There's a lot of talk about rotting. About wanting to rot. About wanting to stay in bed or on the sofa underneath blankets, doing little aside from reading and perhaps eating, and drinking warm beverages and stroking the soft ears of slumbering pets. People were making jokes about January being forty-nine days long, but now January has ebbed greyly into February and the collective mood – at least in the corners of the internet in which I dwell, and within my own, in-real-life circles – is largely unchanged.
On TikTok they’re listing the reasons for this shared apathy. Living under late stage capitalism! Another monstrous election cycle! War! Another talks about hunkering down, about hibernating. In the winter season, she says, solemnly, it is our instinct to retreat. It’s what we are designed to do.
But doesn’t this year, I think, feel somehow worse?
Once, in the winter following my divorce, I was walking in the woods near my parents' house and came across a felled tree. Along one side, an opened seam spilled pale tender shreds of flaking wood onto the dark wet soil underneath. I tried to write a poem about that tree. I used the words innards and feathering, I think. I wanted to show how quietly, how softly, the earth pulled the insides of the tree back into herself. I wanted to explain how I had felt as I stood and looked at it; how I had imagined lying down amid the mud and gazing up at the branches overhead. How I had wished I could give myself over to something as the tree did the soil, noiselessly, painlessly. How I had been so very tired.
Online another young woman addresses the camera. She is neatly dressed and lightly made-up, with waving pale hair parted down the middle. She looks clean. I imagine she smells of coconuts, or lemon; something zesty, something sweet. I imagine that her house is tidy, and that she knows where she left her keys, and can tell you which days the recycling truck comes. When she talks, though, there is a tightness about her eyes and her mouth. Her words are careful, careful, and there's a fraction of a second's lag before her mouth forms the next syllable, as if she's weighing up whether or not the audience on the other sides of their screens will get it, will know what she means. As if she's reluctant to speak a thing into existence. She is saying that she doesn't want to do anything at all, that she can't seem to do anything at all. 'All I want to do,' she says, 'is lie around and rot.'
Not rest, not idle. Not laze or dawdle or even detach. Rot. The word so guttural and unflinching, so at odds with the rest of her. A word that conjures visions of spoiled food furred-over with mould, of dead and stinking things, of putrefaction and decay. This is the word that she chooses. She wants to rot, and so do thousands of other people, apparently, who type comments and double-tap on the heart as my fingers reach over the screen to do the same.
The thing about rotting: it is, above all else, a natural process. When I Google what the innards of a tree are called, I learn that there is heartwood and sapwood. I click on an image from the National Forestry Service in which a fallen log, peeling and peppered with toadstools, is just one point on a compass-like diagram of a tree's life cycle. It could take up to 100 years or more, but that tree in the woods near my parents' house will return fully to the soil. In a subreddit I follow someone posts a photograph of a colourful evening bag that has been embroidered over with realistic-looking patches of grey-green mould stitched from silvery thread. I am repulsed but I am fascinated, someone writes.
A man records a video in response to the pale-haired girl's, and I am sure he makes some very good points, but I confess I stop listening because within thirty seconds he has explained that what she is referring to, what she is feeling, is not rotting so much as is it something else, and he pulls up a dictionary definition on-screen to prove it. The replacement word’s velvety and genteel and has vowel sounds that trail into hush like the retreating tide. I think: that's not what she said, though. She deployed the word rot with a poet’s precision.
To rot is to give up control. To rot is to be steered not by our own decision-making and endless thinking but by some all-knowing, ancient force, by something earthy and wise. A tree, week-old leftovers – they don't choose to rot. It just happens. It's the natural response to a stage in the life-cycle, to the conditions of the surrounding soil and the air. I don't know the girl in the video, or what she has been thinking about or consuming. But I know the feeling she is talking about, and I wonder whether it is not simply a perfectly reasonable response to the conditions we find ourselves living in. In a voicemail I leave for one of my friends I say, I don't think we are designed to take in as much information as we do now, all of the time. In my social media feeds, sandwiched between photos of a schoolfriend's recent holiday and ads for moisturiser, there are bloodied children, things on fire, flooded streets. I want to say in that voicemail please tell me what to do to make any of this better but I don't, because I know my friend doesn't know either.
Rotting implies an irrevocable change of state. You can come back after languishing, after retreating or hibernating, and be essentially the exact same version of yourself. But to rot is to disintegrate entirely, to break down until you no bear no resemblance to what came before. In his response video, the man talks about what we can do to combat the feeling he has re-named, to course-correct back towards productivity. And I get it: it all sounds a bit defeatist, doesn't it? All this talk of rotting when there's awful things happening in the world we need to bear witness to, and at least try to fight. But rot is not straightforward rest, and neither is it static nor inert. It is by and large inescapable, given the right set of circumstances, and not something we need grant ourselves or prioritise. Leave a tree on the forest floor long enough, and decomposition will start. But: crucially– though it may not always be obvious, in rotting there is transformation, even if incremental. It's the reason, the National Forestry Service website informs me, that nowadays they don't recommend clearing the dead branches and decaying vegetation that litters the forest floor. After the rot, renewal.
So: I hope the girl in the video isn't chivvied out of her rot. I hope she doesn't talk herself out of naming it thus. I hope she doesn't feel the need to make her response to the state of the world more palatable for onlookers, to diminish it. I hope she allows herself this splitting open, this ungraceful profusion of feeling and memory and function. I hope she gives herself over, even if just for a short while, to rotting, if rotting is what her body requires. I hope we all allow ourselves this, so we might see what awaits us on the other side.