Euphoria

by Lily King

Perhaps all suicides are happy in the end. Perhaps it is at that moment that one feels the real point of it all, which, after you get yourself born, is to die. It is the one thing each and every one of us is programmed for, directed to, and cannot swerve away from indefinitely.

I felt my loneliness bulge out of me like a goiter, and I wasn’t sure how to hide it from them.

I asked her if she believed you could ever truly understand another culture. I told her the longer I stayed, the more asinine the attempt seemed, and that what I’d become more interested in is how we believed we could be objective in any way at all, we who each came in with our own personal definitions of kindness, strength, masculinity, femininity, God, civilization, right and wrong.

You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.

Nell and Fen had chased away my thoughts of suicide. But what had they left me with? Fierce desires, a great tide of feeling of which I could make little sense, an ache that seemed to have no name but want. I want. Intransitive. No object. It was the opposite of wanting to die. But it was scarcely more bearable.

Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our ‘progress,’ so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?

‘I didn’t want to miss the euphoria. I haven’t, have I? You said it happened at the second-month mark.’ She seemed to stop herself from smiling. ‘No, you haven’t.’

she was good at it. Better than I was. Systematic, organized, ambitious. She was a chameleon, with a way of not imitating them but reflecting them. There seemed to be nothing conscious or calculated about it. It was simply the way she worked.

‘Nothing in the primitive world shocks me, Bankson. Or I should say, what shocks me in the primitive world is any sense of order and ethics. All the rest—the cannibalism, infanticide, raids, mutilation—it’s all comprehensible, nearly reasonable, to me. I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.

Alone was not something you saw among tribes she’d studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil. The culture often had proverbs against it.

Fen claims that if you just let go of your brain you find another brain, the group brain, the collective brain, and that it is an exhilarating form of human connection that we have lost in our embrace of the individual except when we go to war. Which is my point exactly.

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis? As usual, I found myself more interested in that intersection than anything else.

She claimed that conformity created maladjustment and tradition could turn psychopathic. Her last sentences urged acceptance of cultural relativism and tolerance of differences.

The cultures we put in the Northern vector were aggressive, possessive, forceful, successful, ambitious, egoistic. The id of the grid, Nell said. By contrast the Southern cultures were responsive, nurturing, sensitive, empathetic, war-averse. To the West were the Apollonian managers who valued unemotional efficiency, pragmatism, extroversion, while the Easterners were spiritual, introverted seekers, interested in the questions of life more than the answers.

‘Was she wine or bread to you?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘It’s from an Amy Lowell poem we all loved in college. Wine is sort of thrilling and sensual, and bread is familiar and essential.’

‘Personality depends on context, just like culture,’ she said. ‘Certain people bring out certain traits in each other.

She told me the Tam believed that love grows in the stomach and that they went around clutching their bellies when their hearts were broken. ‘You are in my stomach’ was their most intimate expression of love.

Let him rage. Let him rage across the oceans. But he will rage alone. I am getting off tomorrow at Aden. Doubling back to Sydney. He is wine and bread and deep in my stomach.

Through the windscreen I had a last look at the sea, which was rumpled and agitated, a thick muscle that would hold on tight to everything it swallowed.

While this is a work of fiction, it was initially inspired by a moment described in Jane Howard’s 1984 biography Margaret Mead: A Life and my subsequent reading of anything I could locate about anthropologists Margaret Mead, Reo Fortune, and Gregory Bateson, and their few months together in 1933 on the Sepik River of what was then called the Territory of New Guinea. I have borrowed from the lives and experiences of these three people, but have told a different story.