A Moment's Breath
On ill health, crisis, Eastenders, sea urchin spines and those little moments where everything feels okay.
Head out the storm clouds, exiting the cave of feeling viciously miserable — the transition from sickness to health can feel like a miracle. Being sick blights my possibility to consider a life beyond poor health, amputating future tenses, the little ways we create personal happiness become impossible. A miserable little rut, it’s exhausting. But swimming in the med every day certainly helped my recovery. So when the motors of health slip back on track, I feel my sense of self expanding, freewheeling, playing my favourite songs really loudly and kicking my heels down the street like Dick van Dyke in a disastrously modern Vincente Minelli movie. Ah health! Back to the lovely constancy of managing reality.
Contagion is inescapable these days, the pitfalls of ill health still felt in the tremor of another’s cough. How the pandemic and its unleashing of various kinds of sustained turmoil has conjoined with what we experience as the trap of ‘unprecedented times,’ the various intersecting angles of economic, ecological, and political instability that make us feel powerless, as liberal governance hands the keys and mandate to state violence to more fascistic forces and feelings (I’m also partial to the Benjamian insistence that this feeling of unprecedented crisis has of course long been the norm, [see thesis VIII], although there’s a certain unfulfilled promise in liberalism, one it can never realise).
There’s this Jacqueline Rose (and Sam Frears) quote which I have been obsessed with since I first read it back in June, when I was feeling the effects of covid for the second time (and weeks of exhaustion). After a long discussion of the politics of Eastenders, primarily focused on the truth of the show being in how it demonstrates that most people’s lives are defined by a kind of constant tumult, she writes:
Stability, that we have reached a good place, however temporarily, like Sisphyphus rolling his pet rock up the hill, this is the active fiction we chase. And sometimes life is really like that. We reach the top, breathe in deep, and everything feels good. But it is the exception.
On Wednesday, I scratched my foot badly on a rock. Friday evening I convinced myself that the extreme pain was the cause of sea urchin spines (common in Marseille, and a fate I’ve suffered before that ended in a trip to the hospital after three weeks of agony). I spent the evening decontaminating my foot from the imaginary spines, taking on an array of budget treatments written by gnarly surfers on reddit, until I realised the pain was just the damage from rocks. How imaginative we are in expanding the cause of our suffering.
I find Rose and Frears’ idea reassuringly comforting because it provides a small space for a personal, psychic adjustment, that disruptions are often forces outside of us that we have to bear – rather than our fault, our sin. And sometimes the role of knowledge, as a pathway toward empowerment is that it gives us the tools to stare reality in the face, like sunglasses that dim the monstrosities, helping us to recognise the shapes of the burning demons that abound (there is of course here, an absent conversation about the space between tolerance and acceptance, the lack of space for mourning in a world highly attuned to social murder).
Every society will be defined by instability – that’s the great lesson of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a novel that profoundly changed my political thinking, curbing the utopian excesses. Even a society that attempts to break free of the shackles of commerce and private property, will struggle to do so, and those struggles will be felt on a deeply chaotic, interpersonal level. It is still vital that we fight to alleviate that most destructive social forms of suffering though, especially as its most devastating consequence is on our life world (I am so pleased today to wake up to the knowledge of Lula’s victory in Brazil, and how it will take the reigns of managing the Amazon away from that fascist).
In the absence of obvious political solutions (in England at least, apart from some small ones), I do really think the strength of psychoanalytic discourses can be in their capacity to demonstrate that our neuroses are produced by an unbearable weight of social forces outside of us. It’s a kind of freedom for the intellect, that we have the power to diagnose. Psychoanalysis gave me a sense of partial agency over my own problems. Obviously, it does not produce social solutions to these problems – that’s our job.
I often find people whose sense of reality is overdetermined by political misery, and a need for revolution as an absolute solution to all problems to be extremely destabilised by their neuroses. We have to sift through the shit. Some people, for completely understandable reasons, are not very good at tolerating the instability that is to a certain degree a fact of life. Solutions are partial, and so are problems – a psychoanalytic lesson that was extremely important to me.
Now free from whatever weird bug or virus was making me extremely miserable, last week, I made strong progress on a slightly miserable and claustrophobic short story, writing solidly and with consistency from Monday to Friday. To inhabit a writing rhythm again quelled the feelings of panic and insufficiency in which I had become embroiled at the start of my trip. It felt quite dramatic, like my body and whatever virus it contained was ruining my entire attempts to steal time back from a busy life in the service of writing. And writing, I feel free again. Well, for now. I am munching on a freshly baked croissant while at the day job, so I can’t complain too much.
Get Decked
I thought I’d try something new and give a round up of things I’d read recently. I’d really like to pivot away from using Twitter, a horrible little place, and perhaps things like this can help us abandon that trash pile to the devils:
I’m very grateful to Andy Key for sharing this Peter Schjeldahl pieceon the role of the critic on Instagram. Schjeldahl’s commentary on the ways that writing for money sharpened his knife really struck a chord with me:
Blair Mcclendon’s review of Hilton Als’ new book about Prince contains some choice lines: “Prince didn’t really make love songs [...]. It was music that replicated the particular pressure that mounts in your chest when stuck in a conversation at a party while catching someone else’s eye across the room . . .”
I like what Sarah Schulman says about the role of novelists in this interview with Kristin Grogan.
Ange Mlinko’s account of Frank O’Hara’s early career and how Auden disliked his work is worth a read – I always found Auden’s work tedious, too obsessive in its constant sense of being highly composed, anally-retentive in form.
My review of Lloyd Corporation’s most recent show, ‘Today’s Gift, Tomorrow’s Commodity . . .’ at Carlos/Ishigawa gallery is also up now at Plinth.