Falling is a genre of trusting, with Samantha Harvey
I have been journeying to other worlds for as long as I can remember. I was the child who stayed up late, assiduously reading Enid Blyton’s Omnibus; formalising plans with my sister to close our eyes, hold hands, utter some magic words, and find ourselves transported to the Faraway Tree. To the uninitiated, this tree appears in a series of Blyton’s novels, rooted deep into the heart of an enchanted forest, waiting to be discovered by children who were believed that there were other worlds and creatures which would come alive if we were willing to slant our neatly arranged gaze. The tree was populated by elves, fairies, gnomes and pixies, some of whom became our closest friends. I often wrote letters to Moonface, thanking him for letting us use the slippery-slip slide which brought us from the cloudy crown of the tree and its constantly shifting worlds to the forest floor, so we could journey back from our adventures to our beds. I shook my head in dear despair at Saucepan Man who missed vital clues of quests because of the clanking and clashing of pots and pans hanging from every inch of his body but was committed to helping travellers when they face challenges in their enchanted journeys. I marvelled at Dame Washalot who was always doing laundry for all the inhabitants of the forest commune; when she ran out of fabrics to freshen, she would even wash the leaves of the tree. I attended to their relational roles and common chores with a sense of enchantment at what enables a magical life: the relentless labour of keeping the tree and its worlds fertile for our imagination.
Looking back, I think these inter-realm travels were nestled in the faith that with ardent attention, even the mundane would begin to shimmer with magic. The ‘magical’ world regularly spilled into my ‘real’ world, and I felt quietly proud of how my devotion has borne such fecund fruit. My sister and I, so distinct during the day, kept returning to each other for our ritual nightly trips. We stealthily wore our ‘outside tops’ under our nightshirts to attend Silky the pixie’s party in the Land of Birthdays, and suppressed giggles when our parents flicked off the plastic light switch, entirely unaware of the metallic urgency with which we would come alive in other worlds once they put us to sleep in this one.
I don’t exactly recall when we stopped, but I acutely remember how crestfallen I was when my sister moved on to reading Nancy Drew, enraptured by the blonde-haired, blue-eyed teenage sleuth who lived in the ‘real’ world and solved ‘real’ mysteries. That simple shift in her tastes left a bitter aftertaste in my mouth. She wasn’t unkind about her departure and remained witness to my continued travels in the night, but I missed the shared glee of entering gleaming worlds, hands clasped and thrumming on a spring double mattress to register the ricochet of our bird bodies through realms, of falling through one world and trusting that we would land in another one- the magic amplified by our collective leaping. She exited our shared world with such sudden and spontaneous grace that it thinned its intricate lustre and loom, like it had never existed. My own visits to the enchanted forest eventually stopped too, but I clung to the conviction that to ‘make’ worlds which we can ‘believe,’ is no ordinary thing. Magic and its campy capaciousness to transform our given conditions of existence to weave worlds where we can dream up alternative ways of living and flourishing, became an urgent political project in my life. I am never in absence of magic and touch every tree with a sense of enchantment now, even if I still miss the supple softness of slipping my hand into my sister’s late into the night.
For all my elaborate experiences of travelling to and well-practiced enchantment with other worlds, I have never really wanted to go to space. I partially blame school-level education in semi-urban Indian towns in the nineties, where space travel was introduced to us like it was an adventurous pursuit within reach of exclusively white, able bodies, much different than our browner, more tanned and untamed versions. (No place is as seething with intimate politics of what surfaces one can and cannot touch, as a missionary convent school). Awe, lamentably, was reduced to a racially drawn outline around otherworldly human feats, where we could participate only as audience and relate purely through aspiration, not achievement.
Kalpana Chawla was the beautiful, brown crayon who scribbled across these white lines of wonder in my life. She was the first woman of Indian origin to go into space, which was celebrated in big ways in her home country, even though her dream of being an aeronautical engineer was almost quashed several times by societal diktats of what her rightful place was. On February 1, 2003, I remember lingering near the television, anticipating her return from her second mission, wanting a glimpse of her magical return from space before going to bed. I watched, with the rest of the world, as minutes after re-entry, the Columbia Space Shuttle came hurtling down, lit up like a staggering sparkler in the sky, taking the lives of all seven astronauts on board. I watched, spellbound, as Kalpana fell through layers of skies and made her place among the stars. I admired her devotion to the metaphor and felt devastated at the rocket shaped hole she left behind in my colouring box. Even to my 9-year-old heart, her loss felt like an assault on lofty narratives of space technology which made us forget how fragile our logics are, once removed from terra firma. I bristled at the emblematic patriotism of scholarships being launched in her name in the same institutions where she had been actively discouraged from pursuing aeronautical engineering courses, which eventually led to her leaving India and pursuing her higher education in the US. I felt confused by grand speeches made by government officials who claimed her as one of our own, her legacy more precious than her life. Race is more palpable in the dead than in the living.
Growing up, my adulation of her bravery became woven thickly with rightful rage at the hubris of elaborate space programs which sent out alive bodies into space with the recognised risk of them returning as embers. Emancipated from convent curricula and energised by the ululations of a Left-leaning university, I began to see the politics behind interstellar progress. How the financial costs of space exploration weighed heavily on governments struggling to feed their foal, rearticulating poverty as a personal condition rather than a systemic outcome of misplaced political priorities. How space walks were really space wars; undergirded by imperial forces of competition, capital and colonisation, and how no interventions- in this world or any other- lay beyond the ambit of the human intent to capture and conquer every last inch of space; real and imagined, ecological and celestial. Like any Marxist worth her bread, I challenged the grammar of brute facts and technological imperatives, which provided supplies for the insatiable human appetite of eating up worlds and throwing them out, withering roses that were blooming before.
A decade of (un)learning in academic departments amid different constellations of the world, has loosened some braids of my ethos and added more girth to others. I no longer cede all grounds for curiosity to caution, or limit the role of critique to criticism, but I also insist on relating to worlds in ways which do not centre a human experience of it, ways which recognise that humanity is much more a political category, reliant on colonial conceptions of who counts (and who doesn’t) as human, than it is a simple species-reference. Space missions then, feel like an imperial extension of an extractive, exclusionary politics, now more than ever when flight tickets for a trip to space are going for 58 million dollars. I recognise how the grammar of the marvellous obscures the malignant, how records of successful lunar missions leaves out grim details about the 200 tonnes of human trash left behind on the moon’s surface.
Space in all of its elemental exuberance appears as ordinary relation, rather than an extraordinary frontier in my life. It turns up when I take my worrying body for walks next to North Sea and sense that the edges between me and the world are porous proofs of an entangled existence- less border, more shoreline. It dances into view in when I trust the sun to angle itself warmly towards my tense muscles which ache from the memory of learned latitudes left behind for loftier longitudes. Solar, lunar and stellar relations ground me in a place that is not my first home. On a still night, when I stare at a glowing, gibbous moon, in the Northern sky, I see the smudgy dimples and think of Moonface, my childhood companion. It enters me as the pride in my father’s milky eyes, when he looks at me as if I hung the damn moon. Celestial bodies are critical to WhatsApp conversations with my women who hurriedly type- ‘Have you looked at the moon tonight!!!! or Can you believe all this sunshine!!!! (exclamations warranted).’ Hours past my bedtime, I hastily put my shoes on and leave the house in search for the darkest stretch of sky because the Aurora alert went dizzyingly red. I notice the gentle (and often underappreciated) labour of Instagram astrogirlies who insist that exes are returning to haunt us because Mercury is in retrograde. Or is it Mars? The planets are interchangeable in narration, as are lost lovers. But is it not a deep kind of love to offer explanations of planetary proportions for heartbreak that hits us like an earthquake, and leaves parts of us forever trembling in its wake?
When I first saw Samantha Harvey’s (now Booker-winning!) novel Orbital in the window display of my local bookshop, I knew it was a special book. There was something about the black cover blotted with loose wet-on-wet watercolour spots and swirls in pink and blue and crimson and grey, and its titular brevity- at once a declaration and an invitation- that made my fingertips tingle with excitement at this chance encounter. I was so deep into the labyrinthine loops of my PhD and so often frustrated at my growing ‘nothing-to-do-with-my-research’ pile of novels, that I knew it would be a while before I got to hold it and longer still, until I could read it. These limits did not make me any less delighted about the endless possibilities of a good book being in the world.
It has taken me exactly 126 days from the day of handing in my thesis, to picking up this book. Recording days is important, not for rigidity but for ritual, as the six characters in the novel realise, while nestled within the ‘great H of metal hanging above the earth’ that is the International Space Station. Each day in their space-life is measured by 16 orbits of their planet, witnessing the ceaseless lightshow of the rising and setting sun in different parts of the world, recording leaps of super typhoons, researching how mice take to microgravity and how plant roots feel their way in absence of light to tell them when and how to grow. The real gift of Harvey’s writing however, is the reimagination of space as a site not purely of innovation but of intimacy. How feelings of desire, distance, hope and hunger are conjured in the six cosmonauts, each a universe unto themselves. The hum of ordinary life palpitating within the grandiosity of a space mission- of sachet risotto being eaten with cutlery that must be Velcroed after use, the careful catching of teardrops which flow from hearing about the death of a colleague’s mother, while she’s in a different realm, their anxieties about being replaced by space robots who do not need the upkeep their human bodies demand- is so unexpectedly disarming, it scores my heart and all worlds it holds within.
It is a book of contemplation and reads like an incantation. There is a moment in the novel, which is so tender, I want to commit it to memory. It’s about what space does to hearts- the six beating ones in the shuttle and the cells they’re observing in petri dishes. It is so generous; it stirs to be shared-
In microgravity their arteries are thickening and stiffening and the muscle of the heart weakening and shrinking. Those hearts, so inflated with ecstasy at the spectacle of space, are at the same time withered by it. And when the heart cells are damaged or depleted, they don’t renew too well, so here they are, their own tender hearts waning and toughening while they try to preserve the heart cells in their dishes.
Soon after, one of the cosmonauts says- “In these dishes is humanity” and they go on swishing humanity around with their tubes. Such stunning sophistry- what looks like a pool of cushiony cells, is really research with intergenerational consequences. When the cosmonauts first see Earth in all its fullness, it seems almost human-proof in the glistening sun. This perspective of the “rolling invisible globe which knows no possibility of separation”- suddenly shifts, however, when they remember how it is a place where “war abounds and borders are something people will kill and die for.” The exorbitant exposure to Earth’s seamlessness from their distant vantage point is quickly marred by the hurtling realisation that the sculpting power of politics is as utter as the tugs of gravity, so much so that every algal bloom, flooded river, shrinking glacier, scorched forest and oil spill are indelibly contoured by human choices. The recognition of being complicit in its (mis)fortune, causes a deep dissonance and also engenders in the cosmonauts, a deep care for protecting this quivering quail egg of a planet. They are technological superheroes, and they are treading tentatively. I have decried space exploration because it is so human, and I love this book also, because it is so, so human. This book reminds us that the history of technological competition is also the story of fragile, feeling bodies, trying their best to keep hearts beating, both human and galactic. And hearts can still break in the absence of gravity.
I, too, want to imagine ways of treading into worlds without leaving bruises. To think of humanity as so small that it could fit in a petri dish, to think of this smallness as a gift. Humanity really is the surprising relief when light touches a body and gets absorbed, when it could just as easily not. It is the shape that emerges from sustained, loving attention to any object; to see it through a lens of wonder, rather than want. It is what happens when we let space between bodies becomes a reminder of proximity rather than distance. It graces us when we trust the momentary to become momentous, the ordinary an oeuvre of enchantment, by witnessing with tender attention. Humans are not always the best exemplars of humanity, of convening life through relation rather than resource, but my god when we are, is it not the brightest of all brightnesses?
What then, of trust? In a world where violence is more evident than tenderness, where do we source trust from? And how, more importantly, do we keep nurture it in the absence of gravity? As someone who is in month five of falling through institutional precarity (defined exclusively in terms of finding a job on the back of the PhD) I am paying attention to the shivers running down every crevice of my life, threatening to atrophy my dreaming muscles, by cutting off air supply for anything other than job-hunts (I often wonder if it is harder to find an academic job as someone who is more forager than hunter). I follow fresh fault lines erupting on my skin- in how I feel more removed from my words than ever before, as if I spent them all like tokens trying to climb what was taught to me as the academic ladder, which is much more a carousel. I sense it in the loosening threads of an intricately woven immigrant life- with close friends departing to different countries which vicious visa regimes treat as intractable as if they were actually different planets. I scratch it in conversations with my family in my other home, which grow more infrequent and insubstantial with every week of uncertainty- parents of immigrant children pose quotidian questions about the weather as a placeholder for every big doubt and worry they hold for their child. I account for it in the council tax bills that appear twice in one month- lest I forget how keenly my life is being watched and that there is no room for mistakes.
And yet, I am more at peace in this freefall than I was in swaying at the dangerous edge that was the last lap of my Ph.D. I whisper it to close friends who won’t be offended- I loved my thesis and I’m glad I don’t have to look at it anymore. I insist that I do not want to label the uncertainty as precarity until I absolutely must. I want to trust that this could be a time for dreaming, that new words could come which would flesh out these dreams. I want to trust that my body has prior knowledge of being untethered and knows how to anchor itself variously, knows that a life can hold more than a career. Mostly, I want to trust that I’m not in this freefall alone. When I receive the regular rejection email from a university’s HR person, citing- “we had several hundred high quality applications…we had to turn down many excellent candidates,” I imagine the faces of the several hundred others who might be reading the same email with me, while doing their laundry, serving food to their child, or buying themselves a latte, and this imagined companionship is comforting to me. I worry if this email found them on a day when they were already doubting themselves. (But it’s Human Resources, not Relations, right?) I hope they too are consoled by my presence in the hundreds. I want to make solidarity a squeezable thing- “If we’re not special then we might not be alone.”
The stories we tell ourselves and each other, in uncertain times, are important. They are logs who throw to keep the fire burning- singular efforts for shared warmth. On a radio call with someone in Vancouver who is curious if cosmonauts ever feel crestfallen, because she saw images of them in sleeping bags hanging in the space station, Roman tells her that they are not in fact hanging; that the lack of gravity means they are billowing, like a ship’s sail in calm winds. He says, “You might miss home, you might be exhausted, you might get lonely, but as long as you’re in orbit, you will never, never be crestfallen.” The cosmonauts have practised space walking in simulated conditions on earth but the realisation that inside six inches of titanium, they are essentially falling at over seventeen thousand miles per hour, not colliding simply because the earth is rotating at the exact same speed away from them, washes over them like a tidal wave. They slowly comprehend that in space, you cannot fight the falling, you can only check your tethers and adapt to it. It is the companionship- with the whirring planet, the woman on the radio and the five other sleeping bags- which refashions fears of being inconsequential to the hope of being impactful. If I unravelled the cables of all my relations- to humans, the cosmos and with myself- the tethers would run millions of miles long. I can do a lot of spacewalking and tell many impactful stories.
And yet, I’m learning that if precarity is the ache, not everyone is soothed by accompaniment. Of everyone in my life, P would make the best interstellar traveller- the most particular, patient and philosophical of earthly beings. He would listen closely to all the stories in the thrum of space and record every observation in his neat handwriting. He would cherish the solitude which makes everything more bearable for him, and he would be grateful for packets of microwaveable pasta. But rowing as we are in the same boat through prickly, precarious waters, he is right now, a little seasick. He has a right to be. When we walk on the beach together and I struggle to find my balance, trudging through loose mounds of sand, he gently nudges me to tyre marks left by a JCB which has compacted the sand beneath under its weight. And just like that, the ground under me becomes firm. I want to enable similar genres of nudges when he is being jostled by the world. When he reports the weather of his heart over the phone- ‘It’s just not a good day,’ I remind him- ‘Or it could just be not-a-good morning…the day could still surprise you.’ He catches the oar for a quick second- and is buoyed by the generous rearticulation of his storm. He doesn’t know that the wisdom is nascent, newly formed from orbiting with cosmonauts who live through several days in one. I still think P would make a great astronaut, if he trusts his tethers to hold him. I know I would be a better lover, if I let him fall more often.
I’m thinking about the endless effort of being a planet, let alone our planet. The simultaneous labours of titling on its axis, rotating around itself and revolving around the sun. I tell J that I too feel like I’m constantly juggling between labours. That we shouldn’t romanticise it as a skill when it does so much harm by exacting more from already hurting bodies. A day after our conversation, because life is romantic like that, I come across this brief poem from Rosa Cook, titled- “A poem for someone juggling her life.”
This is a poem for someone
who is juggling her life.
Be still sometimes.
Be still sometimes.
It needs repeating
over and over
to catch her attention
over and over
as someone who is juggling her life
finds it difficult to hear.
Be still sometimes.
Be still sometimes.
Let it all fall sometimes.
There is a lot I love about this poem, but the paralleling of stillness and falling is a whole love letter to my tired body. I press it very close to my heart (and yours). I know the earth is hurting. I know that I have not found a job. I know these are important matters. But we’re both still here. And that is the most important matter of all.
At the risk of alienating readers who don’t find their lives already rendered in poems, here is another one by Matthew Olzmann, titled, “Letter to a Bridge made of Rope”-
I don’t trust you. To the shepherd, herding his flock
through the gorge below, it must appear as if I walk
on the sky. I feel like that too: so little between me
and The Fall. But this is how faith works its craft.
One foot set in front of the other, while the wind
rattles the cage of the living, and the rocks down there
cheer every wobble, and your threads keep
this braided business almost intact saying: Don’t worry.
I’ve been here a long time. You’ll make it across.
The earth and I are gifting each other gentle witnessing. A bridge is a thread we throw between two worlds. Trust is the practice of walking with the wobbles. To try in trying times, to know that we are at once the shepherd with his flock, and the poet on the rope bridge, to know that what feels slippery won’t always trip us over. To know that there are less totalising, more generous ways to utter even the harshest truths. To know that the distance between us and ‘The Fall’ is the wonderful work of living.
Climate change is terrible and in the right light, I know that algae blooms can look like Jupiter’s swirling, spectral clouds. I don’t know where I will live in three months from now, but today, as I write on my desk, after the longest time, the sun is an orange lozenge swirling its sweetness into the evening sky. I trust that it knows how vital its warmth is to my words. I know when R asks me if I’m writing again, her question really means- are you trusting your heart? I know that the linden will be in leaf soon after almost half a year of being bare. I know there is a poem etched on a spacecraft that will travel billions of miles in search of a water-moon. I know a reader will unspool my long loom of words with love. With trust, no falling is final. Relations are the ropes. Witnessing is the wonder.
In the book, Nell wills her body to keep moving and not succumb to the weightlessness of space, to not give in, “her bones to birdness.” I’m curious because I think of space most notably in relation to birds and their behaviours. Glassy, glossy geese flying across the endless expanse of winter skies and return unceremoniously to autumnal land as if they belong among us- those honking heralders of changing seasons. Perfect precious puffins, carrying sand eels in their rainbow beaks, their proud white breasts carrying not a bead of exhaustion from lilting for years in icy Icelandic waters before they even sense solid ground beneath their vermillion feet. It is perhaps the absence of human affliction with fanfare which render the minute magic of birds as spectacular to me.
P tells me that his favourite science fiction book is set in a world where there are no planes because there are no birds. How even the question of flight didn’t arise in a sky without birds. The magical, as always, never too distant from the real. I learnt this week that the first creature to showcase the principles of rocket flight was a wooden pigeon. Space was not a treadable surface until birds showed us how. They have been gliding, soaring, swooping, flitting and dancing in the skies since before humans learned how to mimic their movements, and yet, they aren’t interested in pinning flags on planets. Territory is important to birds, as are securing conditions for the survival of their species, but their trust has more wings than ours.
On a sultry afternoon in Bombay, I show P how eagles lock their talons and plummet towards the earth (and water), spinning at startling speed, only releasing each other when they are moments from impact. Avian theories suggest that they do this as a ritual of establishing trust with their mate for life. We fall in love with other humans, jobs and outcomes and chide ourselves for trusting them to meet our spinning expectations; but for eagles, the falling is the loving. Their interlocked talons and hearts- a complete clutching of each other’s mortal destinies- they are made braver in entanglement. We could do with being more bird, than human. We could learn how vital vulnerability is to love. That feral faith in a refulgent release, of knowing that we are equals in this encounter, of trusting that we’re more careful custodians of each other’s hearts, when the world is spinning, than we might be of our own.
My sister has her own pistachio-sized child now who she reads stories to. The last time I was home, we glistened with collective joy about her eventually reaching Enid Blyton reading-age. I hope they will lace their fingers and go on new adventures. On her final mission, Kalpana woke up every day to the song ‘Space Truckin’ by the metal band, Deep Purple. I pay attention to the lyrics “We had a lot of luck on Venus, we always had a ball on Mars. We’re meeting all the groovy people; we’ve rocked the Milky Way so far. We danced around the Borealis, we’re space-truckin’ round the stars” and imagine her in all her astral beauty, rocking out with the planets and galaxies she loved so utterly. I hope that they’re dancing with her now.
If falling is a genre of trusting- may we be birds and human and stars.