You are a Donut

On love, loss, and topology

A hundred people and a dog are sitting in a large circle, in the grand salon of a tavern with maximalist decoration and a miniature lighthouse outside. Near the entrance, a safer space disclaimer so exhaustive it reads like analytic philosophy. Next to it, flyers for Sunday’s moon yoga. In the circle: Old serious people, bohemians, children running around, a pirate with a face tattoo. The circle is empty except for a blue patterned blanket with Lego sculptures at each corner, looking like half-finished functionalist architecture with a few rogue pieces. It’s the goodbye ceremony of my friend Sam. It opened with “Teardrop” by Massive Attack; I cried already.

There is an eerie intimacy between strangers who share a person. I found myself melting into the arms of a grey-haired dude in skater clothes who smelled like self-rolled cigarettes. He’d danced naked with Sam in South Africa. Sam was the godfather of his kid. Godfather Sam, philosopher Sam, animal rights activist Sam, weird relative, dear friend. It’s not really the same person.

We spin stories around the circle, sing songs, and remember. A teenage friend now living in Abu Dhabi recounted how they used to get high and attempt to answer life’s great questions instead of studying. And how they were the only students in the history of their school to carry along their own seat cushions, made by Sam’s mom. We sang songs from Sam’s spiritual lineage, some of us awkwardly, others making accompanying hand signs with reverence. The evangelical pastor rolled with the eclectic ceremony with surprising grace. Sam’s own voice entered the circle; he’d written a philosophical essay on death a year before. He wrote that death gives life meaning, but he didn’t plaster over the curious unfathomability of one’s own absence.

Photos of Sam loop on the wall, showing his wide-open eyes and sharp nose in different hairdos, from a shaved normie look to the late great beard and undercut with braided long hair. I found a stack of magazines with Sam’s essays. The first one I opened was a reflection on the devil, prompted by a tarot card he drew at my birthday. That was the last time I saw him. The chains of the devil are loose enough that the humans could just step out of them.

Even though the different stories didn’t add up, they cohered into a totality around the central absence of Sam. As if the wholeness of a life only comes together in death.

You’ve felt this shape before, but probably not at a funeral.

Holes all the Way Down

A torus is a tube that folds in on itself. A donut. Years ago, Cheryl had blown my mind with an epic tour of toroids from black holes to Voronoi tessellations. Ever since, the torus has haunted me.

Topologically speaking, you are a donut. A continuous hole runs through your middle, from your mouth to your ass, and your body wraps around it. You are a tube that grew limbs and developed feelings about its mother. Your gut, that long, dark interior passage where nutrients get broken down, is technically the outside world passing through you. Food doesn’t enter your body when you swallow it, only as it crosses the intestinal wall. Until then, it’s still in the tunnel, still outside. The most private part of your body is an opening.

This toroid shape repeats at every scale. Every cell in your body is a miniature version: a porous membrane wrapped around a center that’s enclosed but not solid. The holes in the cell are how it receives nutrients.

Around your heart, there is a magnetic field with a donut shape that extends several feet outside your body. It’s measurable, and it fluctuates with your emotional state.

Pores, pupils, nostrils. You are made of holes all the way down.

Lacan spent his career on this observation: the hole at the center of our psyche is constitutive. Without that sense of lack, there would be no desire and no subject as a result. It doesn’t matter whether the hole in the middle of your chest is God-shaped, looking for your other half, or shaped like the person you’d be if you woke up at six and did yoga for an hour. You’re not supposed to fill it. Without it, you wouldn’t want breakfast, let alone God.

We were forming the same shape in Sam’s funeral circle. A whole with a hole.

Skin Around an Absence

I remember dancing that shape. My movement perfectly traced your swaying with eyes closed, even without touching. Did I follow your field lines? As our fingers finally met and I traced the lines of your hands, the pull was almost unbearable. I could hold it because I knew it wouldn’t resolve. There’s a gap between us that no intimacy will ever bridge; not this touch, not any other. The electrons that make up your hand repel mine. They never touch. Attraction is only possible because of that final distance we can’t cross.

Here is how love was born, according to the Greeks: Uranus gets his penis cut off, which is then dumped into the ocean. Foam froths up around the severed member—out walks Aphrodite. “Afros” means “foam”, and every bubble in it is a skin around an absence. As it turns out, you need holes and a penis to make love.

Sex as an analogy carries this further than expected. It’s where desire from lack is viscerally felt in the body. And yes, the torus and the line reaching through are of genital morphology. It’s wholes with holes all the way down, and the thrust through the empty middle is what bridges between the levels of the fractal. The center of our cells holds the information to build the junctions that glue them into tissue. Food passes through our digestive tube to become part of our bodies. Heartstrings connect us to others through the channel of the toroid field in our chest.

It Loops

Once I stopped trying to fill my chest-hole, it could do its work as a fountainhead: spilling over and looping in on itself. The first loop is self-love (and that’s easier said than done). Actually loving myself changed how I could love others. A relationship stops being two people trying to complete each other and becomes its own whole. I remember standing with my partner Iris under the shower, on mushrooms, her arms resting on my shoulders with the water pouring between us. We’d turned into statues of Greek gods; not just lovers but the Tarot card of the Lovers (and it wasn’t the shrooms). The pattern of our relationship reverberated through deep time, and somewhere behind us in the stream, two muddy hominoids were standing in the exact same pose.

The love we felt morphed beyond romance; it became universal. I know how this sounds, but it’s real. I’ve glimpsed it. It feels like everything is made of love, and that love includes you in your entirety, with all your flaws and fuckups. So we’ve looped back to self-love.

Moving along a torus from the inside, you climb in one direction long enough and find yourself back at the floor of the world. Ted Chiang built a universe with this shape for one of his stories; so did every contemplative tradition that ever sent someone up a mountain expecting God and brought them back to the dishes.

You can traverse the nested donuts in either direction. I found that if I can’t reach anyone else, I can direct that same sweetness that I wanted to give outwards towards myself. And if self-love is not available, you can drop straight into universal love (all it takes is a decade of meditation training).

Sometimes a hole is just a hole. At the funeral, I didn’t think “how toroidal”. When I added my Lego block to the malformed structure, I just felt sad, hopeless, and a bit surreal.

What Did Ramakrishna Know?

He could rest in pristine oneness. He had mastered multiple meditation systems and tasted their versions of the cosmic donut. But for some reason, he preferred to stay in twoness so he could love the goddess Kali.

Cracked on Purpose

300 million years ago, trees didn’t rot. They died and stayed where they fell, alone, perfectly intact, absurd monuments littering the earth. The dead just accumulated because no organism had yet learned to digest wood.

Then fungus frothed up around the fallen pillars. It evolved the capacity to crack cellulose open and feed on the dead. It also became the mycelium network that connects living trees to each other underground, making forests possible. Connection was born from the willingness to pass through the crack.

Fungus learned this before I did. When loneliness comes in the middle of the night, there is a counterintuitive move available: I open my body to it, like opening to the cold of the shower. I let the lack expand until it fills my whole chest, and pour myself out in longing. At some point, the outward motion loops back around and points straight at my sweet little bird heart.

Loving my loving, I become lover and beloved.

The ten spheres of the Kabbalah spilled out when God shattered their vessels to enter the world. Presumably, oneness got bored with its own perfection and opted for a lightning bolt of broken mess instead.

It’s hard to remember in the midst of grief or heartbreak, but the gaping hole in my chest is not supposed to be filled. It pulls me to hold a question the way he did, with that long searching look before he answered, and to care for animals. I miss you, Sam.