Eloquent Body

by Dawn Garisch

  Living the questions is a radical thought in a culture that is organised around the principle of instant gratification and the belief that the answer to almost anything can be found within minutes on the Internet. Living the questions means developing the capacity to endure not knowing what will happen next, not knowing whether I am right or wrong, nor how long I will have to wait before an answer is revealed to me. Living the questions also requires me to pay attention to the pattern of mysterious partial replies unfolding around me, which can assist me further on the journey of my question, and also indicate whether I am asking the right question in the first place.

  Out of a plethora of ongoing goings-on, how are we to decide what is an answer? The oracle, or psyche, does not reveal answers in the way a timetable does.

  The feeling function is useful here. By this I do not mean, am I happy or am I sad, but rather: do I value this, what value resides here, does this feel right, or does this feel wrong? Every now and then I write my way into corners that feel terrible, but I persist if they also feel exactly right.

  Both the process of life, and that of immersion in writing a novel, feel more and more like patiently living the questions, with no tenaciously-held ending. Where does life call me? What does my soul want of me?

  Theodore Roethke, in his wonderful villanelle ‘The Waking’ suggests that we learn by going where we have to go.103

  The goal I aspire to while writing or living is to be true to this story, to my story.

  ***

  The musician Sheila Chandra observes that artists are comfortable living with the unknown, as they have had to make a living today out of what didn't exist yesterday104

  In order to create, most artists need to be alone, facing the void both within themselves and also within the project. Initially the art work has not yet taken on form, and they are faced with the blankness of the paper or canvas, the emptiness of the stage, or the silence of the air. They must recognise and overcome their fears, otherwise they would never put pen to paper, allow that movement to run through their body, or pick up the flute.

  The thing about being alone is that those background voices that we can quieten by keeping ourselves busy with external demands suddenly become very loud, even though they may remain subliminal. If we have crippling critics living in our heads, we will avoid being alone with them. It is therefore essential to transform that undermining enemy into an encouraging helper.

  Paradoxically, in the midst of creation, there is that wonderful feeling that one is not alone. The task of gathering together disparate threads into one complete work is an act of connection – with oneself, one's daimon, and with the vast craft of all humankind who over aeons have bent over their looms, easels, drawing pads, cellos, pottery wheels, gardening implements and keyboards, funnelling their efforts and service towards recording and making sense of life.

  ***

  To attend to the minimal cues of the muse, one also has to develop – in fact to long for – what Doris Lessing calls the imaginative space: ‘Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration. If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. ’105

  This is not only a physical place, although it is most concentrated when I am at my desk. It accompanies me wherever I go. It feels like a virtual chamber that floats just behind my right ear, like a thought bubble that contains evolving and dissolving fragments of images, sounds and words. There is always something going on in there, sometimes inaudibly, like a background hum, whether I am lying in the bath or chatting to a friend.

  However, my awareness as I go about the ordinary business of life will get me nowhere if I do not bring that attention to the page, canvas or studio. Creating the space and time to sit alone and hazard the first mark, note or movement, is like jumping onto a stepping stone when it is not immediately obvious where the next one is situated. Discovering where to step after the initial jump cannot be worked out in my head. The thing that wants to emerge only becomes apparent in a piecemeal way through repeated acts of applying myself to the work – starting somewhere, and trusting that there is something bigger than I am who is present and ready to supply the other half of the conversation.

  The creative process can work immediately, like an instant download, but usually it takes time. I must remind myself to take the long view. Rilke suggests: ‘Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterwards summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything! ’106

  ***

  PART FOUR

  Heal Thyself

  24. Non-Medicinal Ways to Loosen Torment

  Endgame

  With modern medicine doctors can now find something wrong with everyone. While shamans and new age healers can cure anything you haven't got.

  Gus Ferguson107

  My friend and colleague tells her patients it is not in anyone's power to heal another. She says healing is an inside job. All a doctor can do is offer some pointers and medication to facilitate the body's innate capacity to heal itself. Our bodies need our co-operation to do this.

  Even the term healing needs revisiting. At a recent psychiatry update for general practitioners, I was pleasantly surprised to find these specialist colleagues recommending that we abandon the idea of cure, and instead encourage our patients to learn to manage their conditions. This, I believe, is true of any chronic malaise, including anxiety. Health is not necessarily synonymous with cure.

  Human beings are hard-wired for anxiety, and we have a tendency to get our wires crossed. Fear can either save or ruin our lives. Panic can be paralysing. When Valium was discovered and marketed in the 1960s, it was a remarkably effective treatment for this pernicious condition. But Valium and other benzodiazepines are not recommended for long-term use because they lead to tolerance and dependence. Antidepressants are safer and more effective in treating chronic anxiety.

  Popping a pill can banish symptoms, but what of the underlying causes, and how might we address them? Heal thyself is not an injunction to refuse help. Help comes in many forms, and there is plenty of it. This section suggests ways to manage better the authentic insecurities of life. We might thereby loosen our torment without either resorting to medication, or relying on medication alone.

  ***

  At the height of my midlife crisis, the feeling in my body was terrible. The word that came to mind was judder. My edges felt torn and blurred. I had a few incidents where the world felt as though it was turning. Once, while driving, I had to pull over to the side of the road.

  Anxiety can be free-floating, formless, expansive. It is hard to deal with because it is so nebulous. It can cause us to act reflexively in an attempt to find relief – a knee-jerk reaction called ‘acting out’, such as drinking, drugging, compulsive sex, shopping or eating excessively, bullying, or biting nails.

  A more helpful response to either acute or low-grade chronic anxiety is to find a container to give the feeling shape and dimension – thus making it manageable. This tendency to return to the container in times of anxiety is evident in small children. They embark perilously from their mother's laps and toddle a metre or two out into the world, only to be seized by apprehension. They come stumbling back into her arms, looking for reassurance.

  When we feel alone and unsupported, we turn to substitutes to make us feel better. We all need a container that simulates mother, father, guardian or tribe. We might act confidently in the world, strapping ourselves independently into our own skins, but most of us need to feel that we belong and are held.

  When my life was falli
ng apart and the world was turning, I instinctively sought containment by going back into therapy, writing everything down including my dreams, writing poems and lying on the ground. I was so depressed and anxious at that time, I could not work. Fortunately, I had the means to stop working for three months while I got myself back. For much of those three months, I lay curled up in a blanket on the ground in the garden.

  Many of our preoccupations are attempts to construct a container against the void. A love relationship, religion, work, a home and sport are all valuable means to reduce anxiety. Creative projects also have the ability to hold us. They supply something of what we need to get our heart rates and adrenalin levels down, to make us pause before reacting, and to slow and deepen our breathing. If we can identify the symbols and images arising out of our distress, and then approach these images through writing, dance, clay, paint or music, we can expand our apprehension of the difficulty. Creative engagement helps us to bear what seems unbearable, and can act as a bridge towards resolving tension.

  ***

  A psychiatrist friend pointed out to me that the image of the mother as a container can be anathema to those who have had a negative mother experience. Paul Ashton has written extensively on creativity and the void.108 He suggests that creative activities, by connecting us to the unconscious, allow us to understand that we are more like a constellation than a singularity, and as a result we feel less alone. Creativity becomes a view from another star, in other words from points other than the ego. That, he argues, is why it feels like it comes from elsewhere rather than from ‘what I know’ which is the ego position.

  I am reminded that the image that is helpful to me might not be so for another. It is necessary to find the particular and personal images that speak to the motif of each individual's life.

  ***

  Symbol formation is an act of imagination. In their book The First Idea, the child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan and the philosopher Stuart Shanker argue that creating a meaningful symbol requires two things. It can only occur in the context of emotional life. And it only appears when perception is separated from its action.109 This last attribute allows someone to talk about how he is feeling or to draw a picture of it without having to act on it out in the world.

  They show how cultural knowledge passed down through generations is a spur for a baby's brain development, parallel to and independent of genetically-transferred information. The stimuli of care and attention, as well as the teaching of practical skills and language by the tribe, allow for development of new brain circuitry not encoded in DNA. Importantly, these activities also allow for the child to develop the capacity for symbol formation, adequate attention span and reflective thinking. They illustrate how these essential assets are fragile, and how their development can be disrupted by neglect or absent caregivers in early life.

  People who have not learnt how to mediate catastrophic emotions such as rage and fear, had their emotional development disrupted in childhood. They are unable to insert a pause between perception and reaction. A pause in that moment gives us an opportunity to weigh up whether our perceptions were perhaps erroneous, whether our emotional reaction is appropriate and what might be going on for the other person(s) involved. It allows us to apply feeling and thinking, recall and knowledge, to try out options in the virtual workspace of the brain, and thereby come to a decision as to which of many different responses is the best one to choose in the circumstances.

  Greenspan and Shanker propose that this capacity for the pause originates out of the earliest emotional interactions between infant and caregiver. A baby learns incrementally to read the nuances of another person's facial expression, gesture and tone of voice, and also discovers how she can influence her environment with her own display through movement and sound. The interest and containment of an adequate carer allows the faceted nature of relationship to emerge, whereby the growing child develops the ability to restrain impulsive actions in favour of pausing in order to better ‘read’ all the signals in an interaction, or non-verbal conversation. This ‘reading and reflecting in the pause’ relies on symbol formation. In order to think about a person or a happening, the child must create something that represents the real within the virtual workspace of the mind.

  Greenspan and Shanker state that when we learn at this early age to transform emotions into long chains of interactive signals, we form an image that's less tied to action, and which can therefore engender meaning and become a symbol. Furthermore, their research suggests that we use such images to plan, solve problems and think.110

  This important faculty cannot develop without a concerned and attentive care-giving environment that enables the baby to learn back-and-forth emotional signalling between baby and caregiver.111 Yet even if we have had the good fortune of involved, available and caring parents or guardians, most of us have developed bad habits. Most of us have some area in our lives where we struggle with impulse control, and where our recurrent behaviour gets us into difficulties.

  The capacity for symbolic life inserts a considered voice between the obsession of the mind and the compulsion of the body – revved and in tandem – in order to alter the unconscious agreement.

  If the body-mind tandem continues to mutter and react unconsciously and repetitively it limits the whole show to the familiar. I perceive this and I do that. Inserting a pause will also insert anxiety while we search for a new way of responding. In Chapter 35 we will consider how to develop the capacity to resist our habitual modes, and to manage the attendant anxiety.

  ***

  Ken Robinson112 claims our task in life is to find that space where what we are good at, and what we want to do more than anything, come together. He calls it the Element. Others call it being in the zone. In that space, we feel alive. We feel guided and supported. We do our best work in this place, and we do it with enthusiasm. Ideas and assistance arrive spontaneously. Even though we might be working very hard, it doesn't feel like work. We wake up in the morning looking forward to getting back to it.

  This is not to say that living a creative life is easy or pain-free. But it roots us in the feeling of containment, connection and guidance. It is one of the best non-medicinal anxiolytics I know.

  Taking free-floating anxiety and doing the work of turning it into an art piece by committing it to paper as a painting or a poem, or finding its shape on the dance floor, or singing it out in the car, not only makes the feeling manageable, but also gives it form out in the world. Outrage, desire, joy, fear and shame need expression, and the stage and the page are places we can go to in order to contain the energy of these emotions and to distil insight and value from our efforts.

  ***

  25. Dealing with the Inner Critic and the Daimon

  But I

  subdued

  myself,

  setting my heel

  on the throat

  of my own song.

  Mayakovsky113

  The inner critic is one reason many of us are so anxious. The internalised fault-finder is a big factor in why we stop ourselves from doing what we love most, or even from discovering what it is we love to do. Sometimes we don't even realise we have this background niggler.

  Most of us are hounded by inner critics for most of our lives – that bullying voice that tells you that you are not good enough. The trouble is, sometimes this feedback is true. Unfortunately, the inner critic does not distinguish between what we do well and what we don't, and secondly, she is often rude and undermining, rather than encouraging.

  Inner criticism is not only related to our personal experience, but also to the dictates of the time. Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘Killing the Angel in the House’, refers to the difficulties women experienced in her era. To be able to write, she says, women need to kill the angel of the house – meaning they need to say a firm No to the internalised dictum to put other people first, to be pure, and to pretend to be less intelligent than they are.114

  Killing the critic is an optio
n. But if we try to get rid of something so ingrained, it could come raging back to cause more havoc. Besides, the critic has an essential function. We all need feedback as to how we are doing, but not in a false, undermining way. Feedback can be hard, but we should not dispense with criticism altogether. The question is how to transform the envious destroyer into a helper who delivers criticism in a considered and related way.

  We need to allocate an appropriate time and place for criticism. If the critic enters too soon after I embark on a creative project, she might interfere at a stage where my ideas are too sensitive, or too unformed, and ruin the whole endeavour. Ask the critic to wait outside, and invite her in when there is something to show her. Be firm, but kind. The inner critic is as afraid of rejection as we are.

  The critic is the appraisal and editing function, the one who can step back and evaluate whether the project is working as a whole, and where it needs further work. Practically speaking, the critic slips in and out all the time, but the more I exercise my creativity in the face of disapproval, the stronger I feel in relation to this entity. The relationship evolves into a partnership where I am better able to argue my case, as well as to consider or assimilate opinions different from those held by my ego without either being defensive, or crumbling.

  Teaching the inner critic to be human and humane in relation to a creative enterprise, can have a positive spin-off in the rest of life, where we also undermine ourselves. We need to transform the old habit of acting in our own worst interests into encouraging our best efforts, and acting with kindness and care regarding how we spend our time and energy. If we do not put ourselves first – if we do not care for and about ourselves – we cannot authentically care for and about anyone else either.

  The critic is intimately bound up with the ego. Our egos overlap with identity. We need to have form and shape in the world – that fence around the plot of who we are – in order to function and be effective. We need sufficient ego strength to be able to get to work on time, or to stretch up a canvas.