Roche limit

The narrator’s opening sentence in W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn reads “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have competed a long stint of work.” And from this period of doldrums in his walk the narrator seems to have recovered . . . well, for at least a while. But walking through the remote places on the southeast coast of England he confronted “traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past.” It was from this paralyzing horror that exactly one year after the walking tour that the narrator reports that he “was taken into hospital in Norwich in a state of almost total immobility.” Now, one theory of the origin of the rings of the planet Saturn is that they are debris from a meteor or moon that was pulled into the planet by Saturn’s gravity. The Rings of Saturn explores the dangerous closeness the narrator in his walk approached trauma and horror that ultimately pulled him to destruction by the gravity of the events he observed. But I suppose the book itself is evidence of his recovery.

The opening lines of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick are Ishmael’s declaration that “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” I grow ornery myself as I maneuver through the world in the Novembers of my soul and I then confirm the location of my burial plot and arrange the elements of my funeral ceremony and order my eulogy. As Ishmael sails, he gets too close to tragedy and is pulled into the object’s gravity. In the end he is saved floating atop Queequeg’s coffin when he is found by the whaler Rachel. It had been sailing the seas searching for its missing children who had been aboard the ship when it had been destroyed by Moby Dick, the white whale whom Ahab maniacally chases and whom he views as the root of all evil in the world. The Rachel had flown too close to the object’s gravitational pull and been destroyed. So had Ahab and the entire crew of the Pequod. And so too, almost had Ishmael. That he could write Moby Dick is evidence of his ultimate survival.
            Henry David Thoreau, too, sometimes would take himself out for a walk when he experienced his hypos. He says, “In my walk I would fain return to my senses.” Thoreau was no stranger to his hypos: in his narrative concerning the burning of Breed’s hut, Thoreau admits, “I lived on the edge of  the village then—” [he was at Walden] “and had just lost myself over Davenant’s Gondibert, that winter that I labored with a lethargy . . .” Thoreau attributes this state of lethargy with which he suffered to an heredity family complaint; alternatively he ascribes this lethargy more amusingly and dismissively to his “attempt to read Chalmers’ collection of English poetry without skipping.” But despite his rationalizations regarding the origins of his emotional state, I am certain that what he suffers from is the very condition of depression that has led to the ubiquity in our modern-day of a wide assortment of psychotropic drugs. He had been drawn into the gravity of the object and was crushed, but his long period writing Walden offers evidence of his survival.

I am thinking of the Roche effect. I read in Wikipedia, “In celestial mechanics, the Roche limit, also called Roche radius, is the distance from a celestial body within which a second celestial body, held together only by its own force of gravity, will disintegrate because the first body's tidal forces exceed the second body's self-gravitation.” The math and scientific explanation exceeds my bandwidth, but I know enough to understand that being drawn into the gravity of the first object will lead to the destruction of that second object. And I am wondering now how others deal with their hypos, their doldrums, their confrontations with the traces of destruction they experience in their lives and still maintain their own orbits. How do we hold ourselves together and not disintegrate when being pulled to destruction by the gravity of the first object. As for myself, to maintain my distances sometimes I would take myself out for a run. I have circled Central Park at 4:00am not a few mornings when I suffered my hypos; run in almost all fifty states; accumulated thousands of miles on the Red Cedar trail; listened as I ran to hours and hours of music first on a radio Velcro-strapped to my arm (before Apple devices were available) and then when they appeared on the market listened on various sized iPods. I walk now listening to the music on the iPhone nestled in my pocket and with my wireless Power beats plugged into my ear. I have written ten books on the roads, one a memoir aptly entitled Anxious Am I? I baked a great many breads during the pandemic. 

I begin to wonder how much of our lives might be spent in response to our hypos, our madnesses, our lethargies. What strategies do we employ to avoid being pulled by the gravity of another object, what it might be, and crash into that object. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn came about after he had apparently crashed; Thoreau’s Walden after suffering his lethargies; Ishmael’s Moby Dick after the experience on the Pequod; I composed Anxious Am I? after the anxiety had sent me during my life out on the roads . . . or at times to my bed, and even before I knew it was anxieties from which I suffered and that these anxieties were common and ubiquitous. I think that perhaps our hypos send us out, into the world, but out there we struggle to resist the gravity of that object whose gravity might overwhelm our own and would pull us to destruction. Yes, we are all in a struggle to maintain our selves in a world that threatens to pull us into it and break us to pieces. That struggle makes us crazy and human. D.W. Winnicott says, “I must ask your forbearance if in the process I seem to suggest that all of us are ill, or, on the other hand, that the mentally ill are sane.” But that is alright, Winnicott says, for “we are poor indeed if we are only sane.” Or as Ricardo Reis plaintively says, “We are all ill, with one malaise or another, a deep-rooted malaise, that is inseparable from what we are and that somehow makes us what we are, you might say that each of us is his own illness, we are so little because of it, and yet we succeed in being so much because of it.” I am comforted by that idea. My hypos, lethargies, anxieties, and doldrums are not separate from me but are essential to me; yes, I am my hypos, my anxieties, my doldrums, and how I accept them and manage them become the strategies that I employ to avoid being pulled by the gravities of other objects out there to destruction. My hypos are the source of my life and work. My hypos are my life.