Exhaled Spirals

I switch on the light, get my laptop and Google I AM AWAKE. | don’t know what I expect Google to do about this. The majority of results it returns are anyway about Buddhism whose blissful understanding of awakeness could not have been conceived by an insomniac.

An article explains how fear and anxiety, often conflated, belong to different parts of the amygdala […]. Fear is a response to a threat, anxiety a response to a perceived threat — the difference between preparing to escape a saber-tooth tiger that is here and now in front of you (because it’s always saber-tooth tigers in the examples) and preparing to escape the idea of a saber-tooth tiger in case one appears around the next bend.

For me, now, a puzzle emerges. What, then, fuels insomnia — fear or anxiety? Anxiety, everyone says. Anxiety, my hypnotherapist says; you are safe in your bed yet your heart is racing as if a tiger is present. You must learn to see that there is no tiger.

But there is a tiger: sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation isn’t a perceived threat but a real one, like thirst or starvation. It is the fear of not sleeping that raises the heart rate and tenses the muscles […]. Here is where insomnia becomes intractable, because it deploys fear to act like anxiety. Where fear is a response to an external threat, insomnia is almost unique in giving rise to a fear that then causes the external threat. […]

The urge to take a sleeping pill suddenly overwhelms me; to be free of thought, of amygdalas and tigers. […] I take too many; they give you cancer, dementia, so they say. | am exhausted to my marrow and down to the tip of each nerve ending. I lie down again with the light off and see myself being chased through a forest in the dark […]. Running, running. […] My heart doesn’t thrup-thrup like it did at the beginning of the night; now it’s a more lumbering, fatigued beat and the muscles in my chest and around my underarms are sore. Running from what? What would it be to turn around and face it? »

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’ [...] It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate rumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision—it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude. 

All who share [a common activity, a common recreation, common studies] will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends. In this kind of love, as Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?—Or at least, Do you care about the same truth?  The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance, can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.

Notice that Friendship thus repeats on a more individual and less socially necessary level the character of the Companionship which was its matrix. The Companionship was between people who were doing something together—hunting, studying, painting or what you will. The Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared and less easily defined; still hunters, but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still travelling companions, but on a different kind of journey. »

There are many factors that can interfere with the giving-up process and, therefore, prolong a normal, healthy depression into a chronic pathologic depression. Of all the possible factors, one of the most common and potent is a pattern of experiences in childhood wherein parents or fate, unresponsive to the needs of the child, took away “things” from the child before he or she was psychologically ready to give them up or strong enough to truly accept their loss. Such a pattern of experience in childhood sensitises the child to the experience of loss and creates a tendency far stronger than that found in more fortunate individuals to cling to “things” and seek to avoid the pain of loss or giving up. For this reason, although all pathologic depressions involve some blockage in the giving-up process, I believe there is a type of chronic neurotic depression that has as its central root a traumatic injury to the individual’s basic capacity to give up anything […].

[Psychotherapy patients] frequently desire only relief from the symptoms of their depression “so that things can be as they used to be.” They do not know that things can no longer be “the way they used to be.” But the unconscious knows. It is precisely because the unconscious in its wisdom knows that “the way things used to be” is no longer tenable or constructive that the process of growing and giving up is begun on an unconscious level and depression is experienced. As likely as not the patient will report, “I have no idea why I’m depressed” or will ascribe the depression to irrelevant factors. Since patients are not yet consciously willing or ready to recognize that the “old self” and “the way things used to be” are outdated, they are not aware that their depression is signaling that major change is required for successful and evolutionary adaptation. »

Es muy difícil saber lo que ocurrió en el pasado, porque el pasado se mueve, está en permanente estado de modificación. Más allá de los diez años, la memoria solo es una novela más.

El pasado es cuántico. Sigue creciendo. El pasado tiene experiencias, cambia, evoluciona, no se está quieto. Fue una cosa en su momento, luego se convirtió en otra y al final solo es una fantasía.

Parece dolor y es superación; parece superación y es alegría; parece alegría y es envejecimiento. »

There hath he lain for ages, and will lie Battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep, Until the latter fire shall heat the deep; Then once by man and angels to be seen, In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. »

I felt loss at every hand. The loss of self-esteem is a celebrated symptom, and my own sense of self had all but disappeared, along with any self-reliance. This loss can quickly degenerate into dependence, and from dependence into infantile dread. One dreads the loss of all things, all people close and dear. […]

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying—or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity—but moving from pain to pain. […] In virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devastation would be lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. […] However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself […] thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words. […]

A disruption of the circadian cycle—the metabolic and glandular rhythms that are central to our workaday life—seems to be involved in many, if not most, cases of depression; this is why brutal insomnia so often occurs and is most likely why each day’s pattern of distress exhibits fairly predictable alternating periods of intensity and relief.

[…] By the time we arrived at the museum, […] my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world. […] For myself, the pain is most closely connected to drowning or suffocation—but even these images are off the mark. William James, who battled depression for many years, gave up the search for an adequate portrayal, implying its near-impossibility when he wrote […]: “It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.”

[…] I can think of no more apposite word for this state of being, a condition of helpless stupor in which cognition was replaced by that “positive and active anguish.” And one of the most unendurable aspects of such an interlude was the inability to sleep. It had been my custom of a near-lifetime […] to settle myself into a soothing nap in the late afternoon, but the disruption of normal sleep patterns is a notoriously devastating feature of depression; to the injurious sleeplessness with which I had been afflicted each night was added the insult of this afternoon insomnia, diminutive by comparison but all the more horrendous because it struck during the hours of the most intense misery. It had become clear that I would never be granted even a few minutes’ relief from my full-time exhaustion. »

I have often dreamed of a book that captures it all—birds, insects flitting in the morning light, raindrops caught in spider webs, the sky changing with the seasons, the smell of rain and the sound of the wind, the cries of animals; a book where one could feel the warmth of the sun, the light touch of plants; a book containing the visible and invisible secrets of the world, and even extraordinary and reassuring things like the recipe for persimmon pie (included here, page 164). A book that would give me the same joy I felt when I used to read Virgil, sitting by the sea in the shade of olive trees (now replaced by buildings). A book where poetry would be like a breath, where language would make its familiar music. It seems to me that Sue Hubbell's book is that book. »

I botanized obsessively during that difficult time. Every day I learned new plants by their Latin names. I wandered about the woods that winter, good for little else, examining the bark of leafless trees. As wildflowers began to bloom in the spring, I carried my guidebooks with me, and filled a fat notebook as I identified the plants, their habitats, habits and dates of blooming. I had to write them down, for my brain, unaccustomed to exercise, was now on overload.

One spring afternoon, I was walking back down my lane after getting the mail. I had two fine new flowers to look up when I got back to the cabin. [...] The sun was slanting through new leaves, and the air was fragrant with wild cherry (Prunus serotina: Prunus —plum, serotina —late blooming) blossoms, which my bees were working eagerly. I stopped to watch them, standing in the sunbeam. The world appeared to have been running along quite nicely without my even noticing it. Quietly, gratefully, I discovered that a part of me that had been off somewhere nursing grief and pain had returned. [...]

Once back, I set about doing all the things that one does when one returns from lunch. I cleared the desk and tended to the messages that others had left. I had been gone for a long time, so there was quite a pile to clear away before I could settle down to the work of the afternoon of my life, the work of building a new kind of order, a structure on which a fifty-year-old woman can live her life alone, at peace with herself and the world around her. »

H) The librarian must regard the reader as an enemy, a loafer (else he would be at work), a potential thief. [...]

P) Opening hours must coincide exactly with working hours, decided by prior agreement with the unions: absolutely closed on Saturdays, Sundays, in the evenings, and during mealtimes. The library’s worst enemy is the student with a job; its best friend is the local scholar with a personal library, who therefore has no need to come to the public library and who, upon his death, bequeaths all his books.

Q) It will be impossible to eat or drink inside the library in any way whatsoever, nor outside the library without first returning all the books one has borrowed, so that all you can do is check them out again after drinking your coffee. [...]

Z) ideally, the user should not be allowed to enter the library; assuming he does enter, insistently and irritatingly demanding to enjoy a right granted to him by [law], but which remains foreign to the collective sensibility, he must not, under any circumstances, enter the stacks, and must content himself with quickly crossing the reading room. »

And the melancholic being waits for words of solace to be sent his way, words that would remedy his inner disaster and open the doors to the future. Unable to face the world, he feels that the world is blind to his misery […], and he despairs at this denial of perception. Or rather: he neither despairs nor hopes; he confusedly wishes he had the energy to despair. »