Doldrums and dragons

Or the limits of tidy metaphors

Photo by Thomas Vimare on Unsplash

Do you know the origins of the phrase stuck in the doldrums? I’ll admit I didn’t, even when I casually used it in last week’s newsletter in relation to (of all things) non-league football.

Thank you to those who made it through my thoughts on Welcome To Wrexham by the way 🤦‍♀️ (as you may have heard, the Dragons only went and got themselves promoted last night). But you'll be relieved to know that it’s back to regular arts programming this week… and an etymological deep dive.

I always thought the doldrums was an odd bit of onomatopoeia that did what it said on the tin. To me the word sounds like dull and glum; the beat of a heart running slower than usual. What are the doldrums, after all, if not a downer you’re can't get out of for a while?

But it took a helpful reader (thank you!) to point out that they are actually a nautical phenomenon and, by extension, a pretty potent metaphor for life, pending.

Imagine you're sailing a boat across the Atlantic Ocean. Alongside running a marathon and watching the entire Lord of the Rings franchise, there are few feats I’m less likely to accomplish. But if I picture the hypothetical scene, it’s perilous - full of Hokusai-height waves and Titanic icebergs.

Not the silky smooth waters you can see in the video below. 

Yet these are the doldrums, and they’re potentially as treacherous as any high seas.

The science, as far as I can grasp it, is this: on either side of the equator is a belt of around five degrees latitude called the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (or ITCZ, pronounced itch, for short), where the so-called “trade” winds of the northern and southern hemispheres collide. Because the sun is fiercest at the equator, it forces them up “like a hot air balloon”, leaving barely any wind at the water's level. Sail into the doldrums and your ship can be becalmed for days - or even weeks.

Becalmed. It's a weird word, isn't it. It sounds like a positive, but an enforced pause like this is the last thing you need when you want to get somewhere specific.

And in centuries past, the airless heat of the doldrums could signal life-threatening danger if your water supplies ran out before the wind picked up. Even the modern competition crew above are struggling to skipper and sleep through temperatures of up to 47/48°C on deck and 50°C downstairs. See the sweaty mattress!

Enforced pauses and sleepless nights… I know a bit about those, having had more than one IVF round cancelled now, mid-cycle, when the drugs I'm taking haven't had any effect. The challenge of this is not that something awful has happened, but that nothing is happening. You must simply wait it out until it's time to start again.

Oddly, the doldrums at sea are often followed by a bout of really bad weather, as all that hot air rises further and cools into precipitation. This image resonates with me, too. I often talk about the emotional pacing needed for the ups and downs of IVF. You can’t live in a state of heightened feeling every day. So some of the waiting, however hard, functions as respite: the calm before the storm.

But back to etymology. Which came first, the psychological or maritime definition of the doldrums? It's a bit chicken and egg, according to one naval enthusiast and blogger, who pinpoints its first written use to 1802 by combing through the literature, from William Golding’s Booker prize-winning Rites of Passage to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which is giving me major English A-Level flashbacks as I read it:

Day after day, day after day / We stuck, nor breath nor motion / As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.

However, our blogger makes one serious omission from their survey - and it's not fiction, but historical fact. Remember the trade winds from earlier? Well, it’s worth remembering the most infamous “trade” those winds carried. Following this thread, I was horrified to find out the doldrums also played their part in the Zong massacre.

What follows is distressing, though it surely should be part of the British history syllabus by now (it wasn't when we were at school).

In 1781, The Zong, a British slave boat bound for Jamaica, was fatally overloaded by its captain Luke Collingwood, even more than was usual by slavers and with not nearly enough water for everyone on board. After the ship erroneously steered into the Atlantic doldrums, an already dire situation worsened for the hundreds of slaves stricken with disease and malnourishment. Collingwood threw 132 of the dead and dying overboard and another 10 took their own lives.

As further evidence of the abject inhumanity of the time, the ship’s owner then filed an insurance claim for his missing “human cargo”, leading to a series of very public trials in Jamaica and England, which ultimately fuelled the abolitionist movement. 

This isn't my trauma to tell, of course. And you could argue it wasn’t JMW Turner’s to paint, but he did so anyway in what became one of his most famous sea works. The Slave Ship (1840), originally titled ‘Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon coming on’, is not the idle “painted ship” of Coleridge's poetry above, far from it.

It now hangs in a Boston art museum, and more recently prompted a very powerful exhibition about Black bodies by African American artist Sondra Perry at the Serpentine in London.

I was lucky to be working at the Serpentine during Typhoon Coming On, and walking every day through Sondra's installation in the gallery, which included a rowing machine, magnified footage of her own skin, and swirling, stormy purple waves, was an experience I won't forget.

But if you didn't get to see that sucker punch of a show, I recommend trying to catch Rites of Passage, currently at Gagosian, Kings Cross until April 29. Especially Victor Ehikhamenor’s work, Do This In Memory of Us, in the final room.

Look up as you walk in and you’ll see that all-too familiar history-book diagram of a slave ship above your head, only the monochrome outlines of bodies are made from rosaries, threaded into lace and canvas. Look down and the same ship is reflected in mirrored tiles below your feet, while a ghostly rendition of Amazing Grace plays from the speakers.

At the evening view, people stood respectfully around the edges of the room so as not to walk on Victor's work and - frankly - the bodies, though a few visitors stepped freely across the floor, snapping pics and selfies. While there was no sign to say they couldn’t, it felt uncomfortable.

But was their clumsiness any different from mine here today? That’s the thing about neat metaphors. They function figuratively until the literal meaning gets too loud and they don't anymore.

I set out to research and write a piece about language this week. But now I know what Luke Collingwood did in the doldrums in 1781, I can't unknow it.

While I wait this week

I’m geeking out at: The British Library’s new exhibition, Animals: Art, Science, Sounds. The BL curators are great at spinning whole shows from what are essentially old books in glass cabinets. Look out for the 16th century bees swarming through an Italian Renaissance manuscript and the early depiction of a monkfish with the head of an actual monk (because that’s what the illustrator thought it really looked like).

I’m watching: Another brilliant slice of Aussie TV, Colin from Accounts on iPlayer. It starts with a meet-cute involving a boob flash and a dog (Colin), and only gets funnier.

I'm celebrating: That Wrexham win! Seriously. No longer pending, but promoted. And now a whole new adventure in League Two next season.