In 1979, Italo Calvino penned a witty addendum to “Becalmed in the Antilles,” a short story he’d published in the 1950s. The story is about a story, one told by an Uncle Donald, who spins a tale of sailing with Admiral Drake, a sixteenth-century English sea captain. His ship is imperiled not by storm but by terrible calm, languishing in a windless hot purgatory while a well-supplied Spanish galleon sits obstructively nearby and waits for the British sailors to die of scurvy or starvation. Uncle Donald never reaches the end of his story—the matter of how his ship “got moving again” and “routed the Spanish galleon”—despite pleas from his young audience for a conclusion. He falls asleep, suspending the reader in that now-familiar tranquil dead zone.

Calvino’s postscript affirms the story as an enduring allegory for political stalemate, but that’s just a part of the puzzle. The narrative resonates as well in 1979 as it did in the 1950s, “because the paradoxical contrast between bitter struggle and enforced immobility is a common condition, both in political-military and epic-narrative terms, at least as old as the Iliad...” The story itself depicts this mad activity borne of stillness:

You have to understand, no one realized how long we would be becalmed there, off the Antilles, for years even, with the haze and humidity, the sky leaden and lowering as if a hurricane were about to break any moment. We were streaming sweat, all naked, climbing in the rigging, looking for a bit of shade under the furled sails. Everything was so still that even those of us who were most impatient for change, for something to happen, were motionless too, one at the top of the foretopmast, another on the main jib aft, another again astride a spar, perched up there leafing through atlases and nautical maps…

Most of that paragraph—“hurricane,” “break,” “streaming,” “climbing,” “leafing”—scrapes against the word “motionless.” There’s so much action in the calm. Anxiety and boredom do not permit stillness; they elicit physical tics and small ritual behaviors. When they do lie perfectly still, the sailors’ minds go on turning, changing, decaying.

Calvino’s paradox has basis in climatological fact. Though a few degrees north of the fluid border of the so-called doldrums, the Antilles can well be affected by hazards ascribed to equatorial waters, slack breeze prime among them. But in The Island, Lord Byron’s narrative about the 1790 mutiny on the HMS Bounty, he wrote:

“Belike,” said Ben, “you might not from the bay,
But from the bluff-head where I watch’d to-day,
I saw her in the doldrums; for the wind
Was light and baffling.”—“When the sun declined
Where lay she? had she anchor’d?—“No, but still
She bore down on us, till the wind grew still.”

“Baffling” connotes variability, not absence. The weather grows still. As the Oxford English Dictionary has it, there are “sudden storms” and “light unpredictable winds” to contend with in the doldrums, so that the principal quality of calm becomes its fragility—the sense it could shatter at any moment, before anyone is ready.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner also famously strands a ship in a region supposedly without life:

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.

Of course there was breath. There was breathing. Movement formally returns a stanza later, with its usual gusto:

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

 

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white.

The doldrums are a pretty lively place after all, and mere prelude, in this case, to a far worse fate than idleness: slow and sure demise.

Bizarrely, Coleridge anticipates theories about the heat death of the universe, a state of no thermodynamic free energy in which life ceases to be possible. Thermodynamic equilibrium, however, requires maximum entropy, which means a maximum dissipation of energy. In other words, something must happen in order for nothing to happen. In yet another way: something and nothing happen simultaneously.

Our concept of “the doldrums” as a state of mind predates any nautical usage. Rather, the maritime meaning derives from the cognitive. In the late eighteenth century, a “dull, sluggish person” was a “doldrum,” drawing on the Old English “dol,” which could also mean “foolish.” By 1811, the doldrums were a distinct mental territory that any unfortunate might blunder into. It’s an early stop for Milo, the hero of Norton Juster’s 1961 childhood fantasia The Phantom Tollbooth, who discovers a molasses-like species called the Lethargarians living there. For all their proud laziness, they remain maniacally legislative and prone to overscheduling:

“From 2:30 to 3:30 we put off for tomorrow what we could have done today.
“From 3:30 to 4:00 we take our early late afternoon nap.
“From 4:00 to 5:00 we loaf and lounge until dinner.
“From 6:00 to 7:00 we dillydally.
“From 7:00 to 8:00 we take our early evening nap, and then for an hour before we go to bed at 9:00 we waste time.
“As you can see, that leaves almost no time for brooding, lagging, plodding, or procrastinating, and if we stopped to think or laugh, we’d never get nothing done.”

Doing nothing has never been such difficult, meticulous work: it entails the very effort the Lethargians seek to avoid. As with most of the more unpleasant regions explored in The Phantom Tollbooth, Milo learns that it’s his own fault he’s in the Doldrums—that it’s not a country he’s encountered, but a place he created for himself, through sheer inattention. He’s only trapped in his own mind.

Colloquially, the doldrums have more to do with listless melancholy than full-bore biochemical depression, but both can manifest as this labyrinthine or elliptical form of consciousness, with escape not just impossible but inconceivable. David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” is a recursive story about a woman whose relentless interrogation of her condition forms the bedrock of the condition itself:

The therapist…said that she felt comfortable enough in the validity of their therapeutic connection together to point out that a chronic mood disorder could itself be seen as constituting an emotionally manipulative defense mechanism: i.e., as long as the depressed person had the depression’s affective discomfort to preoccupy her, she could avoid feeling the deep vestigial childhood wounds which she was apparently determined to keep repressed at all costs.

There’s a clear parallel in this to Calvino’s “bitter struggle and enforced immobility” as coexistent, even codependent values. Just as Joyce’s Dubliners and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot gave the modernist gloss on stagnation as hectic process, Wallace veered between the paralytic and manic aspects of a single condition. He notes in Infinite Jest that clinical depression does not suppose a catatonic effect but peculiar vibration, “a nausea of the cells” that renders “any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency…literally horrible.”

That willed passivity, though dangerous, is not strictly synonymous with suffering, as the transcendental boredom at the center of Wallace’s unfinished The Pale King suggests. A remark from his Caribbean cruise-ship travelogue, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” is also telling:

How long has it been since you did Absolutely Nothing? I know exactly how long it’s been for me. I know how long it’s been since I had every need met choicelessly from someplace outside me, without my having to ask or even acknowledge that I needed. And that time I was floating, too, and the fluid was salty, and warm but not too-, and if I was conscious at all I'm sure I felt dreadless, and was having a really good time, and would have sent postcards to everyone wishing they were here.

These images of amniotic comfort and inward journeys, human hibernation—again the doldrums are crackling with potential energies. The turbid haze of sky, to be cleaved in half by sudden lightning; warm blue waters that lap at a vessel, concealing the flow of sea creatures below; the boat’s bored and increasingly restless passengers, ready to snap under the weight of a moribund world.

That world is a projection, a fault of time and scale. We can scarcely tell the difference between a stormless day and a day spent in the eye of a storm. Stand in one spot and everything else may spin around you, not because you are of any significance, but because you are not. To die and sink in the doldrums is to be absorbed by Proteus, the archaic sea-god of infinite mutation. Fair winds, an arbitrary privilege, are not the only means by which we measure the motion of a soul.