On loops and containers
Loops
I have recently finished reading the second volume of Solvej Balle’s septology, On the Calculation of Volume(2025). Five volumes have been written with only the first two volumes translated into English; we await the translation of the third volume which is scheduled for 18th November 2025. The date is propitious. The novels relate the story of Tara Selter, a dealer in rare and antique books who is trapped in an endlessly repeating cycle of November 18ths. This infinite time-loop, much like in the Harold Ramis film Groundhog Day(1993), means Tara wakes each morning to find that she is destined to relive this single day again and again. For everyone she encounters, her husband Thomas, her parents, her sister Lisa, the woman whose boyfriend has left her, the day is an ordinary one, that is lived just once. When Tara wakes and finds herself again at the start of her day, they each have no recollection that it has already been lived.
Towards the end of volume two, on day 927 to be precise, Tara finds her way into Roman history and follows the progress of the Roman conquerors as they ravage their way across Germany only to be stopped by the Cherusci chieftain, Arminius at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD. As she studies the Romans and ponders explanations of the demise of their empire, she is alarmed to discover that, “everything in the Roman world is a container” (2025, p. 189). Blown glass, Roman vases, houses, ship, amphitheatres, harbours oceans, all of them containers of one sort or another. She too is held in a particular container trapped within the temporal loop that has become her existence.
Like many of the philosophical ideas in the books, the notion of our lives as being held in containers of time, place, is examined, unpicked but never resolved. There can be no resolution when each day is merely a repetition of the last.
Containers
Containers, of course, are everywhere; our lives are full of them. I live in a series of containers: body, room, house, town, country, world…. From the first creation of life, the single celled prokaryotic organism was constructed as a container, even the proto celled lipids that possibly preceded such life were contained within spheres. It is hard to think, to apply reason to a world without the notion that at a fundamental level we are contained. The idea of the universe as an uncontained space, a universe that has no end is difficult to conceive. So where does it end, we want to ask. Surely it cannot be infinite. What is beyond it?
In biology containers must be permeable. The cell wall is a barrier between the organism and the outside world, with channels or other mechanisms to allow some materials to pass through the wall and others to be held in or held out. Without such permeability life would be impossible. Tara is held in a temporal container which denies her a way out into a tomorrow. Yet her container has some permeability. Objects acquired by Tara will mostly stay with her as she enters the next iteration of her 18th November. They may sometimes need to be acquired several times before they stay put, but they are shown to be able to traverse the walls of her container.
In psychoanalytic writing the idea of being contained is central to how we each experience our world. If I am too contained, then I am inaccessible and isolated. If I am not contained enough, then I lose my sense of self, and the world becomes a terrifying place. The biology metaphor applies. I need to be permeable, porous but not leaky or impenetrable. The successors to Freud, Bion and Winnicott use this metaphor to describe the role of the mother in helping the young infant to develop a functional sense of self. Wilfred Bion described the role of the mother as being a container for the unmanageable feelings of the baby. She provides an emotional containment for the infant allowing him/her to feel thus contained. Donald Winnicott too describes how the mother provides a holding environment for the developing but yet unintegrated emotions of the infant.
Most of us, I suspect, in our everyday lives, veer between a sense of being over contained and not contained enough. If the going gets tough we might wind up the drawbridge and become too contained and when we are in a comfortable relationship we might unbatten the hatches and become more vulnerable, more accessible to others. At night, in our dreams, we live in a world where the containers lose their substance, and we find ourselves uncertain of who or what we are or where we begin and others end.
For me the process of being contained and of finding my container has been a long journey ministered by a succession of sometimes good and sometimes not so good therapists as well as good and not so good personal relationships. Right now, I have recently moved house, so I am building a new container in my Worthing flat. It takes a while, and I am a slow builder. I am also eagerly awaiting the publication of volume 3 of On the Calculation of Volume now due in few weeks’ time.
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