Marquette University Intimations Project

Lisa Gandolfi

It must start right there. In the back of my nose, behind my eye sockets. An unprecised, abysmal, unfathomable point in the middle of my brain, where all the neurons fire up their connections and a switch turns on. Then I know it’s time to write. No deadline, end date, pressure or amount of anxiety can turn my writing switch on, and, I must admit, it can become quite inconvenient at times. However, after years and years of listening to my switch, I now know that a good dose of music, a new book, a long car drive or a sunny day – in particular one of those when it is chilly outside, the sky is perfectly blue and cloudless, and when your skin gently warms up under the warm rays – can do the trick for me. Whenever I think about my writing process – which is often by questioning my own mental sanity – I get reminded of an ancient Greek word, which, translated into our alphabet, would be rhysmòs. Archilochus used it in a poetic fragment to define the rhythm (that is where the current word rhythm derives from) that regulates the human life and the universe alike, and that allows us to overcome struggles and difficult moments. Essentially, the rhysmòs works like a real-life buoy, always keeping us afloat in the deepest of waters and among the hardest of circumstances. Humans have the ability to forget, learn, internalize and to swim back up to the surface after lying in the depths for long periods of time. Sometimes our desperate need for oxygen pushes us to bounce back faster, while other times the pain is so intolerable that the journey back to the sun seems unfeasible. But we all learn. We already did. We learned how to cover our mouths and noses in public, we learned to interpret brows furrowing and eye corners turning upward, we learned how to pay more attention to people speaking behind masks muffling their breaths, and we learned not to sneeze too loudly in public, or “everyone will think you’re sick.” We learned that a window, a stretch of grass and a balcony are treasures that should never be underestimated. We learned to turn inwards, to turn to the countryside, to return calls from our parents. We learned that yes, viruses are viral, but TikTok recipes are even more so. We learned medical terminologies and lexicon that we would have otherwise brushed pass on a newspaper article, and we learned to carefully pick our sources among a myriad of alarmistic news. We learned to disconnect, and new ways to connect. We blew candles in front of a screen filled with the faces of our dears, and we learned how to suppress the urge to hug each other after months of distance. We learned superficiality, how to cross out shallow relationships and we found ourselves reaching out to friends whose voice was a distant memory. We rediscovered our childhood activities: board games, puzzles, watercolors, crafts. We tried filling the vacancies our new lives presented and interrogated ourselves on the subjectivity of time, how it expanded and contracted imperceptibly based on our schedules. We noticed the rhysmòs we had grown so used to: wake up, brush teeth, coffee, commute, work, rewind and repeat, and how during all that time, nature had had its own opposite and parallel rhysmòs. We learned to observe the blushing purple wisterias offering solace from the tepid sun, the ants’ imperturbable work ethic and their similarity to our old habits, and the temperamental Spring sky influencing our emotions. If there is anything that – willingly or not – we all learned, is that we have far less control on our lives than we think we do. We can plan schedules, carefully stuff syllabi with our own feelings, and compute spreadsheets for maximizing our productivity. But the rhysmòs always catches up to us, and promptly forces us to scrabble for oxygen.