The Marginalian
The Marginalian

How to Get Over Someone: A Strategy for Coping with Heartbreak Based on the Evolutionary History of Hiccups

By Maria Popova

Long before he became the world’s most beloved neurologist, Oliver Sacks was a twenty-seven-year-old medical resident on his first hospital post when an operation left one of his patients with an unstoppable hiccup. Already a bridge figure between medicine and literature, he found himself haunted by a Somerset Maugham short story about a man who dies of hiccups after a woman casts a spell on him. Fearing his patient might suffer the same fate unless something jolted his brain out of the spasmodic loop, Oliver suggested something radical yet emblematic of what would become his lifelong gift for harmonizing the physiology of the body and the poetry of the mind: bringing in a hypnotist. His colleagues were skeptical bordering on scornful. But the patient had been hiccuping for six days straight and no medical intervention had worked. Oliver recounts in his magnificent more-than-memoir:

To our amazement, he was able to get the patient “under” and then to give him a posthypnotic command:

“When I snap my fingers, you will wake up and no longer have hiccups.”

The patient woke up, free from hiccups, and they never recurred.

Why the strange mental intervention was so effective in abating this debilitating reflex of the body, and how it contours the most effective strategy for waking up from the trance of heartbreak, is rooted deep in our evolutionary history.

The spiral galaxy UGC 10214, known as Tadpole. (Photograph: Hubble Space Telescope)

A hiccup is an involuntary sharp inspiration of air as the epiglottis — the flap of skin in the back of the throat — shuts, producing the hic sound for which the spasm is named. Like our limbs carry the genetic blueprint of our dorsal fins, like our tailbones encode our primate ancestry, hiccups reminds us of where we came from. Although our basic neural infrastructure for breathing evolved from that of fish, the hiccup’s distinctive pattern of nerve and muscle activity is an inheritance from the tadpole stage of our amphibian ancestors. Tadpoles use both their gills and their lungs to breathe, pumping water into the mouth and across the gills but keeping it from entering the lungs by flapping the glottis to seal the breathing tube — one long hiccup.

Frontispiece of The Natural History of Fishes, Amphibians, & Reptiles, or Monocardian Animals, 1838.

While our bodies evolved beyond recognition from the tadpole, our brains maintained the neural circuitry of this dual process — most likely, to help nursing infants manage breathing and suckling simultaneously. The vestigial gills of human embryos are no longer present in most adults, but the neuroanatomy of gilled breathing remains and is activated by certain stimuli to cause hiccups — eating too much or too fast, drinking carbonated beverages, being exposed to a rapid temperature change, undergoing extreme stress.

This is why, despite the panoply of folk remedies and pop culture myths for stopping hiccups, ranging from backbends to biting into lemon, the most effective way is simply to reset the brain out of its evolutionary time machine by making a more complex demand of its neural circuits. (For me, doing a bit of calculus invariably stops a spell of hiccups.) Although physical interventions like controlled breathing can sometimes help, it is rather the cognitive demand they make with the focus they require that interrupts the spasms.

A paradox of the human animal is that while we have not fully outgrown the bodily vestiges of our evolutionary inheritance, we have also paid a heavy price for our growing mental complexity. (“Never say higher or lower,” Darwin scribbled in the margin of a natural history book, arguing with the author about the so-called higher animals. “Say more complicated.”) As we rose from the oceans and crawled onto the land, then climbed the trees to learn to be social, then back came down to walk upright beneath a canopy of one hundred trillion synapses, we became creatures capable of love, which made us capable of loss — this is the price of consciousness.

Superb lyrebird. (Available as a print and a notebook.)

The experience of heartbreak — a recursive mental gasp for reciprocity that is no longer available, or perhaps never really was — is essentially an emotional hiccup: a spasm of thought that feels involuntary, interrupts healthy functioning, and causes debilitating discomfort you are unable to will away. Like the ceaseless hiccups of Oliver’s patient, it is abated only by a mental reset — by setting the mind on a different track of focus that demands enough of its cognitive resources to displace the loop of rumination. It hardly matters what it is — beginning an absorbing new project (this is what the bird divinations did for me), learning a new language or a new craft (this is how ceramics came into my life), training for a triathlon or taking up the cello or going down a delicious rabbit hole about the impossibility of bats or the invention of the bicycle or the chemistry of blue (this is how I wrote Traversal). What does matter is to remember that all feeling floats on a current of thought coursing through the brain at eighty feet per second. Divert the current and the charge of the feeling dissipates — perhaps not to perfect neutrality, but to something bittersweet and bearable, like the memory of childhood, like the body remembers its gills.

BP

How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible

By Maria Popova

How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible

Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perishable, that everything we love will eventually be taken from us by one form of entropy or another, culminating with life itself. Suppose we agree that, as Rilke so passionately insisted, “for one human being to love another… is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

This, then, is the agreement: Learning to live is learning to love, and learning to love is learning to die — the imperative in the inevitable that renders our transience meaningful and holy. The price of this holiness is absolute humility: There is no pact to be made with the universe — we die, whether or not we agree to it, whether or not we have learned how to love in the bright interlude between atom and dust. We may or may not be lucky enough to live out the two billion heartbeats our creaturely inheritance has allotted us. But no matter how many we actually get, it matters how we spend them and what we spend them on. It may be the only thing that matters.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

Not long before his untimely death by an aggressive brain tumor, Brian Doyle — who described himself as “a muddle and a conundrum shuffling slowly along the road, gaping in wonder, trying to just see and say what is” — took up these immense and eternal questions in what became his posthumous essay collection One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder (public library).

Because the harshest realities of our own lives are often easiest to see and easiest to bear lensed through the lives of other creatures cushioned in symbol and metaphor — this is why we have fables and fairy tales — Doyle finds himself reckoning with mortality and the meaning of life as he examines the dead body of a Townsend’s mole (Scapanus townsendii) in his garden. Curious about the animal, he turns to the scientific literature and is suddenly disquieted by reading about the species as a lump-sum of data points. Overcome with tenderness for “this particular individual, and the flavor and tenor and yearning of this one life,” he writes:

This tribe of mole is thought to be largely solitary, I read, and I want to laugh and weep, as we are all largely solitary, and spend whole lifetimes digging tunnels toward each other, do we not? And sometimes we connect, thrilled and confused, sure and unsure at once, for a time, before the family cavern empties, or one among us does not come home at all, and faintly far away we hear the sound of the shovel.

Art by Charlie Mackesy from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse — a tender illustrated fable about what it means to love

Over and over, through the different winding paths of the different essays, Doyle returns to his animating ethos that “love is our greatest and hardest work” — nowhere more poignantly articulated than in an essay about the people seen leaping out of the Twin Towers hand in hand, their hands “nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.” He reflects on this harrowing and holy emblem of our deepest humanity:

Their hands reaching and joining are the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and death. It is what makes me believe… that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fires, to believe that some unimaginable essence of who we are persists past the dissolution of what we were, to believe against such evil hourly evidence that love is why we are here.

The trick, of course, is learning how to be here — how to remain fully present and filled with that ferocious love — knowing we will one day be gone, knowing it might be tomorrow. In what may be the most soulful and sensible advice on how to live an actualized life since Whitman’s, Doyle offers an anchor to that holy here:

You do your absolute best to find and hone and wield your divine gifts against the dark. You do your best to reach out tenderly to touch and elevate as many people as you can reach. You bring your naked love and defiant courage and salty grace to bear as much as you can, with all the attentiveness and humor you can muster. This life is after all a miracle and we ought to pay fierce attention every moment, as much as possible.

Paradoxically, this active and conscious effort is a heart that can only beat in the chest of surrender. Doyle adds the ultimate disclaimer:

You cannot control anything. You cannot order or command everything. You cannot fix and repair everything. You cannot protect your children from pain and loss and tragedy and illness. You cannot be sure that you will always be married, let alone happily married. You cannot be sure you will always be employed, or healthy, or relatively sane. All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference.

Art from An Almanac of Birds: Divinations for Uncertain Days. (Available as a print and as stationery cards, benefitting the Audubon Society.)

At the center of this recognition is that most difficult triumph of unselfing for us creatures of self-importance: humility. In Doyle’s definition, humility is not a lowering down to the ground, as the word’s Latin root (humus) suggests, but a rising up and a reaching toward something we can never quite touch yet must trust is there. Some call this faith — faith that the world holds together, that our tiny and transient lives are nonetheless an essential part of the whole, that the choices we make within them change the shape of the whole, that love is the mightiest choice we could ever make and the highest form of faith.

Doyle writes:

Humility does not mean self-abnegation, lassitude, detachment; it’s more a calm recognition that you must trust in that which does not make sense, that which is unreasonable, illogical, silly, ridiculous, crazy by the measure of most of our culture. You must trust that you being the best possible you matters somehow… That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling.

[…]

This is what I know: that the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.

Complement with Seamus Heaney’s kindred advice on life and W.H. Auden’s kindred poem “The More Loving One,” then revisit Christian Wiman on love and the sacred and Oliver Sacks on finding meaning without religious faith

BP

What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization

By Maria Popova

What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization

The measure of growth is not how much we have changed, but how harmoniously we have integrated our changes with all the selves we have been — those vessels of personhood stacked within the current self like Russian nesting dolls, not to be outgrown but to be tenderly incorporated. True growth is immensely difficult precisely because it requires befriending the parts of ourselves we have rejected or forgotten — what James Baldwin so memorably called “the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are”; it requires shedding all the inauthentic personae we have put on in the course of life under the forces of convention and compulsion; it requires living amicably with who we have been in order to fully live into who we can be.

Those delicate and often difficult fundaments of true growth are what the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney (September 16, 1885–December 4, 1952) examined in the final years of her life in her uncommonly insightful book Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization (public library).

Karen Horney

A generation before Joan Didion observed that “character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Horney writes:

A person can grow, in the true sense, only if he* assumes responsibility for himself.

Noting that a fulfilled and fulfilling life necessitates “the liberation and cultivation of the forces which lead to self-realization,” she considers the well-spring of that ultimate ideal in relation to growth:

You need not, and in fact cannot, teach an acorn to grow into an oak tree, but when given a chance, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Similarly, the human individual, given a chance, tends to develop his particular human potentialities. He will develop then the unique alive forces of his real self: the clarity and depth of his own feelings, thoughts, wishes, interests; the ability to tap his own resources, the strength of his will power; the special capacities or gifts he may have; the faculty to express himself, and to relate himself to others with his spontaneous feelings. All this will in time enable him to find his set of values and his aims in life. In short, he will grow, substantially undiverted, toward self-realization.

One of Margaret C. Cook’s illustrations for a stunning rare edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

Growth is only possible when the self being realized is the authentic self — “the real self as that central inner force, common to all human beings and yet unique in each, which is the deep source of growth.” And yet it can be maddeningly difficult to discern that real self beneath the costume of shoulds, beneath the armors donned in our confrontations with reality, beneath all the personae learned in the course of adapting to the world’s demands and assaults. E.E. Cummings knew this when he observed that “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” From the moment we are born, we begin morphing that tender real self to the pressures of our emotional and physical environment — a process of adaptation that is also the beginning of our lifelong process of self-alienation, marked by an ongoing tyranny of shoulds — our parents’, our culture’s, our own. Horney considers the path to liberation and self-possession:

All kinds of pressure can easily divert our constructive energies into unconstructive or destructive channels. But… we do not need an inner strait jacket with which to shackle our spontaneity, nor the whip of inner dictates to drive us to perfection. There is no doubt that such disciplinary methods can succeed in suppressing undesirable factors, but there is also no doubt that they are injurious to our growth. We do not need them because we see a better possibility of dealing with destructive forces in ourselves: that of actually outgrowing them. The way toward this goal is an ever increasing awareness and understanding of ourselves. Self-knowledge, then, is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth.

In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but at the same time, in a very real sense, the prime moral privilege. To the extent that we take our growth seriously, it will be because of our own desire to do so. And as we lose the neurotic obsession with self, as we become free to grow ourselves, we also free ourselves to love and to feel concern for other people.

Art by Sophie Blackall from Things to Look Forward to

Growth, then, is not something we do only for and by ourselves, but something we do for and with others — a testament to the fact that human connection is “a root-factor of ordinary human growth.” And yet we alone are responsible — to ourselves and to others — for undertaking the process and following through with its unfolding. A century after Nietzsche considered the path to finding yourself, insisting that “no one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” Horney writes:

Only the individual himself can develop his given potentialities. But, like any other living organism, the human Individuum needs favorable conditions for his growth “from acorn into oak tree”; he needs an atmosphere of warmth to give him both a feeling of inner security and the inner freedom enabling him to have his own feelings and thoughts and to express himself. He needs the good will of others, not only to help him in his many needs but to guide and encourage him to become a mature and fulfilled individual. He also needs healthy friction with the wishes and wills of others. If he can thus grow with others, in love and in friction, he will also grow in accordance with his real self.

Neurosis and Human Growth is a revelatory read in its entirety. Complement this fragment with poet, philosopher, and activist Edward Carpenter on love, pain, and growth and poet Robert Penn Warren on the paradox of “finding yourself,” then revisit philosopher Amélie Rorty on the seven layers of selfhood.

BP

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Creativity and Time

By Maria Popova

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Creativity and Time

“In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty lies in the constant conciliation of the dissonance between self and world — a difficulty hardly singular to the particular conditions of our time. Two hundred years before social media, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in creative work; a century and a half later, Agnes Martin admonished aspiring artists to exercise discernment in the interruptions they allow, or else corrupt the mental, emotional, and spiritual privacy where inspiration arises.

But just as self-criticism is the most merciless kind of criticism and self-compassion the most elusive kind of compassion, self-distraction is the most hazardous kind of distraction, and the most difficult to protect creative work against.

How to hedge against that hazard is what beloved poet Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) explores in a wonderful piece titled “Of Power and Time,” found in the altogether enchanting Upstream: Selected Essays (public library).

Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver

Oliver writes:

It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.

Oliver terms this the “intimate interrupter” and cautions that it is far more perilous to creative work than any external distraction, adding:

The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter.

Echoing Borges’s puzzlement over our divided personhood, Oliver sets out to excavate the building blocks of the self in order to understand its parallel capacities for focused creative flow and merciless interruption. She identifies three primary selves that she inhabits, and that inhabit her, as they do all of us: the childhood self, which we spend our lives trying to weave into the continuity of our personal identity (“The child I was,” she writes, “is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.”); the social self, “fettered to a thousand notions of obligation”; and a third self, a sort of otherworldly awareness.

The first two selves, she argues, inhabit the ordinary world and are present in all people; the third is of a different order and comes most easily alive in artists — it is where the wellspring of creative energy resides. She writes:

Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

Art by Maurice Sendak for a special edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales

Oliver contrasts the existential purpose of the two ordinary selves with that of the creative self:

Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?

Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.

[…]

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.

Part of this something-elseness, Oliver argues, is the uncommon integration of the creative self — the artist’s work cannot be separated from the artist’s whole life, nor can its wholeness be broken down into the mechanical bits-and-pieces of specific actions and habits. (Elsewhere, Oliver has written beautifully about how habit gives shape to but must not control our inner lives).

Echoing Keats’s notion of “negative capability,” Dani Shapiro’s insistence that the artist’s task is “to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it,” and Georgia O’Keeffe’s counsel that as an artist you ought to be “keeping the unknown always beyond you,” Oliver considers the central commitment of the creative life — that of making uncertainty and the unknown the raw material of art:

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Van Gogh’s spirited letter on risk-taking and how inspired mistakes move us forward, Oliver returns to the question of the conditions that coax the creative self into being:

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.

Above all, Oliver observes from the “fortunate platform” of a long, purposeful, and creatively fertile life, the artist’s task is one of steadfast commitment to the art:

Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.

She returns to the problem of concentration, which for the artist is a form, perhaps the ultimate form, of consecration:

The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.

[…]

It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Upstream is a tremendously vitalizing read in its totality, grounding and elevating at the same time. Complement it with Oliver on love and its necessary wildness, what attention really means, and the measure of a life well lived, then revisit Jane Hirshfield on the difficult art of concentration.

BP

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