-hyphen-

Love is not a bridge. 

Love is a hyphen.

Bayo Akomolafe (2016)

When perpetually confronted by the catastrophic realities of mass suffering, how do we, the living, respond? Cross-culturally, there are many different ways that people deal with or have dealt with death. But having attended my fair share of funerals within a westernized and White American setting, and often leaving them feeling empty and unfulfilled, I can’t help but wonder each time if there are ‘better’ ways to deal with death. Raised under modern circumstances, I’ve noticed a Western tendency to push away and allocate death elsewhere. These behaviors also extend to processes of decay and excrement, or the dirty realities of living. We, as in some of us in the West, seem to fear our own shit: the waste, excess, and death in which we are all implicated. 

In response to these questions, I’ve begun to wonder how a study of fungi, particularly underground mycelial networks, might assist us toward more balanced practices of tending to matters of life and death. Merlin Sheldrake (2020) writes extensively about fungi in his book Entangled Life, while still leaving ample room for mystery. In the beginning of the book, he discusses how “mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation." Whereas, near the end, he leaves us pondering about fungi’s role in decomposition, and how they must unmake worlds before they even make them. So, this left me wondering: is mycelium living, or is mycelium dead? Perhaps it’s both. 

Inspired by these questions, I began to experiment with yarn string. I chose to work with yarn string, because it most closely reminded me of hyphae, which are “fine tubular structures that branch, fuse, and tangle into the anarchic filigree of mycelium” (Sheldrake 2020). In addition, I found myself drawn to create this practice in the University Cemetery as a place purposefully built to memorialize the ‘dead’. Once situated with all of my materials gathered, I began by stringing one thread to the ‘dead’ and another thread to the ‘living’. The more I continued to hang strings around the cemetery, and the more the ‘dead’ and the ‘living’ threads seemed to willingly jump into the other’s arms, the more I began to ponder topics of entanglement. Performing this practice, you learn very quickly that the strings never like to behave. They often get stuck, knotted, caught, and tangled in unexpected ways. The entanglement of the strings, however, led me to notice what Edward S. Casey (2023) names ‘the multidimensionality of place’. I noticed how the strings were prone to snagging on multiple spots in one movement, whether it be to myself, an existing string, or something in the environment. Building on what Casey writes when he says “there are various heres in every here”, in doing one thing, I was caught by the multiple. 

Not only was I noticing more connections between multiple ‘things’ as I wove the space, I was more aware of the space between the knots and strings. Rosemary Candelario (2019) in “Dancing the Space” discusses Morton’s description of ‘the mesh’, which is described as “both the linkages and the holes between the links." Candelario expands this by applying the oscillation between filled space and empty space as an endless process of expanding and erasing that is perpetually redefining itself. My webbing of the cemetery space helped me to discover temporary pathways between the dead and the living that were then either broken or shifted by retracing my steps backwards. By re-weaving and thus re-defining the space, I was able to design different patterns that helped me realize different connections. Drawing off of Donna Haraway’s (2016) fabulously sticky writings, I was hoping that the stringing would bring elements of ‘activated storytelling’, where “the absent [is solicited] into vivid copresence, in many kinds of temporality and materiality." By activating strings in the air, I am possibly participating in the worldy or other-worldy activation of stories. This is the hope, at least. 

During the process of ‘activating’ strings between the ‘dead’ and the ‘living’, I was reminded of a quote I read a while ago by Bayo Akomolafe (2016), who writes: “Love is not a bridge. Love is a hyphen”. This brought me to thinking about how the ‘hyphen’ might be one doorway to theorizing the string between life-death. Instead of the space between worlds existing in between two different points of a bridge, Akomolafe pushes us to imagine both ends of the bridge as already implicated in the bridging between. So, rather than defining ‘life’ and ‘death’ separately, what if we defined them as conjoined and connected in and through the hyphen? Perhaps, then, with our focus fluctuating between multiple hyphal hyphens and strings, we might learn, as Haraway (2016) writes, not only how to live well, but also how to die well with one another. So, in moments of mass suffering and loss that seem never ending, how might we tend to the hyphen? By re-stringing and re-storying worlds, how might we reimagine and practice love?

References

Akomolafe, Bayo. 2016. “Hyphen.” https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/hyphen.

Candelario, Rosemary. 2019. “Dancing the Space: Butoh and Body Weather as training for ecological consciousness.” In The Routledge Companion to Dance Studies, edited by Helen Thomas and Stacey Prickett. 

Casey, Edward S. 2023. “The Placial Basis of Plant Sessility and Mobility.” In Plants in place: a phenomenology of the vegetal, edited by Michael Marder. 

Haraway, Donna J. 2016. "7. A Curious Practice" In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 126-133. New York, USA: Duke University Press, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780-010

Sheldrake, Merlin. 2020. Entangled Life. London, England: Bodley Head.