Curve 

The world is turnin’

Hope it don’t turn away

We walk the tidelines – my son, my daughter, my lover, my dog and I. We walk the tidelines with their endless inflections like those graphs marking rates of infection and the curves on the beach do flatten and then recede, only to rise again with the waves.

I chant secret mantras to myself. I am lucky to be on a beach.  I am lucky to be holding a hand, sometimes even two. I am lucky to kiss and be kissed. I am lucky to have the sea; to see footprints in the sand and the faint lines made by the grass as their tips trace back and forth, back and forth with the wind.

To flatten the curve, we have been asked to stop moving and to stop touching. Others have described such strategies as “the hammer and the dance” and “catching a falling knife”. Both phrases I was drawn to for their poetry and not for their public health implications.

Curves are everywhere, when you start looking for them. I can see a curve at the edge of the world. Out there, terns are plummeting into the sea like kamikaze pilots, while the white-bellied sea-eagle circles on rising air columns. “When soaring,” my field guide continues, “wings are held in upcurved dihedral.” I miss the curved lines at the corners of my mother’s mouth.

I was pregnant with our son during my final year of psychology. There, I learnt that statistics are founded on uncertainty. The fact that we can never know something for sure means we have to develop windows of acceptable uncertainty - confidence intervals - within which we can say with just the right amount of doubt that something we have observed is likely to be so. For example, the treatment is likely to work. In all this, there is a curve that is very important. It is called the “sampling distribution of the mean”. Like a garden of forking paths, it represents all the other possible values that a particular observation could take.

We walk the tidelines – my son, my daughter, my lover and I – stepping over pieces of charred wood and flinging half-burnt stumps into the surf for the dog. Two months ago this whole coast line was in flames. Here, the only evidence: these black sticks beside the driftwood.

Sometimes I can see the gold emanating around the outlines of my little family, as in a Masaccio altar piece. To each their own halo. It extends the distance of approximately one supermarket trolley and is made from beads of liquid that hang in the air. The halo breaks and then is reformed as baby moves between arms, as boy climbs from one lap to another.

My mother-in-law doesn’t go out walking along the coast anymore, where the joggers tend to squeeze past her on narrow, sloping footpaths. “I can see their sweat flying off at us”, she says. I imagine droplets of jogger catching the light.

I wept in front of strangers just before the birth of my second child, while our country was burning and my garden was scorched. In a light filled room above an inner city library, we spoke - or rather others spoke and I listened, holding back tears. They spoke about the unique grief that we all felt, a grief at losing plants and animals and ecosystems to fires that hadn't been seen in living history. A woman hugged me cautiously around the curve of my belly. You never know, she said, your baby might be the one who saves us all.

More than 2000 years ago, Euclid wrote that the curved line is nothing else than the vestige left by the imaginary moving of a point in one dimension. Since then, the curve has been put to use for all kinds of things. Astronomers use light curves from the X-rays emitted by stars to find out about stellar events like supernova. Oceanographers create sea level curves to understand things like the position of shorelines.  And of course, health scientists create epidemic curves that map the frequency of new cases, often with the goal of identifying a source of infection and controlling it. All of these curves plot some event against time.

The sets are small but then out of nowhere a big one comes through. I feel all that force on my back, my arms, the back of my neck, as I push my way under the first wave. A blue-black shadow spreads its way towards me through the water from the line of the white wash. I know it’s just churned up sand and sea foam but something about it gives me the creeps. I swim out to face the next wave, trying not to look back.

My son, who is three, reports two very vivid dreams, one night following the other. The first was dark blue. “Then there was a fire in lots of colours and how do you put them out? How do you put them out?” The second was bright and fast.  “I was in a rocket and there was food in there that I did bring and there was toys and there was the earth spinning and catching the light.” I write them down and then he takes my pen and draws all over my page in a mess of black squiggles. When I ask what he has drawn he tells me it is a sculpture of the sea.

We walk the tidelines - my son, my daughter, my lover, my dog and I. In the low light of afternoon everything seems hopeful and ripe but somehow unreal, like one of Cezanne’s apples. The dog finds a core. We find the skeletons of cuttlefish, and shells that look whole until we push them over with our toes and see the little rocks wedged into their exposed spirals.

Originally published in Southerly Change Community Journal, April 2020