Search Results for: Love

Making Art Awash in Grief

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In this incisive essay at Guernica, Traci Brimhall explores the human need to create art in a bid to process death and loss. She relates a 100-day project in which Janet, an artist and photographer, mourns her mother’s passing by photographing flowers and other elements from condolence bouquets, assembling and publishing a single image each day. Brimhall relates her own efforts to process grief through the creative process by crocheting afghans for those in hospice, as well as handmaking paper made of found love letters and cards from her ex-husband.

Someone in my group for hospice workers shares the article on flowers as a grief ritual, and that’s how I discover Janet. I quickly read the news story about how Janet uses the dried flowers from her mother’s funeral to make new images for 100 days. Each day she uses the petals and stems to create and photograph a new form, and each day she takes it all apart, tucking the dried floral pieces back into storage. I start to follow her Instagram account, eager for the inevitable startle of old roses rendered into birds or flattened carnations transformed into the segments of a caterpillar rising off a branch. It’s common to see birds and insects as visitations from the dead. Every flying thing from monarch butterflies to Emily Dickinson’s buzzing fly has been associated with death, but I love that in Janet’s work, the visitations are like a form of summoning, a new life from a dried petal.

Scrolling through the 100 days feels like a catalog of grief. The work seems to change so fast: on some days she plays with the shadows each dried bloom casts; on others she makes abstract shapes. Towards the end of her project, she’s creating more mimetic pieces. Some natural materials she returns to often, using a leaf until it breaks apart. Some of the broken pieces are cast aside and others get used again for what they now resemble, the leaf crumbling and leaving only its hard veins, which suddenly becomes a bird’s foot. I love that nothing is wasted. Everything is ripe for transformation. It reminds me of the jewelry and tableaux the Victorians made from dead loved ones’ hair, somehow taking what feels ephemeral or like detritus and making something nearly permanent.

We talk about how to grieve with hope—how to acknowledge, to ask, to be honest. When I pour the bright pink pulp of a stranger’s love letters mixed with mine into a deckle mold, I acknowledge that even all these years later, I am still sad. I don’t know what to ask, but I know what I need will come from process, not product.

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All that Glitters

An illegal mining site in Madre de Dios, Peru / Ernesto Benavides for The Atavist

This is an excerpt from The Atavist‘s 10th anniversary story, “The Gilded Age” by award-winning reporter Scott Eden. Gold mined in the jungles of Peru brought riches to three friends in Miami—but it also carried ruin.

Scott Eden | The Atavist | January 2021 | 5 minutes (1,352 words)

 

The Atavist is Longreads‘ sister publication. For 10 years, it has been a digital pioneer in longform narrative journalism, publishing one deeply reported, elegantly designed story each month. Support The Atavist by becoming a magazine member.

In 1511, the king of Spain gave his New World explorers an order: Get gold, humanely if possible, but at all costs get gold. Humanely was not how it happened.

When gold was discovered on Hispaniola, the native population was forced into serfdom to mine it. Within a few decades, the Taino people had been almost completely “exterminated in the gold mines, in the deadly task of sifting auriferous sands with their bodies half submerged in water,” writes Eduardo Galeano in his seminal book Open Veins of Latin America. Rather than carry on, some of the enslaved people killed their children and then themselves. Francisco Pizarro’s men entered the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, the Incan capital in modern-day Peru, and melted down breathtaking works of high-karat art because bars were easier to stack and transport back to Spain. Hernán Cortés did the same after he captured the Aztec treasure house. “They crave gold like hungry swine,” one Aztec observer said of European invaders. A conquistador named Hernán de Quesada, whose brother founded Bogotá almost incidentally while searching for El Dorado, also set off in search of the mythical golden city, taking 6,000 captured natives into the jungles and mountains of what is now Colombia. None survived.

Gold wasn’t the only metal the Spanish wanted. In Quechua, the language of the Inca, the mountain was called Sumaj Orko, “beautiful hill”—a perfectly shaped conical peak made almost entirely of silver that sits in present-day Bolivia. In 1573, colonists began conscripting indigenous people to toil in the mountain’s shafts, working under a form of forced labor known as the mita system. “It was common to bring them out dead or with broken heads and legs,” wrote a contemporary observer. The biggest boomtown in world history, Potosí, grew at the foot of Sumaj Orko; its population at one point rivaled Paris’s. Up to eight million people, many of them children, are estimated to have died working in Potosí’s mines.

Spain was merely a middleman for all the blood metal. The crown used its colonial spoils to pay off the massive debts it had accumulated in Europe’s banking houses. Gold and other precious metals financed the late Renaissance and, next, the industrial revolution.

The pillaging continued, bringing with it other forms of cruelty. In the 18th century, the miners who came to the Minas Gerais region of Brazil during a gold rush were also slave traders; they preferred buying their human beings from the West African slave port of Ouidah, because the people sold there were said to possess magical powers for divining the richest sources of gold. In 1886, after gold was discovered in Tierra del Fuego, a European engineer orchestrated a genocide there, exterminating the Selk’nam people, hunter-gatherers who had lived in the region for millennia. In the 20th century, General Augusto Pinochet abolished the rights of mine workers in Chile’s lucrative high-desert gold and copper pits. Vladimiro Montesinos, Peru’s murderous spy chief, allegedly took bribes from multinational mining corporations to help them secure control of Yanacocha, which in the 1990s was the world’s most productive gold mine.

By then a new kind of colonist had emerged in Peru. On foot, they came down from the Altiplano, from some of the poorest places on earth, migrating to low-lying rainforests where they’d heard gold was in the ground. They hoped that the tools and skills their forebears had used since time immemorial—shovels, portable sluice boxes—would help them find wealth.

They came to a remote department in the country’s southeast called Madre de Dios—Mother of God—that was covered almost entirely with dense jungle. In time, the new colonists earned enough money to rent heavy equipment. They could dig faster. There were no laws to stop them; squatter’s rights ruled. You took what you wanted. The miners began tearing down forests, clearing the way to search for the glittering flakes that could change a man’s life forever. Or end it.

Peru is the kind of place, in the words of one gold industry participant, ‘where you can do everything right and still get in trouble.’

There once was a sawyer who lived in the rainforest. His name was Alfredo Vracko Neuenschwander, but everyone called him Don Alfredo. He grew up in Madre de Dios. His father, also a logger, was an immigrant from Slovenia, but Don Alfredo treated the forest like he was a native. He took from it only what he and his family—a wife, a daughter, and two sons—needed to survive.

Don Alfredo was tall and slim, and he wore black horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like an Apollo mission engineer. His timber concession, which he obtained in 1975, was located in a part of Madre de Dios called La Pampa. To the west was the high sierra. To the east was the jungle, vaporous and immense. Don Alfredo and his family lived in a small compound—a house and a handful of outbuildings—in a one-hectare clearing he’d hacked out of the jungle. The roofs were thatch. There was no electricity. He’d built everything himself out of the wood—achihua, pashaco, copal, tornillo—found on the roughly 6,000 acres of his concession. His sawmill consisted of wooden poles propping up a metal roof over a large circular saw and an ancient planer manufactured by the American Saw Mill Machinery Co., in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Nearby was an orchard of yucca, papaya, banana, and cupuaçu, a football-shaped fruit with meat prized for its pear-like taste. Fat boas slid under the fruit trees. Flocks of oropendola birds shrieked in the canopy alongside howler monkeys.

For the better part of a decade, starting in 2007, Don Alfredo tried to save his land and the rest of La Pampa from informal gold mining. It was then, and remains today, an industry of wildcatters: people who don’t pay taxes, who don’t bother to seek government licenses or perform environmental-impact studies, who just start digging. Informal mining accounts for as much as 20 percent of the world’s newly extracted gold. In other words, up to one-fifth of the global gold business, worth more than $30 billion a year, according to some estimates, is a black market. And like all black markets, the illegal gold trade is vulnerable to the whole range of organized iniquity: bribery, human trafficking, money laundering, murder for hire, terrorism. The South American gold business is particularly fraught with these dangers, the Peruvian one perhaps most of all. It’s the kind of place, in the words of one industry participant, “where you can do everything right and still get in trouble.”

No one knew the ugly side of Madre de Dios better than Don Alfredo. On a sunny November day in 2015, he waited for the authorities to arrive. At his behest, they’d scheduled an interdiction—the Peruvian National Police would go into the jungle, find a mining site that Don Alfredo had recently reported, chase off or arrest the miners, and destroy their equipment with explosives.

Afternoon turned into evening. The police were delayed. The setting sun flared off the nearby Guacamayo, a stream that runs into the Rio Inambari, which flows into the Rio Madre de Dios (from which the region takes its name), which runs into the Beni, which joins the Mamore, which feeds into the Madeira—a tributary, at last, of the Amazon. Don Alfredo stood on the balcony of his home, listening for the sounds of arrival: the motors of police vehicles turning into his driveway off the Interoceanic Highway, which stretched from Rio de Janeiro to Peru’s Pacific coast. Completed a few years prior, the highway had transformed a series of rude dirt tracks and ancient footpaths into a modern thoroughfare navigable by trucks and heavy equipment, easing the way for miners to infiltrate ever more deeply into Madre de Dios.

Don Alfredo almost certainly would have heard the motorcycles approach, their rumble fainter than the phalanx of police vehicles he’d expected. The two bikes appeared on his property, carrying four riders. The men stopped in the driveway and dismounted. They were carrying guns and wearing black balaclavas.

Don Alfredo opened his mouth to scream.

 

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The Heavy Burden of Breasts

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A psychiatrist told Daniel Valter Jensen that “you can’t live like a something in between,” yet that is precisely what he had been doing for many years, waiting for the top surgery he needed to continue his transformation to male from the female body he was born into. In this searing account for Information, Line Vaaben explores the 10 years Daniel spent in limbo waiting for surgery — years spent struggling with addiction and homelessness. Daniel lives in Denmark, where transgender acceptance has increased in recent years, along with a corresponding rise in inquiries about surgery: “In 2013 at Rigshospitalet, 65 people were referred for examination. By 2019 the figure had climbed 600 percent.” However, in the years prior, many trans people were denied surgery, and in 2010 Daniel was one of them. After being turned down for gender transition, Daniel located a doctor willing to prescribe testosterone for trans women, not caring that it wasn’t legal.

A four-milliliter bottle of testosterone costs 1200 Danish kroner – about 200 dollars. Daniel gently draws the small bottle from his backpack and places it on the table in the doctor’s waiting room. He calls it »my elixir« and gets the injections from his GP every three months. If he delays, he becomes teary and his period returns. He’s had to delay buying his antidepressant and blood pressure medicine, and even skimping on cat food to afford testosterone.

But recently his application for free medicine was approved and he felt greatly relieved.

»Daniel?«

An elderly man in jeans, shirt and Birkenstock sandals summons Daniel into the consulting room. That’s Daniel’s doctor, Jesper Nielsen, who holds up syringe and bottle and draws back the plunger. Daniel lies on the examining table, his striped boxer shorts down, exposing his right buttock. The doctor pierces the skin with the needle and slowly injects the liquid, then pats on a small band aid.

Daniel is finally scheduled to have his top surgery in January 2020, and his excitement is palpable, despite being unable to stick to his doctor’s prerequisite to give up smoking: “There is always a risk of the nipples being lost … And smoking is especially damaging to the nipples.” Sigrid Nygaard documents the surgical process alongside Vaaben’s words with incredibly powerful, honest, and sometimes graphic photographs. After the surgery Daniel, finally, feels on the road to becoming “just a normal guy.”

Hours pass. His head clears. He texts a few friends. He texts his supervisor from The Homeless Unit. And a lot of hearts and smiley tumble back at him. Four years earlier, when he was homeless, he’d felt completely alone in the world. But now he feels the love and care of so many people.

He’s still feeling the anesthetic, so everything makes him cry: When another text message dings. When the nurse carries in a plate of meatballs. When he hears Bee Gees’ ’To Love Somebody’ in the background of a car commercial on television.

He’s not sad. Simply overwhelmed. It’s been a long time since he’s cried that much. Years come to think of it. Perhaps it’s release from the frustrations of a lifetime that now flow out of him. Again and again, he pats his hands along his chest. The breasts are gone! He’d had to wait so many years and then, it only took an hour-and-a-half.

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Repetitive Stress

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Devin Kelly | Longreads | February, 2021 | 24 minutes (6,376 words)

Read Devin Kelly’s previous Longreads essays: “Running Dysmorphic,” “What I Want to Know of Kindness,” and “Out There: On Not Finishing.”

It wasn’t the pain on the lateral side of my right knee in March. I kept running through that. It wasn’t the throbbing of my right shin in July. I kept running through that. It was one morning, waking up, when I couldn’t bend my right leg at all. If I could’ve run, I would’ve. I just couldn’t. 

I should tell you before I say anything more that I am writing this from a place of injury, not recovery. There will be no conquering here, no overcoming. Nothing will be fixed by this essay’s end. Not long ago, I was diagnosed with an osteochondral lesion in my right knee. This, after multiple office visits and an MRI. This, after a year spent running over two thousand miles. After another year spent running over two thousand miles. After another year spent running over two thousand miles. And so on. And so on. And so on, and on.

An osteochondral lesion is a break in the cartilage that spreads itself over a bone. In this case, the fracture is in the cartilage covering the base of my femur. That cartilage does so much. It is, essentially, like a bone being fractured. The diagnosis is uncertain. I can walk fine. I present well. I do push-ups in the morning instead of going out for my usual run. I pace the apartment like a jaguar. I spend a whole day wishing I was someone else. They say I can’t run for months. They say something about surgery, maybe. They say don’t think about it yet. I stay up in bed and wonder if I will ever be the same. 
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This Visionary Chef Has Unlocked the Secrets of the Sea Floor. Can He Change the Way We Eat?

Photo by Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Chef Ángel León’s expeimental dishes at Aponiente, his three Michelin starred-restaurant in the Spanish port town of El Puerto de Santa María, across the bay from Cádiz, showcase his culinary innovation and commitment to sustainability. Consider unexpected ingredients like “discarded fish parts to make mortadella and blood sausage and chorizo,” the “parts of a tuna’s head to create a towering, gelatinous, fall-apart osso buco,” and varied underwater flora presented on plates as sea pears, tomatoes, and artichokes. “He built his menu around pesca de descarte, trash fish: pandora, krill, sea bream, mackerel, moray eel,” writes Matt Goulding in a profile of the chef at Time magazine. “But in León’s mind, these are some of the most noble and delicious creatures in the sea.”

Known in Spain as “the Chef del Mar,” León has big plans: harvesting seagrass off different stretches of the coast and transplanting it to the Bay of Cádiz, near his restaurant, with the long-term aim of domesticating eelgrass and growing a vast “underwater garden for human beings.” Scientists have known that seagrasses are “one of the most vital ecosystems in the fight against climate change,” writes Goulding, but what’s lesser-known is that seagrass contains “clusters of small, edible grains with massive potential” — and it’s León who is exploring its possibilities.

He sees the region’s vast network of estuaries overflowing with flora and fauna—tiny, candy-sweet white shrimp, edible seaweeds like marine mesclun mix, sea bream and mackerel in dense silver schools. He sees a series of mills, stone-built and sea-powered, grinding through grains for the region’s daily bread. A wind-swept, sun-kissed saltwater economy, like the one that once made Cádiz a center of the world.

Zostera grains look more like amaranth or a chia seed than rice—a short, pellet-like grain with a dark complexion. León boiled it like pasta, passed me a spoonful, then watched me closely as I processed. The first thing you notice is the texture: taut-skinned and compact, each grain pops on your tongue like an orb of caviar. It tasted like the love child of rice and quinoa with a gentle saline undertow.

But there is something extraordinary about seagrasses: they are the only plants that flower fully submerged in salt water. They have all the equipment of a terrestrial plant—roots, stems, rhizomes, leaves, flowers, seeds—but they thrive in under-water environments. Seagrasses like Zostera marina are eco-system engineers: the meadows they form along coastlines represent some of the most biodiverse areas in the ocean, playing host to fauna (like seahorses, bay scallops and sea turtles) that would struggle to survive without seagrass.

But anthropogenic forces—climate change, pollution, coastal development—have threatened eelgrass meadows across the world. As León and team refine the conditions for large-scale cultivation, they hope to facilitate its growth along coastlines around the world—Asia, North America and, above all, across the Straits of Gibraltar in Africa—turning millions of hectares into a source of food, protection against erosion and a weapon against climate change.

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All Aboard for an Adventure in Inequality

ANTARCTICA - 2013/11/30: Tourists at Yankee Harbour, a small inner harbour on the south-west side of Greenwich Island in the South Shetland Island group, Antarctica, with cruise ship Seabourn Quest in background. (Photo by Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)

To satisfy his wanderlust, Devin Murphy worked on a series of cruise ships to see the world and learn more about it. As he reports in this fascinating piece at Outiside, what he didn’t bargain for was a free education on the deep disparity between the poor and rich, the haves and the have nots, not only in ports of call around the world, but aboard the vessels upon which he served.

I’m an American who grew up surrounded by comforts that were delivered to me by ships like these—ships that I’d never thought about.

As the summer wore on, my hands became ribboned with cuts from barnacle shards caked into the rope fibers, and I got accustomed to the insults of the assistant engineer, who often tipped over into psychotic rage when I did something wrong. He spent all his free time reading biker magazines and smoking in the dark next to the engines, a patron saint of hatred.

Meanwhile, day by day, I really began to appreciate the passengers. Whether they were recent retirees on a dream trip or industrial business owners leveled by the beauty of the wilds, it was humbling to share in their awakening wonder.

I also got a better sense of the oddity of life on a boat. One time the captain called me to the bridge and told me to man the controls while he went to his cabin. I was 20 years old, steering a cruise ship through the night. It was so exhilarating that, when the captain came back, I didn’t notice at first that he was carrying a full-size test dummy with a long black wig on it. He began dancing around and humming to the doll.

“Um. Sir? What are you doing?”

The captain opened the wing station, sang, “Time for us to part, my love,” and hurled the doll overboard. He blew a kiss to the back of the ship, then called into his radio, “Man overboard.”

He shot a red flare into the sky, and I slowly turned the ship to start our impromptu man-overboard drill. The doll looked so much like a real person that I felt a wash of fear about one day being alone on the waves, drifting off into the cold unknown.

During our return trip from Antarctica, the Drake Passage—the expanse of ocean between Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands and Cape Horn—thrashed the ship around. The hotel executive, feeling sick, went to his cabin and left an Excel spreadsheet open on a computer we shared. It showed what the international crew members were paid, and their low compensation—far less than minimum wage in the U.S.—stunned me. I was able to save much of what I made. These men, who worked with kindness, effort, and attention to detail for 12 hours a day, six days a week, and up to nine months at a time, were being exploited, and they had to send money to families back home. The reality of the flag of convenience became clear.

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The Geography Closest In

Photo by Mats Silvan/Getty Images. Edit by Cheri Lucas Rowlands.

Miranda Ward | Adrift | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | January 2021 | 15 minutes (4,339 words)

The bald conclusiveness of a positive pregnancy test draws a clear line between yes/no, this/that, knowing/not-­knowing. For a moment at least it clarifies everything, or distils it, into a single and irrefutable piece of knowledge. This certainty, when it comes to the body, is rare (later a doctor will tell me: if everything in medicine were as reliable as a pregnancy test, my job would be a lot easier), so I hold on to that piece of knowledge, which is proof of my own productivity, for as long as I can.

But doubt, worry, have a way of threading their way through even the solidest conviction. Threat is everywhere: a light fever, an undercooked egg. Indeed the more I read the more I realise how fragile a pregnancy is, how it isn’t as simple as a positive test and a baby nine months later, which is something I suppose I always knew in the abstract but never had any real frame of reference for before. I was aware that some of my friends and acquaintances, for example, had had miscarriages, but I had not until now really understood what it meant, in both practical and emotional terms, to have to hold an awareness of this terrible possibility always alongside a hope, a longing, for it not to happen to you. Most of what I know about pregnancy, in fact, comes from fiction, from books, films, TV: the way certain signifiers – wooziness, weakness, nausea – are used to suggest a pregnancy before it is confirmed; the way, once it is confirmed, a woman must somehow both alter her behaviour drastically and hardly at all, vomiting copiously into a bin at work seconds before giving a presentation just as if nothing is amiss, but studiously avoiding, suddenly, a whole litany of food and drink; most of all the way a baby is almost always the inevitable result of a pregnancy. The plain fact of it – that at least one in four pregnancies end in miscarriage, perhaps more, since sometimes a woman might miscarry before she even knows she’s pregnant – had somehow eluded me, or else I had somehow failed to think of it in tangible terms.

What does that statistic actually mean, practically speaking? It means that nothing is a given. It means that there are people – a lot of people – for whom the result of a pregnancy is not a baby. It means that even the purest elation is often shaded, especially in the early weeks, when miscarriage is most likely, with fear.

I develop a set of superstitions for protection; certain shirts for luck, certain routes home from the library or the grocery store, certain songs skipped or repeated. An aping at control. And for a while everything is normal, in the sense that nothing is normal, in the sense that I feel slightly ill, weary, a little as if I am not myself. My overriding emotion is happiness, but there is also a part of me that feels as if I have become separated somehow from my body, as if it is acting of its own accord, and the thinking part of me is just along for the ride. There are psychological adjustments to make – I have to play the phrase I’m pregnant over and over to myself to believe it; I have to think about what is good for me not in terms of my body only, but also in terms of the invisible body-­to­-be inside me. There are physical symptoms, too, though they are mild (another thing I didn’t realise: that while some pregnant women are indeed debilitated by illness or weariness, not everyone is). I am never actually sick, though I am dogged by a whisper of nausea that asserts itself at odd times and leads me to keep a pack of digest­ives on my bedside table. I can feel a largeness, a tenderness, to my breasts, and although I know it’s far too early for the pregnancy itself to show I feel fuller somehow, heavier than I was before I knew, as if the knowledge itself has some weight or substance to it.

This is not an unpleasant feeling – because it is a novelty, and because the pregnancy is so unequivocally desired – but it is hard to escape a sense of uneasiness, too. I find myself tracing familiar routes around Oxford, where I’ve lived for years, ever since I moved to the UK after university; I know the roads well, and yet I feel every encounter between feet and pavement to be different now, because I am differently bodied. What I have is a sense, visceral and unignor­able, that my body no longer belongs wholly to me – and in a way it doesn’t. As I walk I feel not exactly a ‘we’, but a blooming plurality, an ‘I and…’, perhaps, the assertion of a possibility taking physical form. Where once I occupied my mind during walks with long, elaborate daydreams, there now seems to be no room for anything other than the immediacy of experience and the planning and execution of the tasks of my own daily life. I take to listening to radio shows and podcasts, tuning out my external surroundings and internal circumstances, focusing on the minute details of, say, a true crime story, losing myself in the voice of the presenter.

* * *

Geographers write about the inseparability of the body from our experience of place: we sense places, are bodily present in them, see them, hear them, smell them, move within them. How else do we know a favourite room or city or mountain trail? The body, as Tim Edensor writes, is the means through which we experience and feel the world.

To which he adds: bodies are not only written upon but also write their own feelings upon a space in a process of continual remaking.

What I am struck by in the delicate earliest weeks of pregnancy is that I am being both made and unmade; rewritten. The pregnancy is largely unspoken of: we have told our doctor, and our parents, which perhaps lends it a weight in the world that it wouldn’t yet have had we not told anyone, but day to day I move through the hours without anyone but us knowing, because the pregnancy is still invisible. When I stand in front of the mirror I see nothing different, but nothing the same, either. When I go to the swimming pool, as I do most mornings, an almost religious habit, the place of it has shifted, though the change is microscopic, under the surface. On a quiet morning I watch the play of sunlight on the bottom of the pool and I am in a foreign country. In the changing room, pulling off my wet suit after a shower, I am self­-conscious for the first time – can they tell? But I want them to tell, even though there’s no way they possibly could, even though when I think of it I have the sense not so much of the world tilting on its axis but of the axis itself having drifted elsewhere. I smile knowingly at a visibly pregnant woman undressing and she looks away, uncomprehending or embarrassed or both. I am the foreign country, or else I have lost the map of this place. Walking home, along the same roads I have always taken, the green of the trees fading into yellow, I feel somehow both lonely and plural.

* * *

And then.

One morning, a few weeks after that first definitive, positive test, I wake up and feel my old self again – that is to say, not ill, not weary, not plural or novel – and that evening I experience some mild pain, a quick gush of blood which soon slows to an ambiguous but ominous trickle, and a sense of doom. I am not sure what the appropriate reaction is: denial? Despair? I cannot summon the energy to cook or even to eat dinner; although it is still early I retire to bed, lying on top of the duvet, curled into a question mark. Alexander lies down next to me, his body settling around mine. He tells me the things I both want and don’t want to hear: that it’s OK, that we don’t know for sure that anything’s wrong yet, that he loves me. He’s meant to be playing football in twenty minutes. Do you want me to stay? he says. I’ll stay with you. No, I say vehemently, as if this is in fact an uncharitable suggestion, you should go, you should play, what can you do at this point, what can I do? Nothing. Even after he’s pulled his socks over his shinpads, laced up his boots, he hesitates at the door: are you sure you don’t want me to stay? I don’t want you to stay, I say emphatically. If I were being honest – with him, with myself – I’d say exactly the opposite: stay, please. Instead I lie back and stare at the wall for an hour until he gets home and we go to sleep.

The next morning I call my GP, who arranges an emergency scan for me at the hospital. The soonest the scan can be done is in two days, so in the interim period I carry on as usual: I go to meetings, answer emails, run errands. It’s not as hard to do this as I would have imagined it would be, and after all, what choice do I have? But it’s also indicative of the ongoingness that will characterise much of the next two months.

I cannot summon the energy to cook or even to eat dinner; although it is still early I retire to bed, lying on top of the duvet, curled into a question mark.

I would have imagined, too, that a miscarriage was a definite thing – yes/no, this/that, knowing/not­-knowing – a neatly shaped happening with a beginning, a middle, a definitive end, each closely following the other. Women say, ‘I had a miscar­riage’, and until now I have always heard their experience as being something contained, even while brutally uncontrollable: all those stories of blood-­drenched bathroom floors, of unimag­inable agony, of horror and shock, of sadness and then resolution (often in the form of a baby arriving a year or two on, as if some consolation must always be offered): what I understand now, of course, is that these stories are told retrospectively, packaged in the way that all stories, to some extent, must be. But when I phone the doctor I’m unsure, grammatically speaking, how to phrase my concern: do I say to him that I have had a miscarriage, that I’m having one, that I’m worried I might have one in the future? The idea of the miscarriage in progress perplexes the part of me that imagined that this is a thing that can only happen privately, violently, suddenly, because it is a thing that is happening without much noise at all, and meanwhile here I am transcribing an interview, here I am meeting with a freelance client, wearing a new skirt I bought yesterday from the charity shop, here I am buying groceries and planning dinner, with nothing but a question mark inside me.

Alexander and I take a taxi to the hospital for the scan; it’s early morning and the driver is playing loud Pakistani pop, which is somehow soothing, and drowns out my own thoughts. In the waiting room Alexander scrolls restlessly through his phone. A little plastic radio on a cabinet in the corner of the room is pumping out cheerful tunes punctuated by cheerful radio host banter. I take my book from my handbag and lay it on my knees, open at my marked place. Knausgaard, A Death in the Family. In his younger-­self narrative, the author’s father has just died, while in his current­-self narrative, his partner is heavily pregnant, lumbering around, practically bursting with new life. But I cannot read on. I become fixated on a single paragraph, a description of a piece of artwork, which strikes me as incomprehensible. I read it over and over again until my name is called.

The scan reveals an embryo with no heartbeat. I lie on the bed, naked from the waist down, a blue plastic sheet draped over my legs. Alexander holds my hand while the ultrasound technician swirls a wand around inside me, talking us through the image of my uterus on the screen. It is illegible to me – darkness, light, hazy shapes – but to her the meaning is crystal clear. I’m so sorry it’s not the news you were hoping for, she says. She gives me a wad of tissue to wipe myself with before leaving the room to let me get dressed. She leads us back to the waiting room, which is fuller now, no one making eye contact, the radio still humming; a doctor will see you soon, she says, to talk to you about what happens next. ‘Soon’ is an ambiguous word, and time becomes difficult to perceive; we are there for what feels like both an eternity and an instant. I take my book out again, stare again at that same page; Alexander unlocks his phone, moves his finger across the screen in a kind of robotic motion.

What I am struck by in the delicate earliest weeks of pregnancy is that I am being both made and unmade; rewritten.

Sometimes these things resolve naturally, the doctor says when we are finally called in to see her; sometimes intervention becomes necessary, or desirable. She schedules me for another scan the following week, so we can monitor whether there’s been any change: in other words, whether the products of conception, as the embryo is now known, have been partially or even wholly expelled. After the scan, she says, we can decide how to proceed; you don’t need to make any decisions now. Good, I think, though I’m a little hazy on exactly what kind of decision I might be called upon to make; she has described the various forms of intervention but I can’t quite situate them in relation to my own body, my own products of conception.

She is very young, the doctor, soft-­spoken, apologetic. She says to call if anything changes before my next appointment, if I have any concerns. She gives me a business card, circles a phone number that’s operational 24/7. To minimise the risk of infection, she adds, seemingly as an afterthought, you shouldn’t take baths or swim.

No swimming. Of course. But I am thrown by the thought of this: the removal of the most obvious physical coping mechanism I have for dealing with what is essentially an entirely uncontrollable physical situation. I realise I’ve said this out loud without really meaning to. A silence falls, either respectful or uncomfortable.

I’m a swimmer too, the doctor says suddenly, as I’m standing to leave, abandoning, briefly, her professional distance. I’d hate not to be able to do it.

After the appointment we walk to a Starbucks near the hospital. It’s dark and anonymous inside, and smells of sweet pastries and wee. I order a latte, two shots, why not, and we sit at a counter at the window, watching buses trundle by. It’s mid­-morning and the place is full of new mothers and their prams, though occasionally someone in scrubs or a suit hurries in and then out again. Alexander texts his boss to say he won’t be coming in to work today. Not just the day but the month, the year, stretches out before us, suddenly open. What will we do with it? What can we do? The coffee is too hot, tasteless, the milk burned, but I suck it down in a rush, turning the inside of my mouth furry. Before all this, the test, the pregnancy, the ungrowing embryo, we were planning a wedding; we had set the date, hired a venue, made arrangements with the registrar. We should have cancelled everything – my due date was too close to the wedding date – but we never did; too superstitious, or preoccupied, or both. Now, of course, I say, devastated, amused, we won’t need to change the date. We can simply pick up where we left off. I feel myself begin to rewrite the map again, to slip in and out of familiarity with myself and my surroundings. There’s a simplicity to it all, underneath the ambiguity, the anguish, that makes me almost giddy: for what is this but a reversion to my natural state, a return to old routines?

A thought – terrible, comforting – hits me square in the face then, that there’s relief to be felt. The awful thing, the dreaded thing, has happened, and I need no longer fear it. I hate myself for feeling this but can’t let go of it, either, because I think it’s a way forward, a way out, a small tremble of light.

* * *

The second scan is no more or less enlightening than the first: there is still an embryo, there is still no heartbeat. No change, in other words: an unwanted stillness.

The doctor gives me a leaflet, which outlines in clinical language the three ways of managing a miscarriage when preg­nancy tissue remains in the womb: expectant, medical, surgical. The first is the wait-­and-­see approach, taken on the assumption that the tissue will pass naturally out of the womb with time. The second involves taking a course of medication to stimulate the passing of the tissue out of the womb: a potentially painful, lengthy, and often messy process, not always entirely effective, sometimes necessitating the third approach anyhow, which involves surgical removal of the tissue.

I still don’t know how to decide what to do, so I put it off: if nothing’s happened in a few weeks I’ll opt for some kind of intervention. I want above all to trust my body to do whatever needs doing, but already it’s betrayed me once, so what do I know?

Still no swimming, obviously, the doctor says sadly. Other­wise, proceed as normal.

As normal. Nothing is normal, I start to think – but then again, in a kind of terrible way, everything is normal again, isn’t it?

* * *

The present­-tenseness of the event, the miscarriage, which is not so much an event as a continual unfolding of uncharted territory, a vast grey area, makes it virtually impossible to talk about in any way that makes sense of what is actually happening. I don’t know what to tell people because the language I have is not elastic enough to encompass something which is past, present and future all at once. So I do what the doctor suggests: I proceed more or less as normal, going to meetings, going to the supermarket, scrolling mindlessly through Twitter, doing the laundry, eating, sleeping, working. I let myself lose track of time. At one point, in a notebook, next to a to-­do list, I write: The calendar is a kind of enemy, reminding me of the facts of things, the time it is actively taking to go through this process of miscarriage. I take to walking – long, slow strolls at the very edge of dusk, through parks and quiet suburban neighbourhoods that smell of woodsmoke and exhaust fumes. I feel my muscles going slack, and an irrational fear grows daily: what will my body become while I can’t swim?

My fear is really a form of vanity. I know that with each day or week that passes without a swim my body will start to look subtly different. I’ll lose, am losing, the public indicators of my fitness – the muscle, the shape of my arms and legs, the things that say to other people that I’m disciplined, that my body is under control. And I don’t want them to see what I know: that nothing is under control, that this body is not working properly, that athletically, reproductively, it is not doing at all what it’s supposed to do.

Mostly, though, if we’re honest, it’s the changes in our bodies that are in control of us, not the other way round.

Words come to me on my walks, as they used to on my swims. Some of them are obvious. Why is this happening to me? I think selfishly, inevitably, as I climb the hill to the park on a soft bed of wet leaves, fresh-­fallen after a night of howling wind. But other things, too, drifting like the smoke and the fumes. Disobedience. Betrayal. Softening, slackening, slowing. Undisciplined. Back at home, in my notebook, I write: I guess I feel disconnected from a part of myself. Not that I’m not still the same person or can’t be again, but that for a while I and some other part of me are not quite coinciding. I’m talking about the swimming, not the miscarriage, or at least ostensibly I am. I have a deep sense of geographical dissonance, like a dream of a familiar place in which the location of everything is slightly wrong, so that you round the corner and suddenly come upon a street that should be miles away, or discover that all along there has been an extra room in your house.

One Sunday afternoon, sitting in a booth at my local pub, I see a woman I used to see most weekday mornings at the pool; she always wore a bright pink cap, a navy swimsuit. She’s about my age, sitting with a friend, eating lunch. Perhaps it’s her local too, I think, for the first time realising, stupid as it sounds, that these people I’ve been brushing up against at the pool are people with lives outside that context, just like me.

Occasionally I log on to Facebook and check the page for the triathlon club I belong to. I look through the list of times from a recent 400-­metre time trial, spotting familiar names, noting the improvements, and wonder how much I, too, could have improved by now. For a moment I’m gripped by something which feels a little like jealousy but isn’t quite – desire, perhaps, something almost carnal. But then the desire, or whatever it is, fades: I’m here now, and maybe, if I can admit it to myself, I’m actually a little relieved that I’m not sweating away in a pool, that I don’t have to worry about how fast or smoothly I can cut through the water, how hungry I’ll be later, how tired.

* * *

The poles of the earth have wandered, the journalist John McPhee once wrote: even that which seems most permanent and solid is, in its own way, shifting. It’s true literally – think for example of the tectonic plates, the movement of the continents, which still, on average, drift a few centimetres a year apart, about the rate at which our fingernails grow, as the geographer Doreen Massey frames it, a reminder that the body is never in stasis either. In other words the whole world is a continual work in progress; the present is not some kind of achieved terminus, Massey writes. To underline this idea, she describes the slow movement of what she calls the ‘migrant rocks’ that came, over the course of millions of years, to form Skiddaw in the Lake District. Solid and eternal as it seems, she says, the mountain is not timeless. Like she and her sister, staying in a hotel in Keswick, it’s just passing through. It was once elsewhere. It will be elsewhere again someday.

It’s easy to lose your footing here, to feel that nothing is solid, but I’ve always found something comforting about this idea that place is essentially unfixed. The rigidity of permanence would be too much to bear, surely: who wants to be stuck in the same place forever? Who can know and love anywhere and not see that a point on a map is one thing, a living, breathing place quite another?

It’s a concept that scales well – if the world is a work in progress, then so too is a city or a street or a swimming pool. So too is the body, which is, after all, as the poet Adrienne Rich puts it, the geography closest in; it’s the first place, the place we must make peace with – subject, like all places, to the pressures of time, of external rhythms and events, changing from moment to moment, year to year, getting older, bigger, smaller, more or less capable of performing certain tasks, more or less like it was at the beginning.

There’s a simplicity to it all, underneath the ambiguity, the anguish, that makes me almost giddy: for what is this but a reversion to my natural state, a return to old routines?

Sometimes we’re in control of that change, or we think we are. Exercise in particular gives us the illusion of power over our own physical futures. Take your recommended thirty minutes of activity a day and stave off all kinds of bodily evil. Lose a bit of weight, add a bit of muscle, establish a routine, live forever, or longer, anyway. The geographer John Bale wrote of exercise as a literal form of recreation: through time, repeated action, the body is re-­created so that it works better. It incorporates knowledge, becomes stronger, fitter. Progress. Maybe next week, or the week after, I’ll be faster than I was last week. All it takes is discipline, resolve, another few thousand metres racked up. Most of all denial: of the body that wants, of the possibility of vulnerability or limitation. A few years ago, I remember, I became obsessed with watching Olympic swimming races; I trawled YouTube, read interviews with the athletes, fascinated by all their talk of sacrifice and discipline. And isn’t this why I watched in the first place? To see what happens when we write certain kinds of want out of our body, and one singular, possessive, demanding want into it: to be the best, the fastest, the one standing on the highest platform of the podium?

Mostly, though, if we’re honest, it’s the changes in our bodies that are in control of us, not the other way round. The fact of the matter is that not that long ago, my body was capable of run­ning 13.1 miles, of swimming 3,000 metres without complaint; not that long ago, my body was actually hosting another body, or the beginnings of one.

And now everything is different, and everything will be different again someday, and different again, and different again.

This excerpt has been lightly adapted for publication on Longreads.

* * *

Miranda Ward is a freelance writer, editor, and lecturer. Her memoir Adrift: Fieldnotes from Almost-Motherhood is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK. She grew up on a cattle ranch in California and now lives in Oxford.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Shelved: Yoko Ono

(Photo by Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns — Getty Images)

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | January 2021 | 9 minutes (2,485 words)

Much is known about John Lennon’s self-described “Lost Weekend” — an 18-month separation from his wife Yoko Ono from the summer of 1973 to early 1975 — in which the former Beatle made records, produced records, drank, and took drugs to excess, and got kicked out of The Troubadour and various Los Angeles studios. Much less is known about how Ono spent her time back in New York.

In 1974, Ono recorded A Story at The Record Plant in New York. More than just another solo album, A Story was to be Ono’s first musical effort independent of her husband. Lennon produced or otherwise participated in all four of her previous recordings. Because of this, and the circumstances surrounding its creation, A Story is a statement of independence, a kind of personal manifesto. As a direct result of the couple’s reconciliation the following year, A Story was shelved at Ono’s direction. Most of its songs would resurface in later releases, sometimes in an entirely different emotional, as well as musical, context.

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‘Almost Home’: On Place, Legacy, Growing Up in Atlanta, and Symbols of White Supremacy

The largest confederate memorial in America is carved out of rock in Stone Mountain, Georgia. The site is linked to many Klu Klux Klan gatherings and the state of Georgia's resistance to the Civil Rights movement in the '50s and '60s. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

In “Almost Home,” an essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Pete Candler reflects on growing up in Atlanta, and the symbols of white supremacy in his hometown.

It certainly never occurred to me then that the Ku Klux Klan — during its second wind from 1915 to the mid-1920s — was reborn not in the hinterlands of Atlanta but at its posh and manicured heart: not in Stone Mountain but in Buckhead. My neighborhood.

Even if I had become aware at a younger age of Stone Mountain’s entanglements with the Klan, it would still have been easy to think of white supremacy at a comfortable distance. Stone Mountain was way the hell out there, in another county, not yet absorbed into the amnesic Atlanta that was swallowing us all.

The piece nicely complements Candler’s March 2019 essay, “A Deeper South,” in which he revisits monuments in the South with a new perspective and uncovers truths about his ancestry. Like this previous essay, “Almost Home” is moving and meditative, and Candler writes beautifully on place, memory, and legacy.

I listened to King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on cassette tapes countless times in my adolescence, and felt myself moved by the idealism of King’s vision — but moved in an abstract way, perhaps, since I never made the connection then between the lofty Christian nobility of King’s soul-jarring calls for justice and the material realities of where I lived. Unaware then of the resonances of Stone Mountain as a holy site for white supremacists and Lost Causers, I didn’t think to notice the deliberate power of King’s decision to mention it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington in 1963, didn’t consider how the power of that moment connected to a specific place I was probably then blithely enjoying seeing lit up with laser beams. But being moved by King’s speeches and sermons is no great achievement; anyone can do it. King’s greatest moments in the pulpit or on the dais had the power to effect in me a movement of the heart, maybe, but not yet a personal turning of memory. That would come later.

Black Atlantans probably are far more likely to know this history than I am. White privilege means there are stories you do not have to be burdened by, neighborhoods of the imagination you think you can casually avoid without damage to your soul. My life as a white person could have turned out differently if I had learned to inhabit a different narrative geography, to be shaped by the practice of alienating mental spaces. But I didn’t have to.

Later in the piece, Candler describes a trip he takes with one of his sons from Asheville, where he now lives, to Atlanta; he introduces Charlie to some of the places he loves, in the hope that he will love them, and — perhaps — sow a connection to them, too.

It is worth asking why any of this stuff matters, if at all. Maybe I am interested in family history; maybe I am seeking some place to anchor my own memories, some small plot of earth to which to bind my own wayfaring self. It could be that I am simply trying to manufacture a history I do not really possess, a surrogate past that I might lean on, that might hold steady for just a while longer. The house I grew up in is all gone now, and I have little to return to in the way of a site that still holds a memory of self should I forget. Maybe that’s what I am looking for on Ponce. I don’t know.

There is something nonsensical in all this, in my desire to give my children a sense of connection to a place where they have never lived, to cultivate in them an attachment to a space inhabited by their forebears they would never have heard about were it not for a random set of coincidences in my own life. It risks being an artificial, enforced attachment and not a real, organic one. But at bottom I just want them to be less naïve than I was, less ignorant than I am. To have a history we can grow up with together. To give them some sign that boundless curiosity will always be met with an ever-greater mystery, that as much as you think you know there is always an infinitely greater knowledge that you do not possess. That as long as you search the grounds of the world for some hint of yourself, you will never fully find it. That you will ever remain a mystery to yourself. That every seeking and finding only prompts more seeking; and that you may often find what you did not seek, and that may be the thing you needed the most.

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Ten Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2021

Author Kelly Link (Photo by Awakening/Getty Images)

The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.

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