Impermissible joys

When I was little enough for my father to tuck me into bed, I would often plead for the lights to stay on a little longer. I knew that once the lights were off, the space for stories and companionship would shrink, and I felt the loss of that every night. To cajole me into sleeping, my father would tell me to listen for stories in the night. I did not quite understand what he meant, so he would explain that if I tuned my ears the right way in the dark, I could perhaps hear an owl calling, or badgers digging, or some other thrilling creature who thrives in the night.

It was a lovely thought–and a great ruse, given that, at the time, we lived in a tiny flat near the urban center of Thessaloniki, where audible badger activity was likely to be scarce. Still, I listened.

I kept listening for stories in the night at all the subsequent places I have called home. There were no owls in my corner of Cambridge, Massachusetts, but I felt some pleasure in being able to identify the rumble of the last train shaking the bowels of my college dorm as I fell asleep. In Colombia I woke to the sounds of my neighbor's vallenato, a type of music named for its origins in valleys in the northeast of the country. The songs carried the aura of cattle fairs with them, even if their Bogotá renditions were interrupted by the delivery of gas cylinders at dawn, the sound of tins scratching cement.

When I first moved to the place I now call home in Scotland, I was delighted to find that Malachy and I could hear the river from our new bedroom. Months of listening in the night taught me to distinguish between high and low water flow, to know a snowy morning by how the flakes muffled the flow of sound.

In the early days, I cherished not only the gift of beginner's eyes when it comes to landscape, but also beginner's ears. I learned to mark the turning of the seasons by bird calls: the first oystercatchers calling in the night in late January or early February, the swifts screeching in the skies above Scotland in the late spring, those same skies going mournfully quiet when the swifts depart in August. 

Among its many other gifts, Scotland also gave me owls. I first heard a pair calling here in February of 2019. Their chatter was most audible from, of all the places, the bathroom, so I took to brushing my teeth while craning my neck over the fern by the bathroom window, hoping for hoots.

Animal sounds do not travel seamlessly across homes, nor do they translate smoothly across languages. In Greek, an owl makes a κουκουβάου (koo-koo-vow) sound, which is a world away from the "too-wick too-woo" the internet tells me owls ought to sound like in the UK. Like many other bird species, males and females make different sounds. "Too-wick too-woo" (or ke-wick hoo-hoo, or whichever of the varied transcriptions suits your ear) is not a single bird's sound, but a conversation, a call and response among males and females. It is the story I was looking for in the night.

My beginner's ears do not allow for sophistication in the transcription of birdsong. Where more poetically inclined ornithologists hear whole syllables of bird chat, which they then map on to human language, what I hear defies transcription. At best, I can tell when a wren is repeating a stanza of its song. Most of the time, however, I just stand there, clueless and in awe, amazed to have heard anything at all. It is a kind of awe that almost requires cluelessness, a form of marvel that is nourished by novelty.

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Last August I became acutely ill with a life-threatening condition, from which I am still recovering. Illness distorts life: It reorients the size and direction of ambitions and desires, warps fears, inspires yearnings. The distortion outlives the initial threat to life. Though I am now facing a good long-term prognosis of a full recovery, the fragility of the days I spent in the acute care unit of the hospital continues to accompany me. I both will the body to recover, and, simultaneously, do not trust it to hold, to survive its encounters with the world.

The stories I tell about this time fluctuate between the vernacular of pathology, littered with new-to-me acronyms and opaque terms, and the register of fearful feeling in which I have experienced the introduction of this vocabulary into my life. Mostly, by virtue of still unfolding, by virtue of their yet-to-be-determined ending, the stories I tell about this time remain vague, abstract, as though they float slightly above the concreteness of daily life.

Illness is concrete: It consists of objects and encounters. It has its own sounds and its own lexicons. It leaves marks on the body; it leaves the body unrecognizable to me. In telling a vaguer story about illness, I do not deny its concreteness or the materiality of recovery: I simply wish for it all to be less true, as though by observing it less sharply, I will lessen its dominion over my life.

For the past seven months, I have taken medication that suppresses my immune system. In a pandemic, as governments pull back protective measures for the sake of an alleged "return to normality," I have become more porous. I have experienced this not only as a literal vulnerability to infection, but also as an emotional state: a permeability to feeling, as though the bodily boundaries between me and the rest of the world are thinner.

I have always been prone to being moved by the world, laughably so. On steroids, I am quicker to tear up at the sound of the first blackbird singing, at the sight of the first bulb emerging from frosty soil. I promptly mock myself when this happens, finding it difficult to tolerate the collapse of the border between daily observation and metaphor.

Illness restarts the clock, rendering ordinary milestones extraordinary: First non-hospital meal, first walk by the river after biopsy-induced immobility, first normal blood results, first day of tapering medication. I mark these firsts for the same reason I pay attention to oystercatchers and bulbs and swifts: I want a record of time passing, and trust in the gentleness of the seasonal reminders in the soil and sky more than I do in the coldness of the calendar.

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The last Friday night in February was full of firsts. Malachy and I traveled 150 miles to the Lake District—our first time in a different country since I became ill. There were other firsts to this trip: First time back in a pub together, first time relearning to be in the company of strangers, first steps towards unlearning the fear of other bodies. Some of the other gifts of the trip—eating at a restaurant, enjoying a meal we did not have to cook ourselves, spending the night in an unfamiliar bed—were not strictly firsts, but they still felt new, given the scarcity of them over the past few months.

On our last evening in the Lake District, we took a long walk around Grasmere. Though heaving with humans, dogs, and walking poles by day, the town was quiet at night. The glow of orange-tinted pubs drew everyone inside.

Standing on the moorland shortly after 8 PM, we heard one owl, and then another. We squeezed each other's hands, the companionable equivalent of pinching oneself in wonder. Within half an hour, the air was a symphony of owl calls.

I had never heard quite so many owls in one place, nor such a variety of them. There were tawny owls, and maybe barn owls, and other owls I do not know how to recognize by sound. We squinted in the dark, but could not see any of them, even though at least one owl was perched in a tree near us. All we had, all we could know them by, was the company of their conversation in the night.

I had little to offer by way of insight, other than the chorus I could not help repeating throughout the trip, prompted by a burst of light through clouds or the goodness of sticky toffee pudding or by nothing at all: I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be alive. 

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Russia invaded Ukraine on our first day in the Lake District. Social media has not only enhanced the feeling that, for some, war is a spectator sport, but also made violence into a site of participant observation, with both participation and observation often unfolding at a distance. Fellow academics who specialize in armed conflict were in Public Expert mode, seeking to interpret and explain. Interpretation and explanation can be benevolent acts of public citizenship, offering a way of sitting together with what we can know and what we do not. And, at the same time, interpretation and explanation from a cool (geographic, emotional, and narrative) distance can carry their own kind of callousness.

The poets I follow on Twitter shared poems. People retweeted them. I retweeted them. For a 24-hour period, "We lived happily during the war" became the soundtrack to the corner of the internet I inhabit.

And then, within the next 24-hour cycle, the public mood on my social media timeline had traveled the full distance from Poetry Will Save Us to A Backlash Against Poetry to We Shouldn't Talk About Saving to Who Are 'We', Anyway. The caps only became shoutier.

"It's okay if you are sad and do not know what to say," a yoga celebrity posted on Instagram. In the post immediately below that one, others suggested that silence was impermissible, that it was its own kind of violence. "I'm unfollowing you if you're tweeting about not liking your lunch while a war is breaking out," someone else posted, and then promptly deleted. The only acceptable way to be A Person On The Internet that day was accompanied by a link to donate to a humanitarian NGO. Unless, of course, you follow the critical humanitarianism scholars and activists online who counsel "not so fast," who remind you that donations come with their own complicated politics. 

Meanwhile, I listened to owls in the night. Meanwhile, I let the joy of their chatter fill me up. 

There is awkwardness to joy in times of public loss, of large-scale violence and the helplessness it inspires. I noticed the contrasts between my days and the public mood on my corner of the internet. Others noticed too. "Erm, I know there's a lot going on, but I gave birth / got married / paid off my student loans," people whispered tentatively online.

Many of the shouty caps have benign sources. They are a way to self-soothe, to feel connected to the suffering in this world and, more importantly, to its alleviation. Like other strategies of self-soothing, shouty caps and urgent Instagram captions commonly offer the illusion of agency and communal action. Less cynically, these spaces on the internet and ways to inhabit them also offer the possibility of community, the possibility of solidarity--especially if those of us who seek community and solidarity ask: Community among whom? Solidarity with whom? By which means? The moments I most experience these spaces as ones of possibility are often born from wordlessness, from helplessness, from acknowledging distance, rather than feigning proximity or claiming expertise. 

In the griefs I have known, the persistence of life is not a threat to the bereaved. In moments of mourning my father's death, I have watched friends dance with their own fathers at weddings. In making sense of my mother's illness, I have sat at Mother's Day brunches as friends bounce babies on their knees. There is a particular kind of pain that surges in those moments, and it keeps company with ungenerous emotions, the kind that are not welcome at brunch or at weddings. And yet: I have never found myself wishing for fewer dances, for less laughter, for less love in the world.

Joy is not a threat to peace. In listening to the stories of people affected by war, many have narrated to me that, in the middle and wake of violence, they continue to fall in love and practice care towards one another. Over the course of this war, both in Ukraine and beyond it, someone's baby will take their first steps. Someone will get so consumed by a break-up that they will forget there is a war unfolding near or far. Someone else will get an awful diagnosis, someone will get frustrated they didn't get the Wordle of the day. Gossip animates war. Joy animates resistance. I have yet to meet people affected by violence or loss who have wished for others to lead lives devoid of joy, or to tell stories exclusively about suffering. 

Solidarity does not require narratives of singularity any more than it requires the night to be empty of birdsong. It is possible to carry the heartbreak and helplessness of this moment alongside the beauty and joy of it. These are awkward weights and unwieldy lightnesses.Their co-existence requires suspension of both the illusion of equality of suffering and the temptation of hierarchies of grief. 

We have returned home from the Lake District. In my intimate chronology of illness and recovery, I suspect the moorland will mark its place in time. The war continues. The nighttime air is quieter here, and I am missing the owls. Malachy is making dinner. There is a higher education strike tomorrow. While we were gone, the irises bloomed.