Diving for Pearls

Commonplace Newsletter #014

Robert Penn Warren- in a poem that I cannot remember the name of, as I am writing this late at night away from my house and my bookshelves- once wrote that the secret subject of every story is time, but that we are not allowed to speak its name.

In a similar vein, the secret subject of these newsletters, whose name I will explicitly state for the first time, is mental health.

See, we talk about lunch and laziness and art and strolling and so many other facets of the ordinary human experience here as ways of circling around, and hopefully taming, the Black Dog.

There are many other aims (Sunday morning entertainment being primary of course) but this is most certainly one of them.

Such covert manoeuvres are called for because tackling melancholia head-on leads, almost invariably, to one of two outcomes.

You end up with either the typical newspaper supplement woe-is-me, masochistic account of middle-class misery or you end up with an intentionally opposite performance, with its compensatory rictus-grin and its gratingly faux-cheerful pablum from an author who is straining too hard to convince himself and his readers that he is now perfectly okay and that you can be too with a few simple tweaks and alterations.

We want to avoid these two equally unfortunate fates. And we will do so by talking in metaphor and analogy. Let us consider the pearl…

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Diving Into The Depths

Humans are teleological creatures. (From the Greek Telos- aim/goal and Logos- reason/ explanation) This is to say that we are beings who are driven by meaning and purpose or at least the search for such a meaning. The possibility of it.

He who has a why can withstand almost any how, as Nietzsche once told us.

So the problem of depression and such in their garden-variety, subclinical, stare-at-the-ceiling-until-the-sunlight-starts-to-crawl-through-the-crack-in-the-curtains sense is that these states feel so completely and utterly devoid of meaning.

They feel pointless. A waste of time. Unnecessary. But I believe, and I say this with some experience, that this is not the case. We just have to consider the situation aright. We have to consider it in terms of diving for pearls.

A ‘pearl’, in this analogy, is a piece of wisdom. The fact that the expression is ‘pearls of wisdom’ rather than diamonds of wisdom or sapphires of wisdom is not an accident. Those latter gems are things that you dig for in the earth.

But pearls are things you dive into the depths for.

This is a rich metaphor.

You may dive into those dark waters of your own volition (as the artist does, which we will tackle momentarily) or you may find yourself sinking into them, drowning even, as life weighs down on you too heavily. But if you can clasp the pearl and bring it to the surface then the ordeal will have been worthwhile. The suffering meaningful. The purpose of the trial cemented.

The collective human experience is one of surviving trials and then passing the lessons of your survival on. Survival is triumph enough, as Harry Crews once said.

In many ways this is what a story is- survival information for future generations encoded in emotion and metaphor.

Emotion because we remember with our hearts and not our logical brains and metaphor because lessons become engrained when we have to tease them out and connect the piece together ourselves. Let the audience add two and two together and they will love you forever.

So the pearl of depression is how you survived that depression. The pearl of anxiety is how you’ve learned to manage anxiety. The pearl of alcoholism is the story of how you climbed out of the hole and the insights about your own mortality and growth in both mentality and morality that this experience brought about.

And speaking of addiction and pearls…

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The Bends

One of the cardinal rules for writing, for meaningful storytelling is this: if you want the audience to feel it, you have to feel it yourself first. Words on the page are the conduit through which emotions and visions are transmitted from one mind to another.

I have no idea how this emotional transference happens, but all of my experience bears it out. You can test it for yourself. Send someone the same bland text message in different emotional states- happiness, anger, sadness, despondency, indifference- and see what kind of reaction you get back. The difference will be wild. God created emojis to try and help us mitigate some of the potential fallout of this fact, I suspect.

So for arguments sake let’s take this as a given. For the audience to feel it your have to feel it yourself first. Which means that the writer, as with the artist in any medium, is essential a habitual and professional pearl diver. They go down into the depths willingly day after day, hunting for gleaming new things to bring up to the surface.

I take it that many of you are already beginning to intuit the danger that lies in this.

Negative emotional states have a way of lingering unless deliberate effort is made to mitigate this, just as positive states are fleeting and ephemeral unless we manage and appreciate them in this fleetingness. Just another one of those rules of the human condition, it seems.

So the writer or the painter, to accurate describe and conjure up feelings of despair has to go inside themselves to find experiences and references for this state. They may reply such scenes from their own past, they may repeat the necessary self-talk, they may visualise and act out scenes of this nature as they put the days work down onto the blank canvas.

The work is good, the days target achieved. But some of the darkness from that induced state of performances lingers. Repeat this day after day with similarly dark states and the darkness begins to block out some of the ordinary light of reality.

The artist feels this and as is so common, they begin to lean on a shortcut to a higher state- alcohol, drugs, junk food- you name it. They do this because it is effective. At least initially. Intoxication is the shortcut that soon becomes a dead end.

This is why the cliches artistic figure of the popular imagination is a tortured soul, an addict, a chaotic presences, someone who oscillates too rapidly from the low to the (false) high and back again.

They have- if we stretch this pearl diving analogy to its limit- the bends, a decompression sickness that comes from too rapid an alteration of internal pressure.

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Knowing Is The First Step

The beauty of this newsletter format versus social media posts is that you can lay down as much nuance and detail as you like. You can be as meticulous as the subject in question warrants, and I believe, in spite of the rule of engagement (so to speak) that anything worth talking about needs to be built upon a solid foundation of context.

It’s easy to list half a dozen things that may well bolster your mental health and call it a day. And each bullet might well be completely accurate. We know all of the advice already regarding diet and exercise and good sleep and meditation and easing off the drinking and all the rest of it. We know. But knowing isn’t doing and after a while the lists and the engagement posts become more hindrance than help.

As I say, the secret theme here is mental health. Which is to say the theme is everything because everything is interconnect and thus each new piece is a new angle on the same perennial theme of what is a good life and how do we go about living it?

Philosophy pulled down from the ivory tower, psychology let loose from the laboratory.

I don’t claim to have all of the answers. But I claim that I am getting better at framing questions in a helpful way and in bringing concepts and references to bear that may not feature prominently (or at all) in the current zeitgeist.

Ultimately, you have to figure things out for yourself. There are people to guide you but no one can save you. And those who do make this claim should be treated with the necessary wariness.

So, to the question of how one manages the adjustment from returning to the surface after ‘diving for pearls’ I will say this. You have to create your own strategies. Strategies that involve shining that light of imagination and using those skills of self-talk and visualising towards states stronger than those that a piece of transformative art sometimes necessitate.

Simply knowing this is half the battle. Truly. A problem defined is a problem that is halfway solved.

And with this knowledge in hand, the artist of today, and the citizen too, can be way ahead of their forebears who thought nightly binges and substance-induced sleep were simply occupational hazards or tools of the trade.

This might seem a vague conclusion. But let it rest in you a while. And see what strategies that imagination comes up with when it is turned towards this new task.

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