Eloquent Body

by Dawn Garisch

  It is possible to live our lives engaged only with a superficial reading of our own text, without paying attention to the overarching plot, the sub-plots, undercurrents, and the patterns emerging. Living the surface story, with the trundle of ‘and then, and then, and then’ means that we become expert floaters, estranged from our own beautiful and terrible depths. Staying with veneer means we might live with sterile, one-sided images – images that have been appropriated by the rational. This pinning down of the symbol by affixing to it only one tangible fact occurs in religion, where Christian fundamentalists use the story of Adam and Eve to deny all the evidence for the theory of evolution, and thereby give evolutionists ammunition for dismissing all theology.

  Christ on the cross, the Buddha under the tree, the lotus flower, the holy black stone of Islam and the virgin birth are all examples of symbols that contain mysterious meanings and resonance. They have survived for centuries precisely because they speak powerfully to aspects of our lives.

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  A life is a story, and biography and autobiography are amongst the most popular genres. A good life, we must remind ourselves, is usually not a bland or uneventful one. Just as one needs all the instruments and all the notes, high and low, to create a beautiful and memorable symphony, the composition of a life will necessitate both joy and grief.

  I could not have written this book without the chequered past I have had – training in fields as diverse as statistical methods in occupational research, movement therapy, and script writing, and employment in situations as different as emergency units, memoir workshops and academia. My illness and my son's fall have also shaped my life. All the seemingly disparate aspects of my life that appear random have built towards and been threaded together by this project. Some would argue that I have merely found a way to put the accidental bits of my life together, but the sense I have from inside my life is that of guidance, of serving some impulse that requires expression. It feels as though this book and the subjects it tackles lie squarely on the path of what I was born for, even though it was not until very recently that I even considered writing non-fiction.

  Perhaps that is a reason why midlife is time for pause and reflection; by then one has lived long enough to note patterns, and to have gathered together a range of experience and skill which, on careful reassessment, might bear the markings of the daimon. They could be signposts helping us to notice where we are going.

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  Second time round and one year later, I am grateful to receive news that I have been awarded two grants to complete this book. It means that I can buy the time to do further research and editing so as to do this project justice. It means that others have deemed this work of non-fiction worthy of their money. It provides assistance to pursue further what I was born to do.

  As soon as I write this, I feel the cringe of the fear of inflation. Who am I to say what I was born for? Yet while I am applying myself to the task of writing down and sorting out on the page these things I am fired up about, I feel alive and engaged. I feel supported and accompanied. This does not even feel like work, although I am working hard.

  The grant is positive feedback from the world. Checking in, I feel fortunate, determined. Checking out, I have more books to read, more ideas to wrestle with, and a couple of interviews to set up.

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  36. Changing the End of the Story

  The only thing to do is to keep still, to hold still at any price

  To learn to contain ourselves.

  So that in the long pause the instincts can reassert themselves

  And our intuition can come to life and give us direction.

  For at the present In the whirring Insanity of mental consciousness

  We violate ourselves every moment, and violate everybody else

  In a cog-wheel clatter of violation.

  D. H. Lawrence173

  Augusten Burroughs, who writes memoir, recounts the moment he realised that he should write. He was on his second litre of alcohol, trying to obliterate the anxiety that dominated his life since his unstable and abusive childhood. He describes not being able to get to the ‘safe place’ through drinking that night. In desperation, he switched on the television. There was a programme on about Eisenhower, who was quoted as saying: ‘Every gun that is made, every battleship that is built, every missile that is launched, is a direct theft from the people who are hungry and starving in this world. ’

  These words moved Burroughs to get up and go to the computer and start to write. He suddenly saw that there were truths and a complexity to life that he was not engaging with; instead he was drinking himself into a stupor and distracting himself with the Internet.

  He describes in some detail how he turned his life around by putting his thoughts and worries down on the page. The charge he got from writing made him feel alive, and helped him give up the lifestyle that was not only killing him, but shutting him down.150

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  In Why Good People Do Bad Things,151 Hollis shows how we are owned by the anxiety management plan we evolved to survive the vicissitudes of childhood. The strategies we put in place may have kept our heads above water back then, but as adults they might well drown us. Our behaviours and attitudes have become ingrained over years and years of habit. When attempting to alter the way we do things, it is too easy to fall back into the deep grooves of our old ways.

  Neuroscientists have shown that the brain retains the ability to change throughout a lifetime.152 We are able to develop healthy neural pathways in adulthood even if these were not established when we were babies. This remodelling of the dysfunctional brain takes place within an empathetic relationship. Schore153 shows that much of the healing in psychotherapy occurs subliminally between therapist's and client's right hemispheres. He calls this subliminal empathy ‘unconscious imagination’. The integrity of the therapist's right hemisphere – in other words, her capacity for relationship – to a large extent determines whether the results of adverse early experience in the patient's brain can be undone.

  This healing of destructive thought patterns also happens outside of therapy. What it requires is that someone cares enough about my wellbeing to both empathise with my pain, and challenge me about my bad habits, for long enough for new patterns of thinking to develop. The simple yet difficult task of the constant gardener.

  The psychiatrist, Louis Cozolino,154 has shown that an individual's capacity for change is dependent on his ability 1) to tolerate anxiety, 2) without knowing what is going to happen next, and 3) for long enough for new neural pathways to connect in the brain. Altering your habitual way of thinking and doing things comes down to literally changing your mind: constructing new synapses and even new neurons within the brain. This is what allows a different pathway to supersede the old way of thinking, feeling and acting. If we cannot tolerate the anxiety of the unknown, we will automatically fall back into old patterns.

  These are profound discoveries, and encouraging ones. It means that in order to improve our lives, we first need to understand that we are anxious beings, whether we are aware of this or not. Secondly, we need to recognise that very early on we put unconscious strategies in place to manage this anxiety, and that they are causing us and our relationships grief. Thirdly, if we are going to change our problematic ways – in other words, give up our habitual anxiety management plan – this in itself will unleash a huge amount of anxiety as we hang in the void of what we have been trying to avoid. Finally – and this is the good news – if we can find non-destructive ways to help us through this maelstrom we will emerge on the other side with altered neural patterns, together with the changed behaviour that goes with it.

  Augusten Burroughs' anxiety management plan was an extreme one. As an alcoholic, he was slowly killing himself. Yet, on that day he was receptive to change. He observed that he needed to write, even if all that the writing did was to help him deal with the fear he knew was gnawing just below his drunken stupor. He is now an internationally acclai
med author.

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  Plans themselves can be anxiety management strategies. We set a goal and go for that ending. Yet plans often don't work out. Repeatedly failing to get into a branch of study, or recurrent illness, or a relationship that keeps unravelling despite our best efforts, is usually experienced as misfortune. But what if these are the methods the daimon uses to encourage us onto a road we would never have chosen for ourselves, but which leads to a different fortune? Our egos tend not to notice as we are too busy making plans. Plans can arise out of unconscious motivations like boredom or fear which have nothing to do with waking up to our lives and what our lives want of us.

  I am all for trying as hard as I can to get something that I really desire, but if I fail to achieve it, it is worth considering that I might be on the wrong track. Negative feedback from life pushes me away, saying no through means other than language. Positive feedback pulls me in, towards itself. It says a big symbolic yes.

  Plans are a good starting place for the artist, but rigid plans can result in writing a book or living a life that never realises its full potential. We need both stability and adventure, routine and surprises, choice and destiny. While going all out in the direction of our goals, some part of us can be keeping the eye of the broad searchlight open for what else is going on in the inner and outer landscapes.

  The theory of feedback from the psyche is not verifiable, but it is not a bad way to live, and we all have to live by something. Instead of spending the rest of my life resentful and thwarted, still focused on whatever it was that I could not get, I might accept the turn of events that blocks my planned path. I might start paying attention to picking up on the alternative track that opens up.

  However, feedback in an abusive situation might come from a person who is manipulating you. The distinction of when to heed feedback and when not to can be clarified by answering the question ‘what are you in service to? ’ Great literature has been written under pain of death or imprisonment. Mandela, Gandhi and Frankl have lived inspiring lives by not succumbing in situations of terrible hardship and injustice, precisely because they did not obey the repetitive and focused negative feedback of abuse, but instead followed the positive feedback and encouragement of a force that lives through them.

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  Anxiety is a potent activator. It propels us towards the action we know has always given us immediate, short-term, relief. Our original anxieties will naturally arise once we withdraw our habitual management plans: excesses of eating, shouting at the kids, smoking, drugs, visiting the doctor, working long hours, the Internet, porn, drinking, cleaning, shopping, computer games, staying in bed, reading, sex and sport, amongst others. The hiatus we create when we refrain from destructive habits will require curiosity and courage.

  In C. S. Lewis's novel on envy disguised as love, Till We Have Faces, Orual comes to understand the destruction she has brought about when she writes the history of her time. She notes that writing changed her perception about what had happened, as though the gods were using her pen to operate on her.155

  Paying attention to the force that lives through us, and following the creative impulse onto the page, stage, into voice or clay is a powerful non-medicinal stress-reliever. The creative act provides an alternative focus, and safe container to turn to while the instincts reassert themselves, and new brain circuits develop. It gives us a medium, a method and tools for working with unpleasant feelings and the unknown, and provides comfort while we wait for our brains and instincts to make the links, connecting us to the authentic. It sets us on a valuable track into our own uncharted territory.

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  37. Of Knives and Glue

  When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it is tied to everything else in the universe.

  John Muir156

  Astonishing things are happening on the genetic front. The end is being converted back into the beginning.

  A future person consists of one fertilized cell which then repeatedly divides into a clump of cells termed a zygote. At an eight cell stage, all the cells are the same. They are all what is called pluripotential, in that they have the potential to become anything – a heart cell, a bone cell, a skin cell or a neuron. At this point, if the zygote is grown in a Petri dish in a laboratory, it is possible for a scientist to extract one of the cells and send it off for genetic testing without affecting the organism. One out of the eight cells can be removed, and the future person will not be born without an arm or a liver or an eye.

  After sixteen weeks of pregnancy, the entire human being is fully formed. The original pluripotential cells have divided a zillion times and all have been fixed as to their system and function. They have had most of their potential permanently switched off. Although all the chromosomes in each cell contain the same sequence of genetic information, only some genes are allowed expression. So, although a bladder wall cell has the DNA potential to produce bile, it does not, as all the genetic codes other than that for bladder wall function have been switched off. End of story.

  Or not.

  Recently scientists have found ways of switching genetic material back on, so as to reverse this specialisation. They can induce a dead-end bladder cell nucleus to return to a pluripotential cell, and engineer it to behave as though it is a freshly fertilised ovum. This is how Dolly the sheep was cloned.

  These developments are aspects of an exploding new technology of stem cell research and genetic engineering. It is receiving massive funding at present, and is seen as the major way forward in both health and industry. For example, endocrine cells in the pancreas are part of the endocrine system, and produce a hormone called insulin which is released into the bloodstream to control levels of glucose. Other cells in the pancreas, exocrine cells, are part of the digestive system, and they produce an enzyme called amylase, released into the small intestine to assist the digestion of fats.

  Diabetes is the failure of endocrine cells to produce sufficient insulin. Millions of people must take medicine or inject themselves every day to correct this.

  The neuroscientist, Qiao Zhou, has found a way to convert exocrine cells into endocrine cells in vitro in the laboratory. This could be a major break-through for diabetes treatment.157

  Researchers have now found the gene responsible for the spider web protein, and inserted it into goats' embryos. The resultant goats produce milk containing spider web protein -the strongest and most elastic substance for its weight that exists on earth. The protein can be used for sutures and joint replacements, as well as in aircraft and bullet-proof vests.158

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  IGem is an international competition for post-grad students held annually at MIT university. The team of students who genetically engineer a unicellular organism with the most innovative outcome is the winner.

  Note: if you cannot speak a human language, you will not be able to give informed consent to a procedure or experiment. You are therefore not consulted before humans alter you or your offspring irrevocably.

  A researcher I read about decided to genetically engineer a hairless, glow-in-the-dark rabbit for the amusement of his kids. He clearly does not think there is a problem with that; one could argue that we are just pushing genes around. One could also propose, as some scientists do, that it is better to use surplus human embryos created from artificial fertilization in treating infertility, for experimentation, rather than the current practice of discarding them. Nature, after all, is wasteful of gametes, and miscarriages are common. An eight cell zygote in a Petri dish does not constitute viable life, and many would argue that it cannot be regarded as human. So why throw zygotes in the bin, rather than using them to improve the lives of those who are living?

  The rational is not always ethical. Progress could also be a big step backwards. Even breakthroughs like genetically modifying goats to become spider web protein factories should give us reason to pause. As when we discovered how to split the atom, progress in the modern age contains its shadow. We are irrevocably alt
ering the genetic base out of which we live. Our brilliance might well come back to bite us.

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  Our civilization, with its outstanding achievements, has got to this point at a crippling cost. It is difficult to celebrate while the house is on fire.

  For too long we have patted ourselves on the back without looking up from the banquet table. We have measured the resources of the world, stripped the earth bare and put it and all that live on her to work for us. We have assumed that all life should be in service to our needs, our health and our wealth, from rats in laboratories, to lions on hunting farms, to the pigs who are farmed underground. We count the profit, but avoid the true costs. We know the price of things we manufacture, but do not consider the value of that we destroy.

  Attendant on the recent financial crash, it is abundantly clear that we need alternative measures of health and growth. If the way our communities run is sick, how can we be healthy?

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  Nature, if given a chance, restores itself. Mostly, the body has a drive to get better. The psyche wants to heal. They would fare better if we helped our fragile tissues, and if we plucked up the courage to follow the tracks of our own bloody wounds all the way back to the initial childhood injury.

  Our lives would be different if we worked together with earth systems and with our own flesh and blood, rather than against them. If we took care of our planet, nurtured ourselves, and befriended our bodies, our only steadfast companion throughout the whole of our lives, we could turn the relationship into one of partners, or allies.