Selection pressure
I had a stomach bug in December. It was unremarkable (24 hours, shellfish), but I had an unsettling experience during the convalescence. I love getting better; it’s obviously good to be well, but there’s something more than that about recovery. It makes the absence of pain a reality. To a body in good health, painlessness is silent. I sometimes try to tune into it, to appreciate the experience of not being in pain – but it rarely works. I cannot make myself aware of those parts of my body that only draw attention to their existence when they are suffering: the insides of the temple where a headache is resident or the place in the lower back where some muscular connection seems to snap. In health, I can’t hold in mind an appreciation of my own comfort and freedom as I would like to; it becomes invisible to me. In that respect, health is like privilege.
It’s only when I’m convalescent that the state of painlessness is something I can appreciate. When I stood up that morning, after having vomited in the night, my vision was filled with sparkles and grit but the pain in my stomach had gone. My body’s constant temperature was a source of physical pleasure. I had a heightened sense of being alive in this body and it was delicious. Nerves mapped neatly from heart to fingertips; eyelashes shielding an aqueous surface; internal organs beautifully configured in relationship with one another. A plastic pint glass full of tap water on the table by the window looked so desirable that I wanted to climb in and allow my body to absorb it like a sponge. I drank it to the last drop, then went to the bathroom sink and let the tap run so that the next glassful was colder, and then I drank all of that, too. Dawn came in through the gap in the blinds and made gold bars on the floor. My mouth was full of sheep wool and my fingers tingled. Everything worked, creakily, my body was still weak but it was slowly filling up with its own health and the room was flooded with morning light.
I was aware of the possible virus as a component of my body. Its presence was weakening, but still tangible as a tightness behind my lowest left rib. I understand in a theoretical way that the vomiting bug was an interaction between a colony of microbes and my internal organs, but I felt that it – this virus, as an individual – had personality. It had been businesslike, scheduling a brief and punctual vomit every three hours, and interspersing these operations with light, hallucinatory naps. Having fulfilled this remit, it absented itself. After drinking the water, I felt weak again and got back into bed. I stared at the light wiggling on the ceiling and thought about the other beings inside my body.
Several years ago I spent some time as a writer-in-residence at a microbiological research institute in Eastern Germany. During that time I had interviewed a professor of microbial ecology, who talked to me about the multitudes of microscopic beings that exist on every living surface. There are colonies of microbes on the trunk of an oak tree, inside a blue whale’s guts, inside your fingernails and on your eyelashes, and on the root hairs of all your houseplants.
This professor’s research involved studies of colonies of bacteria whose interactions were manipulated in such a way as to reveal, over generations whose average lifespan was 20 minutes, what was driving their evolution. He explained to me that he was working on verifying symbiotic co-evolution of multiple species within a host body, that is, the ways in which different species are instrumental in one another’s evolutionary development. We know that symbiosis exists within organisms; the microbes inside the human gut are a familiar example. What we do not know is the extent to which these dependent relationships have exerted evolutionary pressure – the degree to which different species have evolved in symbiosis with one another – in precise and heritable combinations on both sides. Historically, much scientific research in the global north has focused on competition, rather than symbiosis, as a selection pressure. In contrast, my professor was trying to find out how powerful symbiotic relationships have been as instrumental evolutionary forces; how, over evolutionary time, a given organism has had other species inbuilt.
I asked him to explain to me what all this might mean, outside the laboratory. He paused, considering, before responding. Then he told me that these findings, of internal connection across species and generations, have implications for all life on earth. That is, there are complicated networks of interconnection across species – so much so, in fact, that: “I really struggle to draw a line around what is not a relevant organism to any other given organism any more.” The way he put it was that his research was a technical part of a larger process of “un-discovering the individual”.
Peer pressure
I woke up before I realised that I was falling asleep. It was broad daylight outside and I should have started work, but I felt too tired and peaceful in my bed, too fulfilled by my own relative health to be concerned with normal life and its concerns. So I picked up the novel I was reading, Shola von Reinhold’s Lote, and propped myself up on my pillows. I could feel my heart racing with a light beat; I flurried through the book to find my page.
In the novel, the main character, Mathilda, had recently arrived at an artists’ residency in mainland Europe, but was disappointed by the other residents, “predominantly from Europe or America, all white, and many with international accents”. These white internationalised artists are self-denying, in every sense. They rise early, work hard, eat dry toast, and strive to eradicate all traces of their own individuality from the art they make, while frowning on art that “sought to express identity, believing it served the Self in seductive ways that appeared to do more than merely serve the Self”. They are, Mathilda concludes with disappointment, “a medley of the most woebegone drips”.
Mathilda is alone in a strange European city she doesn’t know and where she doesn’t speak the language. At first she has no choice but to socialise with the drips. Then, to her surprise, there’s an invitation that interests her: a few residents are planning to attend the opening of an exhibition of paintings by Anton Amo. Self-named after an 18th-century Ghanaian-born Nzema philosopher, Amo is a Black artist who makes huge, intricate, encrusted portraits, which Mathilda loves. Amo also has a degree of infamy in the art world. After his work had been criticised by a reviewer who also ridiculed the entire art of painting and its “redundant painterly qualms”, Amo had written his own essay, “White People Shouldn’t Paint (or Write Novels or Study Ancient Greek)”. This provoked outrage and Amo was pulled from his next group show.
Unlike many of Amo’s outraged readers, Mathilda has actually read the essay and liked it. A provocation, Amo calls his readers’ attention to a tendency in white culture to declare the “death” of something (fiction, literary studies, classical studies), and then deem it unworthy of time or attention. These declarations are made, inevitably, after the “luxury of several centuries unhampered access to the form” and invariably and wilfully ignore the fact that many others have simply not had this access. Perhaps therefore, Amo teasingly and gravely suggests, the pronouncement could be rephrased. Not, painting is dead, but, white people shouldn’t paint. The argument, Amo suggests, could be extended to anything that has been claimed dead “before others have been able to glut themselves upon it, and in doing so, provide new insights”.
I closed the book and looked around my room. My work clothes looked limp and empty on the clothes rail. I could see dust floating in the air and fingerprints illuminated on the water glass. The door was hanging off the Ikea cupboard where I’d failed to interpret the self-assembly instructions. Everything in my room seemed to bear some trace of human contact, the handles on the cupboard door, the light switches at shoulder height. A short while earlier I had been nauseatingly conscious that all these surfaces were teeming with microscopic beings, but suddenly I was aware only of how the space around me was created and arranged for its interactions with the human body.
I wondered how that body might look in the light of Amo’s argument, whether his case could be extended to the essential state of living as a human being, as an individual inside a self-possessed body. I was still thinking about what I had learned in the laboratory, about symbiosis and collaboration, the discovery that the bounded, individual self was slowly, study-by-study, being called into question. I was thinking about my virus and how it had made my heart race. “We are un-discovering the individual.”
These un-discoveries are made in white, air-conditioned laboratories and published in peer-reviewed articles. They come with clinical data and the clean light of impartiality. And yet, it suddenly appeared to me, in that moment, like a clanging coincidence, that this institutional discourse is withdrawing identity and individuality precisely at a historical moment when identity, individuality and the ordinary rights of the bounded body, are being claimed for non-white bodies on an unprecedented scale. After generations of glutting itself on individuality, selfhood, self-expression, self-determination, self-assertion, self-actualisation, self-analysis, self-examination, self-centredness, self-consciousness and self-control, the white voice moves on, burning down the house so that others cannot live there. There is no self for other identities to reclaim. The residency drips, of course, hated the “Self” and were working to destroy it.
I hadn’t considered this when I was at the microbiological research institute. I hadn’t noticed it even as I studied and wrote on symbiosis, the human microbiome, the interconnection of all beings and the difficulty of placing boundaries between one and another. If collaborative and symbiotic events, happening at a microscopic scale, are a part of our bodies’ histories, what does this mean for the way one body relates to another at a human scale? I hadn’t asked that. It feels warm and good to propose an essential porosity of boundaries between body and body, at least until the boundary between one man’s knee and another man’s neck becomes critical. It seems wise to propose an essential porosity of landscapes, until the government proposes running a pipeline through sacred geography. I’d never thought to bring these different contexts – the scientist in the laboratory and the activist in the street – into the same mental space. But throughout this year, two forces have been moving outward and gaining strength. The two most significant things to have happened this year, in fact, appear to present themselves as an irresolvable conflict. Covid-19 has created a heightened awareness of the interconnection of all bodies, microscopically and globally: the boundaries we uphold, internationally and interpersonally, are constructions of the human scale. The wider world, below and beyond us, won’t respect them. At the same time, Black Lives Matter and expressions of resistance from all marginalised bodies, have articulated a heightened awareness of the value of boundaries, levelly and equally held, and of the urgency of the body’s right to self-possess. Any assertion of unboundaried existence places a certain pressure on these rights. It makes marginalised bodies vulnerable in a new way.
Geological pressure
I marked my page in the novel and put it down on the floor. If I could think about these things, I could think about work. My heart was no longer thumping and my head was clearer. The light in the room had dulled and flattened, my mouth tasted of nothing at all: I was recovering. I felt disappointed. I knew that I had to get out of bed if I wanted to pay my bills in January, but I still felt delicate and I didn’t want to make a move. Out of the window there was a plane in the sky. It had a short white trail behind it, like the foam behind a fishing boat. I thought of shellfish. Crusted ropes. Polluted oceans washing through the pumps and valves of soft mollusc systems, capitalism in particles inside organs the size of a stitch of thread. I felt nauseous and got up.
The procedure of going through the motions of morning felt, in that shaky convalescent state, weirdly complex. Strange climates passed through my building. The shower rained hailstones, then molten lava. The kettle thundered. Innumerable buttons, switches and lids were involved. I thought about the difference between the stories told by the microbiologist and the portrait painter, and how they both seemed true and urgent in the present moment, but they couldn’t both be urgent because they couldn’t both be true. And then, as I spooned oats into the coffee pot, I realised that the two stories didn’t have to fit into one another at all.
I remembered a book I’d read on my summer holiday, Friction by anthropologist Anna Tsing. I left the oats and the coffee, I didn’t want them anyway, and went to the bookshelf and flipped it open. In the book, which is concerned with the pressures between the local and the global, Tsing observes how some traditions of human logic always seek to dissolve one scale into another: “Scales ought to fit neatly inside each other, the small inside the large, each neutral and fully encompassed by the next scale up. If they don’t, we must fiddle, looking for a more realistic fit. The incompatibility of scales is a practical problem. It does not challenge the principles of the model, which requires that the local disappear compatibly inside the global.” But this is not the way the real world works, says Tsing. There is another way. What if we were to explore and be curious about the differences, instead of trying to resolve them? She tells a story of “friction”, the “awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference”. Differences, rubbing up against one another, throw up new worlds. Friction exists always in real encounters – the pressures, destructive or beneficial, that are generated between bodies that host and harm one another across scales.
Tsing was writing as an anthropologist, in a specific context, but her words made me think that it might be possible to hold together the importance of individuality against the importance of collaborative existence. The two ways of being put pressure on each other, but that pressure is interesting and it could be useful.
I still didn’t know whether new scientific insights will move humanity away from a conception of the person as an individual. I didn’t know whether new and necessary assertions of marginalised bodies will take individualism and the rights of the self to new heights. I didn’t know whether some clever resolution will bring it all together in the same smooth sense. I didn’t know how we will relate to ourselves, to our bodies, or to one another, even in the near future. But I could see that the two unfolding stories, existing in different contexts, are both forms of recovery. They are convalescent narratives, healing distinct but connected problems by creating new ways of relating to one another, both as collectives, and as individuals. We, you and I can exist inside all those pronouns, and already do. I sat down at my desk – washed, dressed, healthy, reasonable – and opened my computer to rejoin the real world.
My screensaver was a pixelated holiday photograph showing a view I had stood in front of a few summers earlier. Sicily, inland. The image showed a deep valley with young trees and fields of vines, and hills with strange heaps and shadows in them. I’d been there to see an artwork, but it wasn’t the work that surprised me when I got to it, it was what surrounded it. I’d arrived just after rain. The sky had darkened an hour or so earlier, as my bus had begun to climb into the hills; the downpour had been curt and heavy, abruptly begun and ended. Rushes of water streamed down the sides of the road. My ears popped as we climbed. Heaps of loose chocolate-coloured earth lay like snowdrifts on the edge of the road as we rounded a bend, washed down by the rainfall from the arable fields above.
When the work came into view it looked outlandish, like a UFO nestling between vineyards and meadows. It was the size of a village, precisely: there was a village inside it. The artist, Alberto Burri, had poured white concrete across a hillside to cover a ruined village, one of the sites affected by an earthquake in 1968 that killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands of people. The smooth white surface covered chaos and destruction. Rubble, cooking implements, soft toys, were all left in place to be entombed.
The bus pulled into a lay-by beside the village. I was the only person who descended. When it pulled away again I felt very alone, standing on the sharp corner of a road that was empty in both directions. Behind me the village was a strange form draped in white. It looked like furniture with dust sheets thrown over it, like a person dressed up as a ghost. But it felt different from inside. The concrete was warm to the touch. I felt like a germ inside a giant body when I walked through its alleyways. Weeds had seeded into the cracks and gathered more densely around the edges, confusing the boundaries between the work and its surroundings. There was quiet and a gentle breeze. The calm was intense. I thought of the objects below. Family photographs, cooking implements, soft-bodied dolls with mouths full of earth. The concrete was the colour of bones and already broken in places.
I walked off the edge of the village, out into the adjacent field and looked around. The surrounding landscape was weird. Earth was heaped and massed in strange provisional gatherings: the falls of heavy earth on the side of the road, the earth itself still only a loose covering over the uneven fields, easily washed away with the rainfall. Every untended surface was covered in pale green flowering weeds, but there were few trees. This landscape, which looked so natural to me, had been created only a few decades earlier. It had been created by phenomenal pressure right here where the African and the Eurasian plates converged; a crustal thrust ramp had ruptured multiple times beneath my feet. The ground was unstable and could yet erupt or shake or give way at any time, but the earth that had been thrown up by the quake was fertile. The landscape was in recovery and it looked, to me, as though it was exhilarated with all the ordinary things that it could do in the aftermath of a crisis. Around my feet the soil was rich and sticky, slender threads of steam emerged where the shadows had moved around, allowing drenched ground to move into hot sunlight. It was late summer, sweet black grapes were growing heavy on the vines, fennel and grasses with differently shaped flowers and seed heads were crowded together, finding space in the sunlight. I had never walked on such new ground before. ◉
