 Steve Evans [CC BY 2.0] via Wikimedia Commons
Today: Arwa Mahdawi, Guardian columnist and the author of Strong Female Lead; and : Joe MacLeod, Creative Director at INDIGNITY and author of the column MR. WRONG.
Issue No. 163Look What Does Happen
Arwa Mahdawi A Nest in My Home
Joe MacLeod
Look What Does HappenOne of my favourite things to do when I should be writing is read about the routines of successful writers. It’s not procrastination, it’s very important research! The only problem, however, is that I am far too lazy to adopt any of the exhausting schedules these writers seem to follow. The bestselling novelist Rumaan Alam, for example, wrote his first novel between the hours of 7:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. every night. Alam and his husband also have two children for God’s sake! All I want to do at 7:00 p.m., having spent the day freelancing and juggling post-3:00 p.m. childcare with my wife, is flop on the couch and watch Love is Blind. While routines like Alam’s are far too grueling for me, I did stumble across a fascinating low-effort creativity trick in an episode of the British podcast Desert Island Discs featuring Steven Knight. I’m not a Peaky Blinders fan (although if you’ve got a good pitch as to why I should give it another chance I’m listening) and didn’t know anything about Knight, the creator. But the guy is fascinating. He came from very humble beginnings and helped create Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, among a gazillion other things. But I’m not here to regurgitate Knight’s biography, just share a little trick he uses to get the creative juices flowing. When asked about the research he does before starting a project, Knight said that he likes to utilize randomness. “If you’ve got [a project] set in New York in the 1940s and you put into Google ‘New York 1840s ice cream’ or ‘watermelons’ or any random word, it’ll take you to something that no one else has looked at,” Knight explained. “If you put ‘New York 1840s’ you’ll get all the stuff that’s about New York in the 1840s. But if you add the random word...it takes you to drama and issues and situations you wouldn’t [normally find]. Real life is pretty random, lots of weird things happen and it seems to be the job of the fiction writer to try and make it more normal. People say, ‘Well that wouldn’t happen.’ Well look what does happen.” Yes, indeed: look what does happen. I’ve been thinking about randomness a lot lately. Not so much in the fun watermelons in 1840s New York way but more in the lottery-of-life sort of way. The horrors that will befall a child just because of where they were randomly born. Every time I look at the wrenching images from Gaza I feel, amid the rage and despair, sick to my stomach with guilt that my own existence is so comfortable. That I’m not being forced to watch as my child starves to death. That I don’t have to watch my kid witness things no human should ever see. That I don’t have to listen to the cries of a child irrevocably traumatized from seeing family members burned alive or blown to bits in front of them. That I don’t have to search for an arm, foot—anything tangible—of a family member scattered in rubble so that I have something to bury. The other day on Twitter I saw a photo of a man in Gaza carrying a bag of rice—except that bag didn’t actually contain any rice, it contained the fragments of a ten-year-old. I don’t believe in a God of any sort and am not “spiritual,” but I have started to tell myself a comforting story as I struggle to process images of the genocide, nearly a year after it began. The story is that maybe there’s a possibility we all get several chances at life. Maybe, I tell myself, the kids who are missing their second year of school—who have known nothing but war, who died far too young—might get another chance at having a childhood. It’s an improbable idea, but perhaps it’s not impossible. As Knight said: People say, “Well that wouldn’t happen.” Well look what does happen. I read a fascinating story in the Washington Post a while ago about toddlers who remember their past lives, which sent me down a rabbit hole of the many stories reporting past-life memories that have baffled scientists and research professionals. In 1960, for example, Ian Stevenson, then chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia, undertook a rigorous analysis of the subject, spanning the U.S., India, and Sri Lanka. “Reincarnation is the best—even though not the only—explanation for the stronger cases we have investigated,” he wrote, in one of his several books on the subject. The Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed one of Stevenson’s books in 1975 and noted that “in regard to reincarnation he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases…in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.” There is more recent emerging evidence, also, that the trauma of war might not be contained solely in the people experiencing it, but can be passed down through generations via genetics. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry and neuroscience of trauma at Mount Sinai in New York, for example, worked on a paper showing there’s a small epigenetic “signal” that a life-altering experience “doesn’t just die with you…[but] has a life of its own afterwards in some form.” A 2013 study, performed on mice, similarly found an intergenerational effect of trauma associated with scent. There is so much that science is still figuring out or can’t really explain. And there’s a very big difference between believing blindly in the idea of an afterlife and considering the possibility that there might be more to “what happens after” than we currently know. Just the exercise of considering these possibilities can be a useful reminder of how random the universe is and how small we are in it. A grounding reminder that it is simply an accident of birth that we’re not that man in Gaza, carrying the remains of a ten-year-old in a bag of rice. There are different ways of living on, it’s clear. The horrors of the past 11 months have brought people from all over the world together to fight for Palestinian rights and in that solidarity there is hope. No matter how Palestinians Israel kills, they can never destroy us altogether. As the saying goes: they tried to bury us, but they didn’t realize we were seeds. Is all of this to say that I believe in reincarnation? Not exactly. I’m just saying that sometimes, in order to continue to exist in the world without going completely mad, we need to tell ourselves comforting stories. Life can be random in the cruelest possible ways and sometimes it helps to consider that there’s some chance, however improbable, that this arbitrary unfairness can be evened out. That the universe gives us all another chance.
ELSEWHERE IN FLAMING HYDRA Ocoudis [CC BY-SA 4.0] via Wikimedia Commons Today Diana Moskovitz has a swell piece over at Defector about the possibility of the potential restoration of Jordan Chiles’s Olympic bronze medal, and Simone Biles’s role therein.
A Nest in My Home Image courtesy of the author MY SIDE OF the bed is near the window. It’s not supposed to be, I’m the one who is bigger and stronger and I should be the one sleeping near the bedroom door in order to fight off intruders, but this is how we ended up, and it’s not changing, probably until we move to a new place and the door is on the other side of the bed. For now, I’m near the window. I don’t mind being near the window, because I like to look at the sky at night when all the lights are off. Some nights there’s lots of stars and some nights the moon is beaming so bright that I have to adjust the blinds to cut it. It is mostly very nice to be in bed ready to conk out, looking at the night sky. One recent morning I noticed that there was a bee inside the window, so in my capacity as household insect wrangler, I got a plastic carryout container and a piece of card stock out of a magazine in the bathroom, trapped the bee under the container, slid the card stock under, transported the assemblage out to the deck behind the house and let the bug go fly away and be a bug. The next morning I saw another bee on the glass of the window, crawling up to the top, slipping down, flying up a little, resting on the glass, and then starting the whole routine over again. The bee has a pretty simple program, which consists of heading up and toward the light. Everything else depends on communicating with other bees, so there was no way this bee would figure out that it could go in between the glass and down to the spot where the air conditioner is in the window and escape through the gap. I did the routine with the carryout container and a piece of paper again, because that’s my simple program. Later that day I noticed there were three bees flying around the window and one dead one on the floor. I examined the dead one and figured out it was a yellowjacket. Yellowjackets are not fun. They don’t really do the strict flowers and honey thing. They really love to get into whatever you’re eating or drinking out of doors and share it with you. If you kill one, the others get aggressive. If you swing your arms and stuff, they get aggressive. Even if you’re not allergic you don’t want to get stung by a yellowjacket, or five yellowjackets, or any other number. They are a unit, and if you mess with them, they respond. Days go by and every day it’s more yellowjackets in the house. I’m not returning them to nature anymore, I’m trapping them and flushing them down the toilet. I go through the cycle of investigating how to get rid of all these yellowjackets that are somewhere in my house’s walls and I come to the conclusion that I don’t have the tech, and I am afraid to climb a 30’ ladder to try and spray poison on the nest. The exterminators came and risked their lives climbing up a ladder to spray white powdery death on the nest of the yellowjackets, who responded by flying out and buzzing around looking for something to fight. The exterminators tell me they will all be dead in a few days, mission accomplished. Last night I was in bed and I woke up in the middle of the night and looked up through the window at the hazy with dim city-light-illuminated clouds sky and I saw the silhouette of a single yellowjacket in the center of the window, in the dark, waiting for instructions. Waiting for its family. In the middle of the night I felt bad for this lonely bug. The next morning I trapped it and flushed it down the toilet. THE END
FLAMING HYDRAS EVERYWHEREA fine interview with Hydra Yemisi Aribisala on the power of storytelling, from earlier this summer in Libretto Magazine.
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