tripping the light fantastic either. Most people I knew complained more or less tirelessly about their spouses: they disagreed about how to spend their money, how to raise their children, and how often or seldom they should have sex. They complained of being bored, of their lives being habitual and careful, of feeling spied upon, of carrying with them a perpetual hangover of guilt. It seemed that no one felt good enough at being married. Maybe marriage wasn’t supposed to be unfettered joy. Maybe this was it, coupledom as a slog with the reward being the comfort of believing you were doing your best, not for yourself, but for those to whom you had pledged your allegiance. Maybe marriage was a long exercise in compromise, and self-denial, and an increasingly furtive internal life. To aim for anything else seemed a fatal swim too far from shore in unknown waters.
There seemed nothing for it but to double down. Dig deeper. Work more and harder and longer. The Zulu signal flag is four triangles—black, yellow, blue, and red—making up a four-colored square. Ordinarily, it means, “I need a tug.” But in 1905, when the Zulu flag was hoisted by Admiral Togo at the Battle of Tsushima, it meant, “The empire’s fate depends on the result of this battle, let every man do his utmost duty.”
THE MIDDAY SUN
T hen in a kind of fin-de-siècle madness, we both planned working trips to Africa. Charlie said he would guide potential investors around Zambian safari camps. I said I’d go home and collect photographs for my new book. We planned our travel so as not to be in Zambia longer than a couple of nights together. I said I didn’t want to leave the children home alone; Charlie said he would need to focus on the logistics of his clients’ itineraries and wouldn’t be able to deal with distractions. What neither of us said was that we couldn’t bear to be together, that we couldn’t breathe around each other any-more.
In their 1977 piece “Breathing In/Breathing Out (Death Itself),” the performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay kneel face-to-face, pressing their mouths together. Their noses are blocked with cigarette filters. The image is that of a passionate kiss, but it is in fact an intense, exhausting physical struggle. For the duration of the piece—nearly twenty minutes—the couple have no external access to air. Shortly after the performance starts, Marina’s face grows shiny with exertion; she is audibly suffering. Soon, Ulay is gasping too. At last, they let go of one another’s mouths—propelled backward by their need for oxygen and space.
Breath,
pneuma,
has also been understood since ancient times as soul, as the connection between the outer world and our inner beings, as our integrity. When we breathe deeply, we connect head and heart, and we are connected to the atmosphere. When we hold our breath, when our breath is forbidden, then we are isolated from all creation. Even if we can still function, we are not integral, we cannot be trusted, we are not whole, we have no hope of being authentic. We are dependent and immobile and fixed. In that way, the lack of breath between two people is an isolating, suffocating, limited contract. The couple, gasping, will eventually have to fall apart from one another.
In early September, I wrote letters to our three children, hid them under the cleaning products in the back of the bathroom cabinet where I was sure they would not be found until sufficiently long after my death, and flew to Zambia. By now, the hilarity of my father’s seventieth birthday party had long worn off. A banana-leaf-ruining frost in July had left him with recurrent bouts of bronchitis. Then the rains returned and he came down with a particularly stubborn dose of malaria. Suspicious of medicine in general and of Western medicine in particular, Dad submitted himself to the care of a Chinese doctor, new to Lusaka.
Dr. Quek diagnosed him with polluted blood—“We could have told you that
There seemed nothing for it but to double down. Dig deeper. Work more and harder and longer. The Zulu signal flag is four triangles—black, yellow, blue, and red—making up a four-colored square. Ordinarily, it means, “I need a tug.” But in 1905, when the Zulu flag was hoisted by Admiral Togo at the Battle of Tsushima, it meant, “The empire’s fate depends on the result of this battle, let every man do his utmost duty.”
THE MIDDAY SUN
T hen in a kind of fin-de-siècle madness, we both planned working trips to Africa. Charlie said he would guide potential investors around Zambian safari camps. I said I’d go home and collect photographs for my new book. We planned our travel so as not to be in Zambia longer than a couple of nights together. I said I didn’t want to leave the children home alone; Charlie said he would need to focus on the logistics of his clients’ itineraries and wouldn’t be able to deal with distractions. What neither of us said was that we couldn’t bear to be together, that we couldn’t breathe around each other any-more.
In their 1977 piece “Breathing In/Breathing Out (Death Itself),” the performance artists Marina Abramovic and Ulay kneel face-to-face, pressing their mouths together. Their noses are blocked with cigarette filters. The image is that of a passionate kiss, but it is in fact an intense, exhausting physical struggle. For the duration of the piece—nearly twenty minutes—the couple have no external access to air. Shortly after the performance starts, Marina’s face grows shiny with exertion; she is audibly suffering. Soon, Ulay is gasping too. At last, they let go of one another’s mouths—propelled backward by their need for oxygen and space.
Breath,
pneuma,
has also been understood since ancient times as soul, as the connection between the outer world and our inner beings, as our integrity. When we breathe deeply, we connect head and heart, and we are connected to the atmosphere. When we hold our breath, when our breath is forbidden, then we are isolated from all creation. Even if we can still function, we are not integral, we cannot be trusted, we are not whole, we have no hope of being authentic. We are dependent and immobile and fixed. In that way, the lack of breath between two people is an isolating, suffocating, limited contract. The couple, gasping, will eventually have to fall apart from one another.
In early September, I wrote letters to our three children, hid them under the cleaning products in the back of the bathroom cabinet where I was sure they would not be found until sufficiently long after my death, and flew to Zambia. By now, the hilarity of my father’s seventieth birthday party had long worn off. A banana-leaf-ruining frost in July had left him with recurrent bouts of bronchitis. Then the rains returned and he came down with a particularly stubborn dose of malaria. Suspicious of medicine in general and of Western medicine in particular, Dad submitted himself to the care of a Chinese doctor, new to Lusaka.
Dr. Quek diagnosed him with polluted blood—“We could have told you that
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