Life is an ongoing expedition into the brambled tendrilled wilderness of ourselves, continually stymied by all we mistake for a final destination — success, superhuman strength, the love of another. Along the way, we keep confusing experiment and exploration. An experiment proves or disproves an existing theory; its payoff is data, fixed and binary. An exploration is a traversal of the unknown, of landscapes you didn’t even know existed, with all the courage and vulnerability and openness to experience that demands; its payoff is discovery — of unimagined wonders, of yourself in the face of the unimagined. Discovery, in its purest form, is nothing less than revelation.
On the pages of his posthumously published masterpiece The Book of Disquiet (public library), poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) considers the complex question of discovering yourself. He writes:
Eternal tourists of ourselves, there is no landscape but what we are. We possess nothing, for we don’t even possess ourselves. We have nothing because we are nothing. What hand will I reach out, and to what universe? The universe isn’t mine: it’s me.
[…]
Everything is in us — all we need to do is look for it and know how to look.
It may be that we don’t know how to look because we are looking as tourists — passing visitors to the foreign parts of ourselves — rather than explorers. The spirit of exploration is something else altogether, requiring a total receptivity to experience — the mind uncaged from expectation and convention, the animal sensorium fully open to every channel of aliveness, the soul ready for the revelation of discovery.
Pessoa offers a brief, blazing set of instructions to himself for how to attain such revelatory receptivity:
To feel everything in every way; to be able to think with the emotions and feel with the mind; not to desire much except with the imagination; to suffer with haughtiness; to see clearly so as to write accurately; to know oneself through diplomacy and dissimulation; to become naturalized as a different person, with all the necessary documents; in short, to use all sensations but only on the inside, peeling them all down to God and then wrapping everything up again and putting it back in the shop window like the sales assistant I can see from here with the small tins of a new brand of shoe polish.
Only such raw receptivity to the reality of the universe without saves us from losing sight of the universe within. Consciousness may be the instrument the universe invented to look inside itself, but it is a flawed instrument that keeps inverting the lens — the price of consciousness is self-consciousness. Like the tragic flaw that haunts the Greek hero, our greatest strength is also the source of our greatest suffering. With an eye to this tragic flaw of the human animal, Pessoa observes:
To stop trying to understand, to stop analyzing… To see ourselves as we see nature, to view our impressions as we view a field — that is true wisdom.
This essay is adapted from the sixth chapter of Figuring.
“I am determined on distinction,” Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810–July 19, 1850) writes to her former teacher. She is fifteen. The year is 1825 and she is ineligible for any formal education, so she has taken the reins of her character into her own hands, with resolute guidance from her father — a man who has tempered his disappointment that his firstborn child was not a son with the choice to treat his eldest daughter like a creature with a mind. When the first ringlets were snipped from her hair, he composed an ode to her head as a temple of divine intellect. At six, Margaret was reading in Latin. At twelve, she was conversing with her father in philosophy and pure mathematics. She would come to describe herself as “the much that calls for more.” At fifteen, this is her daily routine:
I rise a little before five, walk an hour, and then practise on the piano till seven, when we breakfast. Next, I read French — Sismondi’s Literature of the South of Europe — till eight; then two or three lectures in Brown’s Philosophy. About half past nine I go to Mr. Perkins’s school, and study Greek till twelve, when, the school being dismissed, I recite, go home, and practise again till dinner, at two. Then, when I can, I read two hours in Italian.
Many years later, she would write in response to the frequent criticism of her uncommon drive, often mistaken for arrogance, as women’s confident resolve tends to be:
In an environment like mine, what may have seemed too lofty or ambitious in my character was absolutely needed to keep the heart from breaking and enthusiasm from extinction.
Thoughts, silent thoughts, of Time and Space and Death. Art by Margaret C. Cook from a rare English edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print)
From the platform of her precocious girlhood, Margaret undertakes an inquiry into the building blocks of character. “Nothing more widely distinguishes man from man than energy of will,” she writes in a six-page essay, positing that a conquering will is composed of imagination, perseverance, and “enthusiastic confidence in the future.” But these elements are not weighted equally — she prizes above all perseverance, which fuels the “unwearied climbing and scrambling” toward achievement. “The truly strong of will,” she writes, having lived just over a decade, “returns invigorated by the contest, calmed, not saddened by failure and wiser from its nature.”
Over the next twenty-five years, this teenager animated by what she calls “the all-powerful motive of ambition” would persevere to write the foundational treatise of the women’s emancipation movement, author the most trusted literary and art criticism in the nation, work as the first female editor for a major New York newspaper and the only woman in the newsroom, advocate for prison reform and Negro voting rights, and become America’s first foreign war correspondent. All of this she would accomplish while bedeviled by debilitating chronic pain at the base of her neck — the result of a congenital spinal deformity that made it difficult to tilt her head down in order to write and was often accompanied by acute depression.
Again and again, she would rise to reach for “incessant acts of vigorous beauty,” signing her influential editorials not with her name but with a single star — at first a symbol imbued with deliberate anonymity, designed to disguise the author’s gender and thus avoid any bias as to the article’s credibility, but soon the widely recognized seal of Fuller’s authoritative voice. Literature would be her weapon of choice — “a medium for viewing all humanity, a core around which all knowledge, all experience, all science, all the ideal as well as all the practical in our nature could gather.”
Behind the public face of unprecedented distinction, Fuller would sorrow and struggle for private contentment — the same cerebral tidal force that swept away the barriers of prejudice and convention would end up drowning out her heart. Over and over, she would entangle herself in intellectual infatuations and half-requited loves that fell short of what she most fervently desired: “fulness of being” — the sublime integration of emotion, the intellect, and, as she would come to realize only at the end of her short life, the body. And yet she was as intent on having an examined inner life as she was on engaging with the life of the world, of the earth, of cosmic existence. “I cannot live without mine own particular star,” Fuller wrote when she was the age at which her contemporary Maria Michell discovered the comet that made her America’s first professional female astronomer — “but my foot is on the earth and I wish to walk over it until my wings be grown. I will use my microscope as well as my telescope.”
Solar System quilt by Fuller’s contemporary Ellen Harding Baker, made over the course of seven years to teach women astronomy when they were barred from higher education in science. (Available as a print and a face mask.)
At twenty-one, Margaret Fuller arrived at her “own particular star” through a transcendent experience she later described as one of eclipsing “the extreme of passionate sorrow” — a revelation that stripped all sense of self and, in that nakedness of being, made her all the more herself.
A revelation the account of which defies, with Fuller’s virtuosity of language, the first of the four features of transcendent experiences — ineffability — that William James formulated a generation later.
In her journal, Fuller recounts being forced to go to church on Thanksgiving Day while feeling “wearied out by mental conflicts, and in a mood of most childish, child-like sadness” — the sorrow of her symphonic potential muted by those tasked with directing her life. She would later recall:
I felt within myself great power, and generosity, and tenderness, but it seemed to me as if they were all unrecognized, and as if it was impossible that they should be used in life. I was only one-and-twenty; the past was worthless, the future hopeless; yet… my aspiration seemed very high.
Looking around the pews, this young woman who would later describe herself as having had “no natural childhood” now finds herself envying all the little children. Once liberated from the service, she heads into the fields and walks — almost runs — for hours, under “slow processions of sad clouds… passing over a cold blue sky.” She is unable to contain the thoughts that have seethed for years and have now erupted to the surface:
It seemed I could never return to a world in which I had no place… I could not act a part, nor seem to live any longer.
So she ceases to think and instead observes nature in its irrepressible aliveness — the trees “dark and silent”; the little stream “shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered leaves,” and yet “it did not quite lose itself in the earth.”
Suddenly the sun shone out with that transparent sweetness, like the last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day. And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere, which has never since departed me.
The beam illuminates her memory of herself as a little girl, stopping midstep on the stairs to wonder how she came into being:
How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw, also, that it must do it, — that it must make all this false true… I saw there was no self; that selfishness was all folly, and the result of circumstance; that it was only because I thought self real that I suffered; that I had only to live in the idea of the all, and all was mine.
A generation after her, the Canadian psychiatrist and outdoorsman Maurice Bucke would fall under Whitman’s spell and give this type of experience a name in his pioneering model of cosmic consciousness.
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolizing my experience and clarifying my own mind in such a way that I am no longer captive to it. All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.
This is why I love diaries, with their rare glimpse of the inner worlds that lavish our own with beauty and truth, with nourishment of substance and sweetness that endures for epochs after the lives that made it are no more.
Of all the writers and artists who have kept a journal as a means of creative catalysis and a salve for self-doubt, no one has confronted the internal saboteur of creativity — those psychic hindrances that stand between the talented and the fruition of their talent — more pointedly than Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883–June 3, 1924).
Franz Kafka
“I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can,” he vows at the outset of his Diaries: 1910–1923 (public library) — the journal that became part creative sandbox, part metronome of discipline, part exorcism for self-doubt as Kafka was trying to live into his creative calling while working as an insurance salesman. “I want to write, with a constant trembling on my forehead,” he declares, and yet over and over he indicts himself for falling short of his desire, for thwarting his talent with insecurity and lack of discipline. “Wrote nothing,” he laments in entry after entry. “Have written nothing for three days,” he sulks as his creative block consumes him. “Bad,” he declares a perfect spring day for having produced no writing. By early summer, he is in despair:
Nothing written for so long. Begin tomorrow. Otherwise I shall again get into a prolonged, irresistible dissatisfaction; I am really in it already. The nervous states are beginning. But if I can do something, then I can do it without superstitious precautions.
The reasons for Kafka’s creative block are various: By turns he finds himself drowning in loneliness, enraged by distraction, physically fatigued and pained by the tuberculosis that would soon take his life, tortured by his era’s version of an overflowing inbox: heaps of unanswered letters. He feels his powers being wasted, feels himself “wretched, wretched, and yet with good intentions,” feels the “absolute despair” of trying and failing to write. The diary itself becomes his watering hole through the dry spells:
Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
On its pages, universal patterns emerge: In his private and particular turmoils, Kafka touches again and again on what I consider the four great perils standing between us and our gifts — those psychic hindrances of which we may not always be consciously aware, but we which experience palpably and painfully as creative block.
Savaged by shame at his writing, Kafka regularly winces at his sentences, then reasons:
I explain it to myself by saying that I have too little time and quiet to draw out of me all the possibilities of my talent.
Baldwin would have had something to say about that excuse, which Kafka himself sees crumble: During a rare respite from his ordinary time-lament — that his day job at the insurance company is taking too much energy away from writing — he finds himself not using the windfall gain to write:
This month, which, because of the absence of the boss, could have been put to exceptionally good use, I have wasted and slept away without much excuse… Even this afternoon I stretched out on the bed for three hours with dreamy.
Such is the bi-polar nature of time-anxiety in creative work: Alongside the feeling of not having enough time is also the time-dilating experience of procrastination — the paradoxical paralysis many gifted people feel at the prospect of living up to and into their gifts. Kafka writes:
Idled away the morning with sleeping and reading newspapers. Afraid to finish a review for the Prager Tagblatt. Such fear of writing always expresses itself by my occasionally making up, away from my desk, initial sentences for what I am to write, which immediately prove unusable, dry, broken off long before their end, and pointing with their towering fragments to a sad future.
“Wasted day,” he groans in another entry. And yet he has the wisdom to recognize that procrastination — “the shameful lowlands of writing” — has a purpose:
Stretching in the presence of the maid and saying, ‘I’ve been writing until now.’ The appearance of the undisturbed bed, as though it had just been brought in… I am in the shameful lowlands of writing. Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.
Art from The Three Astronauts — Umberto Eco’s vintage semiotic children’s book about world peace
3. WORLD-ANXIETY
To be an artist is to feel life deeply, to tremble with the terrors of everything that trembles. As the first global war is painting the world around him black, Kafka sinks into an inner darkness, his anxiety rising to untenable heights:
The thoughts provoked in me by the war… devour me from every direction. I can’t endure worry, and perhaps have been created expressly in order to die of it.
The writing stalls again as he sorrows with the world’s sorrow:
Again barely two pages. At first I thought my sorrow over the Austrian defeats and my anxiety for the future (anxiety that appears ridiculous to me at bottom, and base too) would prevent me from doing any writing. But that wasn’t it, it was only an apathy that forever comes back and forever has to be put down again. There is time enough for sorrow when I am not writing.
Kafka would die of tuberculosis while the war is still raging.
Few things maim an artist’s confidence more savagely than self-comparison, which breeds the two most pernicious species of despair in creative work: insecurity and envy, always entwined in a singularly damaging form of learned helplessness. While working on what would become his first published short story, Kafka acquires a volume of Goethe’s conversations and finds himself completely blocked:
So passes my rainy, quiet Sunday, I sit in my bedroom and am at peace, but instead of making up my mind to do some writing, into which I could have poured my whole being the day before yesterday, I have been staring at my fingers for quite a while. This week I think I have been completely influenced by Goethe, have really exhausted the strength of this influence and have therefore become useless.
Nearly a month later, he is still immersed in and paralyzed by Goethe. After yet another “wrote nothing,” he records:
The zeal, permeating every part of me, with which I read about Goethe (Goethe’s conversations, student days, hours with Goethe, a visit of Goethe’s to Frankfort) and which keeps me from all writing.
“I cannot believe that I shall really write something good tomorrow,” Kafka forebodes in one entry. In another, he declares himself “an almost complete failure in writing.” He is torn between determination and despair:
I will write again, but how many doubts have I meanwhile had about my writing? At bottom I am an incapable, ignorant person who, if he had not been compelled — without any effort on his own part and scarcely aware of the compulsion — to go to school, would be fit only to crouch in a kennel, to leap out when food is offered him, and to leap back when he has swallowed it.
With his characteristic drama for metaphor, he writes in the winter of his twenty-eighth year:
It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones. Almost every word I write jars against the next, I hear the consonants rub leadenly against each other… My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it. Of course, that wouldn’t be the greatest misfortune, only I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odour of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader’s face.
Toupet tit / Gould. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)
Like Audubon did with his bird paintings, Kafka regularly destroyed writing that dissatisfied him. With an eye to all he disavowed one particular year — a great deal more writing than he kept — he is suddenly seized by anxious self-doubt:
That hinders me a great deal in writing. It is indeed a mountain, it is five times as much as I have in general ever written, and by its mass alone it draws everything that I write away from under my pen to itself.
Preparing to visit his siblings and parents, and heavy with shame for having written nothing, he consoles himself grimly:
I shall, since I have written nothing that I could enjoy, not appear stranger, more despicable, more useless to them than I do to myself.
When his best friend does a reading of one of Kafka’s stories at a salon, Kafka finds himself feeling bitterly “isolated from everyone,” chin down in shame at the “disordered sentences” of his “story with holes into which one could stick both hands.” He agonizes:
If I were ever able to write something large and whole, well shaped from beginning to end, then in the end the story would never be able to detach itself from me and it would be possible for me calmly and with open eyes, as a blood relation of a healthy story, to hear it read, but as it is every little piece of the story runs around homeless and drives me away from it in the opposite direction.
He feels unable to write, and the little he does write feels “wrong.” In yet another dramatic metaphor — “metaphors are one among many things which make me despair of writing,” he would later rue — he reflects:
My feeling when I write something that is wrong might be depicted as follows: In front of two holes in the ground a man is waiting for something to appear that can rise up only out of the hole on his right. But while this hole remains covered over by a dimly visible lid, one thing after another rises up out of the hole on his left, keeps trying to attract his attention, and in the end succeeds in doing this without any difficulty because of its swelling size, which, much as the man may try to prevent it, finally covers up even the right hole. But the man — he does not want to leave this place, and indeed refuses to at any price — has nothing but these appearances, and although — fleeting as they are, their strength is used up by their merely appearing — they cannot satisfy him, he still strives, whenever out of weakness they are arrested in their rising up, to drive them up and scatter them into the air if only he can thus bring up others; for the permanent sight of one is unbearable, and moreover he continues to hope that after the false appearances have been exhausted, the true will finally appear.
And then, swift as a whip, his self-doubt meta-flagellates the metaphor itself:
How weak this picture is. An incoherent assumption is thrust like a board between the actual feeling and the metaphor of the description.
He doubts not only his talent but his motivation to manifest it:
I can’t write any more. I’ve come up against the last boundary, before which I shall in all likelihood again sit down for years, and then in all likelihood begin another story all over again that will again remain unfinished. This fate pursues me.
Within months, he had published The Metamorphosis. And this indeed is the great consolation of his diaries: Over and over, Kafka discovers — as every artist eventually must — that the remedy for writer’s block is writing. A generation before Steinbeck observed in his own diary of self-doubt that “just a stint every day does it,” Kafka writes with an eye to the 1911 comet visible in the night sky above him:
Every day at least one line should be trained on me, as they now train telescopes on comets… Then I should appear before that sentence once, lured by that sentence.
Over and over, he discovers that he writes to save himself:
I feel helpless and an outsider. The firmness, however, which the most insignificant writing brings about in me is beyond doubt and wonderful.
He discovers that writing, for him, is not a matter of art but of survival:
I have now… a great yearning to write all my anxiety entirely out of me, write it into the depths of the paper just as it comes out of the depths of me, or write it down in such a way that I could draw what I had written into me completely. This is no artistic yearning.
At its best, it is not merely survival, not salvation, but self-transcendence:
Without weight, without bones, without body, walked through the streets for two hours considering what I overcame this afternoon while writing.
[…]
I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.
He relishes “the strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing… a seeing of what is really taking place.” What buoys him through all the doubt and despair is the deeper knowledge — a kind of profound self-trust — that writing is his calling, the great spiritual reward for which he would give up — and did give up — every earthly pleasure:
When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take, everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed towards the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music. I atrophied in all these directions. This was necessary because the totality of my strengths was so slight that only collectively could they even half-way serve the purpose of my writing. Naturally, I did not find this purpose independently and consciously, it found itself, and is now interfered with only by the office, but that interferes with it completely. In any case I shouldn’t complain that I can’t put up with a sweetheart, that I understand almost exactly as much of love as I do of music.
[…]
My development is now complete and, so far as I can see, there is nothing left to sacrifice; I need only throw my work in the office out of this complex in order to begin my real life in which, with the progress of my work, my face will finally be able to age in a natural way.
“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest essays. “I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.”
It is a powerful sentiment and a dangerous one, because if mutual salvation is not the byproduct of a healthy relationship but an expectation upon entering into one, it can bleed into destructive codependence. And yet we know from the neurobiology of limbic revision that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”
Whether a relationship ends up rewiring or deepening unhealthy attachment patterns encoded early in life depends largely on the expectations we bring to it, and can change from one to the other as the expectations change. When we approach one another with curiosity and care without the expectation of curing each other, something paradoxical and miraculous may happen — the care may become the cure. The Latin of the word “cure” — cūra — means “anxiety,” which is also the root of “care” (to have cares, to be anxious), “curiosity” (an anxious inquisitiveness), and “secure” (without anxiety and care).
The pioneering pediatrician turned psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (April 7, 1896–January 28, 1971) understood uniquely the interplay of the two in the making of secure and healthy relationships. Trained as a physician — a profession predicated on cures — Winnicott came to psychoanalysis skeptical of applying the disease model of medicine to the health of the psyche. For him, proper therapy offered not just a cure of symptoms but “a more widely based personality richer in feeling and more tolerant of others because more sure of [oneself]” — a radically countercultural notion amid a therapy culture predicated on curing pathologies.
Winnicott placed at the center of a healthy and secure relationship — between a therapist and a patient, as much as between two private human beings — what he termed care-cure. In the final months of his life, he developed this notion in a talk delivered to doctors and nurses in St. Luke’s Church, later included in the altogether fantastic posthumous collection Home Is Where We Start from: Essays by a Psychoanalyst (public library).
With an eye to what is at the heart of this care-cure concept, Winnicott observes:
We are talking about love, but… the meaning of the word must be spelt out.
In spelling out the primary qualities of a true care-cure relationship — it must be non-moralistic, truthful, and reliable — Winnicott places especial emphasis on reliability as a way of protecting the other from unpredictability, since the root of suffering for many is that “they have been subjected as part of the pattern of their lives to the unpredictable.” (All trust is, in a sense, a handshake of predictability, and every breach of trust is devastating precisely because the other person has unpredictably withdrawn their hand.)
Winnicott considers the cost of unpredictability:
Behind unpredictability lies mental confusion, and behind that there can be found chaos in terms of somatic functioning, i.e. unthinkable anxiety that is physical.
To be capable of a care-cure relationship, with all its requisite predictability, one must therefore be free of mental confusion and balanced enough to show up in a reliable way. Winnicott offers a definition of a healthy mind that doubles as a fundamental definition of healthy love:
A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.
This imaginative interpenetration of experience is necessary for the greatest challenge of consciousness — understanding what it is like to be another. Without it, there can be no love, for we cannot love whom we do not understand — then we are pseudo-loving a projection. A sign of healthy love, therefore, is the ability to be reliable and responsible with — which is different from being responsible for — the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of the other.
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