I DON’T WANT TO BE HERE

by Stanley

The 1994 BBC interview that Melvin Bragg gave to playwright and television dramatist Dennis Potter, was what Brian Edwards called ‘the finest television interview ever recorded’. Potter was the genius who wrote The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven. At the time of the interview Potter was dying of cancer and sipped morphine throughout the interview in the BBC studio. I remember the moment when he recounted how, a few days before, he looked at an apple tree in blossom from his bedroom window:

…instead of looking at the apple blossom and saying ‘Oh! Isn’t that nice’. Now, last week, it was the whitest, frostiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be. The nowness of things. Everything is more trivial and more important than ever – and the difference doesn’t seem to matter. But the nowness of things is absolutely wonderful …

Those sort of Big Moments in life are somewhat rare – like perhaps when you come upon an opening in the forest and there is this huge roaring waterfall, the sun shining through the mists rising from the depths. It’s as though reality bursts through one’s usual way of seeing and saturates the senses. One is overwhelmed by the thereness of it all! It doesn’t have to be the Big Nature Deal, either; you can get it at the sight of someone you love when they don’t know you’re looking at them. Suddenly, they are so very there !

You absolutely get it.

When you walk from the garage into your house, you know the house is there. Of course you do – but you don’t experience the house like that. You don’t ‘get it’. Not like that. You can live in your house quite comfortably without being enraptured by it.

Then there is the other kind of overwhelming thereness. Not something too good, but something that’s too awful. Not the bountiful, life-giving Mother Nature so beloved by the eco-idealists, but the death-dealing mother, whom the ancients knew as Kali; she who wears a necklace of human skulls; she who reminds of destruction and shakes the ground that before had felt so firm.

Our usual life is lived in a bubble that filters out too much of anything, both ends of the good/bad spectrum. But when an earthquake happens it rips open not just the earth but also all those darker, more frightening aspects of the world, enough to make us shudder with dread. That’s when I really don’t want to ‘get it’ or be there in any sense.

But oh dear! There are a hundred ways of not being-there. You can move to another city; you can curl up under the blankets; you can go on a people-saving spree; you can work your butt off; you can pray; watch television.

I had my own special way when the earthquake hit. I went on a creative binge that was quite manic, writing up this wonderful idea that that had occurred to me when all the power and water was down after the earthquake. In this manic phase I was possessed by a wonderful confidence. Inflated mania is not bad in some ways. You can travel to distant places without any airfare and you can let flourish ideas you wouldn’t normally entertain! Thankfully, however, my trip got harder and harder to maintain, until finally I came down to earth. The strange thing was that my return to reality was facilitated by one of the ideas born of mania itself – which brings me back to the idea of ‘thereness’ we started with.

Try sitting a chair in your lounge and get the room as there ­– by which I mean not just knowing it is there – but actually tuning in to the full perception of the walls, floors and the objects in the room, really getting them as solid and real – and hold it. You will most likely find that you can do it for a few of seconds … and then you will flinch.

I used to think that this was just a wandering mind, unable to concentrate for too long. But I discovered this is not aimless wandering, it’s a flinch. Almost as though you’d touched a hot stove before feeling the burn – in fact, its a flinch so effective that you don’t feel anything. I think maybe it’s a millisecond of unconsciousness. But the result is that you find yourself thinking – and you are somewhere else.

I found if I insisted on getting the solid reality of the room like this, I mean really getting it and holding it for 20 minutes, I got incredibly tense. I mean holding onto my body as though there was some dreadful emergency going to happen. Ah! so that’s what I’m doing. I realised I was resisting being totally present. There could be only one reasonable answer to this: being-here was somehow dangerous. There was something I didn’t want to experience. And it was glaringly obvious that resistance to experience is closely tied to physical, I mean muscular, tension. I suddenly thought of the phrase ‘body armour’ and remembered, tucked away in my dusty shelves, a book I bought in 1975 by Alexander Lowen, a pupil of that mad genius friend of Freud, Wilhelm Reich. Lowen’s book was called ‘Bioenergetics’.

‘Children learn early in life that they can reduce painful feelings by holding their breath and tensing muscles to cut off feeling. When emotional experience is difficult (as it is for many), the holding patterns become "second nature" – built into the body as chronic muscular tensions that persist into adulthood. The tensions operate below awareness and rob the person of a fuller and more vital experience of life.’[1]

We are all, especially as children, experts on detecting toxic people and environments; we instinctively know what is death-dealing. And children solve it, if they cannot escape – which invariably they can’t – by shutting it out, pulling down the blinds, deleting the experience, pretending it’s something else. All very effective ways of not being-there, blotting out experiences; but the price is alienation from the wonderful nowness of things. Realising the connection between bodily tension and the resistance to being totally present has lead me down some interesting pathways. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

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One wants to be open to life and wellbeing, but closed to the darker aspects of existence. But experience is experience. Close down on one aspect and you close down on them all; and when you do this, both the highs and the lows become invisible ends of the spectrum. Life can get far too narrow; and the only way is to open up the field of vision to both the highs and the lows. People come into therapy and counselling because they instinctively know they must open up to a wider bandwidth of living which they know they can’t get at on their own. They don’t want to be prised open, but allow to lift the lid and have a look.

How much to turn on and tune in is a question of psychological economics – a question of how much life do you think you can afford. That’s a very serious consideration.

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[1] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergetic_analysis