The last couple of books I read were biographies of psychologists - one on RD Laing and one on Wilhelm Reich. Both interesting characters who had some good ideas but ended up in discredit. I've also been flipping through Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces , and the last two novels I read were The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. All good stuff.
There were some things I could identify with in the ideas of Laing and Reich. I'd read Laing's first book The Divided Self which has some fascinating descriptions of the way schizophrenics and schizoids (a milder state where the person is still largely in touch with 'reality') see the world. There was a passage I remember, but can't quote exactly, about the schizoid feeling dead inside. They envy everyone else for their life force, and wish they could possess it but also hate it. It's a paradox, and seems to tie in with the myth of vampires.
Wilhelm Reich, early in his career before all the business with the bions and orgone accumulators, wrote a lot about sexuality. He was a big believer in achieving mental health through having good sex - it's a release valve for psychic energy which turns sour if its kept bottled up. I think this echoes the law of thermodynamics that entropy increases in a closed system. And he meant good sex, as in a cleansing & sharing & mutually pleasurable experience; meaningless sex without communication fails to release the energy so tension perpetuates. That would explain why cynical one-nighters or sex with prostitutes are unsatisfying and therefore pointless. And I never responded to porn, it just looks stupid.
I'm writing this around 3am Sunday morning. Friday and Saturday nights I went out, met a few new people but failed to click with anyone. Mind you I dressed very casually, unshaven etc. I haven't been to the gym for several days and I ate too much chocolate this week. That kind of thing has consequences - Reich talks about 'character armour' being the result of unreleased energy. If too much of it gets built up, eventually the person is trapped by it and can become psychically dead.
I've changed a bit since last year, I've overcome most of my natural shyness (getting a stimulating fulltime job where I had to communicate with people was a major help) but on the other hand there's an unresolved tension in my mind resulting from getting dumped. It even has a physical manifestation, the pain I get in my left wrist whenever I get tense. In a way tension has traded places for depression as the negative mental state I have to watch out for and deal with. My ex-girlfriend met me for a coffee a couple of weeks after she left me last year, and said 'you look older'. It was true. I've now got lines on my face that literally appeared overnight when she left.
The trouble with tension is that it causes blockages. I find creative writing difficult these days, and when it's difficult the quality goes down. I end up writing nothing for long periods, interspersed with the odd paragraph of banal humourless crap. My most productive writing period was when I was in a relationship, having high quality sex on a regular basis and so not preoccupied with it. Mind you I also had a lot of time, being unemployed. Eventually the stress & indignity of unemployment outweighed the benefits though, and the relationship went down the toilet.
Tension blockages also ruin social interaction. It's still possible to communicate, but hard to get close to another person. There's information and then there's subtext. Like good writing, connecting with another person (or to put it more bluntly, scoring, though scoring is really only a subset of this) is actually the easiest and most pleasurable thing in the world - when it goes well, everything is natural and just flows, and the two people want to get together because it feels good. But with tension in the way, nothing happens. So there's a paradox, or vicious circle, that not connecting with other people both increases the urgency of doing so and makes it more unlikely to happen.
Fortunately writing non-fiction is much easier than creative writing. It's basically a trade: journalism is about producing information as a finite and quantifiable commodity. I spent Friday at the Kapiti Observer in Paraparaumu doing some work experience - seems like a good workplace, friendly people. I got offered two weeks (low) paid work there in August so they must think I'm at least competent. Oh well competence is a start. But even if it's true that genius is 90% perspiration to 10% inspiration, the 10% is still indispensible. 3.30am, the people with partners are in bed with them by now, I'll have to make do with a hot water bottle. And go back to the gym asap.
http://fiffdimension.tripod.com
if you have never gone without a relationship for at least 5 years or more,you,r just playing guess what.
Posted by: gene at July 31, 2005 10:27 AM