Think About It 099: DAVID HANSCOM

 

The universal problem of being human is what I call, 'The Curse of Consciousness.'  Recent neuroscience research has shown that threats in the form of unpleasant thoughts or concepts are processed in a similar area of the brain as physical threats with the same chemical response.  The 'curse' is that none of us can escape our thoughts, so we are subjected to an endless stress chemical assault on our body.  This translates into more than 30 physical symptoms and many disease states.  These include auto-immune disorders and early death.  However, the worst symptom is relentless anxiety.

      Since this unconscious survival mechanism is hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than your conscious brain, it isn’t responsive to rational interventions to manage or control it.  The solution lies in the fact that this is an unsolvable problem.  Without anxiety that is unpleasant enough so as to compel you take action, you wouldn’t survive.  Neither would you or the human species survive without the drive to seek physiological rewards.

      Is 'relaxed' a diagnosis?  No.  Is 'anxious' a diagnosis?  No!  To read your body’s chemistry gauge, you first have to allow yourself to feel.

 

 

Anxiety Is a Symptom [Psychology Today, 20 November 2019]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read the full article by North American spinal surgeon DAVID HANSCOM:

 

 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/anxiety-another-name-pain/201911/anxiety-is-symptom

 

 

 

 

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Think About It 092: ERIC S JANAZZO

 

 

Think About It 087: IRVIN D YALOM

 

 

Think About It 075: KATHERINE S NEWMAN

 

 

The Write Advice 200: ANTHONY BURGESS

 

Novelists, like poets, work in the medium of human language, but some may be said to work in it more than others.  There is a kind of novelist (conveniently designated as Class 1), usually popular, sometimes wealthy, in whose work language is a zero quantity, transparent, unseductive, the overtones of connotation and ambiguity totally dumped… Such work is closer to film than poetry, and it invariably films better than it reads.  The aim of the Class 1 novel can only properly be fulfilled when the narrated action is transformed into represented action:  content being more important than style, the referents ache to be free of their words and to be presented directly as sense-data.

      To the other kind of novelist (Class 2) it is important that the opacity of the language be exploited, so that ambiguities, puns and centrifugal connotations are to be enjoyed rather than regretted, and whose books, made out of words as much as characters and incidents, lose a great deal when adapted to a visual medium.  Drugstore bestsellers, which overwhelmingly belong to Class 1, sometimes nevertheless admit the other category, but only when the lure of the subject-matter –– invariably erotic –– is stronger than the resistance that the average novel-reader feels towards literary style.

      Needless to say, there are stylistic areas where the two classes of fiction overlap.  Transparent language… can be elevated to a high level of aesthetic interest through wit, balance, euphony, and other devices of elegance.  Elegance, however, is the most that Class 1 prose can achieve; for dandyism one must go to Class 2 writers.  But opaque language can be so self-referring that the reader, legitimately seeking some interest of character and action, may become resentful.  A novelist who has brought his reader to the brink of action only to put off the action while he engages in a virtuoso prose cadenza is indulging in the ultimate dandyism, which makes the clothes more important than the body beneath.  If the promised action is of a violent nature, and the author decides to enjoy a digression on the word itself, finding violent, because of its phonic associations with violet and viol, a somehow unviolent term, then murmurs about artistic irresponsibility will probably be in order.  A Class 2 novel, in fact, does not have to be a better work of fiction than a Class 1 novel, but it usually has a better claim to be regarded as literature.  The beginning of literary wisdom, at least in the field of the novel, lies in a realisation that Class 1 and Class 2 novelists have somewhat different aims…

 

Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of James Joyce (1973)

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to visit the website of THE INTERNATIONAL ANTHONY BURGESS FOUNDATION, an English-based organisation which 'encourages and supports public and scholarly interest in all aspects of the life and work of Anthony Burgess.'  It also operates an archive/performance space in his home town of Manchester.

http://www.anthonyburgess.org/

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 190: ANTHONY BURGESS

 

 

The Write Advice 170: ANTHONY BURGESS

 

 

The Write Advice 150: ANTHONY BURGESS

 

 

  

Poet of the Month 093: HALINA POSWIATOWSKA

 

 

HALINA POSWIATOWSKA, c 1955

 

 

 

 

I LIKE LONGING

 

 

I like longing

climbing up the railings of sound and colour

catching into my open mouth

the frozen scent

 

I like my loneliness

suspended higher

than a bridge

embracing the sky with its arms

 

and my love 

walking barefoot 

over the snow

 

 

 

Dzien dzisiejszy

[Present Day]

1963

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I LACK FORMER TENDERNESS

 

 

I lack former tenderness for my body

yet I tolerate it like a beast of burden

useful though it requires much care

it brings pain and joy and pain and joy

sometimes inert from pleasure

sometimes shelter for sleep

 

I know its twisted hallways

can tell which way exhaustion comes

which tendons laughter tenses

and I remember the unique taste of tears

so like the taste of blood

 

my thoughts — a flock of frightened birds

feed on the field of my body

I lack my former tenderness towards it

yet feel more acutely than before

that I reach no further than my outstretched arms

and no higher than I can rise on the tips of my toes
 

 

Oda do rak

[Ode To Hands, 1966]

 

 

 

 

Both poems translated by

MAYA PERETZ

 

 

 

 

 

Halina Poswiatowska (née Myga) was born in the southern Polish city of Czestochowa on 9 May 1935.  During the 1945 liberation of the city from Nazi occupation she and her parents were forced to seek shelter in a damp freezing basement for a prolonged period of time, leading her to develop the chronic heart condition that would prematurely end her life on 11 October 1967 at the age of thirty-two. 

 

Obliged to spend much of her childhood in hospitals and sanitoriums, she developed an early interest in writing and poetry.  In 1954, against the cautionary advice of her doctors, she married her fellow hospital patient, the artist and apprentice filmmaker Adolf Rzszyard Poswiatowska.  The marriage lasted two years, ending with her husband's death in 1956.

 

Two years later the young widow traveled to the United States to undergo heart surgery, a journey largely funded by donations received from sympathetic Polish-Americans.  1958 also saw her publish Hymn balwochwalzy [Idol Worship], her debut volume of poetry.  This was followed by two more collections — Dzien dzisiejszy [Present Day, 1963] and Oda do rak [Ode to Hands, 1966] — and her final collection Jeszcze jedno wspomnienie [One More Memory] which appeared posthumously in 1968. 

 

Rather than return to Poland after undergoing her dangerous but life prolonging operation, Poswiatowska chose to remain in the United States, living a hand to mouth existence while she applied for a scholarship to study philosophy at Smith College in Massachussetts.  (She did this despite having no fluency in English at that time.)  She graduated from Smith in 1961 and, after refusing an offer to continue her studies at Stanford University in California, returned to her homeland where she enrolled as a philosophy student at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.  She was working on her doctorate, a study of the ethical principles of black civil rights activist Martin Luther King, when she died eight days after undergoing a second major heart operation which she had hoped would improve her rapidly deteriorating health.

Never a mainstream poet, Poswiatowska's work gained little recognition during her lifetime, only coming to be fully appreciated after her death — a reappraisal that has continued in subsequent decades and now sees her regarded as one of Poland's leading modern poets.

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems (in English) by Polish poet HALINA POSWIATOWSKA:

 

https://allpoetry.com/Halina-Poswiatowska

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 199: ANNE LAMOTT

 

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.  You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy.  But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on… As we live, we begin to discover what helps in life and what hurts, and our characters act this out dramatically.  This is moral material… In order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent.  If not, why are you writing?  Why are you here?… Think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world.  Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a way that you have a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul.  All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment.  This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of — please forgive me — wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in on our small, bordered worlds.  When this happens, everything feels more spacious.

 

Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1995)

 

 

 

Use the link below to read an interview with North American writer, activist and educator ANNE LAMOTT:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2024/may/07/anne-lamott-author-interview

 

 

 

 

 

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