Loneliness

"I'm making a list of things I'm not allowed to say:

That I'm lonely. And that I fear this loneliness will crush me, slowly and by degrees.

...That I feel like I'm stuck behind a glass wall watching everyone else live a life I've only ever dreamt of. That it is isolation in plain sight.

.. That I have become greedy for affection. And I fear there is some threshold for loneliness that should I pass I may never recover. That it sometimes rushes in like a tidal wave, flooding levees and toppling internal infrastructure, leaving me at a crowded dinner table afraid to look up from my plate for fear that someone may see the sadness in my eyes.

That loving someone does make everything a little bit easier. There is this construct in psychology called transactive memory. It is the idea that we store information and ideas - memories even - in the minds of the people around us. I cannot help but wonder if this is true of joy and sadness too? If it is possible to share emotion in this way? And what must it feel like when a person you love carries your heaviness, if only for a moment?

That there is exposure in living one's life alone.

And that for a stretch of time I walk north on Sixth Avenue each morning and pass a man who spends the whole of his day yelling upwards at the sky. I wonder if we aren't more alike than not. It would be easy to say, No, of course not.

But loneliness, stripped of the many layers in which we dress it, is fundamentally the same."

Pages 99-100,   'Places I Stopped on the Way Home, A Memoir of Chaos and Grace', Meg Fee

Brokenness

"I wear sadness differently now than I did at eighteen or 25 or any of the years in between.

I'm more comfortable with my own brokenness - more at ease with the notion that it's the well from which I draw empathy and kindness and humour. It is so telling of what it is to be human and alive in this world."

Page 42, 'Places I Stopped on the Way Home, A Memoir of Chaos and Grace', Meg Fee

Down Hysterica Passio

"We all have something within ourselves to batter down, and we get our power from this fighting. I have never 'produced' a play in verse without showing the actors that the passion of the verse comes from the fact that the speakers are holding down violence, or madness - 'down Hysterica Passio'.

All depends on the completeness of the holding down, on the stirring of the beast underneath. Without this conflict we have no passion, only sentiment and thought."

W.B.Yeats, in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley. From 'Yeats: The Man and the Masks', by Richard Ellmann

[Notebook 5, 1989]

Stillness

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."

Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
 
From The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere
by Pico Iyer

Loneliness

"Loneliness, in its quintessential form, is of a nature that is incommunicable by the one who suffers it. Nor, unlike other non-communicable emotional experiences, can it be shared via empathy. It may well be that the second person's empathic abilities are obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of the mere emanations of the first person's loneliness."

When I read those lines, I remembered sitting, years back, outside a train station in the south of England, waiting for my father. It was a sunny day, and I had a book I was enjoying. After a while, an elderly man sat down next to me and tried repeatedly to strike up conversation. I didn't want to talk and after a brief exchange of pleasantries I began to respond more tersely until eventually, still smiling, he got up and wandered away.

I've never stopped feeling ashamed about my unkindness, and nor have I ever forgotten how it felt to have the force field of his loneliness pressed up against me: an overwhelming, unmeetable need for attention and affection, to be heard and touched and seen."

Page 25, 'The Lonely City, Adventures in the Art of Being Alone', Olivia Laing

Pain is a way in

Pain

is the doorway to the here and now. Physical or emotional pain is an ultimate form of ground, saying, to each of us, in effect, there is no other place than this place, no other body than this body, no other limb or joint or pang or sharpness or heartbreak but this searing presence. Pain asks us to heal by focusing not only on the place the pain is felt but also the actual way the pain is felt. Pain is a form of alertness and particularity; pain is a way in.

...Pain is the first proper step to real compassion; it can be a foundation for understanding all those who struggle with their existence. Experiencing real pain ourselves, our moral superiority comes to an end; we stop urging others to get with the program, to get their act together or to sharpen up, and start to look for the particular form of debilitation, visible or invisible that every person struggles to overcome. In pain, we suddenly find our understanding and compassion engaged as to why others may find it hard to fully participate.

..Lastly, pain is appreciation; for most of all the simple possibility and gift of a pain free life - all the rest is a bonus. Others do not know the gift in simply being healthy, of being unconsciously free to move or walk or run. Pain is a lonely road, no one can know the measure of our particular agonies, but through pain we have the possibility, just the possibility, of coming to know others as we have, with so much difficulty, come to know ourselves.

David Whyte, 'Pain' From 'Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words'

From here.

The patterns we impose on our friends

“I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind.

No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.

Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person, the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him.

Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We could prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.”

Vladimir Nabokov, “Lolita”

https://www.facebook.com/SometimesIWriteSometimesIAm/photos/a.210068335788867.45859.210048145790886/827676244028070/?type=3&theater

Walking into yourself

I have been thinking a lot about how people choose between denial and looking at things square in the face -  how and why they decide to choose the tougher, or easier option. The stories they tell themselves to justify the choice, the stories they are afraid to let go. And how when patterns form in your head, you are no longer conscious of the choice being made.

"You can try to cover up depression in many ways. You can listen to Bach's compositions for the organ in Our Saviour's Church. You can arrange a line of good cheer in powder form on a pocket mirror with a razor blade and ingest it with a straw. You can call for help. For instance, by telephone, so that you know who's listening.

That's the European method. Hoping to work your way out of your problems through action.

I take the Greenlandic way. It consists of walking into yourself in the dark mood. Putting your defeat under a microscope and dwelling on the sight."

from 'Smilla's Sense of Snow' by Peter Hoeg (1988), translated from Danish by Tina Nunnally

Where the grain lies

​​"...At first Anders continued to tell her what he knew, under his breath. Sometimes he was a tourist guide, sometimes a sawmill manager. He could, for instance, have told her about Defects in Timber. ‘Cup shake’ is a natural splitting between two of the annular rings. ‘Star shake’ occurs when there are fissures radiating in several directions. ‘Heart shake’ is often found in old trees and extends from the pith or heart of the tree towards its circumference.

….When the heart breaks, he thought, it splits like timber, down the full length of the plank. In his first days at the sawmill he had seen Gustaf Olsson take a piece of solid timber, drive in a wedge, and give the wedge a little twist. The timber broke down the grain, from end to end.

That was all you needed to know about the heart: where the grain lay. Then with a twist, with a gesture, with a word, you could destroy it.”

Page 37, ‘The Story of Mats Israelson’, from ‘The Lemon Table’, Julian Barnes

Limbic Resonance, or the Ancient Ability to Read Minds

"...Within the effulgence of their new brain, mammals developed a capacity we call limbic resonance - a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other's inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals to a limbic brain our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors placed in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depths recede into infinity.

Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.

So familiar and expected is the neural attunement of limbic resonance that people find its absence disturbing. Scrutinize the eyes of a shark or a sunbathing salamander and you get back no answering echo, no flicker of recognition, nothing. The vacuity behind those glances sends a chill down the mammalian spine.

...To the animals capable of bridging the gap between minds, limbic resonance is the door to communal connection. Limbic resonance supplies the wordless harmony we see everywhere but take for granted - between mother and infant, between a boy and a dog, between lovers holding hands across a restaurant table. This silent reverberation between minds is so much a part of us that, like the noiseless machinations of the kidney or the liver, it functions smoothly and continuously without our notice.

...It seems a strange irony that we need science to rekindle faith in the ancient ability to read minds. That old skill, so much a part of us, is not much believed in now. Those who spend their days without an opportunity for quiet listening can pass a lifetime and overlook it altogether.

The vocation of psychotherapy confers a few unexpected fringe benefits on its practitioners, and the following is one of them. It impels participation in a process that our modern world has all but forgotten: sitting in a room with another person for hours at a time with no purpose in mind but attending. As you do so, another world expands and comes alive to your senses - a world governed by forces that were old before humanity began."

Page 63 - 65,  'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

Evolution is not an upward staircase. And why we write/read poetry

Evolution is not an upward staircase

"Many people conceive of evolution as an upward staircase, an unfolding sequence that produces ever more advanced organisms. From this perspective, the advantages of the neocortex - speech, reason, abstraction - would naturally be judged the highest attributes of human nature.

But the vertical conceptualization of evolution is fallacious. Evolution is a kaleidoscope, not a pyramid: the shapes and variety of species are constantly shifting, but there is no basis for assigning supremacy, no pinnacle toward which the system is moving. Five hundred million years ago, every species was either adapted to that world or changing to become so. The same is true today.

We are free to label ourselves the end product of evolution not because it is so, but because we exist now. Expunge this temperocentrist bias, and the neocortical brain is not the most advanced of the three [the reptilian brain, the limbic brain, and the neocortex], but simply the most recent.

Poetry, a bridge between two brains

.....Because people are the most aware of the verbal, rational part of their brains, they assume that every part of their mind should be amenable to the pressure of argument and will. Not so. Words, good ideas, and logic mean nothing to at least two brains out of three. Much of one's mind does not take orders. "From modern neuroanatomy," writes a pair of neuroscience researchers, "it is apparent that the entire neocortex of humans continues to be regulated by the paralimbic regions from which it is evolved.

...A person cannot direct his emotional life in the way he bids his motor system to reach for a cup. He cannot will himself to want the right thing, or to love the right person, or to be happy after a disappointment, or even to be happy in happy times. People lack this capacity not through a deficiency in discipline but because the jurisdiction of will is limited to the latest brain and to those functions within its purview.

...Only the latest of the three brains traffics in logic and reason, and it alone can utilize the abstract symbols we know as words. The emotional brain, although inarticulate and unreasoning, can be expressive and intuitive, Like the art it is responsible for inspiring, the limbic brain can move us in ways beyond logic that have only the most inexact translations in a language the neocortex can comprehend.

...And so people must strain to force a strong feeling into the straitjacket of verbal expression....Poetry, a bridge between the neocortical and limbic brains, is simultaneously improbable and powerful."

Page 32 - 34, 'A General Theory of Love', Thomas Lewis, M.D., Fari Amini, M.D., Richard Lannon, M.D.

The Acquisition of Language

From 'Strange Behavior, Tales of Evolutionary Neurology', Harold Klawans, M.D:

"...While improved hunting implements could assure a better supply of food, and therefore a decrease in infant mortality (the key to true Darwinian biological superiority), it is difficult to ascribe to such a technological advance any changes other than a mere increase in numbers. Certainly not man's cultural explosion, nor the development of language.

So if it wasn't "man the hunter" who was responsible for the explosive biological advantage of modern humans, what was?

Our advantages over other species are most probably due to the development of a complex language. And women are far more likely to have played the more significant role in this than men. Women were the ones who did the tough job: raising the juvenilized children in caves or any other environment and teaching those children what they needed to know to survive in the world while they were still dependent, weak and slow.

Teaching survival to the juvenilized infant depended on language. Language gave the human the distinct advantage for survival. And over a million years or two, the result was the evolution of brains selected for acquisition of language and other skills during the period of prolonged juvenilization."

Page 35

Tell me your story

".....one Sunday morning in 1971, Lewis was summoned to a terrifying scene. A man was holding a loaded gun on his family, threatening to kill them and himself and anyone else who got in the way. Lewis walked right into the man's house, sat down beside him, and said quietly: "Tell me your story."

Ten hours later, the man gave him his gun.

The truth buried in this drama gets to the very heart of Crisis Center work: each of us has a story, each of us has a loaded gun that we aim at ourselves. After hours, or years, of talking, the story can at last be told in its fullness, and the gun can be laid down.

The story has both happy and sad chapters, and parts if it may be forgotten. Sometimes it takes an outsider to help remember or clarify it. Lose your story and you lose the pageant of your life."

Page 23, 'A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman

Lithium

"The Pleiades, an open star cluster, sparkles in the constellation Taurus. ..Although I can't see it with the naked eye, I know a "brown dwarf" lives there, a faint denizen of deep space too large to be a planet but too tiny to be star. Brown dwarfs, which form from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust, are suns that for some reason didn't ignite into leaping infernos. Frigid to the core, not bright enough to see, they're only detectable because of their abundant lithium.

Lithium, the chemical manic-depressives take to stabilize their moods. I bet manic-depressives would enjoy knowing they share an elemental chemistry with huge objects in the far reaches of space, wondrous objects located and defined by their use of lithium."

Page 157, 'A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman

Our stories, and our evolving self

"Our stories help us understand a terrifyingly confusing and dangerous world, most of which is a riddle. For the world to feel safe, we need to make sense of it, especially when we encounter setbacks and misfortunes that shatter our confidence.

Telling anecdotes to friends,  we reveal our true natures, we're not just offering the what and when of our lives.

How was your trip? someone asks. The answer gives more than the whereabouts and the weather. It includes encounters, small triumphs, accidents, embarrassments, revised attitudes. Anecdotes alert our friends and loves ones to our basic values, biases, qualities, and concerns - and also how those vital pieces of identity are changing over time.

The more we learn about ourselves, the more we revise the facts to fit our evolving sense of self. As the vocabulary of life changes, we need our memory to say something fitting, something that makes sense in a newly ordered world.

How we tell the story influences how we feel about ourselves. Change your story and you change your identity."

Page 233, 'A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman

The Enemy

"...Storr sees in Churchill's story a classic relationship between depression and hostility, in which an emotionally deprived child resents his deprivers but can't risk showing any anger or upset, since he desperately needs the very people who are torturing him.

Depression results from turning that hostility against oneself.

Sometimes such people aim at opponents in the outside world. As Storr observes, "It is a great relief to find an enemy on whom it is justifiable to lavish wrath."

In Churchill's case, "fighting enemies had a strong emotional appeal to him....and when he was finally confronted by an enemy whom he felt to be wholly evil, it was a release which gave him tremendous vitality."

Page 183, 'A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman​

An Innate Sense of Value

"...For most of his life, he (Winston Churchill) crumbled under the repeat blows of a depression so familiar, loud, and unshakable, that he called it his "Black Dog" - I suppose because it hounded him. It had its own life and demands, was uncompromisingly brutal, and became a monstrous family member to be reckoned with.

It seems to have been an affliction he shared with a number of his ancestors, including his father, who suffered from what was described as "melancholia". A small, feeble boy, bullied at school and neglected by his remote, glamorous, high-society parents, Churchill grew into a dynamo of a man packed with energy, assertiveness, bravery to the point of recklessness, a tough attitude, extreme ambition, plentiful ideas, willfulness, aggression alternating with compassion, artistic tastes, egomania, and a yen for daring adventures.

The deprivation he felt as a child may well have fueled his ambitions, but, having no innate sense of value, he was easy prey for the armies of depression that plagued him throughout his life.

..In psychiatrist Anthony Storr's fascinating character study of Churchill, he argues that in 1940, when all the odds were against Britain, it took a bold conviction for Churchill to rally the British people, but "it was because all his life, he had conducted a battle with his own despair that he could convey to others that despair can be overcome."

...For the last five years of his long life, Churchill sat in a chair staring at a fire, partly paralyzed by a stroke, wholly demoralized by depression. He stopped reading, he rarely spoke. The Black Dog finally caught up with him and pounced, flattening him under its rough weight.

But what a dynamo he had been, so inventive, so courageous, so resilient. A history-making, difficult life."

Page 183, 'A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman

Forget meaning, practice being

"...Bare attention, Buddhism calls it, a pinnacle of meditation, a path to freedom from pain and suffering - not by fleeing the world, but being fully available to it.

Disponibilité, André Gide named a related attitude. (Availability, Receptiveness, in French)

Phenomenologists label their version of "bare attention" phenomenological reduction. But it's interesting how many of the world's religions and philosophies urge us to live in each silvery moment, while resisting the temptation to skim over, take for granted, or ignore the impromptu sensations that give life its vigor.

Forget meaning, this attitude says; practice being.

Feats of disciplined awareness wouldn't be necessary if we weren't in such a hurry to die and shed the burden of the senses, those permanent houseguests that keep us tipsy or tormented throughout our lives. Slow down, our sages advise, slow all the way down to the pace of stone and shadow.

How long can you watch sunlight flash across threads of spider silk stretching between two limbs of an evergreen? How long after the tree appears to be full of tinsel? Can you observe it longer than that, with continuous pleasure and surprise, but without remembering a Christmas? Without planning gifts or visits? This is the tinsel test.

Poets tend towards bare attention naturally, and are usually able to address one facet of the world with such devotion that, as Blake described it from the depths of his own supple vision, it is possible to "see a world in a grain of sand, / And a heaven in a wild flower, / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, / And eternity in an hour. (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172906)

Page 266, A Slender Thread, Rediscovering Hope at the Heart of Crisis', Diane Ackerman

The Path

"Ali said: None may arrive at the Truth until he is able to think that the Path itself may be wrong."

'Thinkers of the East, Studies in Experientialism'. Page 38.
Idries Shah
 

Emergence, not immersion

"...A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at last the metaphysical journey of your life and your actual movements are one and the same. You may wander, may learn that in order to get to your destination you must turn away from it, become lost, spin about, and then only after the way has become overwhelming and absorbing, arrive, having gone the great journey without having gone far on the ground.

In this it is the opposite of a maze, which has not one convoluted way but many ways and often no center, so that wandering has no cease or at least no definitive conclusion. A maze is a conversation; a labyrinth is a an incantation or perhaps a prayer. In a labyrinth you're lost in that you don't know the twists and turns, but if you follow them you get there; and then you reverse your course.

The end of the journey through the labyrinth is not at the center, as is commonly supposed, but back at the threshold again; the beginning is also the real end. That is the home to which you return from the pilgrimage, the adventure. The unpraised edges and margins matter too, because it's not ultimately a journey of immersion, but emergence."

Page 188, 'Flight', from 'The Faraway Nearby' by Rebecca Solnit