What Doesn't Kill You Just Takes Longer

In 1892 Julius Wolff published his theory that bones grow stronger in response to certain stressors. Wolff’s Law. Such a venerable name lends credence to that withered old axiom, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

(It’s a little more complicated than that. Mechanotransduction is the process by which cells convert stimuli into electrochemical activity. It’ not pain that teaches cells to adjust and reform, but training. Carefully controlled amounts of impact stress. Weight lifters, tennis players, their skeletons unearthed thousands of years from now will confess their stress to post-Anthropocene paleontologists. So too will the bones of astronauts tattletale, thinned by their time weightless outside the earth’s grinding gravity. See, it works in reverse as well.)

121 years after Wolff’s Law, The Joy Formidable released their album by the same name.

And what a great band name, no? Joy so formidable it demands a definite article. Thee Joy Formidable. If ever there were some so emphatically armed against agony, here they be named.

Wolf’s Law features my favorite of their songs, a sludgey, slow burning, deep cut inspired by Wangari Maathai, the environmental activist, and first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

“The Leopard and the Lung” begins with a boiling piano, joined by a muffled drumbeat. Two hits on the snare each measure. I love how the beat draws attention to itself. Even when Ritzy’s bansaw guitars get blazing, the drums are irrepressible.

While Maathai is not namechecked in the song, someone else is. The first verse:

President Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s longest serving president, infamous despot, and outspoken opponent of Maathai’s, gets the dubious distinction of a namedrop alongside “the void” he began. I think this is functionally the same as Bo Burnham’s “Bezos I”, if not so slickly sickly ironic. We may not survive the future, but the record of wrongdoing and its perpetrators will.

The refrain is two shots of pessimism, with a semisweet chaser.

This chorus resists hackneyed triumphalism, and is honest about the inevitability of defeat. We all die. Don’t bother with dignity, blazes of glory, or deathbed soliloquies, just face your something, whatever it may be.

During the verses the kick drum takes control, doing double time, and keeping that low-hum dread going. Halfway through the second verse, the guitars cut, like Ritzy’s lost her hands, and the pulsing drums drop for the last line.

The personal is only a microcosm of the political.

I’m sick of individualist solutions to collective problems. There is no amount of recycling I can do to keep the oceans from rising. The narrator’s stare is that same despair.

Return to Wolff’s Law—no one says “What kills millions around you makes you stronger.” Survival is more often a story of luck than of strength.

Facing a climate apocalypse is not a character building exercise.

I’m sick of being told that persisting through enough pain will one day make us all worthy. Worthy of what? The gospel of persistence sounds so close to the siren songs of self-destruction.

In the song’s bridge:

Defend. Attack. These are not mutually exclusive choices.

“One will that’s worth so many” is not a venerating of one hero above a rabble, but a reminder that action inspires action. A domino effect.

Wangari Maathai would go to places designated for deforestation, for golf courses, for pleasure palaces, and in protest plant trees. It might be her name on the Nobel, but Maathai never undertook these actions alone. Sure, no one aspires to namelessness, but let’s not imagine our remembrance more important than our acts.

Wolff’s Law is misunderstood. Wolff did not say that broken bones mended into stronger bones, rather his research showed bones could be trained into stronger formations, much like muscles. Training is not, as some grindset knuckleheads might want you to believe, a microdosing of meaningless pain.

Re-read two favorites recently: So Many Olympic Exertions by Anelise Chen and Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash. Both authors are sensational writers who lend Shakespearean stakes to swim meets and D3 college wrestling regionals. Both explore the lives of athletes who supernova. I’m sorry to report their self-destruction does not save them.

In the climate quixotic we cannot calcify. We cannot believe in simple perseverance. Adversity is not an accident. Its architects have names.

History does not judge Daniel arap Moi kindly.

Why wait for history to have all the fun?

Here is some information and an avenue to assist the victims of environmental racism in Pakistan.