ELEANOR WHITE
I thought I knew what it meant to be humbled: I had known the unforgiving weight of being pummelled underwater by the Bristol Channel, whilst training for my powerboat licence; I had known what it was to be stranded on an island by the changeable weather of the Gulf of Maine, whilst leading a sea-kayaking trip.
And yet: three fractures to my cranium humbled me. For all that I
had been, I was now a body in pain. At the age of 22, I had no language to articulate my experience of seething, unrelenting pain; nor could I unravel my knotty confrontation of the ‘undiscovered countries’ [1] that illness discloses. I was no more than a body in pain, communicating through misunderstood
moans and wails.
And yet: as my centre of gravity slowly shifted from the ground (to crawling, to walking, to cycling), I came to befriend incomprehensibility. With no lexicon of pain, ‘incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow’ [2].
Is incomprehensibility not the question for humanity: the
incomprehensibility and immobilisation of living through
compounding socioecological crises?
We can trace fracture directly to its Latin source fractura ‘a breach, break, cleft’. I’m reminded of the 2013 acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer, George Zimmerman - a murder case which exposed deep fractures within the US.And yet: ‘There are too many ways to say cleave’ [3]: to split apart and to stick together. The seeds of the Black Lives Matter movement were planted in this moment of injustice. In protracted fracturing, there is such radical hope in fractal organising.
Alycia Pirmohammad’s poem, quoted above, continues:‘but one day I’ll split / into myth and pass through the mouths of a hundred / generations’ [4]. What are the stories of cleaving – passed from (watery) body to body – that we can learn from being at sea?