Eloquent Body

by Dawn Garisch

  At eighteen, I'd considered life a straight road. Not that it had been easy, but I thought I knew who I was and where I was heading. Born into a family who were not interested in psychology or religion, and who looked to science to provide answers, I had taken for granted that what was concretely in front of me was the raw material I had to work with to construct my life. The intangibles like dreams and soul held no meaning.

  Disease provided a window, or rather a trapdoor, into a parallel reality – a reality based on the non-rational, which was nevertheless cohesive and imbued with meaning. If I had developed pneumonia or broken my leg, doctors, backed by science, would have rushed in and fixed me and nothing would need to have changed. But I was suffering from an illness that medicine barely understands. As a result, I was forced to look elsewhere to make sense of what was happening to me.

  Initially, I did not do this. I attended the ophthalmology clinic and submitted myself to injections of corticosteroids angled behind my eyeballs and took the prescribed tablets and drops. These were sight-saving measures, although the treatment itself, ironically, can cause cataracts and other unwanted effects which obscure vision.

  I carried on studying, evolving into a doctor, learning from tutors both explicitly and covertly how to become a medical practitioner. I studied the body as mechanism and as genetic construct and as chemical cascade. I learnt to take a family, medical and occupational history, to examine the body, to diagnose and to treat. Our class of just under two hundred students was taught that illness and injury are the failures of anatomical and physiological systems. We were steeped in the attitude that death is the enemy.

  In those seven years, I learnt about an approach to the body that has had enormous impact on the wellbeing and life span of humans in the latter half of the twentieth century. Yet I could never shake off the feeling that there was something missing.

  Over the next few decades after I qualified, afraid for my sight and in pain, I consulted a psychotherapist and a range of alternative therapies. I learnt from these teachers that there are many approaches that view disease as dis-ease, as the means our bodies use to alert us that we are out of kilter; I learnt too that accidents or ‘bad luck’ can be a way the unconscious tries to wake us up. I discovered that there might be something that life wanted from me that was neither ego-driven nor genetic, nor to be found in any rational manual. Wanting to track all sources of my condition, I became open to what I now think of as the poetry of the body – the way story and metaphor reveal themselves in the physical, emotional and spiritual self.

  ***

  It is easy to misconstrue the body as being a machine. The way we fit together and pivot and hinge is awe-inspiring. Watching an orthopaedic surgeon operate with saws, glues and nails, one can be forgiven for thinking that a human body is a very sophisticated robot. Treating someone who has diabetes with insulin can look like supplying oil to an engine that keeps running out of this ingredient essential for proper functioning. Taking a pill to prevent conception can lead us to believe that we are in control of physiological processes that can be entirely understood through logic.

  Yet there are aspects of disease and healing processes that we cannot take apart and explain as yet. One example is the placebo effect. We usually regard this either as an indication that the patient is a malingerer – that the symptoms are generated by their psychological state of mind, and that they have responded to a con trick – or as a nuisance, when studying how effective a new drug is. In trials that tested antidepressants,4 the placebo worked almost as well as the actual drug. It begs the question why researchers are so keen to eliminate the effects of a placebo.

  Another example is that women who have been trying to conceive for years without success, and then adopt a child and stop trying, not uncommonly become pregnant.

  The focus of some researchers is shifting away from an approach which views the sick body as one whose systems have failed and which needs an external agent to restore health. They are starting to pay more attention to the innate self-healing capacities of the body and how they are either interrupted or activated, and whether and how this relates to ancient and indigenous practices. For millennia, humans have used story, ritual, talismans, voodoo, laying on of hands, going into trance, hallucinogenic drugs, herbs, ‘energy’, visualisation and vision quests, sacred places, dreams, throwing of bones, music, meditation, prayer, breath work, song, needling and scarification to protect and to heal. We also know that attitude and intention can make a difference in the healing process5 -they are aspects of the overt or covert stories we tell ourselves about our illness and lives.

  Measured in terms of numbers who consult, the success of alternative and complementary health practices cannot be merely accidental, nor anecdotal. Many mainstream practitioners regard these approaches as bogus as they usually do not stand up to rigorous testing. Indeed, many have not been adequately investigated, largely because companies who sell medicine are the ones who fund research.

  I suspect that the popularity and anecdotal efficacy of alternative approaches to healing could lie in the power of symbol and story. Symbol as used in this book refers to anything we attach meaning to beyond what concretely exists: for example, an egg is a means of reproduction, but it symbolises many things – birth, rebirth, perfection, creation, hope, protection, fertility, to name the most common – and is employed in art, such as in Salvador Dali's paintings, and in rituals such as Pesach and Easter. A symbol, unlike a plus sign, cannot be pinned down as to its precise meaning, for we all bring slightly different and even pre- or non-verbal associations to bear. We know this from our dreams, where if we dream of an egg, we might experience a deep resonance, but be unable to express adequately the felt connection.

  Even if we were to test alternative approaches to healing through double-blind, randomised, controlled trials – the gold standard of arriving at truth in medicine – this valuable tool might well prove to be inadequate. There is no ruler that can measure symbol, which in its essence can only point towards a constellation of approximate meanings, but can never signify something exactly. My experience, through my own illness, is that the body is both science and poetry, muscle and metaphor, chemistry and psyche.

  Even if the mind forgets, the skin remembers: the organs keep a record of their guests.

  Phillippa Yaa de Villiers6

  In the twenty-first century, artists and scientists are working away at opposite ends of the table, observing, investigating, documenting. Both are attempting to find truthful answers using very different tools.

  ***

  The development of the scientific method has shaped our age. It has helped us to differentiate fact from fiction. It can allow us to test our intuition and assumptions to see whether they hold true, and under what conditions they do. In medicine, science has helped us to identify unscrupulous practitioners and bogus treatments. It has provided a means for us to develop inspired strategies and interventions towards assisting the ill and injured and improving quality of life. In its pure form, science is curious and open-minded. In its corrupted form, scientists are in service to commerce, and might be more interested in profits, success and being right than in the truth, the health of individuals, or of the planet.

  When serious practitioners of the arts – writers, artists, dancers, and composers – apply themselves to producing a work, they are also attempting to reveal what lies at the core of life. They are concerned with reflecting upon and provoking awareness in service to truth. Yet they employ fictions to do so: stories, representations, illusions.

  Can scientists and poets talk to each other? Do these seemingly disparate approaches even speak the same language? The bridges that attempt to connect the lands of measurement and poetry have been rickety at best. Carl Sagan, the scientist and author, stated that he tries not to think with his gut7, whereas Yeats, the poet, warns:

  God, guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone; He that sings a lasting song Thinks In the marrow
bone.

  W. B. Yeats8

  One of the many challenges of writing this book is what style of language to use. Poets use one kind of voice and scientists another, and each discipline often has serious difficulties with the style, affect, grammar and vocabulary of the other. Medical researchers tend to use objective, passive tense ways of expressing themselves in articles and books, and avoid words that spin off into multiple associations. Their brief is to be as exact as possible, to use words as scalpels to cut down to the bone of objective, verifiable truth. They go to inordinate lengths to write in such a way to keep themselves out of the picture.

  Poets might keep themselves out of the writing, but they approach expression as a subjective enterprise. The words they choose evoke layered images, and through juxtaposing unusual words and phrases in unexpected ways they evoke metaphor and symbol, trying to see things anew, circling in on truth from a subjective, imaginative perspective.

  As a writer of fiction and poetry, I identify with a poetic use of language, although I had to write scientifically acceptable prose when I worked in occupational health research. But the language of the laboratory is usually alienating and hard work to read.1 I have to find a different way to set scientific contributions down. So I was pleased to discover that there are scientists who are writing popular science in a poetic language, like Antonio Damascio. We all need role models, and I will take him and author and neurologist, Oliver Sacks, and ask them to be my bodyguards and encouragers, and to sit by the door of my creative self. Above all, they are not to let in the wreckers: the strict critics, and those that speak in tongues of the passive tense.

  Then, hopefully, a good time will be had by all.

  ***

  Central to this book is an hypothesis – a term employed by scientists. An hypothesis, according to my Collins dictionary, is ‘a suggested explanation for a group of facts or phenomena accepted as a base for further verification’. We all base our lives and decisions on explanations we conjure from a group of facts and phenomena. Ideally, like scientists, we test these theories out as we live, modifying or altering them when we come across contradictory results.

  The hypothesis of this book is that the tools we learn in order to initiate, pursue and complete a creative project can also help us to live more awake, less anxious and more integrated lives. In the following chapters, I set down some facts and observations reported by scientists and artists, as well as findings of my own to support this thesis. This text proposes that the hypothesis is one worthy of testing to see whether it stands up to the truth. We can do this by carefully noting the results that emerge in the ongoing experiment of our lives.

  I want to write a book about the body and psyche, about science and art, that my doctor colleagues do not dismiss, and that my homeopath and poet friends do not reject.

  I am trying to talk to myself across the wide divide of the table.

  ***

  1 A scientist friend pointed out that the same is true of some poems! I had to agree.

  2. Dancing to the Whistling

  [The creative forces] have you on a string and you dance to their whistling, to their melody. But in as much as you say that these creative forces are In Nietzsche or In me or anywhere else, you cause an Inflation, because man does not possess creative powers, he is possessed by them. That is the truth.

  C. G. Jung9

  Many cultures and religions – from the Buddhist belief in karma and reincarnation, to the Christian commitment to God's guidance – have promoted the view that human beings have a predetermined purpose on earth.

  An exhibition entitled Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures, curated by the British Museum in 2003 displayed artwork by Osi Audu. Alongside was the following text:

  The Nigerian artist Osi Audu … has spoken of creating objects as containers of memory. He has In mind the Idea that a sense of self is constructed through memory; the self is a projection forward of remembered experience into present time. Each of us derives our selfhood from our ability to remember. However, all Is not as it seems to Western ways of thinking. Audu's Inspiration is the Yoruba Idea, which he encountered as part of his own education, that just before birth every ori (a word that can mean both ‘consciousness’ and ‘head’) comes to an understanding with God (Olorun) as to the trajectory of their future lives. With birth the detail of this agreement Is erased from conscious thought and concealed in the Interior of the mind within the inner head (ori-inu). Life is a struggle to recapture the original plan and bring It back to consciousness as a memory that can be worked towards achievement.10

  This example from Yoruba culture demonstrates a teleological approach (from the Greek tele- meaning end or goal, and -ology, derived from the Greek logos, meaning word, and subsequently study). It assumes there is an agency with a more inclusive perspective than oneself that knows better how one should proceed. This force can help guide us towards living a fully-fledged life. Some people call this entity God; others call it the psyche or spirit, others, the muse or daimon.

  The psyche, according to the Collins dictionary, is the human mind or spirit. The name derives from the Greek word for breath or soul. The Jungian view is that the soul has no form and therefore needs the physical world through which to express itself, and give itself shape.

  This world view is at odds with modern science, where the theory of evolution, brilliantly conceived by Charles Darwin and backed by tomes of evidence, shows that life arose out of random events and keeps changing due to mutations. Many scientists have used this evidence as proof that there is no greater force or guiding principle.

  Yet most writers and other artists are very familiar with that moment when you slip through from the experience of the ‘everyday’ into the creative space where something else takes over. It is like entering a dream, where the person you usually identify as yourself becomes background, and other forces, other guides, slide in to help you or to direct your attention. Splendid ideas pop out of nowhere, connections emerge that you hadn't seen coming. Afterwards, you are nonplussed. I can't remember writing that, you think.

  Guidance not only manifests while in the actual act of putting pen to paper, brush to canvas, or finger to string. When I began writing my novel Once Two Islands (Kwela 2007), motivated in large part by the themes, characters and concerns of Shakespeare's play The Tempest, a summer school brochure arrived from the University of Cape Town announcing a course on ‘Rewriting the Tempest’! And when I set out to write this book on the overlap of the unconscious, the creative impulse, science and the body, Robert Bosnak, a Jungian analyst and teacher visited Cape Town for the first time, invited here on a lecture and workshop tour; his areas of interest are the unconscious, the creative impulse and the body. He is currently working with scientists in the USA in this interdisciplinary domain.

  Jungians do not consider these happenings coincidental or random. They use the term synchronicity to describe concurrent events that seem related, yet in a non-causal way. Synchronous events are not uncommon, yet they are difficult to study. The psyche, or the unconscious, resists being pinned down, like the slippery edge of a dream upon waking.

  Is making connections between non-causal events mere wishful or magical thinking? Does the mind seek and impose order where there is none? We know that large areas of the brain are devoted to making associations between inner perception, outer experience and memory, and that we might make mistakes when we correlate non-related events or memories.

  The neuroscientist Changeux claims that the order we perceive in the world is a function of the brain itself. He claims that the human brain spontaneously creates mental representations that it tries to apply to an essentially meaningless reality11 He argues that this tendency of the brain to order reality is the basis for the creative endeavour.

  Perhaps one day science will develop methodologies to understand, measure and plot the unconscious and the muse and all the forces that live through us. It is possible that one day we might develop
one great theory that explains every phenomenon – scientific, spiritual and poetic – and which will put the arguments for and against to rest. I find it unlikely, in that we are stuck in the paradox that we must use the tool of the brain to examine itself. Yet both the poet and the scientist need to keep the door ajar to allow new ideas, and even each other, in.

  ***

  Having embarked on this project, I am excited to discover that neuroscientists and psychologists have started to collaborate. When I was a medical student, we did not take psychology seriously. It was a vague subject founded on anecdotal evidence and taught by eccentrics. It had nothing to do with us; we were ‘normal’ students inhabiting a world that could be measured. The few hard facts we could relate to belonged to psychiatry, where drugs demonstrably changed people's behaviour.

  In those days – only thirty years ago – society thought there was something weird about people who went into therapy. It was shameful to admit one was not coping and needed help. Therapy was for the mad and the unstable. In the emergency room, medical staff would label suicidal or anxious patients ‘fruit loops’. Psychiatrists and psychologists were considered to be people who had a screw loose – strange people who might meddle with your mind.

  The approach in other areas of medicine was generally straightforward: find the germ and kill it. Find the tumour and cut it out or zap it. But in the field of diagnosing and treating emotional suffering and thought disorders, the many conflicting theories made the discipline suspect.

  Until fairly recently, scientific tools were unable to prise open the mystery of the subjective experience of inner life. Neuroscientists limited themselves to diseases that affected brain function like speech or movement. They deduced which areas of the brain were used for which functions from lesions at autopsy, by imaging the brain using computed tomography (CT) scans, or by surgically damaging parts of an animal brain. Scientists left investigating what governs the subjective experience of thought and emotion to psychoanalysts.