet it.
The meme-wave, which had been telling man that it was an island and could stop all interaction with other humans simply by stepping out of a line of matchsticks, had declared victory. #natureishealing, it screamed. Dolphins in Venice. This is visible from there. Tigers, leopards, cheetahs, civet cats, normal cats, walking the streets! All because humans suck!
There was, of course, a second wave of parody #earthishealing memes. Dinosaurs spotted near Powai Lake in Mumbai. Burj Khalifa spotted from Noida, thanks to the pollution-free air. A pair of jeans spotted on the streets of San Francisco.
But the first wave was interesting, not for the fake news, or even its relentless optimism. Not even for the underlying message that humans suck. Everyone agrees that the earth would be better off without humans. What’s interesting is that no one wonders what humans would be without the earth.
There was a general consensus, of course, that the humans who had cut themselves off were functioning fine, cooking, eating, looking out of balconies, clapping, singing, chatting online, working online, living online. Except for the ones who were not, but humans have a tendency to deny the existence of other humans who don’t have the things they do, like food, and homes to hide out in.
The memes themselves looked like bits of things washed up on the shore after a storm. And yet, somewhere underneath all that rubble, was a feeling that was quickly papered over and guilted away. Even before it could be named.
Image: Painting by Kristian Al Droubi
What is a human being, without the earth? A spaceship?
The heart-stopping cold touch of freedom
People tend to talk about the loss of freedom very easily, imagining that freedom is a pleasant thing, like meeting a friend in a bar and having a drink and not having to go home before midnight. Freedom, thinks Luis, is a big word. It was the biggest word he knew. Freedom, finds Tenar, in Ursula Le Guin’s Tombs of Atuan, is a frozen moment on a hillside. Just after she leaves the absolute blackness of the underground, this former high priestess of the dark. Freedom is a terrifying thing, and she doesn’t want to move. This place is neither here nor there. She can go forward, she can choose, she cannot go back, however, because then choice would be lost. You can get stuck in freedom, like a wash of icy air that very quickly sets into your blood. Can’t we just stay here? she asks.
Image: Priyadarshini John
The encounter the ROV couldn’t have made
In Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, Granny Weatherwax lets her mind wander. She feels the mice in her house, the goats in her shed, a dash of flight from an owl. Wolves, forest creatures. And somewhere underneath it all, a thing, like a very big animal. Forlorn, but in a way that suggests it could go from lost to angry very soon. Young and ancient. This is a whole kingdom, signalling distress, and all it takes is a fine-tuned receiver to catch an invisible signal.
Sperm whales descend to depths of more than 6000 feet. They can spend about ninety minutes underwater, before coming up to breathe. The sounds they make have been described as clicks, creaks and codas. Coda: a pattern of clicks. A little song made of clicks and creaks. Whale-talk. A little different from the famous calls of the humpback whales, played in the sixties during all that love-talk about the earth, to tell us that whales were worth keeping alive. Whalesong. A joyful-melancholic, poetic sound. You can listen to one hour of it now, to put you to sleep.
The harmless-sounding clicks of the sperm whale, though, are also the loudest sound made by an animal on earth. 230 decibels, louder than a jet plane taking off. A click that can vibrate through your body. I’m guessing Curious Sperm Whale might also have been talking to his ROV. Maybe he was wondering why the interloper neither responded nor turned into prey. Maybe that’s why he had to get a closer look.
Blue whales, on the other hand. Another very loud animal. Researchers fitted one with a camera and a recorder. They wanted to know what this bass boom was about. A sound like a great throbbing heartbeat. The whale dives a thousand feet, all the while thrumming its way into the recorder, communicating, unknowingly, to the thousands or millions who’d end up watching this video. Somewhere in the dark depths of the sea, the camera finds something like an answer. Like a shadow, or a ghost, a glimpse of another blue whale. Is this, then, a mating call?
They say there are only about ten thousand blue whales left on earth now. I wonder how long a whale has to call, how deep it has to dive, how far it has to travel, to find a mate. Sperm whales have been wisely keeping their numbers to themselves.
All these sounds, all these huge brains, this giant living thing, young and ancient. A call like a giant heartbeat, a threatening drumroll of clicks. Songs and codas.
What are you, without the earth?
It took about a month for the babble to get loud enough, and for other sounds to get muted enough, for the echoes to stop. Memes obliterating the view. In fact, at some point, I could barely hear anything at all. I thought something terrible had happened, but that turned out to be earwax. Some other terrible thing had happened, though. Something like the cutting of an umbilical cord. There was only one real connection to make, one place to be, since the day we were born. For most of us, life will begin and end on this world, on this planet.
Astronauts get to disconnect. Even they don’t get to make another home for themselves, just to float in space for awhile and come back. They need to stay in orbit. Nobody gets to leave, really.
Grounded humans also get to disconnect. When I was a child, I registered the feeling of disconnect as a hot air balloon with the strings cut. Imagine if you just kept floating on, and the sky stopped being blue, and your blood started to freeze, and stars started to appear above you? Imagine that you had everything you needed to survive – oxygen, a pressurized suit – how long would it take for the loss to make itself felt?
#natureishealing. Even if that wasn’t fake news, what were humans doing?
That discomfort you’re feeling is grief, said an article. This was the truest thing I read in that time. Absolute heartbreak. The rest of the article was babble, but hold fast, says Le Guin, to the one true thing. It takes a tremendous amount of self-confidence to imagine that you can cut yourself off from the earth and survive. I don’t mean the temporary, deeply dependent cutting off that astronauts do. I think of that as a long voyage – maybe the longest you could take, the most soul-wrenching. But still, a journey, with the promise of a return home. Promises, even if they’re not kept, are necessary.
But to stay on this planet, to not do anything that might require you to make contact with it, and to think that it means nothing. It takes an almost religious certainty that until now, all the communication was one-way. We were talking to the earth. We were naming it. We were drawing lines on it. We were mucking it up. We were fucking it up.
Like the most marvellously narcissistic relationship that ever existed. Like we were simply not listening. Like we had already become spaceships.
Bliss is just a form of VU
Back in Ursula Le Guin’s lost paradise, bliss is experienced by angels, on the ship. Angels are a religious group. Angels don’t want to descend. Life on the ship is pure, they say. The world outside is not. But angels have access to bliss. For some reason, bliss can lift some of the ship’s denizens up into the ethereal realm, but leaves other stones unturned, unmoved, resolutely grounded.
Image: Priyadarshini John
Somewhere in the world
The useful thing about being a woman is that your life is already a series of complex navigations around a severely restricted mobility. Mobility, unlike freedom, is not the biggest word.
Mobility: the ability to move or be moved freely and easily.
Also mobility: the ability to move between different levels in society or employment.
The useful thing about being a woman is that you can watch a new web of entrapment being laid over a thousand ageing webs of entrapment, and still see it as a web, rather than a stone wall.
The useful thing about being a woman is that you don’t confuse the loss of mobility with the loss of freedom. You know what to complain about.
I have not learnt from the lockdown how well I can survive in a lockdown. Defeated, in this moment of victory. All I hear, since the lockdown, is this great heartbeat of a call, and all I’m thinking about is how to reply.
