Death Is the Mindfuck of Existence: A Conversation with Ida Marie Hede
Ida Marie Hede photographed by Tine Bek
Rosie Ellison-Balaam talks to Ida Marie Hede about her novel Adorable and how it fuses art, biology, and theory to unfurl the otherwise hermetic space of personal mourning and to challenge the way death is understood in our contemporary society. We hear about how scientific literature on gut bacteria (yep!) gave her a language to write about the experience of losing a parent while simultaneously starting a young family – and what happens to the body in both processes. Hede conceives of bacteria as that which connects our bodies with history, our immediate surroundings, and each other, and Adorable emerges as a touch-positive novel offering better tools to live with death and loss than do society’s rigid systems and grand narratives.
How did you come to write Adorable? What interests and influences informed the novel?
In its early stages Adorable was a collection of short paragraphs on my fathers death. Memories of him and scenes from the days of his funeral. At the same time I was writing passages on everyday life with kids, on shit and nappies and the grotesqueness of the maternal body. I wrote quite obsessively while on my second maternity leave, I felt desperate to not lose touch with my writing practice. I remember walking with the pram one day, walking into a burning orange sunset, my son was still quite little, and a structure formed in my head, an idea of combining the two tracks of material I had.
Adorable came into life as it swept up a wide range of older influences, obsessions with art and theories I’d had for around a decade; some from the years I’d spent in London. Experiencing my father’s death while also being a young parent truly gave some speculative nerdy interests a new meaning. Old ideas very literally found life again.
There is a streak of nostalgia in the book, or maybe rather, a sense that I needed to exorcise my worn out passions; a sense of wanting to move towards something new. But in the process of this exorcism, or rejection of the old, love keeps insisting itself, the past can’t be outdriven that easily. I was at point in my life where I was supposed to play the role of an adult, but my own doubt, youth, and longing kept overwhelming me.
Some of the recurring motives in the book, the enchantment of technology, as well as the individual body in the ‘bigger’ family or society, were described through the idea of the gut bacteria. These motives very effortlessly connected life and death to me. They all contained a push and pull between the material and the immaterial.
Adorable by Ida Marie Hede, tr. Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg
I had been collaborating with the Medical Museion here in Copenhagen, and started reading science literature on gut bacteria. It didn’t seem frivolous at all to think and feel ambitiously about pushing the artificial barriers separating life and death, after reading of how billions of bacteria live inside of us all almost as undying entities, weirdly connecting our bodies with history, with death, with everything in the world. It made me able to write about the intimate while imagining my own body wildly. I wouldn’t have dared to write like that before. I was reading on necropolitics, theorists such as Achille Mmembe and Rosi Braidotti, who both write of the way in which societies value life over death. After Covid, this just seems more urgent, the way in which certain living bodies are already placed in a death-category, their lives not given worth. Braidotti writes of imagining oneself as already dead in order to think collectively, and ethically. The idea of imagining myself as already dead, in an abstract way of course, really got to me! Having children had made me feel porous, vulnerable, closer to a state of rot. Fighting my anxiety of death as loss, and of my own death, made me feel closer to life. Closer to the very simple things in life that I took for granted: A child growing, for example; so fast that it is suddenly gone. The moments of life that contain loss, those moments that stick in your memory. This also made me see death everywhere, for a while I was obsessed with thinking of death and loss both near and far, and that’s also part of Adorable’s coming into life.
The body features throughout Adorable, with the birth of Æ, the physical love between B and Q, as well as the death of B’s father. What attracted you to write about this renewal and decay?
My son was conceived ten days before my father died. At my father’s funeral, I still didn’t know I was pregnant. It’s a beautiful, yet weird and corny thought that there was some transfer of life. A transaction, or a swap. It’s natural that my father died when he did, and I planned to have a second child. There is no mystery. Yet, this coincidence stayed with me, like a tiny, self-mythologizing secret. The very banal feeling of the surprising vibrancy of life in contrast with the strangeness of loss was really at the core of the book. Those infiltrated states. It was fruitful to mix up and confuse these states, to just allow them to work against and into each other. The loss inherent in having a child, and seeing it grow and change to something perhaps alien to you, independent from you, out of your control. When I started writing of the corpse, the idea of the lovers body appeared. Roland Barthes describes the sleeping lover as a body. Love is messy and physical. Lovers’ bodies are as leaking as are birth-giving bodies. Relationships are as gross and hard, as they are all-consuming and tender. I wanted to describe a wide range of bodily and mental states, as equally physically and psychologically complicated. It also turned out that everything I tried to write on death and loss emanated a dissatisfaction with its bleakness and nihilism, like the text wanted to renew itself all the time, shed its old skins. And everything I wrote about life, the bliss of love, the child as adorable, seemed to want to make itself uglier, to talk about the grimness of ageing, the decay of bodies at all times, the fragility of life both intimately and globally.
Photo: Sofie Amalie Klougart
In grappling with death B returns frequently to the body, mentioning ‘mirror touch’, “the ultimate emphatic state”, where you register the sight of a touch on your own skin. What effect did you want these sensory passages to have on the reader?
Adorable creates a link between global death and the death of a loved one, in this case, the narrator’s father. The idea of death as something private, not shareable, something preserved within the idiosyncratic bubble of a family, one could say, the hermetic space of personal mourning; and then the frenetic experience of global death we face everywhere. I didn’t know how to portray this idea of the global death. I had ambiguous feelings about just describing a person watching others perish through media screens. The detached and fetishistic relationship we have to the suffering of others. But then again, this voyeuristic ‘death-watching’ takes place everywhere. I did include a few descriptions of far-away-deaths, for example a young girl floating in the Mediterranean. And historical death, the way we learn and understand the world through death cultures of the past.
Yet I felt the text could grapple with this in other and better ways, by keeping the sensory experience at close hand. I read about mirror touch, which is a specific condition, but also simply a metaphor for responding to the pain of others with ones full emotional machinery. Even when mediated through a screen, death is grotesquely real, it can be felt. Mirror touch is the ability all humans have to connect to others through the senses.
The narrator loses herself in speculations about death all the time, and her father’s death becomes vivid through descriptions of the materiality of his corpse, of touching his hand, holding his imaginary beard. I quite liked to imagine the kitschy Sistine-chapel-ish image of fingers touching translating into more words, more thoughts, more struggles, more life. How touch, contact, sparks something unpredictable.
For example, there’s fantasies of an army of corpses arriving at a traditional Danish feast, drinking and eating. Fantasies, of the narrator floating with her father’s corpse into a film, mingling with the characters, thinking of having popcorn in the cinema. Both the private and the public death is constantly negotiated though materiality, an urge to touch, a desire to feel any surface, to be exposed to any kind of bodily state.
Winogradsky column – a device for culturing a large diversity of microorganisms. Photo by Medical Museion
If I wanted anything, maybe I wanted the reader to shed some of their anxieties of death. To be seduced into feeling death physically. To understand death as a paradoxically bodily state without reducing it to only rot, to only something vulgar. I mean, death is the mindfuck of existence. It’s bizarrely enchanted. It’s not going away. I think the level of absurdity and comedy in the book points to that. Maybe, if you’re not scared of deaths horrors, it’s a little easier to start thinking of how much death that surrounds us, how close we are to dying ourselves, maybe it’s easier to empathise. I don’t think of the book in any activist way, I know it won’t change the world, but I do think it confronts certain imaginaries of death and has its own little call for solidarity.
I think I also wanted the text to expand the space of mourning by imagining death in a less elevated, linear, or regulated way. To let mourning be what it also is, messy, unclear, intense, physical, absurd, full of weird and conflicting desires. In a backwards way, also a state of life.
There is a biological level to the novel, with mentions of bacteria, skin, and eggs, even characters have this chemical form, with names like Æ, B and Q. How do you think the body as this web of matter and meaning works within Adorable?
I think the levels of (pop)science in Adorable, the factual knowledge of bacteria, the descriptions of eggs, skin, birth, yes, this whole biological register, adds a very real-life element to a world which is interested in speculating and fantasising. It provides something factual, that in itself is quite surreal and almost otherworldly as science is. It’s a great place to start off, full of wonderful language and terminology, it keeps the text always close to the body, but allows it to spin out into other realms. My fetish for the biological and the chemical is also a way to complicate the ideas of bodies and subjectivities. I’m less interested in individual and personal psychologies than in bodies as elements in a bigger system, almost as if they were limbs or organs in a big body. This is also why I like to work with characters as stylised and artificial, as cardboard-figures that move through texts and give space to the worlds around them. When B, Q and Æ don’t have names, they’re of course less individualised and more actors on a stage, or proteins in a complex system. They try to make sense of the society they’re part of, but they’ll not as such be able to grasp it as a whole. As they flow through their worlds, they encounter it with fresh eyes, but only in parts, which is also why Adorable is a collagist book, taking the reader on a journey, through a yet unexplored landscape.
In the third part of the novel, the death essays, technology is the root of its structure. The use of a telephone to transport you to someone else, or another place, or even another time. Both intimate and distant, what do you think the role of technology is in the novel?
I’m glad you ask about the role of technology. The idea of the call and the telephone are very central for the book. I had literally been interested in the re-enchantment of technology for a decade, it’s a very tangible element in my earlier writing. Everything from the invention of electricity, the telegraph, morse code, to industrial machines and oil drilling.
Photo by Nadia Josefina El Said
There are always conflicting understandings of new technologies, either they’re doomed, considered dangerous, or almost naively celebrated. But what I’ve really been interested in is how a specific technology opens up time and space in new ways. How it affects human imagination, or opens up spaces of power for those who don’t have power; think of the women workforce in the telegraph operating room. And it’s important to say that however invisible and discursive a technology is, what fascinates me is it’s bare materiality, the objects themselves. Futuristic dreams or utopian beliefs, they are traced back to clumsy, blinking, swirling machines. And it’s the same with death, it’s the paradox of the ungraspable and then the corpse right there.
I’ve described Adorable as nostalgic as well as fighting nostalgia, perhaps metaphorically as a way of rejecting grief and love and also coming to terms with grief and love. I felt the idea of the telephone and the call belonged to an earlier version of myself, an old me that I didn’t quite know how to relate to. But as it happened, I did receive the message of my father’s death over the phone, and it set off my writing. The telephone and the call was such a simple element that contained so much of what I wanted to express, the physically intimate yet distant, as you put it. Thinking of it, I could always come back to the call: what is this death? Oh, its something so felt yet so immaterial. What is being in love? It’s between knowing and not-knowing. What is a child? It’s yours, but also not, it’s cute but in a blink, it’ll be a smelly uncontrollable grown-up. What is a memory? It’s evasive but residual, it might resurrect itself anytime. What is being called? It’s not up to you, sometimes you don’t want it, you didn’t ask for sexual attention, sometimes you’re calling for love, calling in desperation, the call insists itself. The power-call, the love-call, the death-call.
The novel weaves in and out of consciousness from the mundane to the hallucinatory; where the commonplace and profound mix. Could you talk about what you think they offer when placed together?
I think Adorable is a book interested in continuities rather than ruptures; in widening everything. I think the book imagines continuities organically. But the way the continuity is performed bears resemblance to a clash, because it’s often such different registers or moods that I’ve put close together. My idea though was to not even out conflicting moods, just to let them hang together, making visible the constructions, the mechanics of the work, the small screws. In the early writing process I don’t think much about deliberately placing something together, it often happens that in writing I will end up moving through a number of registers; one mood leads to the next, there is so much to be said and so many ways to say it, and in the editing process its a matter of deciding to not smooth over the transitions. To let them rub elegantly, and sometimes a little edgy against each other, in order to surprise the reader. Like moods that flirt with each other. Not remove the egg-headed passage if it happens to set in right there, in the middle of the scene with the nappy change. Floating from one thing to the other without obeying chronology to me is insisting all of these realms, feelings or sensuous experiences are part of any world, any subjectivity, without hard borders. And we don’t have control over how things move. We can’t keep out a wild laugh in the middle of the gravest darkness. To me this weaving also contains an affirmative protest. Protesting expectations of things appearing ‘whole’, of lives following regulated paths, of persons being confined to limited identities.
Still from Marguerite Duras’s Le Navire Night (1979)
Take the notion of gut bacteria, it’s so paradoxical. Bacteria are ‘good’, invisible, eerie, natural, unnatural, abstract, and real, they’re comical because they’re so many more than ‘us’. Powerful, protective, maybe they’re phantasms, maybe the real inhabitants of earth, they point to collectivity as they assemble in one body in clusters. There’s so much to be said.
Do you think this collagist form allows for the conceptual to be better understood?
I think a conceptual text today rarely has one tight framework. Often it blends tight structures with memory writing, or it juxtaposes a variety of forms. To me, the conceptual isn’t bound to a kind of system-writing, nor to the passive enactment of one idea. A book might have a conceptual streak if it shuffles motives in poignant ways, if it challenges the tropes of psychological fiction, if it plays with repetition, dialogue or composition. As for my own work, I think of it as both conceptual, poetic and narrative.
B throughout the novel encounters art in various forms, from the acting of Matthew McConaughey in True Detective, to a lecture by artist Tania Bruguera, and from the ventriloquist Nina Conti to Maya Deren’s last dance, and to the films of Marguerite Duras, among many others. Each one offers something different, but how do you think art impacts and informs B?
The character B is certainly looking to make sense in the world, and the encounters with art opens up a sensuous space for her, full of speech, sound, images, movement. In the longer ‘Death Essay’, B transforms to an I-narrator, who isn’t necessarily the same character, yet they overlap. All the time, art, film and music is a way for the narrator, for B, to process her experiences. There’s identification, comfort, relief in the works of other artists. B is urgently looking to understand, she has a curious and speculative voice, also a voice driven by loneliness, and it gets a bit desperate at times, bouncing into anger and satire. I think the voice in Adorable quite clearly feels abandoned by the grand narratives, the regulated linear life paths, which society presents women with. There’s an inability to accept and live by the rigidity she senses in these structures. And when something absolutely important happens, like a parents death, the world around her presents her with very poor tools. It’s a world scared of touch. But art has a different effect on her; in art, no-one is scared, and spaces simply open up to her in a quite overwhelming way, sucking her in. Here, the smallest details make the greatest sense.
As a writer, how does art impact on your work?
It impacts my work very much. I probably share a lot of B’s longings. I love reading psychological novels, but I also always long for more immersive, weirder, fragmented, and open ways of understanding the world and how we might all live together. I often find that in art or film, and it influences my writing sometimes more than other texts. “What’s driving everyone else, what are we supposed to be doing?”, the narrator asks at one point. I identify with that; that feeling of always looking for something, needing a place to belong and connect, but not exactly knowing where that is. I feel uncomfortable if an illusion is too tight, if I don’t understand it, if I can’t really get into it. The open realm of visual art is definitely inspiring, even when it’s messy or not achieving what it wants; it can hold any medium, any material, any strange or critical thought, any question, cross boundaries and genres. And then my language is also very rich in images, I like to write of movement and make my characters jump and dance. I like the humour saturating art. Art is a crazy toolbox in that sense. Images pop into my mind constantly, and then I have a sentence, a space in a text, and I’m already on to something.