Anemoia
and making like a water bear by tunning in tough times
Dear friends,
before taking any steps into fiction today, I would like to report some urgent1 news from the exotic world of reality. You hopefully already know about tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, the most terrifying yet cute yet indestructible of little organisms found just about everywhere. If you do not, please begin reading about them right away.
Anyway, it is my pleasure to report that a new species of tardigrade was recently found, this one adapted to life in an inland sand dune in Finland. Like others in its superfamily, this latest little dude shows the reduction in claws and legs common to soil-dwelling creatures who tunnel through soil particles. Also, they sometimes get around by hitching a ride in the digestive tract of snails, among other interesting forms of transportation. Also worth noting and described in this ScienceAlert article, which does some nice reporting on the two studies in question, is the “tun” state: this is when a waterbear protects itself—from water deprivation, extreme high or low temperature, visiting outer space, being fired from a gun, being bombarded by X-rays, and other slings and arrows of outrageous tardigrade fortune—by what’s called anhydrobiosis. I’ll quote writer Russell McClendon here because I like how he describes what that means:
“tardigrades eject water from their bodies to become a dry, virtually indestructible speck called a tun. In this suspended state, a tardigrade can survive for years or decades, then abruptly reanimate in the presence of water.”
A first exercise in imagination. This one is both imaginative and therapeutic. If January’s post-holiday return to work or school has you already feeling fragile, it may be time to curl up in a very small ball and imagine your way into a suspended state. The downside is that as a tun, you are a dry speck. The upside is that you are virtually indestructible. Find a cozy place. Dress warmly but comfortably to mimic this extremophile who can handle insane heat or cold. Now lie down on your back and make yourself as small as possible. A very small ball, hugging yourself, rocking from side to side if you like, stretching out your back muscles as you hold on to your knees. Alternatively, try a tight but comfortable fetal position, on your side. If neither of these positions are possible or comfortable, not to worry. Just pull your outer parts inward as much as possible, physically and/or emotionally. Stay there for ten minutes, or perhaps years, or decades. You are a tun, all your vulnerable juicy bits ejected. You are protected from anything that could possibly assail you. Let your mind drift as you contemplate the incredible unknown richness of teeny tiny species diversity. How can these things really exist?! Don’t force it, but when they are ready to do so, just allow your oversize problems fade away like great blimpy, substanceless clouds, irrelevant at this scale of observation. When you are so relaxed with the wonder of it that you can hear the very small sounds of the very small creatures on your eyelashes, you’ve done enough. Abruptly reanimate and go find a tall glass of water. Drink very slowly.
Nostalgia is the theme of many novels, perhaps most famously Marcel Proust’s sequence In Search of Lost Time (of which, God forgive me, I have so far only read parts). There is also Nostalgia, Mircea Cârtârescu’s 1989 novel that I have been trying to get hold of for months and months now (it’s on perpetual order at the public library, so I wait to find out if it’s actually thematically about nostalgia. There is also a book of the same title by M.G. Vassanji, and likely others). Nostalgia is important to us as seekers of experience because obviously you feel nostalgia in response to experiences worth feeling nostalgic about.
With the unusual verb tenses and thematic juxtaposition of its resonant first sentence (which lodges its rhythms and strangeness in the mind just like “Call me Ishmael” or Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins”), Gabriel García Márquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude tells us that his book is in large part about nostalgia and the grip of the past upon the present:
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
García Márquez is just one of an ever-growing number of writers who you’ll likely see recurring from week to week here, one of many greats who are famous for good reason. In Love in the Time of Cholera, his very first sentence generates an atmosphere actually redolent of nostalgia:
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
Other writers likewise accomplish this setting out of theme and nostalgic atmosphere or mood or tone with a first perfect sentence:
“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” writes Daphne du Maurier hauntingly at the very beginning of Rebecca.
But the aspect of nostalgia I would like to get at today is the way tiny fragments of description in novels, and their careful juxtaposition with other elements to bring them into focus, can evoke piercing nostalgia for things that we ourselves have never experienced. After evoking in the reader the full sensory experience of life in 1860s Sicily in The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa makes us feel the same melancholy horror and sense of mortality his protagonist Don Fabrizio, based on di Lampedusa’s actual great-grandfather, a Sicilian prince and his life through the Garibaldian era, once felt at the loss of an entire cultural reality as history overtakes the world and cultural mores of his youth, consigning them to the dustbin:
“As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things that are thrown away, that are being annulled”.
As readers, by this point we are replete with memories of the sensual, dynamic prince’s world back when it was vivid, lively, in fact saturated with life, animated with lavish, sensory scenes of parties, revolutionary intrigue, and family expeditions, and an indelible scene of a young couple, the prince’s charismatic nephew and his fiancée, cavorting around the abandoned rooms of the disused guest-room of Don Fabrizio’s summer palace, just barely resisting their unconsummated desire in the palace’s atmosphere of…
“…excited sensuality all the sharper for being carefully restrained… [where] even the architecture, the rococo decoration itself, evoked thoughts of fleshly curves and taut erect breasts; and every opening door seemed like a curtain rustling in a bed-alcove.”
After all that, and remembering the ‘carcass’ described here (no spoilers) as it was in life, this closing incident of the book is physically jarring. When I first read it, I was left with a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that reworked everything that came before, giving what I had initially read as straightforward, gorgeous experience a painful cast of nostalgia. Now some part of me will always long for a place I have never visited, at a time I have never experienced, as if it were my own past, my own youth. There’s a word for this particular type of fictional nostalgia, a newish word: anemoia. The term was coined in 2012 by awesome neologizer John Koenig, of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (a website and Youtube channel and now a book).
If you have not read di Lampedusa’s only novel and real masterpiece, do read it. Then read over what I’ve said above, and let me know in a comment if you also feel the pit-of-stomach feeling at the end, and then the lingering flush of nostalgia. It is a book you will never forget. And if you have already read it, you may enjoy, as I did, Steven Price’s clever, delicate, atmospheric novel, Lampedusa, in which he relies on known facts and his own immersion in the spirit of The Leopard to fictionalize the life of Lampedusa himself, and the writing of that great book.
Writers living in exile—Vladimir Nabokov, for example, or Julio Cortázar, or Salman Rushdie, or Reinaldo Arenas, or Jean Rhys— write as if trying to reanimate their own real past.
Here’s Cortázar on the importance of exiles not forgetting, as they long for the place from which they are exiled, that in their case that place still exists, and on the imperative for a literature of exile to not be merely about wallowing in nostalgia, but rather “an effort to take back the territory of our nostalgia instead of being stuck in mere nostalgia for that territory”.
Bringing back the past through literature is a task of urgency in particular if it isn’t the writer who has left, but a world that truly does no longer exist to go back to, as with much of the literature about the Holocaust and other genocides. Although he was famous for his devastating accounts of his experience at Auschwitz and after, in much of his writing Primo Levi evokes the world of southern Piedmont, Italy before the war in precise detail. And though he goes on to say that “it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page, especially a man like Sandro,” in the enchanting, multifaceted The Periodic Table, Levi does exactly that, making readers living far in the future, subject and author both dead and gone, nevertheless mourn a unique human’s untimely death as if he were a friend:
“In our midst, Sandro was a loner. He was a boy of medium height, thin but muscular, who never wore an overcoat, even on the coldest days. He came to class in worn corduroy knickers, knee socks made of homespun wool and sometimes a short black cape which made me think of the Tuscan poet Renato Fucini […] He had a curious mimetic talent, and when he talked about cows, chickens, sheep, and dogs he was transformed, imitating their way of looking, their movements and voices, becoming very gay and seeming to turning an animal himself, like a shaman. […] He had chosen chemistry because he had thought it better than other studies; it was a trade that dealt with things one can see and touch, a way to earn one’s bread less tiring than working as a carpenter or a peasant.[…] To see Sandro in the mountains reconciled you to the world and made you forget the nightmare weighing on Europe. This was his place, what he had been made for, like the marmots whose whistle and snout he imitated: in the mountains he became happy, with a silent, infectious happiness, like a light that is switched on."
W.G. Sebald, Jonathan Safran Foer, D.M. Thomas, Olga Tocarczuk, Milan Kundera, Daša Drndić, and Jenny Erpenbach (whose The End of Days had me weeping openly on a transatlantic flight a few years back), among many others, work creatively with nostalgia, finding ways to subvert time itself by writing what should have occurred, but didn’t, as if it had, or by moving back and forth between idyllic past and the moment it is destroyed, or by making past follow present, restoring it (in the writing workshop I take with novelist Martín Solares, he describes beautifully how Milan Kundera does this, bringing the dead back to life, one of the magical things you can do with fiction. Here’s the first chapter of the English version of Solares’ book about how novels work, for a taste of the magic he himself works in his analyses. The links up there from each author name are to one of their works relevant to these themes, each worthy of its own essay, and definitely worth seeking out).
In this way a writer preserves the lost object or landscape or time of their longing forever, lodging the very longing itself and the precise what-it’s-like of it in the memory of their anemoiac readers for as long as the work is read or remembered. In this way, painful as these not-ours memories may be to recall, we get to live more lives.
Perhaps between now and when we meet again on Friday, you’d like to consider what memories you wish you had, and find the best possible fiction from which to acquire them (please write to me via the comments or at carly_z@hotmail.com or by DM on Twitter to @CarlynZwaren if you need suggestions. I’d be delighted to oblige). Or, if you are already reading, pay close attention to how the past you read about becomes part of your memories. Write about this if so moved. To accompany this week’s (optional) task of absorbing other people’s past experiences, real or imagined, and making them your own, here is a little nostalgia music for you:
Wishing you a good week, and see you Friday!
-Carlyn
chronic illness and gradual acknowledgement of disability has forced me to discover the pleasures and virtues of Slow Writing, a new movement whose name someone faster than me has surely already coined. It’s like Slow Travel and Slow Food, only even less remunerative. You will please therefore interpret words like “urgent” or “recently” or “news” according to the near- geological rather than news cycle time scales suitable for literature, for which it takes time to determine lasting value or relative importance anyway.