Encounters With Death
Arlette Farge, the seabed, apocalypse, precarity, touch.
Earlier this week, I saw a screenshot of a tweet of an anglerfish that had supposedly swam to the surface of the water, looking gnarly and huge, its brown-black body protruding out of the glasslike water with a very obvious sense of obtrusion, of a lack of belonging. A quote tweet said that an erudite culture would recognise this as an omen of the end times, which irked me because of who I am as a person. We have every intelligent means of understanding what is going on politically, ecologically, environmentally. The mere suggestion (even jokingly) that we need to decipher some kind of complex system of clues to figure it out is painfully frustrating to me. I am, of course, overreacting.
I looked up anglerfish and revisited the wikipedia page after many years, re/discovering that there are actually many species of it, that the deep sea anglerfish represents the only known natural instance of parabiosis, a process involving more than one organism join together to form a shared physiological system. Cian told me that the fish had died shortly after being caught on camera, which is hardly surprising, given that it was miles from the kind of habitat it had evolved for and always known. It was very clear, looking at that image, that one is looking at death, whether you want to think of it as the mystical or the biological kind.
Google also let me look at an animated VR-style anglerfish (though the VR functionality didn’t seem to work, thank god, really), reminiscent of Pokémon GO, a brown blob looking hideously angry floating across my screen, moving of its own accord, looking immensely pissed off when I poked or prodded it. I twisted it around, made it face me, made it face away from me, spun it into circles, watching its little bioluminescent appendage dangle, playing with it like an unwell child plays with a powerless insect, egged on by its ostensibly unreal quality — and though I understood completely what was going on, I somehow felt like I was interacting with something alive.
Last summer, I read Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield, and it featured, at its center, a preoccupation with the sea and its underneath. This preoccupation became an obsession, an all-consuming mode of being, almost, and was at least in part shaped around a desire to understand what life can look like at the very complete depths of the ocean, the physical limits of what we refer to as our world. And it was resolved (if that) with a complete subsuming. When I read about the kind of creatures that inhabit these limits, the lives they live, the distance that separates our understanding of the world from theirs, I become possessed by a kind of sadness — a longing, a desperation, a resignation.
It is easy to think of oneself as special for accessing, understanding, and receiving boundaries of these sorts not as necessary, neutral objects but as personal (even personalised) injustices. In The Allure of the Archives, Arlette Farge writes:
“When exploring these [archival] sources you can find yourself thinking that you are no longer working with the dead—although history remains first and foremost an encounter with death. The material is so vivid that it calls both for emotional engagement and for reflection. It is a rare and precious feeling to suddenly come upon so many forgotten lives, haphazard and full, juxtaposing and entangling the close with the distant, the departed.”
For days now, these words have circled my brain: history remains first and foremost an encounter with death — something I’ve felt deeply since I was a teenager deciding what to study in college, and something I’ve felt even more in the last few weeks as I’ve tried to put together a PhD proposal. The task of the historian can never be complete recovery, just as the task of the biologist cannot be to ever truly know what an anglerfish feels inside its mind, how its body parses stimuli, the way it might understand and experience pain or hunger or fragility. So much can be understood, but the true task is to push against what can’t be: this hunger, this desire for the kind of living that is impossible to access, is what makes history so palpable to me, refashioning a childish fascination for the unknown. ““The desire to understand is a demanding one”, writes Farge.
I turned 27 last week. Like many people of my generation, I understood some time ago that the world is no longer able to or interested in sustaining the kinds of adulthoods we grew up observing or imagining. I will never own a home, in all likelihood, and I have not lived in the same country for more than a few months at a time since I was 18. Wanting to do a PhD is, somewhat laughably, in fact a plea for some kind of stability, of wanting to live in one place for a few years and have a stipend that lets me pay the rent. Debt, in the background, continues to shape everything in my whole life. Farge, again:
“The belief that popular thought was inane was founded on the assumption that because the lower classes suffered the hardships of labor and want, they had neither the possibility nor the opportunity to bother themselves with anything that was not directly linked to their physical or material needs.”
Last Saturday, I went to a talk by Gabrielle de la Puente in Cobh, taking the train down, walking to the venue with no internet in the rain, feeling the slap of wind on my face like a jolt of grounding. We went to a cafe after (the pub was too crowded because of the rugby), and we talked and talked and talked, I met artists and filmmakers and organisers and followed them all on Instagram after. At the talk itself, we all discussed how evil social media is. When I told Gabrielle I don’t live in Ireland permanently, she asked where I do live, followed by, “Or do you not live anywhere in particular?” which felt like breathing; a relief.
It is a relief to touch the world. I have been doing it more these past few weeks, and while I’m constantly, permanently aching for a stability that lets me actually find and build a home, a place with diminished precarity and my own desk and a kitchen with all my crap and a coffee shop nearby where I can become an insufferable regular, I am also grateful for the trees and the wind and the sea and my family and my friends and my partner and my books and everyone I keep meeting when I go out to say hi.
“The French word fonds can refer either to archival collections or to the ocean floor.”
- Thomas Scott Railton, “Translator’s Note” in Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archives