A Moveable Feast of Uncertainty

My friend loves horror films. She seems an unlikely candidate. Her hair is dyed electric banana to compliment her wardrobe of whimsical pastels and patterns. Once, on a dark and stormy night, I arrived at her house with wet socks. She went to the bedroom and retrieved a pair of pinks socks with an avant-garde blue swirl that looped up the ankle. I looked at it, dumbfounded, before she answered my curiosity: “it’s a sneezing nose”.

At some point in that evening, between the rain playing overbearing ASMR on the roof shingles and stray cats meowing at the back door, my friend said it would be a perfect night to watch a scary movie. I asked her why she liked to be terrified in such deliberate and manipulative ways. She said that most of the time she moved through the world with varying levels of anxiety – at least at a horror movie marathon it guaranteed everyone would be at the same level of anxiety as her for one evening.

This is how I feel about COVID-19.

The first week of the Australian lockdown was – for me – pure exhilaration. I realised early on that the feeling was similar to when I was diagnosed with MS. After a slow build of tension the problem was diagnosed and there was a release from blind uncertainty into things you could and couldn’t control. There was urgency to life and a desire to live well. I channeled the hand washing energy into cleaning my bedroom to a sublet ready standard. I played basketball down at the local court every morning – the joyous, pumping soundtrack on my bluetooth speaker brought a smile to the joggers and dog walkers. I was at my writing desk every day after not being there for months. I wrote 5k words on a project I’d long ruminated over. I even submitted two arts grants (!)

I needed to connect and re-connect with people. I talked to different family or close friends every day. We used video chat (because we need to see faces now). Similar to my MS diagnosis, there was only one thing to talk about. Any conversation that managed to veer away from COVID-19 was swiftly brought back to the all-encompassing state of things. So much so that after a week I organised to talk to people on the proviso that we wouldn’t talk about COVID-19. It always turned out to be an empty promise. Hopeful, but empty.

Circumstances simplified life. To geo-locate me you only had to look at home, my desk space or the basketball court. I could tolerate the 5am starts to get on the Centrelink website, or when someone in the library sneezed the frightened jump on to the top shelf. This after all, was the low-level anxiety I lived with all the time.

I was soon careful not to share my exuberance for the collective “new normal” with people who found themselves in a different situation (although I’m potentially immune-compromised I am without debt or dependents and have some savings in the bank i.e. not on the margins). Where others might have been feeling their way through the COVID-19 fog I was familiar with the landscape – an experienced navigator. Professor George Jelinek, who developed the Overcoming MS program I follow, articulated the familiarity I felt:

For me, one of the hallmarks of the OMS community we have created is the capacity we have developed to maintain our hope in the face of uncertainty. I can think of few other conditions where this matters more. Most people in the general community cannot imagine how they might cope in the face of not knowing from day to day whether they would wake up with some new symptom of serious neurological damage. That uncertainty would not be tolerable for most people. But out of our shared adversity, that is precisely the strength that we have cultivated.

After a week my experience told me I needed to slow down. The flip side of exhilaration is anxiety and despair. On a late-night podcast with Alice Fraser, neuroscientist Ash Ranpura described anxiety as “a free-floating sense of dread, unattached and formless”. I have known it well and could sense the monster lurking in the shadows.

I took a day off. I didn’t play basketball or go into my desk. I stayed at home and did as my meditation practice often told me to do (not that I’d meditated consistently in months). For a day I would… just notice.

The low-level stress woke me up at 5am and every noise my well-meaning housemates made throughout the morning was unbearable. In the afternoon I lowered the blinds and watched a bad movie in the dark. A thriller no less! When the credits rolled I felt the adrenaline leach out of me. Anxiety, which adrenaline had dampened down, began to bloom into a noxious, debilitating flower in my gut.

I felt shame. Why did it require a pandemic for me to get back into writing? (Ignoring the fact that I’ve slowly been getting back into the practice the last few months) Why couldn’t I give myself that time? Why wasn’t I thinking of others, helping others? And a million other questions that outmatched my imagination and reduced down to

How long will this go on for?

How long will this go on for?

How long will this go on for?

I didn’t know if I was cross-examining my own anxiety, the collective anxiety, or the crown virus itself.

This lasted an hour. Only an hour, but a long, lonely hour. I asked for and had expected it and was still surprised. I was also prepared to take action. Living with the uncertainty of MS for 9 years has prepared me well. COVID-19 inspires a moveable feast of uncertainty. It’s a horror movie without a director.

I took hold of the things in my control. I opened the blinds and looked out at the flickering red lights of the city skyline. I went for a walk in the evening air around the lamp-lit park. If the monster was lurking in the shadows it was quiet now. I came home and ate broccoli and kale, with soba, toasted sesame seeds and garlic-infused olive oil.

All of these things are poison for the flower of anxiety!
All of these things are in our control.*

 

* “This is all about you and me taking control of the virus, rather than the virus taking control of us.” – Dr Norman Swan, ABC 7:30

Strength of Some Kind

Christopher had his worst moments of depression when he was with the weak. In ordinary life, he enjoyed their company; they made him feel protective, especially when they were charming and young. But now he needed to be with the strong. All his friends had strength of some kind and could transmit it to him.

– Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind

I’m returning to this blog after a decade. A DECADE!!! I don’t know if ALL CAPS needs an exclamation mark — so I added three.

I found the above passage in my Drafts. The reason I copied it out is elusive. In 2010 I’d returned from Japan via China and New York to live in a new place, just as foreign: Sydney. My parents were on the verge of divorce, all my friends lived next to, above, or below me in a cramped townhouse with cockroaches in the toaster — that’s the Sydney rental market for you — and rent needed to be serviced by a full-time job. Full-time! Job! Ugh!

I guess I felt weak. And needed some strength. And was jealous — I lived with two couples — that it seemed “all [my] friends had strength of some kind” and wouldn’t “transmit it to [me]”. Perhaps they would have if I had the strength to share how weak I felt.

Recently I read the essay The I in the Internet from Jia Tolentino’s collection Trick Mirror: reflections on self-delusion. She quotes blogger Jason Kottke, who I read when I kept my first blog — the unfiltered teenage ramblings of boytoworld — in which my first post wondered if my Social Studies teacher was gay, and love letters were a quick copy + paste from e-mail to Blogger. Kottke “asked himself why he didn’t just write his thoughts down in private. ‘Somehow, that seems strange to me though,’ he wrote. ‘The Web is the place for you to express your thoughts and feelings and such. To put those things elsewhere seems absurd.’

“The internet,” Tolentino writes, “in promising a potentially unlimited audience, began to feel like the natural home of self-expression.” It was around the time of the rise of Facebook and the not yet monetised YouTube that I — counter-intuitively —  stopped blogging and vlogging. The internet was now a lot more personal. Everyone was on it. My Mum was my friend on Facebook, even though I’d said I would never get on Facebook. The anonymity and the allure to share a deeper Self online was gone. It was replaced by a performance of Self for an ever-present, ambiguous audience,  and my lingering awareness of what I didn’t like about internet.

In the intervening decade I experienced the power of the internet and social media to amplify the Self. Much more so than when I was in my teens or early twenties where it felt like there were a handful of friends and strangers reading my blog, watching my vlogs, liking my status updates. The momentum of the internet seemed to have carryover. Posts online would start the conversations I had IRL. I became what I had once jokingly dubbed: the attention artist. And it went hand-in -hand with performing comedy and the zero-sum mechanism of success: laughter. The unreality of internet addiction — in all its forms — and the subsequent performance anxiety and lack of sleep to fulfil the online Self ruined relationships, first with myself and then with others.

I often balk at the long posts on Facebook decrying mental health issues (exacerbated perhaps by the platform it’s posted on). Sometimes there is a shared connection. An unnameable feeling is articulated (although this is an experience I come across more often in books). This happened around the time of the summer bushfires. A post written detailed the anxieties and impotence around what we could do. The sentiment was spot-on and it tallied up the likes, the hearts, the emoji tears…  A month on I couldn’t tell you who wrote the post or what my relationship with them is (old friend? virtual acquaintance? content provider?). I can’t even remember what it said that moved me. I’m sure I took a screenshot. It’s somewhere on my desktop…

This blog was quotable chunks from literature that put words to unnameable feelings. Only I didn’t write to them or explain why I wanted to post them. So a decade on they’re like looking at old school class photos where you recognise the faces of close friends first, have a memory or two of acquaintances, and then wonder where the rest of all these circumstantial strangers are now. I didn’t realise as I wrote this analogy that it would be an apt description of my relationship to social media these days. As I tally up 800 words on this post I’ve arrived at the reason to return to this blog: close relationships.

Some kind of strength comes from these close relationships. Between people, words, the online performance and the fleshy Self. In the last year or so I’ve withdrawn from social media. Not that the urge has diminished to share how strong, weak, proud, ambivalent I feel — it is necessary. It’s that the closest relationships I have carry nuance. The strongest people I know know my weak points intimately. That is what I want to share.

I’m sure a social media savvy teenage would read this and say “duh, Facebook isn’t real”. It only took me a decade to learn that and a quaint blog post to articulate it.

Trick Mirror: reflections on self delusion, Jia Tolentino (Random House)

Christopher and Wystan

Christopher could never have done alone what Wystan was doing. He was too timid to have taken such a step independently. Would he have gone to Spain with Wystan, if it hadn’t been for Heinz? I think he would, despite his timidity, because he could have found no other good enough excuse for staying behind. As things were, he didn’t feel guilty about this, only regretful for what he was missing.

Christopher wasn’t seriously afraid that Wystan would be killed in battle. The government would probably insist on his making propaganda for them, rather than fighting. Still, Byron and Brooke had died by disease, not weapons, and a war-zone is full of potential accidents.

This was a solemn parting, despite all their jokes. It made them aware how absolutely each relied on the other’s continuing to exist.

Their friendship was rooted in schoolboy memories and the mood of its sexuality was adolescent. They had been going to bed together, unromantically but with much pleasure, for the past ten years, whenever an opportunity offered itself, as it did now. They couldn’t think of themselves as lovers, yet sex had given their friendship an extra dimension. They were conscious of this and it embarrassed them slightly — that is to say, the sophisticated adult friends were embarrassed by the schoolboy sex partners. This may be why they made fun, in private and in print, of each other’s physical appearance; Wystan’s ‘stumpy immature fingers’ and ‘small pale eyes screwed painfully together’; Christoper’s ‘squat’ body and ‘enormous’ nose and head. The adults were trying to dismiss the schoolboys’ sex-making as unimportant. It was of profound importance. It made the relationship unique for both of them.

On January 13, Christopher saw Wystan off on the train. Wystan had a bad cold but was otherwise cheerful. His only anxiety was about his luggage, which had been sent ahead, by mistake, to the Franco-Spanish frontier. He was afraid that it was lost forever. Luckily, he was wrong.

– Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and his Kind

She Wasn’t Hard-boiled

It was a picture of Faye Greener, a still from a two-reel farce in which she had worked as an extra. She had given him the autograph willingly enough, had even autographed it in a large, wild hand, “Affectionately yours, Faye Greener,” but she refused his friendship, or, rather insisted on keeping it impersonal. She had told him why. He had nothing to offer her, neither money nor looks, and she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her. Tod was a “good-hearted man,” and she liked “good-hearted men,” but only as friends. She wasn’t hard-boiled. It was just that she put love on a special plane, where a man without money or looks couldn’t move.

– The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

– Stevie Smith

I Like Your Work

6. If you’re an artist, critic, or curator, someone will inevitably ask you what you’re working on. It’s good to have either two projects that can be mentioned briefly, or one project that can be mentioned in more depth—though still kept within the bounds of appropriate party chatter. In different cities, artists, critics, and curators take different tacks on describing their workload. In Los Angeles, artists must always look like they are rested and fresh. In New York, the more haggard and hardworking you look the better. It’s always appropriate to be on your way to or to have just returned from international travel, e.g., “I just got back from being in this biennial in Prague, but I’ve only a couple of weeks to get on my feet before I have to have some meetings in London.”

– I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette

When Will I Be Blown Up?

Bohemia Lies By the Sea, Anselm Kiefer

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

– Nobel Banquet Speech, William Faulkner

Numberless Silhouettes

If she went to Alan now it would be like detaching one of these cut-outs of a woman, and  forcing it to walk separately from the rest, but once detached from the unison, it would reveal that it was a mere outline of a woman, the figure design as the eye could see it, but empty of substance, this substance having evaporated through the spaces between each layer of the personality. A divided woman indeed, a woman divided into numberless silhouettes, and she could see this form of Sabina leaving a desperate and lonely one walking the streets in the quest of hot coffee, being greeted by Alan as a transparently young girl he had married ten years before and sworn to cherish, as he had, only he had continued to cherish the same young girl he had married, the first exposure of Sabina, the first image delivered into his hands, the first dimension, of this elaborated, complex and extended series of Sabinas which  had been born later and which she had not been able to give him. Each year, just as a tree puts forth a new ring of growth, she should have been able to say: ‘Alan, here is a new version of Sabina, at it to the rest, fuse them well, hold on to them when you embrace her, hold them all at once in your arm, or else, divided, separated, each image will lead a life of its own, and it will not be one but six, or seven, or eight Sabinas who will walk sometimes in unison, by a great effort of synthesis, sometimes separately, one of them following a deep drumming into the the forests of black hair and luxurious mouths, another visiting Vienna-as-it-was-before-the-war, and still another lying beside an insane young man, and still another opening opening maternal arms to a trembling frightened Donald. Was this the crime  to have sought to marry each Sabina to another mate, to match each one in turn by a different life?

– A Spy in the House of Love, Anaïs Nin

Betrayal is Betrayal

The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find out the circumfrence of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That’s what I’ll find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I’ll sprinkle it on my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on. Except they might have a growth rate I can’t measure, or they might mutate, or even disappear. One thing I am certain of, I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. It’s not a word people use very often, which confuses me because there are different kinds of infidelity, but betrayal is betrayal, wherever you find it. By betrayal, I mean promising to be on your side, then being on somebody else’s.

– Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson