It’s a cold day today, but in a spring way, and I love you.
(24th March, 1937; Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov)
The slog of January to very early Feb was one, for us, submerged in greyness. The first month of the year seemed to last forever, yet with no real sense of the days passing by. Just fog!
Our vitamin D levels dwindled as there was absolutely no visible sun; those select mornings when it did make a short appearance saw us all vastly uplifted.
It was a Valentine’s Day visit to Whitby with family that I only properly remember a completely blue sky… I have a fond recollection of a couple sitting in a bus stop, sunbathing in five-degree cool. Romantic!
Blue sky through Whitby Abbey
As I experience more years (having recently (reluctantly) turned twenty-five), I grow increasingly impatient for spring’s arrival. Not just for the daffodils, lambs and chocolate eggs, but more so for the longer days and increased likelihood of sunshine. With longer evenings on their way, I feel less inclined to convince myself I’m running out of time.
Over winter, I wilt – a plant without what it needs – I’ve come to find the transition back into green, yellows and pinks more and more welcome. Everything shifts, in a flowery sort of way (colour comes back).
A usual indication of the change in season is our cat basking on the garden patio. She’ll only do this when the conditions are just right, and it seems that today the stone is at optimum temperature:
Cali in the afternoon sun
This is handy, as it often lets us know whether it’s suitable to let the tortoise out for a stroll too.
Barley doing her yoga on the patio tiles
A bit of natural sun makes all the difference to a heat lamp for her, which I’m sure we can all agree with (I’m terribly anti-Big-Light these days). I don’t know if tortoises contain or produce serotonin, but their heat-seeking (survival) instincts resonate strongly with me.
It may sound extreme, but things simply feel more doable when the Sun is out. I have all the instincts of a hibernating animal, who has been cooped up much too long and all of a sudden feels much lighter (in more senses than one).
Perhaps this is just a reflection on my grasping at any sense of optimism nowadays, if merely a bit of warmth through my joints: life feels that bit more liveable, I don’t feel half as unwell as the cloudy day before, and for some reason my body works a bit better than usual. I feel suddenly inspired, as though I’ve quite literally had some light switched on somewhere in my brain.
Seeing Project Hail Mary at the weekend (enjoy it!) seems to have inspired me to think about our Sun and perhaps worship it a bit more than before. This, and a particularly glare-y bus journey home.
I suggest we all pause and bask (responsibly) for a bit.
(Title taken from ‘I have to tell you’ by Dorothea Grossman)
(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.
R.D. Laing, Knots, p. 36 – infinite thought cycle – persistence of imposter syndrome?
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.
Some old drawings depicting a couple of mime EPs in Knots (1975), by me
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.
Some daffodils and a double-yolker I turned into a face in 2021 – fun in lockdown…
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.
AS YET TO BE 