Exhaled Spirals

Enfin, tant que nous aurons des livres, nous ne nous pendrons pas. —Madame de Sévigné

[exhaled-spirals]

« In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state. It is a barren, fatiguing, and agitated condition; one without hope or capacity; a world that is, as A. Alvarez has put it, “airless and without exits.” Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage […] is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self castigating. The body is bone weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, or all-consuming. Like an unstable gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action. »

— Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast

[exhaled-spirals]

« I crave that feeling you get just before you go to sleep, when everything gives in. The fight ends. The fight of our thinking lives. […] Rest awaits. The relentless ticking clock of your conscious awareness prepares to be smothered, your limbs prepare to go slack, the things that hurt will stop hurting, the whole frenetic circus of it all is about to collapse. There’s nothing for you to do, or work out. »

— Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease

[exhaled-spirals]

« There’s a metaphor I heard a long time ago when I was a philosophy student: an actress is on stage in a theatre when she sees a fire in the wings. She tells the audience there’s a fire and that they must get out. The audience thinks this is part of the play and they ignore her instruction. The more animated and urgent she becomes, the more delighted they are by her passionate and brilliant acting. There’s nothing she can do to speak beyond her role as an actress; every attempt only affirms the role.

I think this metaphor was part of a feminism course, but its wider resonance has never left me. Its relevance to life often applies. Here and now, in the eyes of the doctor, I am just neurotic and self-obsessed. The more I do to be listened to as a human being, the more I strengthen my role as neurotic and self-obsessed. The less she listens to me the more I tell or show her that I'm suffering. The more I tell or show her I’m suffering the more she thinks I am neurotic and self-obsessed. Each time, my role is reinforced and my role overrides my humanity. I become less human in her eyes. I am a type. I annoy her and waste her time […].

No part of me wants to go to the doctor. I’ve come to dread it, to feel in it an absolute humiliation. I see her about insomnia as seldom as I can and when I go it is always for something specific; a prescription or, as before, a blood test. […] I wondered if it would be possible to have another blood test, I say. Everything I read about insomnia says you should rule out any underlying medical cause, and that hasn’t been done. I know it’s a long shot, but it would help me. Just to eliminate other causes would help me.

She turns to her computer and is silent. Finally, without any eye contact, she says, This is not a shop. […]

Rage and exhaustion are much the same sensation, I discover, a flame struggling out of the same dead fire. Anger is alive, energetic, object-oriented, but rage is what’s left, eating itself alive. Rage and exhaustion eat me alive. […] A lifetime of courting favours and having manners and asking nicely and never minding, never minding if the answer is no. »

― Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease

[exhaled-spirals]

« All was hushed and dream-like, and there was no sound save the murmur of happy insects, which seemed like the humming of the sunlight itself. »

— Richard Le Gallienne, The Highway to Happiness (1913)

« Insect swarms are dancing in the sunbeams, burrowing in the ground, diving, swimming, a cloud of witnesses telling Nature’s joy. »

— John Muir, Our National Parks (1901)

[exhaled-spirals]

« The river is something that happens, like exercise or illness, to the body on any given day I am rivering.

To not end where you thought you did, not with skin but water not with arms but meadow of watercress, dropwort, floating pennywort, against all odds to be buoyant.

To feel there is an upward force greater than the weight of the heart the knuckles the head to feel as in to feel it physically push up the ribs which are bones now

[...] hordes of heartbeats not my own: mollusc onto stone, milfoil onto moss, mayfly onto trout,

[...] the satisfaction of finding a spot deep enough to swim in needs its own word, signalling a joy at depth, like snorkelling without the snork; kelling – eruption of eye over retina in slow pan of arrival, in spring kelling. Entry is slip, unplanned into palette of oils, limbs form brushstrokes, muddied in matter,

smell of earth and sadness at getting further from the river needs its own word; a de-connecting, de-spiriting, de-kelling –

[...] in the day in the river in the moss in the rushes we’ll come and part in the river in the heather in the rushes in the rain we’ll stay and the day and the day and the days dart over and summer is over »

— Excerpts from "Swims" by Elizabeth-Jane Burnett

[exhaled-spirals]

« So there’s no way of knowing if my sleep problems could be hormonal, I say, and she says it wouldn't do any good to know in any case since not much can be done, [this] is something that has to be (she pauses) experienced.

[The doctor's] choice of word sits oddly between us — not endured or suffered or managed, but experienced, as if it’s experience I don’t want. It’s not suffering I’ve come here about, it’s not that I want to alleviate some suffering but that I want her to make me stop having experiences. In that word is the very sum of her chastening, again, as you would a child: you want the world to be simple, fair and free of all difficulty, but the world isn’t that way and the sooner you recognise that I can’t immunise you to your own life — the sooner you grow up — the better.

This is surely something women get more than men — this message that they need to learn to put up with things. I read somewhere that women are far more likely to be told by a doctor that their symptoms are stress, while men’s symptoms will be investigated and more often referred. By stress, it’s meant that women are complicating and compounding their experiences in a way that could be avoidable if only they did breathing and gratitude exercises and stopped being surprised by the inevitabilities of their lives — the feelings of premenstrual rage, the loss of pelvic floor muscles in pregnancy, the loss of bowel control in childbirth, the loss of sleep in menopause, the subjection to various and subtly ubiquitous inequalities and injustices that affect every corner of their lives, the subsuming of oneself […] to the point that the sense of self becomes so vague as to be virtually derelict and not a self at all, only a roughly amassed set of duties and culpabilities and failures […].

No catastrophising, [the doctor] says softly. No catastrophising, I say.

I’m not sure now if I feel like a child or a person standing in front of a magistrate in a district court, someone promising to change her ways and be a good citizen and stop being a burden on society. The child is meek and innocent, the person in court meek and guilty. I can't decide which I am. »

― Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease

[exhaled-spirals]

— Danger Slater, He Digs A Hole

[exhaled-spirals]

— Ilse Sand, Confronting Shame

[exhaled-spirals]

— Linda Gask, The Other Side of Silence

[exhaled-spirals]

« So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings. »

— Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

[exhaled-spirals]

« The other two with their happy, objective minds would always be absorbed in the moment but she would look backward and remember, and look forward and be afraid […]. Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so, she did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues. »

— Elizabeth Goudge, The Scent of Water

[exhaled-spirals]

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.”

— John Muir, quoted in Samuel Hall Young‘s Alaska Days with John Muir 

[exhaled-spirals]

« Another midday cloudland, displaying power and beauty that one never wearies in beholding, but hopelessly unsketchable and untellable. What can poor mortals say about clouds? While a description of their huge glowing domes and ridges, shadowy gulfs and canyons, and feather-edged ravines is being tried, they vanish, leaving no visible ruins. Nevertheless, these fleeting sky mountains are as substantial and significant as the more lasting upheavals of granite beneath them. Both alike are built up and die, and in God's calendar difference of duration is nothing. We can only dream about them in wondering, worshiping admiration, happier than we dare tell even to friends who see farthest in sympathy, glad to know that not a crystal or vapor particle of them, hard or sot, is lost; that they sink and vanish only to rise again and again in higher and higher beauty. »

― John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra

[exhaled-spirals]

« The heat stifled us like a heavy blanket. Cicadas kept up a shrill, continuous chorus that quivered like the heat in the air, and the heads of the grasses. It seemed that everything was quivering—air, heat, grass [...]; the strident insect falsetto seemed like the voice of air itself, chattering through all eternity to earth and grass. The light was blinding and everything was on a high note, intensified, concentrated: heat, light, sound, all blended into a substance as hard and bright and indestructible as quicksilver.

I had never before seen heat, as you can see smoke or rain. But there it was, jigging and quavering above brown grasses [...]. If I could have stretched my hand out far enough I could surely have grasped it, a kind of colourless jelly. »

— Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika

[exhaled-spirals]

La fin d’une histoire n’a pas besoin d’être heureuse, tout compte fait, mais d’être comprise.

— M.R. Carey, La Chute de Koli

[exhaled-spirals]

The small seed of despair cracks open and sends experimental tendrils upward to the fragile skin of calm holding him together.

— Judith Guest, Ordinary People

[exhaled-spirals]

« I don’t look at a clock in the night but I’ve spent so many nights awake that I usually know the time within around ten or twenty minutes; I know the texture of the passing hours and the texture of my thoughts as the night abrades them. […]

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? »

― Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease