A long-lost post from August 2nd, 2012
In the early years of this blog, I would dash off new posts with ease. I wasn’t setting out to be a writer, only to express the simple sweetness of life as I felt it in the moment, with a little speculative reflection thrown in. I was embarrassed to confess my joy openly, to avoid setting a barrier against my reader. It had a fourfold cause: the sudden discovery of good health, love, material sufficiency, and freedom from care. That was seven years ago. Sometimes I’m in low spirits these days, under the weather as in my last, following a whole month of rain.
My immediate neighbourhood is not immune to the suffering in the world, as I said then. We’re all in this together. But I’ve wanted to rise above it in my writing, paint only the silver linings, never the black clouds. I should take a lesson from Fernando Pessoa. The very title of his main prose work The Book of Disquiet shows the source of his own inspiration. Here’s an example of what I mean:
I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me—this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we’re mean-hearted but because we don’t feel like unbuttoning our coat.
Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I always will be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry. But my mind quickly puts me in my place… I remember that I’m on the fourth floor of the Rua dos Souradores, and I take a drowsy look at myself. I glance up from this half-written page at life, futile and without beauty, and at the cheap cigarette I’m about to extinguish in the ashtray beyond the fraying blotter. Me in this fourth-floor room, interrogating life!, saying what souls feel!, writing prose like a genius or a famous author! Me, here, a genius!…
I should add, in case you are not familiar with Pessoa, that his narrator is semi-fictional, the book is sub-titled A Factless Autobiography, and was merely a set of manuscripts in a trunk till posthumously edited and (brilliantly) translated from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith. The above extract is fragment no. 6 in the Penguin edition. His entire theme is the wresting of a peculiar kind of joy from a vast realm of irksomeness, by means of a flight from the world into imagination. I have always found him a joy to read no matter what his theme; and I have wished like him to be able to write fluently from the depths of any kind of mood.
As I see it, the task of the writer is to be generous to the reader. I have joined a new writers’ group, here in my home town. It’s a wonderful thing, I may talk more about it later, but it has made me realize many things, whether or not they were raised in the two meetings we’ve had so far. We all joined, I guess, because we wanted to share our difficulties and help one another. It’s only a couple of months since I sneered at the idea. The others are more into fiction, but I think it makes no difference in the end. One writes to provide fodder, to enrich the reader’s life, if only for the time it takes to absorb the words. Even the simplest entertainment is a gift from the performer to the audience. I could digress with many examples but—restricting ourselves to literature—consider P G Wodehouse, the polar opposite to Pessoa. What could be more comforting than his “cloudlessness”, as Martin Amis calls it? In a review of a new edition of Sunset at Blandings, Amis continues:
The only moment of anomie I can recall in his fiction occurs in an early short story, when Jeeves, prompt as ever, brings Bertie Wooster his usual whisky-and-soda at six o’clock. ‘It’s the bally monotony of it all,’ complains the alienated Bertie, ‘that makes everything seem so perfectly bally.’ Bally, by the way, is a public-school diminutive of ‘bloody’. Even here, you see, things aren’t that desperate.
Right now, I’m having to force myself to write. My soul is undergoing some kind of botheration; is trying to tell mind, but mind fails to understand. I should say that it’s the body which gives voice to soul, if only we know how to listen. Body carries messages from soul to mind, through feelings, emotions, physical symptoms. Symptoms make us go to the dentist, doctor or priest—or in any event, to take the wisest action we know. Our primitive ancestors, and the other animals, have been equipped with instincts for self-healing. We are far from that simplicity. Our body prompts us to take needful action and can do no more till mind listens, and when we surrender ourself to the wisest remedy we know, it stops sending symptoms. We feel no more pain. This is the Placebo Effect, but if it isn’t enough to meet the soul’s demand, the effect is only temporary.
My doctor doesn’t believe the above, of course. It occurred to me yesterday that something has been clouding my perception of the simple sweetness of life that used to provide my daily inspiration; and it’s been going on for months. On a whim, I checked the “live-longer” prescriptions I’ve been taking daily against various cardio-vascular contingencies the doctor thinks I’m increasingly prone to at my age: to look at their side-effects. If some of those hit you, you wouldn’t want to live longer. I thought my body might be complaining against these powerful drugs, and decided to give them a break. Within two hours, I felt back to my old self. Ha! The placebo effect works in reverse. Time will tell.
The body and soul, as opposed to the shifty and makeshift mind, never ask for immortality. It’s governments and doctors who take competitive pride in increasing longevity; recklessly ignoring the problems it causes at every level. Nature in its wisdom favours the cull. Man in his stupidity puts a spanner in Nature’s works.
Yesterday I heard on the radio about a study which has proved that people with chronic depression and anxiety live shorter lives. That seems a blessing to those involved. I’m sure some of them don’t find life worth living unless aided by known killers such as alcohol, tobacco, recreational drugs, risky sex and poor dietary choices; or suicide. Who am I to disparage their choice?
Lead author Dr Tom Russ said: “The fact that an increased risk of mortality was evident, even at low levels of psychological distress, should prompt research into whether treatment of these very common, minor symptoms can modify this increased risk of death.”
A “low level of psychological distress” is plain ordinary unhappiness, but they diagnose it as anxiety and depression of course, and say it’s an illness, which they can treat with anti-depressants. Another spokesperson at the same organization, the Wellcome Trust (funded by a drug company) says:
This study highlights the need to ensure they have access to appropriate health care and advice so that they can take steps to improve the outcome of their illness.
Why? Not to alleviate unhappiness, but to make them live longer. And the methods prescribed to make them live longer would be “lifestyle changes” (stop drinking smoking, recreational drugs and all the other deadly things) and take the prescribed antidepressants so as to stay unhappy and live longer. You might think my logic is at fault there. Aren’t antidepressants known as “happy pills”? That’s just humorous sarcasm. Another press release issued today on the same radio programme claims that: “Antidepressants save lives”. Yes but another survey, quoted on the same news item, has found that the town of Blackpool in Lancashire has England’s lowest happiness rating as well as the highest use of antidepressants. I’m not suggesting the correlation proves that antidepressants cause unhappiness, only that they do not ameliorate it.
Beware doctors and lawyers! They have their own ambitions and agendas, like politicians, financiers and marketeers. May you and I, through writing and reading, maintain soul-to-soul exchange, reaching across space and time. I pray we keep our integrity, resist the corruption of truth for short-term ends, paint the bigger picture, stay fearlessly close to all-wise Nature, whose children and heirs we are.
Let writing be my drug, both medicinal and recreational.
16 thoughts on “Live & die by the pen”
Charles Bergeman
I have labeled donut holes (fried dough, covered in liquid sugar), “happy pills”. I suspect my doctor would not approve. But they bring me great joy.
Vincent
Now you’re teasing. Homer Simpson must be your role model.
ZACL
There are zillions of contradictions to the contradictions and the contraindications. Sometimes the physical constitution is stronger than the psyche that governs it, in whatever it does.
Vincent
You’re right of course, ZACL. The topic is as big as the world. Or as Walt Whitman says, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” However, if the psyche is the mind, it does not govern the physical constitution. It interferes with it.
Joanne
it is what i have come to love so much about poetry (words in general really), art, photography, creativity. For me, creating is a bridge to a deeper connection within myself, and sometimes I even manage in my way to make a deeper connection in someone else. Having lived with chronic illness and pain for as long as I have, the most powerful medicine is found in this, as well as being in a natural environment among the trees and birds as much as possible. My greatest, most effective medicine has never been from a prescription bottle, or in my case multiple times at the receiving end of a surgeon’s scalpel. It’s really wonderful to discover your thought-provoking writing again!
Bryan M. White
A wise person once said, “You take the good. You take the bad. You take them both and there you have the facts of life.”
Vincent
I tried to track down who this wise person was, suspecting his name was Bryan M White. But it seems he was either Alan Thicke, Gloria Loring or Al Burton – whoever is credited with the song lyrics.
Vincent
Joanne, it’s good to have you here commenting again, and the endorsement of your own experience on this topic.
CIngram
Good luck with the writers’ group. I tried to form one in my little Spanish fastness, but I only found two others, and they both turned out to be mad. One brilliantly, exhaustingly so, the other the kind you cross the street to avoid. Perhaps if I were a true artist I would have gone ahead with it anyway.And good luck with life. Most of it strikes me as rather fun, but it takes constant effort of will to care about what is good, and to ignore what is bad.I find the world, and everything in it, constantly fascinating. Mutatis mutandis, I think you do, too. It helps a lot. It’s almost impossible to be bored or unhappy that way.
Arashmania
You raise a very interesting point here about the relationship between (natural) life and (artificial) medication, about, if you like, “madness” and sanitized “sanity.” Had most of the major artists listened to their doctors, their art would have lost out significantly (perhaps with the exception of Mozart whom I am listening to as we speak and who somehow keeps me in an overall uplifted mood regardless of my own physical states; he seems a happy-go-lucky genius of some sort).Speaking of music and madness, my latest post somehow ties in with yours, thematically at least, where I wonder if treatment for madness is always the best option: http://arashworld.blogspot.ca/2012/08/madness-on-celluloid-bold-experiment-of.htmlAnyhow, I think the soul, knowing better, is not afraid of mortality; it is the body that gets only half-chewed answers about life and existence and hence worries. I do not mind doctors. In fact, I appreciate their work. They are doing their jobs. And they do happen to help many people. But even their advice must be taken with a grain of salt and they mainly treat the body, while writing (music, film), as you stated treats the soul. Vincent
I agree with almost everything you say including appreciation of the work that doctors do (as opposed to some of their motivations).But when you say this – “Anyhow, I think the soul, knowing better, is not afraid of mortality; it is the body that gets only half-chewed answers about life and existence and hence worries.”– I have to reiterate a point I made earlier, that I don’t accept the traditional dichotomy between body and soul. I see body and soul as as a unity fully aware of mortality. It is mind which has the fancy ideas, and gets out of step with Nature. This is not to denigrate mind, only to advise that it must keep to its proper place and remain subordinate to the wisdom of body-soul, or soul-body, if you prefer. One is visible and the other invisible, but they are a unity.
Vincent
I enjoyed your comment, CIngram. Your remark that “I find the world, and everything in it, constantly fascinating” is a cloudless sunny attitude worthy of Wodehouse’s characters, especially Jeeves. I would agree with it all except for “constantly”. There are times when I would turn inwards away from the world like Pessoa’s character in The Book of Disquiet.
When I feel down, depressed and disconnected, I read. Some days almost anything will do. Comedy or tragedy. A lot of times I read you. Your writings always make me feel more connected with the world. Sometimes I even read my own stuff for a lame chuckle.
Vincent
Bless you for this, Rev. It’s not as simple for me. I can feel down when I hate what I’ve written, or my inability to write. And when I feel down, I may not be able to read anything. Yesterday I was excited about a new book I was reading. I started to plan what I’d write about it, to encourage others to read it. But as I read on, I discovered its excellence was patchy. The author needed a more critical editor, to tell him what to cut. I got too involved with it as if I had written it myself. My mood went down. Mad, I know. I read your stuff always, Rev, for a chuckle, for information and to admire your ease in expressing the events of the day.
Ghetufool
bravo! minor discontent, why did you start it with Pessoa when you want to drag us down to anti-depressants?
Darev2005
thank you from my side also! you have a perfect anti-depressant here. i read somewhere (some quote i guess) that there is no sadness that doesn’t go after an hour of good read.
Vincent
I’m glad it was only a minor discontent. But thanks for pointing out so clearly its structural flaw. See also my next post.nt. But thanks for pointing out so clearly its structural flaw. See also my next post.
a wayfarer’s notes 