The Compulsion

To Ingest

What I really want to tell you about is this eel that I have seen suffering and convulsing so cinematically. I watch the eel’s near-death escape as it dips from the dark ocean floor into a misty brine lake, where it cannot survive the salinity; another eel passes indifferently by, avoids the same mistake. The toxic shock contorts my eel’s muscles to form a figure of eight, looped twice over. Not an ouroboros but a knotted infinity. This is the natural shape of all its ligaments tensing simultaneously: the Opisthotonic death pose. It is the same pull of rigor mortis in water, when one dies and floats, that contorted the spines of dinosaurs into the fossilised shapes full of drama that we recognise – back arched, screaming, burlesque – disinterred for my entertainment and the entertainment of my geological generation.[1] My eel suffers on a popular YouTube clip from a generic documentary with a few million views. I trace its popularity to three reasons. One, the near-impossible beauty of the eel’s performance, that of contortionists in talent shows. Two, how surreal and material the visual density of the brine lake is, so thick it forms a viscous mist. Three, the invisibility of its toxicity, the smoothness of that boundary between death and survival, that softly buffered threat.[2]

To Dissolve

A salt brine pool at the bottom of the ocean is also known as an underwater lake – water so dense with salt that its weight pools it together like coagulated blood. The formation process of a salt brine lake is similar to that of underground saltwater deposits that are locked within rock. Prehistoric seas from different geological periods get disconnected from oceans and dry up. Their salt deposits sit in the ground until a new sea unfurls in the same location and dissolves them into its waters. The dissolved salt is so dense and heavy that it never lifts and instead rests at the bottom – an inland empire, a lethal puddle.

To Thicken

There is a Polish idiom that can be paraphrased as: ‘Truth is just, and like olive oil, it will always come to the surface.’[3] ‘Just’ as in ‘fair’, and the metaphorical surface is that of water. I have always assumed this phrase is of Biblical origin, since no premodern Pole would have grown an olive tree. The idiom exists in Yiddish, too. It seems to be drawn from observational wit rather than a Talmudic metaphor, like the phrase ‘blood is thicker than water’. Evangelicals of the 18th century used this idiom to warn us that people are more likely to be loyal to those they are related to, even after converting to another religion: ‘The blood of our mother is thicker than the water of baptism.’ However, there exists another interpretation, put forth in a Messianic Jewish sermon delivered in Arizona in 1994.[4] Here, the Evangelical argument is reversed: ‘The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.’ Water, then, would be just, and come to the surface of oil.

To Coagulate

I recently underwent bloodletting in the form of hijama, a type of wet cupping practised in Muslim communities as recommended by the scriptures. My practitioner’s cups are no longer made with glass but silicone. A flurry of small incisions are made in my skin with a blade, after which the first suction cup fills up with quick, watery blood. This is discarded. The second cup pools with blood that is surprisingly thick, dark and viscous – a dollop that could almost pass for an object rather than a liquid, like the yolk of an egg. It reminds me of a video I saw as a child on Animal Planet where a snake hunter holds a Tupperware box of rat blood, which he injects with a snake’s venom to demonstrate how it coagulates within seconds. “Just imagine the rat.” The hijama practitioner claims this viscosity is caused by toxins circulating in my blood. I thought blood this thick could only come out of a womb – I never knew it could come up into the muscles of my back and seep through the surface of my skin.

The cup is discarded.

To Spring

In my childhood understanding, the world was mapped by minerals that had a shifting but constant presence in the air and water. They were brought up often by my grandparents’ generation. Neighbours, aunties and grannies with different outlooks on life and politics had differently mineralised drinking water at home and would bring it in from different sources. Bottled water came from regional springs, and one had to buy it in a shop. But in the city, grandma had Oligocene water: she would pick it up from the public water sources in bańki – plastic gallon bottles bearing the same Polish name as the glasses used for cupping in Eastern Europe – and wheel them upstairs every 24 hours, as you can’t drink Oligocene beyond that timeframe. As a child, I thought the ‘Oligocenes’ were an order of monks, like the Cistercians or Nazarenes that lived in a convent near my house. But, without knowing it, I was actually encountering a paleontological term in public life for the first time. The Oligocene period, 33.9 million to 23 million years ago, which gave source to the groundwater my grandmother drank in Warsaw, was also my first encounter with water and class.

To Distil

On the other end of the water and class spectrum was Konstancin – a 19th-century villa suburb of Warsaw. This is where I first encountered the idea of a spa town: the Counts of the 19th century, encouraged by their Prussian and Austro-Hungarian peers building Bäder and sanatoriums, classed this area as valuable. Passing through Konstancin, we gossiped with schoolmates and looked up broken websites of history blogs. Here were some of the only surviving buildings we knew from before the war; we heard someone rich ran a private church in one of them, of the Burning Man variety except Christian. The buildings that survived usually have an air of collaborationism – a hotel used for the offices of Nazi headquarters, villas that sympathisers made available to commanders. A spa town with saltwater – what is a Count to do? One built a saline graduation tower, extracting the waters from the Miocene layer of the Earth, laid down about 23 to 5.3 million years ago. Miocene and Oligocene, the two paleontological reserves, became channels for class once they came up to the surface.

To Coat

Biofilm is a community of microorganisms that survive by sticking to one another and coating their surroundings. In many environments, biofilm has unique sets of conditioned functions that allow it to persevere in extremely inhospitable conditions. It often symbiotically protects extremophiles, like the many organisms living in the salinity of the brine pool in the background of the contorting eel video. Extreme salinity, like heat and cold, is discriminating to lifeforms.

To Inhale

Air, too, felt regionalised in my childhood. The salty sea breeze needed to be absorbed in surplus to store in your body back home. Specifically the iodine, my grandmother reminded me. Not just that going to the seaside is like going to a sanatorium, but also that one must somehow fill up on the iodine and transport it as a reserve in the body when going back to city life. If I had asthma, I could have been sent to a sanatorium by the public healthcare system, where salt caverns are built to mimic what you get on holiday, she reminded me. The Baltic Sea waterfront is for inhaling, and it’s a functional duty to inhale our fill. This was my grandmother’s teaching, and she would always inhale as best she could, with geographic specificity.

To Absorb

Iodine was popularised in the nations of the Eastern Bloc during the mass panic in the fallout of the Chernobyl catastrophe. While scientists were reportedly denied access to information about the extent of the radiation’s reach, they promoted the preventative use of an iodine solution to children at a multinational scale. This was nicknamed Lugol’s liquid – płyn Lugola – after the 19th-century French pharmacist who had invented it. The strategy was to use non-radioactive iodine to saturate children’s capacity for absorbing it, so that the radioactive iodine particles they came into contact with in the air would not be taken up by the body. Lugol seemed then a fearsome creature, benevolent yet made of the same stuff as radiation, to be called upon by the desperate.

To Scale

Reaching the suburbs of Warsaw from trapped prehistoric pools, the saltwater fuelling the Konstancin spa is concentrated and drawn up to trickle down stacks of blackthorn twigs. The sheer amount of tiny entangled pieces of branches, each with a droplet of saline solution vaporising off it, seems immense, overwhelms. About as tall and as long as blocks of modernist flats, the graduation towers were built by the Communist state in the same period as the Oligocene water springs. Spas graduated to take on the ideological weight of the public. The only instruction for using a graduation tower is to sit, stand or walk in front of it to inhale the air, wet and cold and rich in iodine. Multiple guides on YouTube teach us how to make a graduation tower at home. Scientifically, it’s impossible to induce the sea-like microclimate required for any medicinal purpose on such a small scale.

To Turn

In The Cheese and the Worms, a 1976 book forming part of the scholarly movement of microhistory, Carlo Ginzburg recounts the trial of a 16th-century Italian miller for crimes of heresy, using documents declassified by the Vatican from their Holy Inquisition archives. Through the course of the book, Ginzburg identifies the village mill as a place of gathering and exchange – a centre of community and commercial activity, like the pub or the market. The power of river water was used to grind down the wheat that farmers brought from their fields in the surrounding area with great round millstones. To harness the energy of the river was a big investment; people had to wait in line in front of the mill for hours in order to get their turn. The resulting queue became a site of gossip, joking and heresy, forming what we’d now call a counter-narrative. Literate landowners mixed with people who could not read or write their ideas down. Notions of a popular movement among the workers were emerging alongside accounts of the peasants’ spiritual beliefs. Consequently, the millers who facilitated the sites of exchange were sometimes tried by the Holy Inquisition, and through their testimonies, they effectively produced some of the only written accounts of popular spirituality.

To Lubricate

The practice of fracking – or ‘shooting the well’, as it was once called – dates back to 1862. While the bedrock was originally shot with a torpedo, it is now fractured with powerful streams of water mixed with a selection of chemicals, lubricating and streamlining its speed. There is no public access to the set of chemical compounds used in fracking water.[5] Currently, the most popular way of managing fracking waste fluid is to shoot it back into the fracked shale, or into large systems of salt caverns.

To Drain

Our understanding of how salt finds its way to us – the choreography and architecture of its domes and caverns, its forceful movements to the Earth’s surface, the forms it coaxed from the surrounding rock and the times it got trapped on its way to us – is tightly bound with the research of the petroleum industry. The Texas oil boom, also known as the gusher age, started in 1901 with the discovery that stubbornly impermeable domes of rock salt trap and densely press reserves of fossil fuels during their hungry climb towards us. White marks of rock salt on the surface, generously, could point drillers to the deposits below. Since depleting much of what was to be found throughout the last century, the seekers turn to salt once more, now with another plea – for storage.

To Capture

@DrAliQuwesh
1 month ago
Thanks for this amazing video and sharing your insights. I am a senior chemical engineer working in the area of CCUS, energy transition, upstream oil-gas projects and trainings. Let’s connect and see ways of helping each other. Happy to consult in oil and gas projects.

@user4826
1 year ago
I would install these in all major cities around the world. Impressive technology. Maybe integrate this technology onto major highways and high carbon areas. Scientists need to step up. I think this technology has massive potential and can be sold to governments for a great profit, with the added bonus of clean air.

Industrialists are seeking storage for substances they desire and those they are desperate to dispose of: products (hydrogen) and byproducts (captured carbon, fracking fluid, nuclear waste). Vast underground halls are manufactured for this by pumping in water to dissolve the halite that resided in caverns, turning them into empty space and pools of brine. In its womb, brine can hold gas – sequestered with a chemical transfiguration to make it stable for storing, a keepsake. Rock salt is impermeable to gas, it shouldn’t leak. One of the only challenges is posed by the microbiome that might survive, despite everything, in the salt and bring forth life – the extremophiles and biofilm. Life, here, means the production of methane.

To Diagnose

You can now access a document, declassified in 2013, that contains Soviet political jokes, typed up and xeroxed for the attention of the Deputy Director of the CIA.

Soviet scientists are experimenting on a fly. First, they rip its wings off.

– Fly, go! The fly starts to walk.
They rip off one of its legs.
– Fly, go! The fly manages to keep walking.
They rip off three more of its legs.
– Fly, go! The fly tries to move, barely making it forward.
They rip off all of its legs.
– Fly, go! The fly isn’t moving.
The scientists draw their conclusion: upon losing all its limbs, a fly goes deaf.