Breath: Pushing beyond fear

This is “not a story about surfing; it’s a story about fear, about pushing beyond fear, and about becoming addicted to the pushing.” This is how Patrick Ness sums up Tim Winton’s latest novel, a coming-of-age classic about the solitary Pikelet (Bruce Pike) who, with his friend Loonie, discovers the joys and the adrenaline rush of surfing and is never quite the same afterwards.

“There was never any doubt about the primary thrill of surfing, the huge body-rush we got flying down the line with the wind in our ears,” writes Pikelet, the narrator of Breath. “We didn’t know what endorphins were, but we quickly understood how narcotic the feeling was, and how addictive it became; from day one I was stoned from just watching.”

In an extraordinarily evocative novel, Winton recreates (through Pikelet’s memories of a time 30 years before), a rich sense of place and character in a Western Australian seacoast of the 1970s:

Sun blazed in rods through the big old gums. There were dragonflies in the air above us. I saw a towel near the diving plank and beside it a grubby pair of thongs, so I had no reason to doubt there was a crisis. Only the sluggish water seemed harmless and these females, who were making a frightful noise, looked so strangely out of place. I should have twigged. But I went into action on their behalf. As I bolted out to the sagging end of the springboard the wood was hot and familiar underfoot. (p.12)

How strange it was to see men do something beautiful. Something pointless and elegant, as though nobody saw or cared. In Sawyer, a town of millers and loggers and dairy farmers, with one butcher and a rep from the rural bank beside the BP, men did solid, practical things, mostly with their hands. Perhaps a baker might have had a chance to make something as pretty as it was tasty, but our baker was a woman anyway, a person as dour and blunt as any boy’s father and she baked loaves like housebricks. (p.23)

One surfer seemed to show up on only the very biggest days. He was quite an old guy and his board was so long and thick that he’d carry the thing on his head down through the peppermint scrub to the beach. Then he’d jog to the water and launch himself into the crunching shorebreak and aim straight for the rip, paddling on his knees, always as casual as you like, whatever the conditions. You’d barely see him for half an hour and then a set would break out wide, like a squall rolling into the bay, and you’d suddenly pick out the white squirt of a wake on the grey-brown crags of a wave big and ugly enough to make you shiver. There he would be, that tiny figure, strangely upright and nonchalant, rising and swooping until he was close enough to be more than just a silhouette. His skill was extraordinary. There was something special about his insouciance and the princely manner in which he cross-stepped along his long, old-timey board, how he stalled and feinted and then surged in spurts of acceleration across the shoaling banks, barely ahead of the growling beast at his back, and when the wave fattened toward the deep channel in the middle of the bay, he’d stand at the very tip of the board with his spine arched and his head thrown back as if he’d just finished singing an anthem that nobody else could hear.” [p.28]

There are many things to comment on here. Brian Doyle likens Winton’s landscape to the equally evocative landscapes (and people-scapes) of the American masters William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Alice McDermott. Winton “has created a place so fictively real that it truly reveals the complex people and passions of his native Western Australian seacoast”, says Doyle. The fictive town where Pikelet comes from is Sawyer, which brings back memories of the river adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Then there’s the sense of being extraordinary. Despite being an “old guy” (only 36), Sando is the epitome of what the boys wish for themselves. He has a quiet strength, is calm and collected and on the biggest days he will take on the roughest and ugliest waves with an insouciance, a coolness that only serves to magnify in the boys’ eyes his extraordinary skill. Winton’s use of action verbs is itself remarkable and in one paragraph he can have his readers gasping at his masterful skill. He will use simple but unexpected verbs like cross-stepped, stalled and feinted and then build the action up to a crescendo, with the apt analogy of Sando “singing an anthem that nobody else could hear”. For me there’s an echo of what Adam Phillips talks about in his description of the romanticisation of madness — “being in touch … with powers and forces and voices”. Except hear the powerful forces are all too evident to the watching spectators while the anthem is one that only the extraordinary surfer can hear.

The novel is effectively one of two parts. The first deals with the build-up and the adrenaline rush of surfing the huge waves of Old Smokey, Barney’s and the ship-wrecking rock known as the Nautilus. The surfing guru takes the boys under his wing and they discover, accidentally it seems, that Sando was once an internationally-renowned surfer while his girlfriend, the bitter but enigmatic Eva, was a champion extreme skier who wrecked her knee in a bad fall.

Here the issue of fear is one that takes centre-stage and that also separates the men from the boys. The characters in Breath believe that “one becomes extraordinary only by facing fears and taking risks, and the bigger the risk, the better”. Sando tells them that anxiety about catching huge waves is natural and to work through the fear rather than fighting against it. Loonie, however, believes that fear can never be admitted and demands ruthless courage. On the day when the boys are to take on Old Smokey, Loonie still has his arm in a sling and so misses out while Pikelet, paralysed with fright at the huge waves, is only able to surf them at all with the help of Sando’s gentle encouragement. Something broke between the friends that day, as Pikelet recalls, and afterwards it is Loonie who leaves Pikelet in his wake with his fearless, daredevil attitude.

The second part details Pikelet’s fall from grace. When Sando and Loonie go off on a surfing trip to Indonesia, leaving Pikelet and Eva behind, the two take comfort in each other, despite the fact that Pikelet is only 14 or 15 years old. This is a sexual awakening which is also a form of pushing through fear, and the parallel between surfing and sex is not coincidental. Pikelet’s sexual awakening, however, is also a form of abuse since he is basically too young and unprepared for the emotions that follow.

Comparing Winton’s breath and Sam de Brito’s The Lost Boys, Stephen Matchett writes in The Australian that “there is no arguing that this is another of Winton’s superb explorations of Australian men. As in Dirt Music and the Vic Lang stories, Winton writes about the walking wounded of life, the blokes who failed to meet their own expectations and those of the people who loved — or at least liked — them”. Matchett says the core of the story is the way that Pikelet “loses the sense of self he finds in surfing, and the way he is judged and found wanting by his mate, his mentor, his girlfriend and his lover”. The phrase “walking wounded” seems to be one that gets used often to describe Winton’s male characters. Thirty years on, a grown Pikelet still judges “every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living”.

As impressed as he is with Winton’s superb writing, Matchett is also disturbed by the way the male characters (in both books) are “passive in the wreck of their own lives”. I wonder if Winton makes use of this deliberately, allowing the narratives to become, in effect, a way that his “walking wounded” male characters make sense of their lives and start to take responsibility for putting the broken pieces back together.

Sunday light

I’m working on a review of Breath by Tim Winton but today I’m in the mood for something light. So here a few pics and an extract from an excellent piece by Hilary Mantel writing in the LRB about her experience at a British hospital (reminds me of Litlove’s excellent blog the other day):

I have to hurry to keep pace with the nurse. Can I befriend her? Will she tell me what comes next? Can I even make her look at me? She is young, dumpy and pallid, and recalcitrance runs from her pores. I have already learned this: if you are assertive the staff bristle, if you are gentle and friendly they blank you. I used to work in a hospital myself, so I know about the necessary cushioning of professionalism. But this is not professionalism; it is hostility, and resentement at having to walk the Green Mile late at night, with a woman breathless beside you twisting the wedding ring on her finger. I don’t want much, I don’t want to put her on oath; I want to protect my husband, to know where he’s going so I can find him again and I want to be acknowledged with a human word. Finally, crushingly, she says: “This is what we call diverticulitis.” It is almost irresistible to say, this is what we call a punch in the head.

Very evocative writing (and moving too). I want to read more by her.

Here are the photos - I love the one of my dog looking expectantly (and quite happy with herself for having found a shaft of sunlight to sit in, with a lovely mat underneath as well):

Understanding a murderer’s motive

I read three reports on murders yesterday, which made for disturbing but also compelling reading. It’s a bit like not being able to take your eyes off a car wreck. I know I shouldn’t really look and that it will haunt me but I’m also intrigued as to the extent of the horror. The first one was a trans-Atlantic murder by a “seemingly ordinary” 27-year old Englishman while the other two were all-too-familiar robbery-related killings in South Africa.

Writing in the London Review of Books (14 August 2008), author Jonathan Raban provides a fascinatingly detailed account of the virtual life of Neil Entwistle, a “seemingly ordinary [read working-class] 27-year old Englishman with an honours degree from the University of York” who married up, ran into lots of debt and then took an extreme way out of his predicament. Entwistle, who had been living in Massachusetts in the US for barely four months, killed his wife Rachel and baby daughter Lillian with his father-in-law’s Colt .22 revolver while they lay sleeping in their new double-bed before fleeing back across the Atlantic to his parents in Worksop. In June this year a Massachusetts court sentenced him to two concurrent life sentences without parole.

Raban provides a brilliant account of the banal, largely internet-based life of the killer. Neil Entwistle was an internet scam artist and sleaze merchant but not a violent murderer (at least before the killings). So why did he do it? The judge commented that his crimes “defy comprehension”, an opinion shared by the lead prosecutor. Shortly after the verdict, the lead prosecutor was quoted as saying, “Sometimes you just don’t know why … No “why” would really explain this. There is no why.”

I imagine that Raban took this up as a challenge, to understand the why of Neil Entwistle’s actions. He puts the pieces together in a way that recalls (for me at any rate) the careful attention to detail of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. If I had the time and the resources, I would be interested to try and understand the why’s of two local murders, both of which received brief mentions in yesterday’s paper.

The Cape Times reported on the arrest of two suspects in the Van der Westhuizen murders in Kleinmond. Last Sunday the small seaside town was shocked by the fatal stabbing of Shalk, 78, and Marie van der Westhuizen, 73, a couple who were known for their generosity and charitable work and who had just celebrated Marie’s birthday with family and friends. Two men, aged 22 and 23, who used to do casual labour for the couple, were arrested in the Overhills informal settlement and the police recovered items taken from the couple’s house. The Cape Times also reported the murder of well-known businessman and business publisher Robin McGregor, 79, founder of the Who Owns Whom publication, who was found stabbed to death in his house in Tulbagh on Tuesday. The Tulbagh police found McGregor’s body after their Bellville counterparts stopped and arrested three suspects, aged 28, 29 and 30, who were driving McGregor’s grey Mercedez Benz Compressor in Neethling street in Bellville South.

While short on details, these two stories suggest a similar pattern. In both incidents the victims were elderly whites who lived in small rural towns in the Western Cape, the suspects are male and almost certainly coloured or black and the primary motive for the killings appears to be robbery. Reading these short news items I had a lot of unanswered questions. Immediately I thought of drugs, gangs, poverty and a culture of violence and also racial inequality. I wondered about the effects of the fuel-price hikes and the global (and local) recession on already-struggling, long-term unemployed youths.

It would be heartening to read what someone like Jonny Steinberg, whose award-winning writing on crime includes Midlands and The Number, would make of these two brutal murders. Steinberg has a way of weaving multiple elements together in a way that illustrates broader problems through attention to a single narrative. Just as Jonathan Raban helps to dispel stereotypes that Entwistle, the son of a coalminer who was struggling to live beyond his means, was therefore somehow suspicious and bound to come to no good, Steinberg enables us to see beyond the stereotypes to the complexity of South African criminology. It’s not only the Najwa Pietersens (or the Neil Entwistles) of this world that deserve detailed coverage. But in a country which has roughly 18,000 murders a year, what are the chances of getting to the bottom of the latest tragic killings?

Commitment

I had a group meeting yesterday on the theme of commitment so I went looking for inspirational poems or quotes while I allowed myself to get side-tracked into The New Yorker for poems and cartoons.

Being in a slightly melancholy mood, I turned to a melancholy-sounding poem called “The God of Loneliness” by Philip Schultz. It’s about fathers queuing outside a toy store for their sons and it reminds me of how I tend to take my own father for granted. Then I read “One can miss mountains” by Todd Boss. The last lines go: “A man can leave this earth and take nothing — not even longing — with him”. Loneliness and longing remind us of what we’re trying to regain. Jack Gilbert, in “After Love”, writes: “There is somehow a pleasure in the loss. In the yearning. The pain going this way and that.”

There’s nothing I can find about commitment in The New Yorker poetry section but there is a fun poem about gadgets by Dorothea Tanning called ‘Never Mind’. “I caught the toaster eating my toast,” she says. “Did I press the right buttons on all these buttonless surfaces, daring me to press them?” And then I enjoyed reading “Slow Drag Blues” by Kevin Young. I like the part about grief who keeps dogging him and who he addresses as “Good Grief”.

And then a quote on Commitment I can use (by W.H. Murray, who also quotes Goethe):

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (& creation,) there is one elementary truth— the ignorance of which kills countless ideas & splendid plans: That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents & meetings & material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.

Going Sane: Adam Phillips’s Mad, Sane World

London-based psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips has been described as the “psychotherapist of the floating world”. Author of roughly 12 books including Winnicott; On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored; On Flirtation; and most recently, Intimacies with Leo Bersani, he is also the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Freud. In Going Sane (2005) he analyses the issues of sanity and madness in a bid to understand why it is that madness is a lot more interesting, and to sex up or reclaim “sanity” as a worthwhile ideal.

In a world that tends to romanticise madness, sanity becomes a “matter of moderation, self-control and mechanical rationality”. Whereas the mad are often seen as “in touch … with powers and forces and voices”, the sane can be pedestrian, bland and uninspiring. The mad, like Hamlet, get many of the best lines while the sane are soon forgotten and fade into obscurity. You only have to look at the world of celebrities to see that it is the Amy Winehouses or Britney Spears of this world who get the most attention, precisely because the media (and the public) are fascinated with successful people who are also flawed and have problems just like the rest of us.

There were aspects of Going Sane that I didn’t like, such as the “curious repetitiveness” described by one reviewer, the lack of a personal voice and the over-reliance on the first person plural (as in “we tend to” think this and that) which tends to assume a similarity in the way people think about things which often isn’t there. Phillips draws on a wealth of literature and other sources (the culture of Western civilisation) so it’s not fair to say that he isn’t reflecting on his own culture. It’s also not his aim in this book to draw out the different cultural influences into “mental illness” but I did wonder about how the book would be different if he considered issues of race, class, gender and culture.

There were many times in the book when I wished that Phillips would just give a practical example and ground his complex and clever ideas in a way that was more accessible. One reviewer described “Going Sane” as “too clever by far” and it was sometimes difficult to follow the paradoxical ideas around sanity and madness. But, as Phillips explains, the issues of sanity and madness are paradoxical in nature since one person’s sanity is easily identifiable by another as madness.

Phillips shows us how ambivalent we are as individuals about both madness and sanity. We want to be in touch with the energy of our infantile appetites, with their insatiable needs and aggression, but we also don’t want to be overwhelmed by our own appetites or hurt by those of others. As Gideon Lewis-Kraus points out in his review in the New York Times, “infantile madness is the inability to bear the frustration of unsatisfied desires”. Phillips also shows us how “sane sex” is a contradiction in terms. You need to be a bit “mad” (or out of control) to be swept away by lust and to give yourself over to sexual desire. (But uncontrolled sexual desire is also not very desirable.)

There are some extraordinarily good passages in the book. The section dealing with autism, schizophrenia and depression for example, which are three of the most difficult areas of current “madness” to deal with, is clear and helpful. Those suffering from autism and schizophrenia are “mad” because they can’t understand us and we can’t understand them and they are unable to form good human relationships. Depressives on the other hand lack desire, and so are unable to see how it is that they would want to continue living.

In “Sane Now”, Phillips explains the difference between “superficial” sanity and “deep” sanity:

Sanity as a supposedly superficial quality is a caricature of normalcy. This sane person, viewed as a kind of cartoon character, is thoroughly reasonable, thoughtful, considerate, and well-balanced; but he is also, by the same token, two-dimensional, soulless and uninspired, a triumph of conformism over idiosyncrasy. Sane here means so well adjusted as to have no character; so in apparent harmony with himself and others as to have no special life. For the superficially sane, sanity means a life without conflict, a life of relative peace, a life without malice or greed.”

“For the more deeply sane, whatever else sanity might be, it is a container of madness, not a denier of it. This sanity, once again in its cartoon form, often bears the wisdom that accrues from hardships endured and conflicts forborne. This sane person has felt and acknowledged but not ultimately been overwhelmed by the rigours of his nature. His sanity, such as it is, is both the cause and the consequence of not having conformed, of discovering his true nature through a refusal to comply. For the superficially sane, adaptation is their religion; for the deeply sane, adaptation is what corrupts them, and is experienced as a form of submission.”

I think that it is a brilliant distinction - between being superficially sane and being deeply sane. Obviously those of us who have been through our own troubles and have emerged, wiser, from the other side, would argue for the deeply sane alternative.

Some more quotes:

It is the capacity to be disturbed by our feelings — something that can happen to us in the making and the experience of artworks — and to be nourished and sustained by this disturbance that Winnicott is promoting.

Our modern and often realistic terrors about children’s vulnerability, about the terrible things that can be done to children, also mask our own terrors about what children can do to us. … All the modern prescriptive child-rearing literature is about how not to drive someone (the child) mad, and how not to be driven mad (by the child). Children would be very surprised, I think, to discover just how mad we think they are. And yet one of the messages we are given by writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens — and Winnicott’s account of what he calls “primitive selves” is perhaps the most compelling and contemporary example of this — is that while infants and children may be mad, it is this very madness, these “most intense feelings and … fearfully acute sensations” that are our life force. Without this first madness, without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods — to our most passionate selves — our lives begin to feel futile.

I think that one of the reasons that this book has been so well received is that Phillips shifts the focus from madness to sanity. As he says, “By keeping the debate so exclusively about madness, the mind doctors of the twentieth century, like the psychologists and moralists of the nineteenth century, have kept us (and themselves) in the dark about sanity”. Sanity at its most basic involves happiness and living a “good life”. This life involves contradictions, ambivalence and difficulty but it is better for having survived these. As Phillips says, “the deeply sane are rather more like tragic heroes and heroines who have survived their ordeals”.

I would still like to see more context and more examples but perhaps one of the benefits of this type of writing is that it provokes thought. When I finished Going Sane I wanted to have a discussion about how these issues work in practice. Phillips says that his goal with his books “is not to inform people, but to evoke things in them … I want the books to return you to your own thoughts”. The same could be said of good literature but perhaps that is also a cop-out which allows him to get away with being intellectual, safe in the knowledge that people will rise to the challenge of interpretation themselves.

Work trip

I’ve been away for a few days in Bloemfontein doing lifeskills exercises with the troops and my mind still feels like it’s away. I’ve been known to be a bit scatterbrained in the past so I suppose this is nothing new but today when M was telling me about two of her friends whom I’ve met before I couldn’t remember who they were. As soon as she started reminding me then I remembered exactly but it was a bit disconcerting that I could forget their names so easily.

I suppose the anxiety of travelling to the Free State, facilitating a programme I’ve never done before and then travelling back takes its toll. Today I had the day off so it was nice to meet up with M for lunch (at the nursery where the fresh aroma of manure added to the flavour of the food), take my dog for a long walk and catch up on a bit of blog-reading. “Home” (which is actually my parents’ home) feels like a whole different world after only two days spent in the Free State. I’m hoping to find my battery charger soon so that I can take decent pictures with my digital camera again. In the meantime, these slightly blurry phone pictures provide a taste of what my trip was like. The stark beauty of the Free State with its majestic koppies and yellow grassland; some of the weather-havens of the sort that the troops will stay in when they’re on deployment in Burundi; one of the social workers standing with me a weather-haven; and then some of my group doing a role-play. The theme was “Fighting Temptations” and they really took to the acting, especially when it came to playing the part of the local women.

On the reading-front I finally finished “Going Sane” by Adam Phillips (in between reading some Anne Enright, Jo-anne Richards, Niall Williams and Tim Winton). I found it enlightening, confusing, brilliant, waffley and thought-provoking. I’ll write up a proper review of it soon, and include some interesting quotes, but given my current mental state that could take a few days.

It’s just cricket

Kevin Pietersen looks annoyed. Picture by Getty images at the Daily Telegraph website.

If there’s one thing that the English do better than playing cricket it’s writing about cricket.

The Daily Telegraph’s obituary for Bryan “Bomber” Wells is a good example – it recalls the joys of playing the game before cricketers took themselves so seriously.

Overweight and undertrained, Bomber Wells could hardly have looked less like a professional sportsman. This unathletic impression was confirmed by his bowling run-up, or rather his lack of run-up. As he himself explained, he took two steps when he was cold and one when he was hot; and sometimes he simply delivered the ball from a stationary position.

He once managed to bowl an entire over (by pre-arrangement with the batsman) while the Worcester cathedral clock struck 12.

You can’t imagine the current lot doing that, although I suppose it is a bit ridiculous. I once saw Jacques Kallis at Joburg International airport and, just from the way he walked, you could tell that he had an extremely healthy regard for himself. Perhaps that’s what happens to you when you’re a star, a cricketing legend. No smiles at the people gaping at him, nudging each other and whispering, “Isn’t that Jacques Kallis?” He was “in his bubble” as they say about sportspeople with great powers of concentration.

One of the things I like about watching or listening to cricket is the fact that it’s generally a soothing way of dealing with anxiety. Of course it helps that SA could win the current series against England, despite the fact that they’ve stuffed things up from similar situations before. Helping them this time is one Jeremy Snape, an English cricketer and now a sports psychologist, who can hopefully help them to avoid the pitfalls of panicking and choking, as Derek Pringle explains.

I won’t comment on the hypocrisy or greed or other negatives associated with the “gentleman’s game”. But I think Mephistopheles has a point when he says:

The beauty of Cricket does not lie in the hypocrisy surrounding it. Rather, it begins and ends inside the boundary lines. Two batsmen against the other eleven who are trying to get them out. Cricket is a game where there is room for individual brilliance within the framework of team work. The beauty of Cricket is in some of its vignettes. A bowler marking his run-up and the batsmen taking guard. The crowd waiting in anticipation while the bowler starts his run-up and then that anticipation turning to instant boredom as the batsmen shoulders his arms and lets the ball through to the wicket keeper.

Sometimes boredom is good. And there’s always time to read while watching cricket. A cuppa tea, a good book and the gentle thwack of bat against ball. As long as we win

Forty Things Surprise meme

Seen this at quite a few sites (first at Charlotte’s blog) and the surprise is that they left out three (rather odd) questions. Trust me, you won’t miss the three omitted ones.

1. My uncle once: climbed the drainpipe up to his classroom with a sackful of Cokes.
2. Never in my life: have I been to South America.
3. When I was five: I wanted to go to Heaven.
4. High school was: not the best time of my life.
5. I will never forget: the kindness of my granny when I was growing up.
6. Once I met: Kylie Minogue at a bookshop, at least I’m pretty sure it was her.
7. There’s this girl I know: who has got it all together.
8. Once, at a bar: I kissed a complete stranger.
9. By noon, I’m usually: hungry.
10. Last night: I fell asleep with the light on after reading a book.
11. If only I had: lots of time (and money and inspiration) to write to my heart’s content.
12. Next time I go to church: will possibly be at Christmas.
13. What worries me most: is when I will be able to afford my own place again.
14. When I turn my head left I see: government-issue blinds, a government-issue filing cabinet and the light shining off some leaves through the window.
15. When I turn my head right I see: a computer screen that I don’t use, a telephone (fixed again - yay), a creme wall and some more blinds.
16. You know I’m lying when: I look more anxious than usual and talk really fast.
17. What I miss most about the Eighties is: making new friends at university.
18. If I were a character in Shakespeare I’d be: tragic (or possibly comic).
19. By this time next year: I will be free of the army and hopefully still employed.
20. A better name for me would be: I’m OK with this one thanks.
21. I have a hard time understanding: indifference (and enduring hatred).
22. If I ever go back to school, I’ll: do a Ph.D.
23. You know I like you if: I bake you something.
24. If I ever won an award, the first person I would thank would be: my parents most probably.
25. Take my advice, never: ignore your gut, it’s a tried and tested way of assessing how you feel.
26. My ideal breakfast is: coffee, croissants, fruit salad and yoghurt (with the right company and something enticing to read).
27. A song I love but do not have is: anything on Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” album.
28. If you visit my hometown, I suggest you: walk on the mountain (but don’t take valuables), drink sundowners at Clifton, eat out at a great restaurant and go to the District Six museum.
29. Why won’t people: take responsibility for their emotions?
30. If you spend a night at my house: you will have a very inquisitive dog who will sniff you, some talkative parents who will quiz you and you will wake up with a lovely view of the mountain.
31. I’d stop my wedding for: I’d rather not think about such an anxiety-inducing scenario!
32. The world could do without: religious intolerance.
33. I’d rather lick the belly of a cockroach than: eat one (gross).
34. My favourite blonde(s) is/are: at the moment that would be Mandy (with a golden retriever in second place)
35. Paper clips are more useful than: prestik.
36. If I do anything well it’s: procrastinate.
37. And by the way: I found this cartoonist the other day at http://www.mentalhealthhumor.com

James Joyce: “The Dead”

James Joyce’s short story “The Dead”, from Dubliners (1914), touches on the issue of narcissism, one which is central to the “problems of living” that many clients who come for therapy experience.

Narcissism can be defined as an excessive amount of love and admiration toward oneself but in a psychological context it has a more specific meaning. It refers to a psychological condition characterised by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.

Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead” fits this label. He’s in his mid-40s, a teacher and a journalist, happily married with children. He’s well-regarded as a teacher and a journalist and is his aunts’ favourite nephew who is to give the after-dinner speech at their annual Misses Morkan’s dance party. But he’s also preoccupied with what other people think of him and appears a bit bewildered by his own emotions and his effect on people. He appears too wrapped up in himself and whether or not he is highly regarded and so is unable to empathise with others. He is over-familiar with Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, and she takes offence. Dancing with a fellow teacher, Molly Ivors, he’s perplexed that she teases him about being a “West Briton” (an Irishman who looks to Britain rather than his native Ireland). She’s effectively accusing him of not being sufficiently Irish and not taking take enough pride in all things Irish but he comes away from the encounter irritated and perplexed.

His marriage to Gretta is a happy one up to a point but the party provides an example of the miscommunications between them. When Molly Ivors invites him to holiday with them in Galway (perhaps to make up for the teasing), he says he’s going cycling in Europe instead. Gretta is delighted by the idea of going to Galway but Gabriel says coldly that she can go alone if she likes.

Later on the cab drive home and back at their hotel he longs for intimacy with Gretta but she’s full of regret for her first love, of whom she was reminded when one of the guests sang “The Lass of Aughrim”. He feels slighted and sees “himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught sight of in the mirror”.

However, in a moment of epiphany (which Joyce is famous for), Gabriel appears to be able to transcend some of his own narcissism to empathise with Gretta and to feel some of the sorrow that she experiences. After Gretta has cried herself to sleep Gabriel is left wondering about the living and the dead. He looks out at the snow which “was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furley was buried …. he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe, and falling faintly, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead”.

Bill Tucker, who includes this story in his “How People Change”, identifies narcissism as the central issue of the story.

Narcissism is the central issue in the psychological treatment of many patients, usually but not necessarily men, coming in mid-life to treatment for long-standing problems in love or work, sometimes accompanied by specific physiological symptoms. Like Gabriel, such men are unaware of their insensitivity to emotional issues and find themselves genuinely bewildered by the intensely negative responses they continually evoke. Like him they tend to be overly sensitive to slights and to indulge in constant monitoring of how they are perceived, with what we might incautiously compare to a teenager’s degree of self-consciousness. Gabriel is warmly regarded, but he does not feel connected to any of the other guests.

I wondered what a client like Gabriel Conroy might be like on the couch. In some ways he would be an ideal patient – intelligent, articulate, insightful and observant. He would classify as a high-functioning neurotic. Narcissistic patients tend to drone on at length about minor things (a bit like a blog!) but he is also observant enough to be able to apply insights to his own relationships and could make good use of therapy to connect with a rich, inner emotional life.

Stellenbosch wrapped

I’m a sucker for artistic statements, especially when someone (in this case landscape artist Strijdom van der Merwe) takes the trouble to wrap all the oak trees in Stellenbosch’s historic Dorp street. I don’t really care that it’s raising money for charity. I just like the way it looks. That old cliche about Stellenbosch (and CT for that matter) being a city of contrasts is incredibly true. On the way in to Stellenbosch you can’t help notice all the sex-workers on the side of the road with their short skirts. But the city itself is respectability personified. The architecture is lovely (for want of a better word) and it’s a quaint, vibrant, beautiful university town. Someone described it as an island of wealth in a sea of poverty. But today I’m just admiring the oak trees. My mom’s comment was, “I hope those trees can breathe.”