How bout some Takes since it’s Friday.
One
This is charming–a really nice example of Deep Work, if you are out looking for some, which I sometimes am. I am fascinated by the very idea of concentration, of really being able to focus the mind for more than five minutes. It sounds like such an interesting and curious idea. I hope I get to do it before I die. I probably have at least another fifteen or twenty years of wait though.
Two
Although maybe this guy could help me. Seriously, watch the video a couple of times at least, and then enjoy a deep and loud and long laugh. Because seriously, it has to be the winner of the Internet this week. What a fantastic time to be alive.
Makes me want to try it myself. Instead of responding verbally to any kind of request, I will just turn the power of my healing gaze onto the screaming child and will just gaze and gaze and gaze and gaze until one or both of us starts crying.
Three
Spent the whole day yesterday thinking about mental health, both past and present. Not my own, necessarily, but everybody else’s. Of course the past wasn’t all rainbows and sunshines of mental health–as long as you’re really poor and have a terribly difficult material life you’ll be really happy. That is most assuredly a ridiculous idea. Just as ridiculous as thinking that if you have everything you want and never suffer you’ll also be perfectly happy.
I think there are two kinds of mental health issues to consider as I look into the past and then turn my piercing and healing gaze to the present. One, every culture and every time and every place has its own measure of mental health and has its own way of categorizing those who don’t quite, as it were, make the grade. It might have been called madness, or that horribly idea of hysteria, or any number of ways of talking about it.
Where I grew up, in fact, there was a social category for the mental ill. If you went “crazy” as some did, you would sort of wander off into the bush, and maybe dress in a certain way. In cities, the “crazy” were given social leeway to break all the rules and do whatever they liked. In fact, they had room to mock, to be funny, to provide social commentary where it might be dangerous for someone in the sane category to tread. My dad did some interesting research in our village of how the crazy go about becoming sane. If someone wanted to “return” to their right mind they could go become a clown. Not our kind of clown but something quite different. In many cases the cure “worked.”*
In some sense, it seemed, looking in from the outside, the category of being crazy offered that person a lot of leeway, one might say even grace. And the surrounding community would offer what care they could. That person wouldn’t starve and go hungry because he couldn’t farm, for instance.
So that’s one thought.
Four
The other is that, of course, happiness and mental health are not the same but I think I often conflate them. Lots of people are unhappy but they don’t suffer from diagnosable mental illness. And this is true of every age. Not everyone in the past was happy. Of course.
But I do think our pursuit of “happiness” as a culture has produced a kind of cultural madness, a losing of our collective mind, an inability to think properly and behave rationally. The sharp rise of diagnosed narcissism, for instance, and the alarm with which many ordinary people look over the scope of their days and come to the conclusion that they can’t cope and there’s no hope. This is a kind of sickness, an unmooring of the person from transcendent meaning, an untethering of the rational mind that produces deep unhappiness and maybe even trauma. This, I think, is a sickness of our own devising. And if those of the past who saw what we had, and then saw how unhappy we were, they would probably not understand why we are like this, just as we ourselves so often don’t.
Five
What is it that the psalmist says? The fool says in his heart that there is no God. And then what does he have? Only himself and the terror of his own mind. And if he has good health and a comfortable home, nothing to distract him from his deep delusion, he is going to go mad.
Six
He will then turn to the power of the healing gaze, or the Internet, to twitter, to computer games, to more self indulgence, more pursuing of himself to find happiness, which will just make him more and more “crazy.” He will keep doing the thing that never works, that perfect definition of madness. He will never stop and deeply consider the only thing that will produce ultimate healing and sanity.
Seven
Go check out more Takes! I’m going off to try not to lose my mind.
*These are vague, westernizing scare quotes, such as someone who doesn’t really know what she is talking about uses to indicate that she doesn’t really have any business blogging about this.
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