6. Her Triumph

Celebrating a friend’s PhD defence, and thinking about the confederation of souls.

Last month, my friend Aalia passed her viva (a.k.a. PhD defence) and earned her DPhil in Law.

Maybe because I don’t like Taylor Swift, I’ve always reflexively shuddered in disgust at any idea resembling the Eras Tour, wherein someone (with a Nero-like disposition! fiddling while Rome burns!) makes other people watch as she celebrates her past selves in a series of self-indulgent displays, all glossed over with a generous sheen of fluorescent, secondary-coloured artifice. But Aalia’s post-viva celebration was at a small pub around the corner from my house, and while watching a small, rotating cast of her friends gather for drinks, I remembered that everyone has their own version of an ‘eras’ celebration. They may not be for show, but they are revealing. At all the birthday parties, bat mitzvahs, and sweet sixteens from my American childhood, I was treated to the same surprise: each time I went into the event knowing only the friend who’d invited me, only to discover once I got there that this friend also belonged to other worlds about which I knew nothing. Here were her gymnastics team/orchestra/French club friends; over there her middle school/primary school/kindergarten playmates; at the next table her synagogue/church/temple friends; and of course her siblings/cousins/nephews…

I always came away with a newfound, more fleshed-out understanding of who this person was, and who I was in relation to them. It always turns out that your friendship is just a two-dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional shape. You also get treated to the strange fact that a person is not, apparently, a being unto themselves, but an adaptive thing whose outlines change with their environment. I’m sure I behave differently toward different people in my life, but it’s such a fluid change that I almost never notice myself modulating. But I distinctly remember, for example, the first time I heard my mother’s Phone Voice: sweeter, more yielding, and even pitched slightly upward, compared to how she normally spoke to us kids. I was surprised because that voice implied a whole person who was totally different to the woman I knew. It suggested that there was more to her than what I’d till then assumed was a comprehensive conception of Mom.

A two-dimensional slice of a higher-dimensional shape. (Image generated by Craiyon AI using the semi-gibberish prompt: ‘wie passt man sich neuen Technologien an? Mond Inklusion Mitochondrien verkleben und kommen nicht vorwärts. Rosa camel schwarz black sun effekt ein Punkt im Bild vor aufgerissener weißen überblendung bitte zeichne mir das Copy’)

At Aalia’s celebration, I got glimpses of not only her other selves but also her friends from various eras interacting in amusing combinations. During one sweet moment, her new boyfriend and her platonic flatmate in London split a pizza as they compared notes on how best they’d learned to care of her when she was ill or sad. At the other end of the table, my best friend Ravindra was asking one of Aalia’s friends from the philosophy department question after question about how animals perceive pain. Aalia’s friend from the Oxford Union was laughing with a friend from her former residential hall. One knew her as the convicted, eloquent lawyer who gave a political speech in front of the entire debate society; the other had seen her go, in seconds, from lolling on a futon at a Friday girls’ night in, to playing mother hen to some distressed undergrads who lived across the hall.

Aalia — the form of Aalia I knew — and I were introduced by our mutual acquaintance Ravindra nearly four years ago, when we were both in the early stages of our PhDs. Ravindra actually gathered four of us in total, and we quickly formed the Wild Geese, a seminal poetry group I’ve written about elsewhere. The group has actually gone through many iterations. Initially, we were going to host a campus radio show together. When it became clear that we couldn’t handle the organisation required, we turned our meetings into a series of themed evenings: dinner followed by poetry recitations on a given subject, like Love, Hope, Winter…Finally, we settled on the lowest-energy conformation of the group, a collective whose raison d'être was beauty appreciation and emotional nourishment. We affirmed our stated purpose by going on radical ‘beauty appreciation’ adventures like hiking in the woods, dancing at a club in London or college party in Oxford, pulling all-nighters working together in one of our rooms, having movie nights (sometimes in the presence of a certain cantankerous cat I occasionally cat-sitted), and going to the darkest place we could find in Oxford to hunt for aurora borealis. (We found it, and watched the miraculous streaks of light from Port Meadow until dawn.) The beauty of our adventures were always amplified by food — pan-fried fish in mustard oil; idli sambar; paneer makhani; 麻酱面 (má jiàng miàn) — and, of course, poetry.

Poetry really did amplify the harmonics of our experiences, and I’m not just saying that. I have one especially vivid memory of the night the Wild Geese stayed up late to smoke a joint on the bank of an icy pond. We sat in the grass listening to night and water sounds while a full moon beamed white light into the water, and Priya picked this moment to read out loud from the works of possibly one of the world’s most romantic poets, Rainer Maria Rilke.

‘Let this darkness be a bell tower/and you the bell,’ she read, while the air resonated with the sound of two actual geese who’d started loudly and rhythmically fucking, across the pond from us.

‘What is it like, such intensity of pain?’ Priya choked out, raising her voice. ‘If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.’¹

‘What do you think they’re saying?’ I shouted over the sound of honking and splashing.

‘Harder, harder…’ suggested Ravindra, fake-moaning and thrusting his hips.

‘Yeah, and then…flappier, flappier!’ crowed Aalia, and we all dissolved into peals of laughter.

I think what has kept the Wild Geese together is simple: we are all artists in our souls. I’m not here to attempt a universal definition of an artist, but only to defend my abstract feelings the same way Potter Stewart, the US Supreme Court Justice, once defended what constitutes hard-core porn: ‘I know it when I see it.’² I think what makes someone an artist is a matter of one’s vision: not only an innate sensitivity to details but also an attraction to intensity of experience, whether blissful or painful. And on top of all this, an annoying, irrepressible habit of making abstract leaps from physical, tangible things to the realm of larger concepts or connected ideas. This way of thinking is annoying precisely because it doesn’t turn off, even when it makes life harder. It’s anathema to productivity, especially in terms of allowing you to meet basic unromantic deadlines or make practical decisions, e.g., Where should I live? What jobs should I apply for? What should we order at this restaurant? What tasks should I prioritise today? This tendency to attribute significance beyond the literal, to everything, has also caused all of us to struggle mightily in our PhD work. So we’ve also bonded from being verbally whipped by our supervisors: ‘Why can’t you get this [objectively very simple task] done?!’

Although our artistic impulses take different, overlapping forms, Aalia is the only one of us who writes poetry. She writes them in every language she speaks (English and Hindi), and, no matter the the language, the poems erupt from the same source, some gurgling pit within all artists that causes them immense discomfort until they give their art a place outside of themselves to live. This is fine, a blessing, even, until the gurgling starts up when you’re supposed to be doing something else. I think this problem is a familiar one to all of us who are trying to do multiple things at once, even if the brewing discomfort isn’t an artistic desire (entrepreneurial impulses, for instance, or athletics, or language-learning…). But in these circumstances we all face the same choice: answer the call, or somehow find a way to ignore or defer your desire.

I suspect that ignoring/deferring your impulse is always the harder thing.

I’m proud of Aalia because she has overcome so much in these PhD years: I feel as if I’ve really witnessed the development of a full person. Thanks to a confluence of academic, professional, and personal pressure, or maybe just whatever whimsical higher power just decides it’s time for the weight of everything to come bearing down on a person at once, Oxford stripped her of something and replaced it with an anxiety that peaked midway through her PhD and never subsided. To give a representative picture of her travails, this was Aalia’s 2024: During a prolonged physical illness (3-6 months of low-grade malaise that every so often morphed into random fevers and body aches), Aalia crammed for 13 entrance exams she was expected to take on 2 months’ notice. After a short stint in Copenhagen, she moved from relatively provincial Oxford to the seething metropolis of London. She was writing the final chapter of her PhD thesis and settling into her new job at the same time, thinking she would work on both simultaneously until the end of the year, only to be informed that she would have to submit her thesis three months earlier than expected in order not to lose her visa. Her new job was an entry-level position at a prestigious law firm, working punishing hours, in a field she wasn’t yet familiar with. At the same time, she was dating with mixed success, trying to find someone selfless yet ambitious, and as serious about family as she was. As an academic leaving academia, she had the same existential questions as anyone moving countries, switching careers, or leaving relationships: Did I do the right thing? Will this really lead to as much fulfilment as will make this decision worth it, in my own estimation? Will everyone understand? Will there be a way back if this current track doesn’t work out? And running the same daily gauntlet we are all familiar with: On the days when the voice inside you answers, no, no, no, and no — can you still carry on, holding out, with optimism, for the future?

Recently I keep coming back to that quote attributed to James Baldwin, the American writer: ‘The terrible thing about being a writer is that you don’t decide to become one, you discover that you are one.’³ Writer or not, I think Baldwin has pointed out the essential distinction between a career and a calling. Maybe a career is something you decide to be, but a calling is something you discover that you are?

I’m aware that a lot of distinctions (native vs. foreigner, science vs. humanities, etc.) are are not only false but also useless. (Falsity alone is sometimes ok: many models and stories are false but useful. And something that’s true but useless is ok too, especially if you think truth equals beauty, or if you subscribe to the Aristotelian notion that truth is a fundamental property of being.) But the distinction between a career and a calling feels important to me, because it’s adjacent to questions about the purpose of our lives. Aalia is a good ‘case study’ because I’ve always thought these two aspects of her life are pretty well demarcated. Her career is all the legal stuff: becoming a barrister, or a legal scholar at the nexus of intellectual property and human rights law, or wherever else her studies and practice take her. But her calling is the irrepressible artistic stuff: her unfinished work as a poet, a writer. One of these aspects of her person was chosen and the other wasn’t—it was just a gift and curse she discovered she had—and now she has to decide what to do with that discovery. And I am following her life with great interest because I want to know what she will ultimately decide.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s a virtue either to have or not-have a calling, nor do I think it’s particularly noble, if you have a calling, either to act or not-act on it. But it’s interesting to observe that, if you have a calling, even if you choose not to act on it, it has a way of leaking out the sides of your existence. (Even now, sitting at her desk in the law office, Aalia doodles little poems about the cats whose faces she can see pressed up against the windows in the building across the street.) It’s fine to live like that, and I suspect many people do. If you believe the American writer Annie Dillard when she says, ‘How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,’ then you are a poet as long as you keep writing poems.⁴ But I guess it feels different if you have ambition along this axis: if you want to become famous for your poetry, or if not famous then at least recognised — to have your identity as a poet be visible from the outside. Because then to ignore your calling is the spiritual equivalent of what a lot of conservative religions do to gay parishioners, telling them it’s ok to have gay thoughts so long as they don’t act on them. Inaction, in this case, is a denial of some fundamental aspect of your personhood! It will damage you to keep this desire suppressed!

I recently finished a riveting, gorgeous novel called Pereira Maintains, by the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi. In the book, this fat old newspaper editor (the eponymous Dr. Pereira) who has been crushed by life and now finds himself living a timid, folded-up existence, feels a stirring in his soul when he meets a couple of young revolutionaries fighting for a noble political cause. (The backdrop is 1930s Portugal, and the noble cause is anti-fascism.) Anyway, a key moment in the story is when Pereira sees a doctor ostensibly for physical treatment, but ends up getting some psychological/spiritual counselling as well. The doctor introduces Pereira to the idea that a person’s spirit isn’t necessarily an integrated whole, but rather a team of modular parts, a confederation of souls:

‘…whereas Dr. Ribot and Dr. Janet see the personality as a confederation of numerous souls, because within us we each have numerous souls, don’t you think, a confederation which agrees to put itself under the government of one ruling ego… What we think of as ourselves, our inward being, is only an effect, not a cause, and what’s more it is subject to the control of a ruling ego which has imposed its will on the confederation of souls, so in the case of another alter ego arising, one stronger and more powerful, this ego overthrows the first ruling ego, takes its place and acquires the chieftainship of the cohort of souls…”⁵

This idea isn’t new, and its analogies are everywhere in the natural world. For example, many animals are integrated wholes, but many plants are famously modular. If you, a human being, lopped off an arm, let’s say, and just left it like that, you might die: since your circulatory system is an integrated closed loop, by cutting it open you might bleed out, not to mention that your temperature regulation, immune responses, etc. etc. etc. would all go out of whack because an essential piece went missing. Whereas a houseplant is modular: you can pull off a whole complex organ, like a leaf, any time you want, and the rest will continue photosynthesising, and eventually it will even grow a new leaf. In fact sometimes, for instance if an insect has chewed through a leaf, it might even be a smarter idea for that plant to to cut off all nutrients to that leaf and just let it slough off, since it might take less energy to grow a new leaf than to try resuscitating all those damaged, necrotic cells. Thus the importance of understanding the structure of the system: is it integrated or modular? Must you invest in repairs (such as surgical reattachment), or can you shed a piece of yourself without consequence?

The interesting part, in Pereira, is what the doctor says next:

‘It may be, concluded Dr. Cardoso, that after slowly nibbling away in you some ruling ego is gaining the chieftainship of your confederation of souls, Dr. Pereira, and there’s nothing you can do about it except perhaps give it a helping hand whenever you get the chance.’⁶

If the soul is modular, you should ‘give it a helping hand’ whenever you sense that one aspect of the self is trying to take over. In other words, pluck off the leaf so as to sooner support the flourishing of the rest of the plant — you can always grow a new leaf. In some seasons of life it might be necessary for your career to take over, and in that case you should let your calling go, with the confidence that it will come back. But if you think your soul is integrated, then this approach will kill you. So far, in the first season after her PhD, Aalia’s career seems to have ‘gain[ed] the chieftainship of [her] confederation,’ and she is surviving. Her survival is evidence, however preliminary, that the soul might really be modular.

I am following the lives of all of my friends for this kind of existential reassurance. I am thinking of others like my friend Sandeep, a complexity scientist and budding game developer who recently called to tell me that he thinks he is made up of teams, a council of voices whose relative volumes he is adjusting according to their importance in a particular season; and like my friend Louise, who says she is going to write poetry first and study Russian lit afterwards, over the next ten years; and like my friend Samuel, the economist/lawyer/journalist/fiction writer who keeps all these mental tabs open at once, toggling among them in frenzy of experience. And of course I am thinking of myself. This is what Aalia’s triumph means to me, to us. We are, after Aalia, n= 2, 3, 4…We are the fleshy incarnation of the English poet John Donne’s famous meditation:

‘No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.’⁷

Integrated vs. modular organism each receiving an amputation, with varying consequences for survival. (Image created with BioRender)

My friends! Those I’ve named, and those I haven’t: we must keep living. Our persistence is the evidence that there is a stable third way for souls to be, besides integrated or fractured: modular. We must live with a sense of agency. When you feel a different ruling ego taking over, give it a helping hand.

A few weeks before her viva, I went to London for the weekend to sample Aalia’s new life. We did everything old friends do: took an ill-advised afternoon nap, then put on glittery makeup and matching purple outfits to see the glittery Christmas lights in Covent Garden. On Monday I woke up early to the sound of Aalia’s pump-up playlist as she got dressed for work. She emerged from her room in white tie-shirt with a frill running down the midline, tucked into relaxed-fit black dress pants, no trace of glitter. Elegant and sophisticated, one of a legion of young working women in the big city. Then she took a deep breath, stepped into the pre-dawn dark, and continued to live.

1. Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.

2. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964).

3. James Baldwin quote: https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/05/24/james-baldwin-life-magazine-1963/

4. Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. Harper & Row, 1989.

5. Tabucchi, Antonio. Pereira Maintains. Translated by Patrick Creagh, Canongate Books, 2010.

6. See fn. 5

7. Donne, John. Meditation XVII, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. 1624.