nulla. Waste of Time
A hole is defined by the space left of what’s removed. For instance: earth or flesh removed (the earth’s crust being pocked; the body’s skin being wounded). The removed must bear a sign—usually in the outline of the remaining dirt or flesh—that a uniformity or homogeneity had, indeed, once existed.
Its English homophone bears an entertaining relationship; “hole” is not quite the opposite of “whole," but their connotations spin into competing and contradictory meanings. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the word “holistic”—where a whole and its parts are regarded as essential to understanding both the whole and the parts. None of these words—hole, whole, and holism—preclude one another, and each one is spawned from a different etymological root.
In relation to the root’s priority, the hole is “beyond-waste” (it cannot be waste, it can only have the capacity for waste). To enter one with a prerogative (to “get at that root”) is an attempt to move beyond the waste within the waste. In this way, to think harder about the hole, or be with it longer, is a beyond-waste of time. Like all waste, it is where the evidence of us and of all animals is most emphasized.
I. Entrance to Hell
At first it does seem that Dante is corralled toward the deep entrance to hell by a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf in the Inferno. But the true entrance is likely much more immediate, as the “right road [was] lost” in only the second line of the poem. And while the employment of Virgil is the invocation of epic myth (which is the invocation of blood and land; i.e. “roots”), to be guided “through an eternal place” (line 90) called “hell” would feel, at the very least and to many people, like a waste of their time.
This is how holes work. Their entrances—just like their dimensions and limits—are not easy to separate from conscious or unconscious situations. “Experience of the abyss lies inside and outside the abyss,” writes Édouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation. There are edges of hell we might never directly encounter, but this does not mean they do not affect us. Moreover, upon acknowledging such an encounter—that is, just becoming viscerally aware that an entrance to hell does exist—there is no turning back. And who are we to predict where that visceral awareness—in the form of a physical hole; in the form of the word “hole”—might meet us?
It may be that any and all holes hold the potential of being the Inferno. Holes, more broadly, hold the potential to reveal—or keep submerged—everything. And everything is not good; everything is all that we cannot know (which is to say, we cannot control). Daily routines spin into compulsions known as politics, and politics feed and forge the fluctuating distinctions between the unknown and the misunderstood—and this space, between the unknown and the misunderstood, is how I care about holes.
In the realm of symbolism, the hole is symbolic; but where the symbol may start is not unlike where the entrance to hell truly begins.
I care about Hiroko Oyamada’s novella The Hole. In it, the protagonist, Asa, encounters rapid interpersonal change in her life after falling into a hole almost halfway through the story. She’s lead there by a mysterious creature and encounters characters before and after the experience that are intimate to her reality yet faraway/nonexistent to her in-laws. The nature of the story is surreal and uncanny, and the titular, organizing principle ultimately left me wondering what it is about holes in literature that are so simultaneously ordinary, powerful, and potentially necessary to arcs and characters.
Like Dante, she imagines a right road lost; and all lost people, to echo Tolstoy, are lost in their own way. Suddenly it seems that to be human—to be any kind of animal that feeds, procreates, and becomes food—is to be a politicized hole.
II. “340” by Emily Dickinson [1st stanza]
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, And Mourners to and fro Kept treading - treading - till it seemed That Sense was breaking through -
III. The Negative
In Stand & Deliver, Jaime Escalante (played by Edward James Olmos) explains how negative numbers work: “you dig a hole and the hole now has a negative amount of dirt.”
So this negative place becomes a primary place of being, a place of example, a place dealt with daily, begrudgingly, painfully, fatally. It is as conceptual as it is pragmatic; it is as addictive as it is exhausting. This negative space matters so much, we turn away from it. We want the hole to be not-a-hole. Holes are dangerous; they’re evidence; they’re a hazard; they’re a job incomplete; they’re pointless. A preference for efficient flatness presents itself—no pocks; no pits; no dimples; no orifices; no secret beginnings. But then it quickly seems that this flat place is not a real place, and we turn back to the hole; we imagine what it might be good for, how holes are even older than us; we feel that the hole is the beginning and the end, so we make them, deal with them, play with them in the meantime to find peace, to find strength, to find more, to find the truth.
IV. Hollow
The hole is always something else; it is whatever we need it to be—and our definitions of its mutations do nothing to fill it completely. Infinite and quiet junctures, lurking as animal dugouts, as spontaneous graves in no-mans-lands and distinguished cemeteries, fateful comeuppances, and cruel and prolonged constraints. This power of the hole lies entirely outside of its label; its ability to rupture one’s direction happens at such a simple intensity, for what happens in the hole will never stay in it forever, even when a creature has devoted its entire life to its construction and maintenance.1
Its a physical as well as psychological interruption of humanity’s flat chaos (where kinds of chaos are coded as “normal”), where the thought swelling into language does not flood so scientifically; where a doomsday prepper’s profitability lies in their role as simultaneous reality-TV spectacle and, in the feverish individuality of “rational” consumer behavior, a multi-billion-dollar-a-year-and-growing sectarianism.
In this context, subterranean shelters are not holes; they are the domestication of catastrophe; they are the anti-hole.
V. Hallow
Asa—the protagonist of The Hole—does not fear the end of the world. I wouldn’t say she fears anything, yet she is not fearless. A cautious wanderer, she is not removed from the benefits of a routine lifestyle. But the steady slippage between her unsettled appetite for humble unknowns and the normalcy of a predictably gendered marriage form the rhetorical abyss of this story.
In the first chapter of the book, she thinks “There was a time when I would have wanted to know what [my husband] was up to, but not anymore. As long as he wasn’t doing anything sexual or criminal, there was no need for me to get involved.” From the very beginning of the story, upon describing the context of their move to the countryside, Asa’s observations confuse the logic of trust and loneliness. Is the sexual/criminal ultimatum of involvement reasonable? Is this evidence of love or detachment?
This kind of ambiguity does exist without the physical or symbolic presence of a hole. But the hole’s appearance quickly leverages negative, or removed, space in all its forms. Ambiguity shifts into non-existence, where non-existence chases existence, sparking unpredictable forces of faith and nature.
In Douglas Kearney’s poem “JESUS [BRER RABBIT] FALLS THE THIRD TIME. Weakened almost to the point of death, Jesus [Brer Rabbit] falls a third time,” the rhetorical hole starts in the title, as Brer Rabbit replaces the negated presence of Jesus, wherein African-American folklore and the presence of the logic of an eternal figure of Christ—where the colonial domination of Christian thought in the Americas both justified the enslavement of African people and became an enduring foundation for the Black Church—are endlessly at play. And where do the trickster and the savior play but in a crucifixion wound; in a hole:
was there a hole in His Hand
I’d dive in and He would go in after me
and out the other side
and I’d go back in His palm and He’d
dive into Himself and out
as I’m in again and He
and I’d be the hell out and in
He’d be in then out as He
got the hang of it and roll away,
turning in the circle that’s Himself
of Himself. amen.
The hole is simultaneously a mutation and a holding pattern. However innocent, divine or erotic, it is a place where the fact of movement can never fully (safely, maybe) disassociate from its stasis.
VI. “340” by Emily Dickinson [2nd stanza]
And when they all were seated, A Service, like a Drum - Kept beating - beating - till I thought My mind was going numb -
VII. Chest Deep
Asa is working through her stasis,2 a stasis completely determined by her move from the city with her husband to the Japanese countryside, where she is quietly expected to be, to appreciate even, her new role as a dutiful housewife. She regularly remarks on her increasingly infantilized state, wandering unemployed and alone in her new town while her husband is at work. Of course, Asa finds this challenging—and though the story invokes the trope of an autonomous working woman who trades some of her independence for ascending financial class through the circumstances of her marriage, her challenge is a more nuanced tangle of familial resistance. From Asa’s perspective, it’s never quite clear where the locus of resistance to her circumstances resides—is it her subtle resistance of her in-laws, or her in-laws subtle resistance of her?
The hole (the awareness of what we aren’t aware of [yet]), in its narrative priority and regardless of its size (e.g. a gunshot wound being much smaller than a freshly dug grave), bends time and space, much in the way we speak of the supermassive black holes throughout the cosmos. In a constellation of interpersonal and physical ephemera, Asa’s hole (similar to Jesus’ Brer Rabbit’s), is a force of amplification—and to find Asa describing to her husband that she did physically fall into a chest deep hole, juxtaposed against her interior pondering of his habits at work, of whether or not he likes her cooking, of hypothetical misgivings of being an inferior house-wife, all quietly blares compartmentalization, of a feeling of holes in an intimacy exposed to us for its utility and efficiency. Emerged from the physical hole, her burrowing continues toward the nowhere of obligations.3
Moments like this in the story are a validation of interpersonal juxtapositions that are not meant to “fit”. To admit to one’s constant, unutterable and interior streams of concept and observation can be very unattractive; it’s anti-social; it very rarely “fits” the situation. So too can it be incredibly poetic; it’s no wonder why this very dynamic is enchanting in written narrative, especially in comedy and horror (and while this story is neither of those, its surreality is achieved by an alternative fermentation of both—for instance: an eternally smiling, speechless grandpa watering his lawn all day as Asa experiences her new uncanny home can be easily teased into horrific foreshadowing or absurd comedic repetition; in this case, this grandpa holds all possible connotations without overdetermining a contrived secret or an enduring meaninglessness).
To simultaneously keep her wandering interior movements covered and briefly disclose an experience with an earthly mirror of her psycho-emotional state—that is: an absence; a creeping void—is an incredible depiction of the dual nature of vulnerability and opacity (as worrying over her dependencies also drives her intuitive balancing between the spoken and the unspoken). Out of The Hole emerges a latticework of omissions obliged by the utility of intimacy.
VIII. “340” by Emily Dickinson [3rd stanza]
And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space - began to toll,
IX. Revelations
Similar to holes, the limits of an abyss are never fully defined. There’s always more unknown, even if (in fact, especially if) the bottom of the abyss is reached. The amplification of the ultimate question transcends the situation—the question being: why?
Enter Joseph Campbell’s monomyth: the hero’s journey. If one is a storied hero, then a history of torment and enslavement and cruelty all meant at least one thing: that this person, the hero, was destined to transcend the torment, enslavement, and cruelty. The paradigm of the hero assumes that the hole/the abyss is where authentic capital/power is forged; as this type of monomythic hero, one is nothing without the revelation bestowed by the abyss. And good heroes do not seek their abysses and their revelations within their narrative—the hero must initially reject the abyss: this is their only way to prove their heroic fate is larger than their daily, self-involved desires of the known world. If the tests of circumstance and accidents slowly amplifying the hero’s abilities are replaced by logical preparations and abundant privileges, the hero does not become the most authentic hero.
More importantly, without this type of hero, a dominant language of inspiration does not feel familiar within the psychological determinations of Western/Christian/patriarchal capitalism. This is in large part why the most important function of the hero’s journey is to purify inspiration for the audience. And the more excessive the temptations and challenges, the more earned the transformation and atonement of the hero (and, thus, the audience).
And while Asa’s hole does appear to be a kind of portal to revelations in this story, it does not cleanse Asa or clarify her situation, as does, say, the mysterious empty well for Toru Okada in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.4
Outside of the structure of something like the monomyth, a “revelation” and a “memory” are very difficult to disconnect; at a certain point, it isn’t quite clear which one happens first. Perhaps it is in large part our physical and emotional locations (or depths) that let us call these interior arrivals “memories” and “revelations." Either way, the hole is there whether we fall into it or not; whether a memory is revealed or revelation is remembered. Perhaps the most important part about holes is that: when we are in the hole, we are not in the hole.
X. Violins & Guitars
Where Toru’s purposeful time in his hole motivates him even more to rescue his missing wife, Asa’s hole eludes monomythic inspiration. Upon learning more about the creature that lead her to the hole, she returns to it, to face it, to show herself that it was, in fact, just a hole. But then, something horrifying happens: she finds a field teeming with children, popping in and out of holes like whack-a-moles.5
This moment is as joyous as it is terrifying. It seems that the more these children show up in the story, the less explanation there is for Asa. The children are like holes that laugh and poke at her; holes reminding her that she is a hole too.
That we begin reading this story poised to get an answer at some point is not Oyamada’s concern. Yet what her prose and her narrative turns elide are my typical conditions of consumption—I am not asking what Asa has overcome; I am not asking why these children fester here; I am not asking why her mysterious brother-in-law is so removed from the rest of her in-laws; I am not asking why the mysterious black animal roams so freely and somewhat conspicuously. The mundane answers to these questions are written clearly in the story, yet it is that this very clarity of description and narrative progression produces the kind of hole that violins and guitars use to amplify their chords and discords alike.6
Oyamada does not need to rely on the word “fragment” to show that nothing is singular in The Hole. Instead, the depiction of Asa’s home-searching invites the reader to be without a reason—in other words: to be a strand within the narrative-braiding of spiritual availability and physical spontaneity. So the peace Asa makes with her new home depends upon a constant and regular plurality of being.
XI. “340” by Emily Dickinson [4th stanza]
As all the Heavens were a Bell, And Being, but an Ear, And I, and Silence, some strange Race, Wrecked, solitary, here -
XII. The Positive
To fall into a hole might be reasonably regarded as a childish predicament, regardless of how old one is. To fall into one by accident as opposed to digging one on purpose is akin to having one’s mind opened rather than opening one’s own mind.
By the end of The Hole, after a funeral, Asa is embraced by the matriarch of the family and finishes her interpersonal sojourn by getting a job at a convenience store. The conclusion to her quest—which also casts doubt on her own sense of shared-reality with the town—includes her saying: “I saw no animals, no holes, no children.” Is Asa’s mind closed now? Is everything flat now?
As a whole, Oyamada’s novella depicts a wild isolation, a spectrum of shelter-to-prison that changes as Asa changes. I am transfixed by The Hole’s folk, contrapuntal circumstances: the life of mysterious animals are crucial to humanity’s own accidental self-discoveries. I do not preach a gospel of win-win, but I do see in more than one place that mysteries of the undomesticated ask us to feel through the world and our own circumstances in divergent ways.
XIII. A Cosmic Cylinder
In Ted Chiang’s short story "Tower of Babylon,” a man named Hillalum is enlisted to “dig through the vault of heaven.” Scaling a tower that takes a full month and a half to climb, he finally encounters—in the place of a figure recognizable as Yahweh or an ethereal abyss—a deluge bursting through the heavenward mine; struggling to survive his total submersion in the water, he suddenly emerges from a cave; there, nervous to meet Yahweh, he finds a world totally earthly, totally familiar, with the revelation of the relationship of the world and the heavens being a cosmic cylinder—where the physical place is the same, but Hillalum’s sense of sameness is totally transformed.
XIV. “340” by Emily Dickinson [5th stanza]
And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down - And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing - then -
Kafka’s “The Burrow” begins:
“I have completed the construction of my burrow and it seems to be successful. All that can be seen from outside is a big hole; that, however, really leads nowhere; if you take a few steps you strike against natural firm rock. I can make no boast of having contrived this ruse intentionally; it is simply the remains of one of my many abortive building attempts, but finally it seemed to me advisable to leave this one hole without filling it in. True, some ruses are so subtle that they defeat themselves, I know that better than anyone, and it is certainly a risk to draw attention by this hole to the fact that there may be something in the vicinity worth inquiring into. But you do not know me if you think I am afraid, or that I built my burrow simply out of fear.”
Making a home of the interruption—as the essence of a hole is its power to interrupt a flat cycle or routine—projects Interruption onto everything. The potential for accident—especially the accidental hole (and, in Kafka’s burrowor’s case, the unknown neighbor’s hole)—becomes luscious paranoia: a fear of the death of the individual that this individual translates as the end of the entire world.
“I had to work. Even if I couldn’t find a job, I had to do something. My body was getting heavier with every passing day. Not that I was gaining weight. On the contrary. But I could barely move. It was as if every muscle and joint, every cell in my body, was stuck. Putting it that way makes it sound like I was blaming my body, like it was beyond my control. I was slipping, and it was completely my fault. It was only a matter of time before Grandpa or Muneaki or Tomiko tore me apart for being so lazy. And they’d be right. Except—would any of them ever say something like that to my face?” (Oyamada)
“—and I fell into a hole.” “A hole?” He reached for the pickled cucumber and tossed it in his mouth with the ketchup-covered rice, then finally chewed a few times. I listened to the crunch. I’d already eaten my dinner. I didn’t make an omelet for myself. I just had some meat and a single egg—sunny-side up—over a bowl of rice. Before we moved, my husband never came home this late. I was always working overtime, too, so we’d eat together—even if it was some reheated curry of stir-fry. I never had the energy to go to the supermarket after a long day at work, so we hardly ever had vegetables. We had a few frozen things that we could heat up—fried rice and things like that. Now I never bought anything premade. I made our meals from scratch. This was far better for us, both financially and nutritionally. At the same time, I’d pass out from hunger if I tried to wait for my husband to come home. It’s not like eating together meant that much to me, but when you make dinner twice a day, one of those meals is going to lack heart. Miso soup is best when it’s fresh. Anything pickled is going to get soggy eventually. Fried food mutates into something else when you reheat it. “How deep was it?” “Up to my chest. A little deeper, maybe.” “No way.” You can’t survive on boiled pork or meat and potatoes.” (Oyamada)
Toru states that “The best way to think about reality, I had decided, was to get as far away from it as possible—a place like the bottom of a well.”
And Toru’s acts of heroism are, largely, thinking and remembering. Upon descending into the well for the first time, Toru notes that “…in this darkness, with its strange sense of significance, my memories began to take on a power they had never had before. The fragmentary images they called up inside me were mysteriously vivid in every detail, to the point where I felt I could grasp them in my hands. I closed my eyes and brought back the time eight years earlier when I had first met Kumiko.”
“We’re looking for a hole. Have you guys seen one?” “A hole?” the kids repeated in unison as they looked at each other. “This place is full of holes! They’re everywhere.” (…) And there really were. Some were narrow and others were wide; some were shallow and others were deep. There were holes partly covered with grass, almost like traps, and narrower ones that looked as if they’d been scooped out with some sort of tool. One hole was brimming with dirty water, trembling. Bugs were hatching on the surface. Children popped up all around me, wriggling out of their holes.” (Oyamada)
“I could see violence, hear consolations. Reconciliations. Pain and anger dissolving in a deafening chorus of rock, paper, scissors. What was going on? Where had all these children come from?” (Oyamada)