Highly Strung

Highly Strung

Nervous. Temperamental. Brittle. Unstable. These words are synonyms for the phrase, ‘highly strung’, a slur for people who have expressed feelings of despair and distress. The term, ‘highly strung’ originates from the tuning of stringed instruments, something I thought about for the first time during the Spring of 2020.

During the early weeks of the Covid-19 restrictions known as ‘Lockdown 1’ in the UK, my daughter was learning to play Ode to Joy on a rented violin. During a zoom lesson, her violin teacher was explaining how to tighten the small tuning peg that held a curled tendril of the violin’s G string. A small gesture. One quarter-turn too far. The string snapped. The music stopped.

When I saw my daughter standing, a broken violin at her feet, I felt an immediate instinct to make it better. I thought of acts of making and of the Greek god of making things better, Apollo, the god of medicine and of music. In classical art, Apollo is often depicted with a stringed lyre at his feet. I also felt helpless. My knowledge of medicine and art wasn’t enough to repair this.

I kept the broken string on my desk and almost a year after the music had suddenly stopped, I used it to make a necklace, threading beads onto the broken violin string. I was touching the string, over and again, as my daughter had touched it when she played Ode to Joy, but with the intention of repurposing something that was broken. The resulting beaded work is called Highly Strung, the title repairing a term that invalidates many of the nervous, temperamental, brittle and unstable feelings, that many of us in health and social care have felt during the Covid-19 pandemic. The work of beading has been by turns relaxing, but also therapeutic, helping me to notice my own ‘highly strung’ emotions and tune in to them.

Beads are an enduring part of human culture, crossing boundaries of time and place. I am biracial and have childhood memories of my German grandmother holding a beaded rosary and also of my Pakistani grandmother praying with a beaded tasbih. The two women, one Roman Catholic, one Muslim, born in different continents in the early twentieth century, had no shared language, but had both grown up touching beads as an act of spiritual searching and devotion. Beads are personally emblematic of the threads that run common to human experience, but these experiences are not unique. In 2006, archaeologists found shells with holes, believed to be the oldest surviving beads, and dated them at around 100,000 years old. In many cultures, beads have been used to convey messages, requiring skilled decoding by people familiar with the cues of colour and pattern, just as doctors became skilled at decoding patterns and hallmarks of Covid-19 as the pandemic progressed.

Beads outlive us. Necklaces have been found in ancient Egyptian graves. Highly Strung is a memento mori, a necklace desgined to be worn around the neck and draping the chest, slung like a stethoscope, drawing the eye to the anatomical sites that Covid-19 ravages. Highly Strung is both metaphor and adornment. It is an offering to my colleagues in health and in social care, working in harmony like the string players of an orchestra, often working under immense strain, similar to the stress endured by the violin string that holds this entire work together. How many of us wonder if the next quarter turn of the year will break us? Highly Strung is an invitation to consider how we might remake ourselves.

I have used beads from Prague, Purdilnagar, Venice, and Ghana. I have chosen these beads to represent the diverse backgrounds of health and social care workers. The beads have been made by unseen hands, reminding me of the unacknowledged hands that craft so many acts of care.

Highly Strung is made of many components, each infused with meaning, but as a whole piece my intention is for it to be both joyful and hopeful, refashioning brokenness to optimism arising from the lifting of lockdowns, the vaccination programme, the freedom in care homes and the development of treatments. The resulting opulence of Highly Strung is a reminder of the good fortune we have as vaccinated westerners, a tangible reminder of our responsibility to share vaccines equitably with all those bound by common threads of humanity.

Sabina Dosani