–it’s april(yes,april;my darling)it’s spring!
–alive;we’re alive,dear:it’s(kiss me now)spring!
(Lines taken from ‘when faces called flowers float out of the ground’, E.E. Cummings)
It is all too easy to find ourselves worked into mental corners, to white-knuckle the temples with every wish of quieting worry or hushing an irrational thought. As an anxious person (likened once to a deer in headlights, once to the ever-paddling swan…), I – naturally – think a lot. Think about the endless possibilities of the everyday, yes, but also think a lot about thinking.
Today, I thought I’d share some of those with you.
The (often) vicious cycles of thought and over-thought can be disruptive, detrimental. An anxious spiral, overload of sensory input, or intrusive/harmful thinking each forge internal battles between the mind and self.
Belief systems that we unknowingly create can inflict themselves when triggered (sometimes without), and render us tethered to, knotted into overthinking. Anxiety, panic, fear and other sensitivities, can exacerbate – tangle – what may have begun as a small worry can soon expand.
An overstimulated mind can reach boiling point; one may melt down, another could freeze. For some with a perpetual nervous monologue, it can simmer on.
The title of this post is taken from R.D. Laing’s Knots (1970), which I have already alluded to, and included an example above. It is a work that is difficult to categorise: poetry, prose, flowchart? I suggest, if you’re interested, to take a look online…
This particular bit (above) is actually a later iteration of a longer poem – built from the same concept, same words:
I am not entitled to it/because I have stolen it./I have stolen it/therefore I am not entitled to it./I am not entitled to it/therefore I must have stolen it./Or, it has been given to me as a special/favour/by someone who is entitled to it/so I am expected to be grateful for all I/have/because what I have/ has been given, not stolen.
(Knots, p. 34)
Written here without its structure, you can see Laing’s vision; he is depicting the busy mind and the repetitious impasses one may get into through overthinking.
My first encounter with the text was one unrelated, long before my interest in literary anxiety. It was actually Edward Petherbridge and his YouTube channel (always a delight) where he has uploaded poems, reflections, art, along with various clips from his 1975 staging of Laing’s work.
When spoken aloud, Knots is perhaps less overwhelming than initially seen on the page, yet it still succeeds in driving the reader in (sometimes literal) circles.
Its incessant repetition resembles the sensations of a busy brain that I have found done effectively elsewhere via stream of consciousness narration (Woolf, Joyce, Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing a more recent example).
Feeling inspired, I revisited my postgraduate dissertation, which interpreted various aspects of E.M. Forster and his works as moments of Anxiety, Overstimulation and Eruption (and is also the inspo for this blog’s URL!). I’m hoping to re-engage with this area of interest in future, however I will take a section to illustrate before I proceed…
At just eleven years old, Forster writes a letter to his mother of his fears, anxiously envisioning certain moments, or ‘instances’, that could hypothetically arise:
I feel so very nervous somehow. I don’t know why it is but perhaps it is excitement, but lately I have always been taking the dark side of things. I have never been like it before, but it is not all nice. It is very much like despondency; I am afraid I shall miss the train in the morning, afraid you will not meet me, afraid I shall lose my tickets; those are instances of the kind of state of mind I am in; it is not so bad in the day-time as at night, then I cry a lot.
(E.M. Forster, ‘To Alice Clara Forster, December 1890’)
Sigmund Freud writes that ‘anxiety has an unmistakable affinity with expectation: it is anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness and a lack of object.’ Young Forster’s ‘despondency’ in the extract above, ‘afraid’ repetitively of multiple potentialities, demonstrates a distinct apprehension towards anticipated risks. In this listing of fears to his mother, with whom he shared an incredibly close relationship until her death, his nervous sensibility is clear from a young age. His low emotions, and association of such feelings with the night-time, can also be likened to a teenage Maurice, an arguably autoethnographic protagonist, and not only for his nominal similarities with the young Edward Morgan. Early in the novel, following an anxious outburst upon hearing of the gardener’s departure, Maurice endures ‘a great mass of sorrow that had overwhelmed him by rising to the surface’, soon taking to bed where, ‘His heart beat violently, and he lay in terror, with all his household close at hand’ (M, p. 14). In isolation, in darkness, ‘he was afraid’ (p. 14), not dissimilarly to young Forster, who in his letter explains that the night-time causes his worries to worsen, and ‘then […] cry a lot’.
(Feeling ‘unspeakably oppressed’: Moments of Anxiety, Overstimulation and Eruption in E.M. Forster. University dissertation submitted September, 2023)
The quotation I included above from one of Forster’s letters is all too familiar to those who worry – the haunting ‘what if’ that snowballs into questioning the outcome of everything to come… as Freud puts it, that notion of expectation, of waiting for the unknown, and fearing it.
In many cases, avoidance is often the answer. It is natural that thought and action are intrinsically linked; as creatures of habit, we are influenced heavily by how things make us feel.
Alternatively, small comforts, exercise, good company, better weather, caffeine, are each examples of things we might actively seek for that boost of serotonin and/or energy. Even the sun feels that bit more restorative now. I for one can admit that the step from dark winter into the light and air of spring gets increasingly welcome as the years go by.
However, there is always a pang of guilt, alike to that of an unproductive New Year’s Day, or an unfulfilled vacation, that seems to follow the rise of the daffodils, fall of April showers, the changing clocks (the loss of an hour… makes you dwell on every wrong you could have righted).
The pressure of new beginnings poke ideas of mass productivity into otherwise still-waking-from-hibernation brains. We’re still adjusting – coming to terms with what for some tends to be a darker period, mentally, of the year. What is one supposed to do when the habits are bad, and the routines aren’t there?
Thus, the knotlike cycle continues, and I return to where I started writing: how easily we find ourselves returning to doubt…
As I said before, I am a big thinker (forgive the chaos of this post), and while I have a bounty of thoughts circling, I thought it worth trying to embrace my inner R.D. Laing (and executive dysfunction) to finish.
It’ll never get done
Because
I’m scared to make a start
I’m scared to make a start
Because
It’ll never get done
If you made it to the end of this, thanks so much for reading. I’ve been in a veritable slump as of late, hence the inactivity, but am hoping I may return from a week away in the sun with some ideas up my sleeve.
Best!
AS YET TO BE 