And My Bright Abyss

"Mischief in Arcadia & Other Tales" is a newly released collection of short stories and “veiled memoirs” by Dr. Omar Sabbagh, published by Sulfur Editions in 2026. The book gathers eleven pieces of short prose that move between fiction, auto-fiction, and memoir, forming what Sabbagh describes as an “overall auto-fictive statement” on his adult life to date.

An excerpt from this book, entitled "And My Bright Abyss," is published here as part of Kulturnest’s Havens Exhibition, where the book’s preoccupations with memory, displacement, inner refuge, and the fragile architectures of belonging resonate deeply with the exhibition’s wider exploration of what it means to seek, imagine, or lose a haven.

‘Christ is contingency…’

Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

The three years, 1999-2002, in which I studied PPE at Exeter College, Oxford, have proven to have shaped my career and my life thereafter, if perhaps with slightly different ratios.  I arrived a young enthusiastic Marxist in my views, ready to stoke the revolution.  And to this day, my political views stay very far left of center.  That said, and it took me a while to come to terms with this sad fact, by temperament or mindset I am, as I was, very conservative.  In some ways, the nervous breakdown that pitted my career at Oxford was just one outcome of the seemingly implacable conflict of those two facets of who and how I am: my views and wishes, and my inborn nature.

Roughly half-way through my time at Oxford I suffered acutely of paranoia and delusions, which were then, thankfully, caught, diagnosed and nipped in the bud.  However, while the first half of my years at Oxford were, when seen in hindsight, a slippery slope into acute mental illness, the second half was equally debilitated, in terms of both academic and more extracurricular features of undergraduate life, by the heavy medication prescribed me.  My time at Oxford was overshadowed, and has, expectedly, overshadowed my pursuant adult life.  But there are boons from banes.

As a writer, a writer in prose (of different sorts) and in verse, that rather difficult and troubled period of my life has also proved, I suppose, a kind of serendipitous gift.  All writers know that good writing is spurred and built and driven by tensions.  And while every writer is different, and while only some writers tend to ‘resolve’ their reigning tensions or preoccupations – others merely ‘exploring’ them without resolution – I do believe that the pivotal period in question was the source of my later, felicitous capacity for what Keats called, ‘negative capability.’ 

A highly analytical mind such as my own (though I like to think, with no contradiction whatsoever, I have a good imaginative and intuitive side to me as well), starts-out trying to ‘understand’ everything, to break things down, to hole them analytically.  However, over the course of my life I have realized – in both senses, cognitively as well as experientially – that an ability to accept that one’s mind just cannot grasp everything, be it academic or experiential, is the keystone to the potential of being a happier person, to the building of a happier life. 

My best book to date, Y KNOTS: Short Fictions (Liquorice Fish Books, Oct. 2023) is titled the way it is, in part at least, due to this very salutary recognition.  When one is young, brilliant even, one wants with riveted vigor and force to ‘understand,’ to know the answers to all the ‘why’ questions that come to people and pit one’s life.  The older one gets, the more life throws at one the unpredictable and the radically contingent, the more one learns to ‘accept.’  (To put it idiomatically: ‘shit happens.’)  While I was an atheist in my Marxist youth (and for Marxist reasons), now, though only ‘philosophically’ religious (not practically) – because I understand that the more compelling, prescient, poignant, if rhetorical, question to ask is ‘Why not?’ – I have been able to come to terms with my life the better.  And this sad and indeed tragic recognition would never have freed me, as a man and as a writer, if it hadn’t been for the mishaps of my Oxford years.