8 - limbo

or: thank god i was baptized

I am rereading Dante’s Inferno at a strange time in my life.

1 - Limbo as Punishment

What if I’m punished for something beyond my control?

The first circle of Hell, so says Dante Alighieri, is limbo. He’s not really referring to our modern concept: in the epic poem, limbo is for unbaptized babies and friendly pagans who lived and died before Jesus existed: “They did not sin. And if they have some worth, that’s not enough, since they were not baptized” (Canto IV, 34-35). They aren’t so unhappy, though - they spend eternity in “a meadow growing green” (IV, 111) but are otherwise barred from the delights of heaven. Likewise, they’re shielded from the horrors of hell. Essentially: they just exist, and that’s all.

To me, this first circle is to me perhaps the silliest. It’s silly because it is, on some level, a bit ridiculous to condemn one to an eternity of nothingness based on circumstances out of their control. (That’s an oversimplification, but I’m not wading into medieval theology. Briefly, though: poor babies.)

On this reread, the first circle is nagging at me. The subsequent eight circles make some kind of sense, even if I might personally disagree on what precisely constitutes a mortal sin: murderers, assailants, cheaters, liars, hypocrites, magicians, fortune-tellers, and thieves all find themselves punished harshly in Dante’s hell. You could successfully argue a go-to-hell case for any one of these (except maybe the astrologers and magicians. I think they just have jobs.). But punishing people who had no say in their circumstance? It seems absurd, unjustifiable - honestly, quite terrifying.

My issue with this is control. I need to control every single aspect of my life or else I spiral into insanity. My biggest fear - my most debilitating, nausea-inducing fear - is simply losing control of a situation. Of losing out on a course of action due to circumstances beyond my control. Of being subjected to something I would never choose because a choice has been denied to me. Limbo, for this reason, infuriates and terrifies me.

This, though, is the first part of why limbo is bothering me so much.

If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there
would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.

2 - Limbo as Uncertainty

What if I never find clarity of purpose?

I’d argue that the concept of limbo has lost some of that religious connotation in our modern English. (No one’s first thought is of unbaptized babies, anyway.) Now, you can say that a marketing project is in limbo, or a passport application. It is bureaucracy, just shorthand for uncertainty, floating in an ether with no beginning or end in sight. Limbo is for unresolved things, incomplete ones.

If I can call limbo an emotion - and I think I will - then I feel it all the time. If I notice that I’ve made an error submitting some government document or school form, I would rather immediately get hit with a message from some official admonishing me for my stupidity and negligence than have to wait even ten minutes unsure of whether my submission has gone through. I would rather be hauled to prison without trial if I make an error on my tax returns than spend a neurotic sleepless night waiting until the CRA help line opens at 8am. I cannot, cannot stand for things to lie uncertain.

This is, naturally, a problem, as life does not move at the rhythm of one girl but rather at the rhythm of everybody else, collectively, who make up the world in which we live.

Going beyond government documents and work presentations, my present aversion to uncertainty manifests itself daily in many little ways. It is the thing that nags at me when I think about the future, the deep void that only echoes when I call out for a response. It didn’t used to scare me so much, back when I was in school. Back then, the uncertainty was actually exciting: to me, being in limbo represented security and comfort while dreaming about the possibilities of my future. Would I be a renowned academic lecturing at Oxford? An A-list actress? A history teacher? An archaeologist?

Since birth, I have been known as the archaeologist in training. There has only ever been one path for me, only one thing I ever wanted. And then, on a school trip to Washington in grade eleven, I bought a book at the Smithsonian called Lives in Ruins. It followed the careers, challenges, and extreme bouts of unemployment of American archaeologists in the mid-2010s. This book was like a nuclear implosion to me. One stat from the third chapter still lingers in my mind: at the recent AAAs, for every shitty, underpaid job posting, over two thousand candidates applied. Very suddenly, I was catapulted into anxiety as I began to realize that the only thing I’d ever wanted was, in fact, a bit of a pipe dream.

In CÉGEP, things looked up: I stopped thinking about the future so much and just enjoyed what I considered to be two years of Dead Poets Society-esque intellectual fun. I read Homer, Euripides, Chaucer, St. Augustine, Keats, Winterson, Faulkner, and felt like a little baby genius with no cares except church doctrine and Romantic poetry.

And then in university, my footing became a little uneven. I kept pursuing archaeology, but a little more out of desperation: I was trying very hard to enjoy these brief few years where I could study anthropology without worrying about a job market. I got great grades, I had fun, and when I realized I couldn’t afford any anglo field schools, I did some franco ones and had a (mostly, iykyk) great time. In 2019, I even got a grant from the government to go practice Arctic archaeology over the summer. However, I did not, in the end, get to do much traveling in 2020. The grant was renewed in 2021, but we didn’t go that year, either.

During my years of secondary education, I quickly learned that finding a job in archaeology was not for the faint of heart. You can either work uncertain contracts every few months doing excavation blitzes for private corporations or the government (usually at construction sites in the far north) or fight to the death with every other overqualified graduate student on the continent for a small handful of university/museum positions every year. More and more, these posts are grievously underpaid, not tenure-track, and require you to uproot your life on a whim, making any attempt at stability or family quite tricky.

All this to say: I do not know if I will be an archaeologist and I am mourning this collapse of identity. I feel guilty for having wasted everyone’s time - my teachers, my professors, my mentors, my parents, my friends, my younger self - even if that guilt doesn’t really make any sense. I feel like a failure, unable to achieve the one thing I have always dreamed of. I feel embarrassed, actually. Ashamed and embarrassed and jealous of my brilliant, incredible, brave friends who are choosing to pursue their dreams in spite all of the uprooting, anxiety, disrespect, and pitfalls that come with a life in academia.

This is not to imply that I’m deeply depressed or lethargic: I’m just confused and more than a little afraid. I feel as though through some strange confluence of circumstances in my life, I have found myself on a path I’m not altogether happy with. I deeply suspect things would have been vastly different if I’d made some alternative choices and the world hadn’t exploded in 2020. And this, too, is a kind of uncertainty that I cannot stand: where would I be now if I’d gone to Nunavut? What would I be doing if the world hadn’t shut down right as my adulthood began? Normally, I can manage what-ifs, but these ones are very loud. What if, what if, what if…

I know what it is to exist between the world’s certainties.

3 - Limbo as Stagnancy

What if nothing ever changes?

And this is the scariest thing to me.

This path I’m on is not terrible. There are so many people that I cannot imagine ever living without. There are so many moments of levity and peace in my life and so many little rituals that I cherish. So much is going right for me and I have a great many things to be grateful for.

But.

I realized, quite instantly, in 2023 that the next chapter of my life would be à l’étranger. As I began venturing out more and more, as the world opened itself up to me, I realized that if I’m passionate about anything anymore, it’s travel. It is sunshine and sea, honestly, and a pace of life that is quiet and warm.

I began preparing: I applied for an Italian passport at the consulate, starting taking language classes, focused on building my résumé and skills, began travelling more and more to visit my family abroad to get a sense of where I wanted to go. Vancouver (not technically à l’étranger) felt good, but I could never make the kind of money needed to live comfortably there. Trieste was magical, but I wasn’t sure about being so far to the north. Paris is special to me and I know it well, so maybe throw that into the mix. Rome is fantastic and familiar, but it’s so very crowded. Naples is less familiar, but no less fantastic. Athens is perhaps my favourite city, but I don’t speak a word of Greek. And then: I’ve heard so many great things about Marseille, Bologna, Lucca, Nafplio, Lyon, and on and on and on…

But here’s the gag: I think I am too indecisive to ever choose a place to move. A great part of me truly believes that I am so scared to make a decision that I will end up staying exactly where I am for my entire life. I think I lack the guts to push myself to do something big like this, even if it’s necessary. I think I will panic and spiral about the ordeals of foreign bureaucracy, social isolation, linguistic confusion, loss of identity, distance from family, and inability to just take the leap. I think I will only ever talk a big game about making changes and then never do the fucking thing. I will kneecap myself. And the kicker: I can’t even blame limbo for that.

In conclusion: I who hate uncertainty am trying to gain a new citizenship, move continents, lose all proximity to friends and immediate family, live in a new language, build a new reality, navigate a new world, find the magical job that will both pay my bills well and keep me satisfied, and do it all alone. I am scrapping and scrabbling for at least one kind of certainty: happiness.

The fear is that unless I take this leap, unless I do something truly committed, I will live a life not unlike those poor babies and pagans. I will wander blindly through a world that does not excite me and which never changes. I will find no meaning, no peace, no purpose in my life. I will operate at a baseline of regret: not quite depressed, not truly unhappy, but deeply, deeply unsatisfied. Say I never become an archaeologist in the way I used to dream it: if I cannot have that thing, then I deserve to explore what other possibilities the world has for me. (And perhaps it’s not such a bad idea to figure out where on this globe I might be more employable.)

Let me tell you that there is one sin I have come to fear above all others.
Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. […] Even Christ was not certain at the end.

4 - Limbo as Possibility

What?

The text that has stuck with me the longest from my introductory ancient philosophy course is Plato’s Apology. Specifically, the question of should the philosopher fear death? The answer, according to Socrates: no, because to have any emotional reaction to a situation as unknowable as death wouldn’t make sense. You can only fear or love what you already know - everything else yet-unrealized is still just background noise.

My favourite film in recent memory is Conclave and that’s what I’ve been quoting this entire essay. I won’t recap the film here to you now, but the crux of its message is this: the world is not so straight and narrow that uncertainty or chaos can ever be banished or conquered. Chaos - limbo, not knowing - is the natural way of things. Move within it, shuffle things around, open your mind to new possibilities - but do not fight it. When things are cast into doubt, the nuns and cardinals of the conclave pray. I think prayer is not the only tool, though: poetry, philosophy, meditation, writing, therapy - in my mind, these are all partially interchangeable tools for addressing confusion and doubt.

I am twenty-seven years old and I feel as though these last few years of pandemia have been wasted on treading water. Nevermind that fantastic and beautiful things have happened, too - I am a pessimist, I’m not talking about those. This mindset of waste and guilt is, pretty clearly, not productive or especially healthy.

When I spiral into lethargy and rot, my tool is not to meditate or pray or name five things I can smell: instead, I force myself to go out and experience some kind of meaning. My old reliable is a museum visit, where I’ll play my classical playlist and spend a long time thinking about art and history and people. Otherwise I’ll go to the library and stay until I’ve found the book that sparks anything at all in me. When the weather is good, I go to the mountain and walk until I feel a lightness of being. And once or twice a year, when I need to call in the big guns, I book a trip to somewhere beloved or new - just to remind myself of what’s out there.

I think I will always be afraid of limbo (sorry Socrates), even if it really is a part of being alive. But instead of being condemned to it, I wonder if it isn’t something I can lean into: like a giant drop on a rollercoaster, all you can do is grip the rails and holler.

What a long-winded way to say that Sisyphus was right.

this is a different kind of limbo