if the price for joy is death

would you pay it?

I have been thinking about joy, lately.

Despite it being of the most delicious of human emotions, it is also, I think, the one we speak about the least. I have been wondering why that is. Is it because joy is fleeting? Or because it is complicated, never quite distilled to its purest form, always tinged with a hint of blue, as if – even in the moment we experience it – it is already in the past, already something to be yearned for? Or is it because joy is so hard to put into words; an embodied emotion, something to be felt in the movement of limbs and the stretch of a smile rather than forced into the confines of language, into the cage of a mouth?

My life has been blessed with many moments of joy. Some so small they are fireflies, winking from the dark, others so overwhelming I am subsumed in them – lost to skies I cannot name.

But there is one memory that always finds me when I think of joy.

We are in Cornwall and it is late, close to midnight, at the tail end of summer. We – me, my partner, a small group of close friends – had heard about a beach with bioluminescent waters. The beach is small, far from any towns or villages, tucked into the mouth of an estuary. We climb down a steep, muddy bank to it – through the oaks and pines, through the earthy, wet scent of night.

When we get down to the shore, we look up. The sky is clear as glass: stars and stars and stars. They light up the black water, the pebbles, the treetops, the people. For there are many people on this beach, groups of them sitting in circles, or getting changed, or walking into the calm water, their whispered words giving nothing but wonder away.

We change into wetsuits, put on our goggles and snorkels and descend into the water. The night is already magic, even before the magic has really begun, for we are here, together, in the black sea beneath the swallow of stars.

When we dip our heads into the crisp, cold darkness, black gapes back. We move our hands in slow strokes, and it is then that the magic envelops us. In the movement of the water, a galaxy shimmers back; a thousand bursts of algae-gifted light.

It feels like we are swimming through space and time: stars birthed and shining and then dying, but others, in the same instant, coming alive.

And every now and then, I surface at the same time as another. Our eyes meet in the thin lip of land between two galaxies, and we grin, smile, giggle, laugh out loud. It is not always someone I know. Sometimes, it is a stranger. Still, we grin and laugh as if there is no distance between us. Our eyes are shining, as if to say I know! I feel it too!

This is one of the beauties of joy, is it not? A thread weaving our delicate, mortal human selves into one another until we lose track of our boundaries. We are just laughter. We are just joy.

If I had to give joy an image, I would call it bioluminescence. A thousand sparks shouting into the dark. But rather than sparks within the darkness of a night-sea, they are sparks within the darkness of a cranium. Synapses bursting with light; networks of neurons humming with electricity; fireworks and magic within the hollow of a skull.

---

Last Sunday, my newsletter mentioned a shell I found on a beach near my house; an ocean quahog – a mollusc that can live to be half a millennium old. Its aged white shell, long-emptied of life, gleamed up at me from a rockpool, and I plucked it from its resting place and took it home.

Apparently, you can tell the age of a quahog by the rings on its shell, just as you can a tree with its trunk. It is hard with the shell I found; it is so worn and cracked around the edges that there is no way for me to count the rings accurately. Still, I come to the conclusion that this quahog must be older than a century. While this delights me – to have the remnants of such an ancient animal in my company – the age of this quahog pales in comparison to the oldest ever found.

“Ming” was named after the Chinese dynasty during which it was born. 1499 was the year of its birth. It was still alive when it was dredged up from Icelandic waters by researchers; at 506 years old, it is the oldest animal we have ever found.

Ming was killed so that researchers could determine its age. It now resides in a museum, so that humans can marvel at its dead body. I will not linger here, because this is a post about joy not anger, but I will say this: science must learn to respect the wondrous; science must learn that this world does not exist for our quantification of it.

Ming lived for so long because it slowed its metabolism (the process that produces energy in our cells) down to the bare minimum. One of the byproducts of metabolism are molecules called “reactive oxygen species”, and these little molecules cause chaos. They damage DNA, and proteins, and tissue. They are, it is thought, the reason why we age: over time, the damage they cause accumulates within our cells, leading to grey hair, and wrinkling skin, and age-related diseases like cancer.

By slowing down their metabolisms, quahogs dramatically decrease the production of these rebellious little molecules, and so their ageing process slows down.

Slow and steady, they live, and they live, and they live.

---

Brains are beautiful and wild things. They are flesh and water and synapses and sparks, and from all these tangible, knowable substrates emerges something ethereal, something unknowable, something that escapes the confines of a skull and forms the very gravity of our existence: sentience.

Despite our best efforts, the phenomenon of sentience is still somewhat mysterious. We thought it was only ours, but it is not: we share it with the ape, the whale, the octopus, the rat, the crab, the bee, and thousands of other species. We cannot replicate it. We often struggle to define it.

And within this mysterious phenomenon, within this unknowable entity, sits joy. An emotion that emerges from millions of snapping synapses. An emotion that makes us feel light; alive.

There is a price to sentience and joy, though; a price to these brains that fizz and snap and light up like a bioluminescent sea. They are metabolically expensive, eating up 20% of the body’s energy even though they are only 2% of its weight.

Joy, at least joy as we humans know it¹, needs a metabolism that does more than the bare minimum. A metabolism that fires and glows, burns and churns. A metabolism that also, inevitably, produces byproducts that cause ageing, and death.

I have never been able to find words that capture joy, only words that echo it. It is, I think, an entity that is uncatchable, undefinable. It is too embodied, too full, too complicated, too big for words to capture.

And yet, it is one of the things we live for, isn’t it? This exquisite, delicious, ephemeral emotion, blue-hued and fringed with yearning, a product of the bioluminescent ocean within our skulls.

I think of that night on the Cornish coast. Of swimming in stars beneath, above, within. Of the feeling of being alive.

If the price for joy is death, I am happy to pay it.

Perhaps these are the only words I need.

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1. I could not speak for an ocean quahog, but they have simple nervous systems, and no brain, so it is safe to say that however they experience life is very different to how we do, and certainly does not involve the same huge metabolic costs of our ridiculous and marvellous brains.