She’s a healthy mussel. . . . She’s a wicked mussel. She’s a sliver of the liver of a river whose liver is sick. An ugly river, voluble with its complaints. I had this story from precisely such a river. Well, and so the credence you accord to trickling notes diluted and caught up in flowing is up to you. For all you know, it may be true. The two-hundred-year-old mollusk at the center of this riverine rumor could exist. A shellfish of the tubercled-blossom pearly mussel species could’ve survived the dam’s construction. A solitary female could be indeed the last of her kind in the tributary which isn’t quite her entire universe.
She’s wicked because she alone, despite the vile stagnation of the water trapping heat and pollution and toxic algae, annihilating useful fishes; she alone, though her planktonic breakfasts became plasticky and odious . . . That is, she isn’t wicked because she lives. She disobeyed the law. Far from fulfilling her obligations, she indulged in lofty questions.
Maybe that isn’t wicked either. Maybe it’s even natural, at least as natural as the law. She’s after all a bivalve, two-faced to the world, a headless foot in a hinged two-shelled shell. With two outsides she’s her own double (Epioblasma torulosa torulosa); cleaving to herself with her ligament, cloven from herself where her shells part from each other at her discretion. A flicker of the light can change her mind from “closed” to “open.” And nothing is simply this or that with her. Both sides of a matter may occur to her in the same instant; a morsel both vile and delicious, a notion both perceptive and stupid in a single moment.
There are people who believe that a true mussel has but a single shell. One supposes that those people consider themselves specimens of a class of which a single arm hinged at midpoint by a neck or head is the defining characteristic. But who knows with such people! Concerning the ability to count in those who count, one cannot suppress a certain dubiousness. Rarely can they come to any agreement about anything even amongst themselves, and yet they cannot countenance the notion of a single being simultaneously presenting two divergent faces to the world. Unlike those of your typical marine mussel, the dual faces of an Epioblasma are indeed, in form and contour, different from each other, for each face experiences riverine life in its own way; marked by history in its own way, each face expresses an outlook of its very own.
Nevertheless: “Nice people don’t live falsely and don’t have doubles.” So they say. They say it’s “out of ingratitude” that mussels like her are “contrary on purpose”: what this female calls her singular dialectical consciousness or even “paradoxicalism” is simply her inability to make up her mind as a consequence of her mean and wicked disdain for what’s actually important. Instead: this absurd indulgence in lofty questions.
Not that she was hated universally. Only “normal” mussels biliously resented the “retort” she flung, at society and all that’s natural, in the form of her lofty question: what does it mean to live?
But perhaps you’re one of those humans who thinks only humans think. Therefore, if I, your narrator, propose a shellfish who’s obsessed with lofty questions, you think I’m mistaking a shellfish for a human and even doing it on purpose. And if I, your narrator, happen to be just such an inquisitive shellfish, you’ll discount everything I’m saying, just because. One hopes you’re not a stick-in-the-mud when it comes to reckoning who counts.
In the days before the dam and its vile corollaries walled off every hope of escape and started killing people (lots at once and then in slower agonies), our philosophy-prone mussel refused to part her shells just because everyone was doing it. To the rare critical thinkers, the argument wielded against her was known as Historical Specimenism.
It went like this. History proceeds, things happen to you and you participate in things happening, only insofar as you’re a specimen of your species. This isn’t only right and good but historically and even biologically inevitable: you’re a sample, a quantity; your life is a function of your species; everything you do and think is for the sustenance and perpetuation of the species. It boils down to mathematics. This is the law that originates and sustains life.
But if her shells’ remaining closed to waterborne male gametes was inevitable, then she was no more than “blamelessly to blame.” With mockery she reproached “mathematics,” their reductive economics, their “life is an algebraic multiplication operation.” And had the others been alive today, she’d have demonstrated the absurdity that Historical Specimenism revealed itself to be when driven to its logical extremes.
The others aren’t alive. She cannot say she minds, devoted as she is to contemplation. Besides the meaning of life, she has her shells to contemplate, their pearlescent private insides, which she builds and paints herself. She also, before dining, examines every particle, the benthic and planktonic; separates delectables from microplastic and so on; wraps up the inedible for putting out with the compost. In such purifying capacity, she’s a “liver of the river” but just a “sliver” because really all bivalves together . . . The deaths of many mussels entail the “liver’s” “sickness.” (It’s a bad witticism, “liver of the river,” as though mistaking a river for a human with an automatic ingestion-filtration system. But I shan’t retract the witticism, I don’t want to.) Sorting particles is a skill wherein errors can be fatal. It’s all up to her little gills. With little gills she sorts, eats, and breathes, and if she hadn’t thought it through, those same little gills would’ve hauled about hundreds of babies. Once the kiddos grew too large, she’d have had to put them in someone else’s gills, by subterfuge or force causing congestion in some poor fish. And this was their “mathematics.” One supposes she’d have been “blamelessly to blame,” but she still thinks it’s a dirty trick. So she refused.
“We don’t even know where the living lives now, or what it is, or what it’s called!”
In winds and weeds, dragonflies’ ripples: stories wander. Rumor says the news came with overheated rain: that the mussel species tubercled-blossom pearly was extinct.
Aha! thought the survivor. Follow that nonsense to its logical extremes, what do you get? A healthy mussel alive and dead.
How so? Answer: If I’m but a quantity plugged into a species’ survivalist program, then the species is an assembly line of clones. Between one clone and another, there’s no difference. No extra quality qualifies a clone to determine whether or not the program is working, whether the species is indeed sustaining and perpetuating. Because each, by definition, is completely consumed by the labor of sustaining and perpetuating, we clones are categorically unable to take a broad view of this labor or its results. Therefore, according to Historical Specimenism, only someone outside the species can tell whether or not my species is extinct, can even count up how many of us there are, as indeed they could not do for their own kind! But (here the argument loops itself into knots) those who count are not the counted, who in consequence are miscounted. Humans, those who count, counted zero tubercled blossoms. Since to live is to be counted, our philosophical shellfish is dead. And she can assure you she’s very much alive.
How easy it was for them to get it wrong. For a terrestrial primate with dubious agendas to overlook somebody deep in contemplation, with golden shells burrowing in gold-brown sediment under sunlight-gilded water. But those who rush about with agendas and mathematics and on such “indisputable basis” pronounce that everyone is dead: these “active figures” possess limited vision. Accordingly, our heroine is either dead alive or isn’t the mussel that she is.
She isn’t lonely. Well, sometimes. She’s no objection to mosquitoes or immigrant “zebra” mussels. Sometimes she pines for terminally dead individuals. But not really. She doesn’t pine for the mass-production operation that was “the species.” Which wasn’t actually like that. It was, but not all. . . . In short, Historical Specimenism isn’t really how life goes.
You imagine a certain mussel, golden brown, small for her age, shut up in shells and lofty questions, neglecting to eat as much as others, ingesting fewer harmful particles, and not wasting energy on gametes. You look to such “immediate causes” to explain her. More mathematics! Less of this and more of that, therefore she lives. But that reasoning explains nothing. Others, less distracted, plugged better numbers into the formula for healthful life. Where did it get them? Life slips through the cracks in reason. As she, underwater, under sediment, listening to the world through the intermittent gap which sometimes she doesn’t permit to form between her shells, burrowing instead into her thoughts, carries on slipping through the faults in preconceived ideas of life. She’s too bivalve to pronounce upon life’s meaning. But that very quality of undamming, in her own two-faced way, has to do with living living. Life slips through cracks. That’s how it goes.
* * *
Well, so I’m a human. “It’s a burden for us even to be men,” wrote Dostoevsky. “We’re ashamed of it, we consider it a disgrace.” He didn’t mean it as I mean it: we’re a disgrace because we bring suffering and extinction upon quiet little strangers like pearly mussels. He meant that “normal” humans of the sort that are good at life “don’t even know where the living lives or what it is.” And so the highly abnormal human in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground refuses to let “normal” preconceptions set the terms of his life. Not that he himself decides on any terms. He is a “paradoxicalist.” His idea of living is . . . ellipses. He exists in a state of unrelenting anxiety and extreme bile at the merciless mercy of contingency. And lives a truer living than anyone who deceives themselves with “gingerbread” theories of life’s lawful orderliness.
And so these maybe-extinct mussels? What’s that dead Russian done to merit a place in the Tubercled-Blossom Pearly Mussel Memorial Library of Hope? Answer: resonate. In my efforts to hang onto hope for maybe-not-extinct mussels by scribbling in their honor, resonances from Underground slip through. Maybe they’re extinct, who knows. If all those mussels really are as dead as Dostoevsky, my scribbles strain to feel them and him through the same cracks. If they’re not extinct, contrary to official pronouncements, then though Dostoevsky never knew a tubercled blossom, he understood them better than anyone who actually knew of their existence. For that man stood before a firing squad. Until the ultimate moment, when the Tsar commuted the death sentence, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky experienced, eye to eye with imperial rifles, the process of his own extinguishing; he stood at the threshold of extinction, looking it in the face. He also didn’t understand a thing: no one tore him from himself to turn his pearly skeleton into waistcoat buttons. They withdrew him from the threshold and sent him to hard labor in Siberia, dead alive.
A political prisoner among violent criminals, Dostoevsky observed what he’d call “paradoxicalism”: a man who conducted himself “decently and tactfully” would in an instant turn and “put the knife to you, without wincing, without remorse,” and Dostoevsky was surrounded by such people, such bivalvular personalities. In all his books yet to be born, he took up and tarried with the extreme contradictions at the very foundations of human consciousness and conduct. The man from Underground, Golyadkin The Double, Raskolnikov, the Karamazovs, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova indulge and suffer to the fullest the inborn multiplicity that drives them from within and even shapes their outward appearances.
And this is the main thing: after his release from prison, Dostoevsky took to heart, took into that throbbing place whence he would labor to bring forth his novels, the private complexities of the prisoners; those people who, according to those who count, forfeited their right to count as people. He invited them in, the uncounted. Even after his release, instead of distancing himself from them, he continued drinking in, through memories traumatic and maddening, the essential instability of the uncounted; and far from writing it off as pathological, he undertook to discover and express its ubiquity. Under the influence of the written off, the dead alive, Dostoevsky wove his stories, stained and twisted his semantics, and gave life to nonextant creatures. His entire literary process took form under the influence of hermetic strangers from a realm sealed off and left to rot behind a dam.
That pungent influence, seeping through cracks, even changed the way he thought about his language. Whereas his early stories, Poor Folk and so on, were legitimized by “beautiful and lofty” European overtones, beginning with Underground Dostoevsky’s literary language was suddenly fidgety and spiky, prone to scattering and tying itself in knots, flickering and about-facing . . . so that it wasn’t literary at all, although of course it was, for what else could it be, being far from conversational? It was even as if uncommunicative at times, when for example it seemed unable to settle on a point. But language that cannot communicate isn’t language! Under the influence of the bivalvular uncounted, Dostoevsky’s writing became a subversive element of language and literary forms.
Who counts for less for those who count than a shellfish? A shellfish that’s either extinct or, as if doubly undergrounded, making itself invisible under underwater sediments and thereby useless and presumed nonexistent. Scribbling not just at them or for them but with . . . mussels after Dostoevsky after Siberia, that is, under their influence; that is, writing under the influence of shellfish could be just the same confusing, vacillating, self-undermining, and overall subversive effort as Dostoevsky’s with his memories of thrown-away people. Well, and so how may a dead alive shellfish challenge literary and linguistic forms?
Answer: the effort is receptive. Creative too but also and very much receptive. On my part, that is, your narrator’s. The little pearly mussel who may be dead but who’ll sit in your hand if she’s alive, with her shells resolutely clenching together, is invited to slip through the cracks in my reality, presence, and consciousness. And so I’m cloven too, should I succeed, shot through with wisps and shattered echoes of a mussel I’ve never met; the slippage happening in dreams, imaginings, speculations, creations which themselves may be uncounted, to tweak and twist my language, to salt and stain my perspectives from within. From within issues the influence invited from without. As in a séance but not really. The inward efforts meet the outer, vanquished potentialities in energetic resonance . . . as when the combined energies of the medium and the invisible inspire levitation in furniture.
Eh, we go too far. The mussels live, I hope. Even so, as a terrestrial animal I’m as foreign to them as extraterrestrials are to me. The distance between us is absolute and must be respected as the distance between us and Dostoevsky must be respected. The main thing is, mathematics cannot help us here. We know from that hopeless fellow Underground: “Statistical figures and scientifico-economic formulas” or murderous dissections cannot explain musselhood, mussels’ desires, mussel-cular living, any more than they can explain the ubiquitous paradoxicalist human. “Statistical figures and scientifico-economic formulas” cannot predict where mussels are likely to thrive under present and future conditions (if thriving is to be done anywhere under present and future ecosystemic conditions) any more than they can ensure “new economic relations [arising between humans] quite ready-made, and also calculated with mathematical precision,” because desires and what life means cannot, for the fundamentally contradictory animal that is the bivalve and is equally the human, be calculated with any reliability at all.
Tubercled blossoms are being declared extinct precisely because there are no figures that can account for their presence or absence without making some assumption on the grounds of a lack of figures! The only evidence for their extinction is an absence of evidence for either their extinction or any other possibility. For this reason, the little golden darlings receive a death sentence. Because nobody who counts has scientific-officially counted any tubercled-blossom pearly mussels since 1969, the species is being written off, “delisted,” scratched from the official “Endangered Species List.” Who’ll bother looking for them now? There’s no point in doing anything for their sake anymore—for example, protecting what remains of their habitat. Having not counted to begin with, they’ll be doubly discounted, even doubly doubly discounted when delisted. And then they may indeed become extinct.
Hope? Never. Maybe. If Dostoevsky can create, from nothing but the vapors of complicated convicts’ irrational influences, a nonexistent “underground man” who can’t make up his mind about a single thing but whom readers still desire to meet and to consider long after the extinction of his creator, then there’s hope. Why shouldn’t writing under the influence of one bivalve bestir feelings equally irrepressible for another, who mightn’t be dead after all? But, then again, thinking this “underground man” under the influence of underwater mussels or vice versa undermines any specifically humanist intentions that Dostoevsky may have harbored. Maybe you think that’s wicked.
Mandy-Suzanne Wong, a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays, is the author of The Box (Graywolf, 2023); Awabi (Digging Press, 2022); Drafts of a Suicide Note (Regal, 2019), a Foreword INDIES literary-fiction finalist; and Listen, We All Bleed (New Rivers, 2021), a PEN/Galbraith-nominated essay collection.
