Dolce Fa Niente

I have been sleeping hours upon hours each day since term ended. Usually nine hours at night and a few more during the day. I haven't been able to sleep like this since I was a teenager/very early twenties. It's lovely but I keep wondering whether I haven't taken on an illness of some kind.

I've been very scholastically useless so far. This will change, probably tomorrow, because it has to if I want to do well and I do want to do well. I have essays for conferences to be written and a big presentation at 10.00am on the first day of term and so must crack on a little now or end up having to work on Christmas Day, which I refuse to let happen.

I have been socially very useful so far. I have been to three Christmas parties (two involving the dread 'networking' - but with think tank people, at least, so not as bad), a birthday party, afternoon al fresco mulled wine consumption, a Progress event featuring a speech given by Tessa Jowell in Westminster (my first time inside the Houses of Parliament - so exciting I could hardly keep from bouncing up and down like a small child) and a surprisingly non-awkward and contentedly uneventful night at the pub with that girl I (possibly stupidly) kissed.

That has been my life of the past week: reading the whole paper and drinking the entire pot of coffee in my pyjamas, desultory tidying up, novel consumption hour, possibly an errand but nothing too strenuous, novel consumption extended afternoon edition, bath, get dressed, sit on the uncrowded tube for an hour to get to the other side of town and reading and listening to music, four hours' good conversation and the trip home, here by night bus, there by miraculous catching of the last train. At home, the hot water bottle and some tea and back to sleep.

It's blissful, really. Such a nice contrast to the chronically recurring insomnia of mine.

Time to be more active now though. Take the work back up and add in the Christmas baking, hurray! Advent Lessons and Carols on Tuesday and I can hardly wait for midnight mass. I hope I'll get to take the night bus home in the snow and sit up top and stare out at it. Either way, it's procession time and lots of singing.

At home, no one ever wants to go to Christmas mass on Christmas Day except for me, so I think I'll go this year and indulge myself. I'm a happy person to feel that going to mass is an indulgence...that's a desire that sits easy on the conscience and is easily indulged, unlike so many of my other ones that nearly always trouble on the latter score if not the former.

So this post isn't about much but I haven't done much but drink and talk and read my way through Orlando, All Passion Spent and Madame Bovary. But I'm happy right now and that seems worth recording.

Overwhelmed and Omphaloskeptic

There are too many things going on! I'm not sure that's really a complaint, as I quite like most of the things. However, they are myriad.

On the things I quite like side are parties; Monday night philosophy drinking; my new armchair that I lugged home in the box from Ikea over one bus route, the Overground and the Underground*, which was a rather painful thing to do but more than compensated for by having someplace to sit that isn't the floor or my bed; a new addition to my collection of favorite philosophy quips**; reading Tristram Shandy and its heroic 18th century punctuation - can't think why I haven't read it before nor why we no longer punctuate like that; all the arguments I've been able to make about infinite regress and infinites by addition; being back in London; the shocking - to me - way I've made friends so quickly and effortlessly; the general thrill of studying interesting things; seeing old friends that I haven't seen for years; reading the Guardian; my new shoes; having a clothes rail and hangers and my newsagent.

On the things that are not things that I like side very much are plumbing faults; owing medium to large amounts of money to various institutions; not having very much money to pay said institutions with and also buy food; that it takes four to six weeks for overseas cheques to clear and mine has been sitting in the bank for four weeks and still hasn't cleared; the reaction of various Anglicans to the Pope's recent announcement; the fact that somehow Rousseau's concept of the general will has gotten stuck in my head in the manner of an annoying song***; the fact that there is so much going on that I seem to miss at least half of it; that my feet hurt so much and so often and with such minimal provocation; the way this overwhelmed-ness makes my head too swimmy to concentrate and think properly; Boris Johnson; the way my hair hasn't gotten used to the hard water yet and sticks up in strange and disturbing ways in the morning; being tired all the time still and a very annoying virus/cold/cough thing that has been plaguing me for a week without actually making me properly ill or allowing me to be properly well****.

Things that I may or may not like (just not sure yet) side are the post-lecture drinking with the professors on Wednesdays because it makes me very nervous but the conversation is good; my inability to feel any emotion, positive or negative, about the ex-girlfriend which is a relief but does not bode well; the amount of Hackney Marshes closed off for development for the Olympics, which development may or may not be a good thing in the end*****; a weird crush I've developed on a new-friend girl at university that is not really a crush but something in between (and therefore not holy, see fourth footnote) that makes me uneasy and implies subtle and delicately strange things about myself and my ethical convictions; the unpredictable bursts of high-burning glittering bliss that might be the early warnings of hypomania - enjoyable when they occur but worrying afterwords and the way this post has footnotes with footnotes.

The world is all the things that are the case, and so it follows that this is the world I'm in for now******.
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*I feel very boring though to be buying furniture from the Ikea. Why did I lug it home? Please see paragraph three, thing I don't like number four.
** "That's not a counter-example, it's a monster." Imre Lakatos
***I wouldn't have thought that philosophical concepts were capable of this but it seems to have happened anyway.
****This virus is a thing partway between being and not being and is therefore not holy (Please see De divina omnipotentia++, a letter written by St. Peter Damian to Pope Gregory. Peter Damian was also in charge of reforming cannon law and is responsible for the formalisation of the law concerning priestly celibacy {somehow, the Catholic Church made it through 1,000 years without actually requiring it} and the regularisation of cannon law concerning homosexual behavior {I know we think of it as identity and not act now generally but it would be inaccurate to say that Damian condemned homosexuality itself rather than homosexual acts} that has led to the modern Catholic condemnation of homosexuality via Aquinas' natural law theory and thus forward to the present day to one of the things I dislike in paragraph three. These later accomplishments and the reasons behind them are discussed in Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus, which is a very interesting read. Impressing pagans is part of the reasoning behind the celibacy dogma and the restriction of the priesthood to men and priestly duties with regard to hearing confession are behind the condemnation of homosexual acts.
*****It was a great thing for my childhood stomping ground, Atlanta, but then look at Calgary - hard to predict.
******Blatantly stolen from the beginning of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
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++ De divina is found in vol. 6 of Damian's Opera Omnia, if memory serves. It's definitely in the Opera Omnia but it might not be vol. 6.

The Other Side of Envy

I did tell myself in my strictest tone that I was to go to bed at 10.00, no arguments. It worked last night. Here I am, however, at 1.24am. I finally got really excited about going to London. I've spent a great deal of time with boxes and back pain this week. It's about forty minutes of packing, ten of whinging followed by three hours of sitting on the couch with the hot water bottle.

I have an ink stain on my couch, annoyingly: this is the price I pay for building nest on the couch out of blankets, pillows, my journal, several pens because I can never seem to find the same one twice, books of various kinds, both reference and fiction, my knitting and one or more shawls. I think I shall be quite content to be 65 and eccentric, once I get there. There used to be a cat and a pack of biscuits in there too but those have disappeared (and no, the disappearance of the biscuits was not an easy thing for me either). Somehow, the cap seems to have come off the pen - I only use ink pens for proper writing on paper - and somehow re-attached itself in the night for when I picked it up this morning, the cap was on but the pen was entirely empty and there was this big black mark. Time to get out the rubbing alcohol and old paper and rags. This has nothing to do with anything in particular so I shall return to the subject at hand...

...renewed enthusiasm. During all this knitting, pen covered, hot water bottle couch sitting, I have been watching movies set in London. I didn't start off doing that on purpose: I just picked one and then another one. Now I'm excited and my accent is doing that shifting thing that it does. We have an Oxbridgian Classics professor at the university and whenever I talk to her I get accent shift and then turn tongue-tied because I'm worried she'll think I'm making fun of her.

It's an odd, rather moth-eaten accent that I get living in England. It sounds British to Americans and American to Brits, although I do get the occasional confused inquiry as to whether I hail from Ireland or New Zealand. That mostly happens when I'm drunk. But it shifted enough today that when my sister called, she teased me about it.

She also told me she envied me a little. She hasn't been the only one to say that recently and it feels strange to me. Many of these statements come from people whom I envy. I tend to be envious of their ability to graduate from university in a normal amount of time and to hold down jobs and to settle down and get married and, in spots, enter into the property market. This has something to do with my impending 29th birthday, I'm quite sure, but a few (well, only one out of that list, to be quite honest - going to grad school has put paid to my worry over my ability to graduate with my BA, hold down a job, since I have a good reason not to for a whole year and I have no overwhelming desire to entangle myself with real estate for the time being) still hold. I only have intermittent envy over their mental boringness since I can see two sides to being mentally interesting.

I have spent the vast part of this summer longing for that one thing, as though I were a transplant from the earlier part of the 20th century. I would rather have that than an MSc, at the moment. I've had to sit myself down and, again in my sternest tones, tell myself that if I can't have it, at least a year in London and a good degree is an excellent consolation prize; and really, it is. Still, it's funny to see that while they have what I want, I have something that they want. Even my sister, whose life to me seems so well-run and complete and perfect of its kind and whom I would envy with an ill grace if she weren't such a lovely person and good, beloved sister to me.

I miss my cat. All this taking myself aside and giving my self stern talkings-to is a bit more to the side of madness than it was when he could be involved. Then it was more like being Alice through the looking glass. She had three: a cat and two kittens. Of course, things turned out rather more oddly for her than they have for me.

I find I'm on the other side and it's a strange place to be: it is strange to have something that can be envied, especially something for which I have had an incomplete desire all this unending summer. I don't know what to do with it, nor to think of it. The world has switched sides while I was otherwise occupied and I'm disoriented. That has happened fearfully often this summer but to elaborate would need another post.

Speaking of posts, this is no way to end one but I have been on an anaxiolytic-induced shambly rambling tropos all evening so I shall just give in. Did you know that in both Latin and Greek, fearfulness is such an important and prominent emotion that there are 'fear clauses' in the grammar? They are usually followed by the subjunctive, occasionally the optative in Greek (if I remember rightly - the optative is a verb mood so alien to English that I have always had a great deal of trouble distinguishing it from the subjunctive, not least because the conjugated verbs are spelt nearly exactly the same way) and even, in Greek, make use of a different negation word than most sentences. Now whenever I use 'fear' or 'fearfully' my subconscious shouts 'fear clause!' at me. I wonder whether, by virtue of lacking a formal fear clause, English is braver or just less realistic about human nature.

The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project

The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project is something I have had in mind for a while. At the moment of starting, I am stuck in omphaloskepsitis (navel-gazing-itis) and I am glad to have thought of something to offer up that's more in tune with the original purpose of this blog.

I am asking all of you who read to save up and share any and all references you come across in literature, journalism, blogs, television, magazines, movies, day to day conversation, scholarly articles, academically dubious articles and sources: in short, anything that reflects a popular conception of the nature of mental illness and especially the perceived nature or character of those who are mentally interesting, negative or positive. I would also welcome more selective contributions from older (pre-1970) psychiatric and psychological texts.

My aim is to build up a database of popular references to mental illness so that, in true pragmatist philosophy mode, I can gain a fuller idea of what exists in the minds of the living, the influences that shapes these perceptions and the historical discursive context of current understandings of mental illness in the popular social dialectic. With this understanding, I hope to be better able to address mentalisms philosophically in a more relevant way.

If you're not sure whether a reference you have come across is relevant to this project, just go ahead and stick it up anyway. I need your help and I welcome and appreciate any and all contributions.

When posting a reference, please try to give sufficient citation in whatever form. Sufficient citation for anything in print would consist of the date of publication, author, publisher, page number and title. For blogs, as much as can be gathered of the publication citation plus a link would be great. For conversational references, date, time, local and a brief description of the relationship between the participants (e.g. psychiatrist to patient, parent to child who is mentally interesting) would be appreciated. Names and personal details are not requested or necessary. If you do not have all of the information requested, don't worry, just give as much as you are able.

I am particularly interested in anything that strikes you as a recurring conception and particularly interested in anything that strikes you as unusual.

With your help, I hope to make a useful contribution to political philosophy and, eventually, public policy for the greater good of the mentally interesting and the benefit of greater understanding to the non-mentally interesting. Thank you in advance and know that I will faithfully give due credit to any aid you can afford me in this project.

Greetings From Our Nation's Capital

I am up in DC where it will be around 37C tomorrow (100ish F) and humid as only a city built on a drained swamp can be. What can they have been thinking? Philadelphia (the original capital) has much nicer weather, if you ask me.

So far, I have not done much but drag myself out on walks in the heat, ducked into the National Gallery for the sculpture garden, gotten gravel in my shoes and blisters marching around the National Mall and made thick clouds of smoke in the guest room where I sit and worry for most of the day. The pleasant side effect of all this worrying is that it has driven me to reading novels with a speed and concentration I thought I had lost years ago. I'm glad to find I can still read like that, with total absorption.

So far I have made it through 'Mariana' (Monica Dickens), 'Someone At a Distance' (Dorothy Whipple), 'No Fond Return of Love' (Barbara Pym), something else too light for me to name without embarrassment - snobby of me, I acknowledge - and most of 'Persuasion' (Jane Austen). Next in the pile is 'Cheerful Weather for the Wedding', which I bought on the strength of the fact that Virginia Woolf compared the author, Julia Strachey, to Katherine Mansfield.

I have been here four days.

Unfortunately, spending time with the parents has made me more muddled than less about what I ought to do with myself. They are very sweetly concerned about my health but with the result that I am more confused about what course I should follow in the immediate future. Between that and the long wait to hear about what funding I will have for next year, my anxiety, never very well moderated, is assuming operatic proportions. I wish, in my cowardice, that someone more competent could take over my life for the next few weeks, sort everything out and then hand it back over. However, I must do as E.M. Forster has recommended and face both the external and the internal situation bravely. I aim to do better than Lucy Honeychurch; I should like to do as well as Margaret Schlegel.

Tomorrow is church, which always makes me feel better. Sunday is my favorite day of the week. I do wish, though, that my mother's church's new organist would not play everything so slowly. I don't have the breath control to make whole notes (semibreves) last that long. 'Joy to the World' sounded like a dirge at Christmas midnight mass this last year and became slower and more grandiose with each verse. I was gasping by the end of it.

I never meant for this blog to become so personal but I cannot get my mind un-mired from from the Slough of Despond that has made up so much of this summer. We are past Midsummer Night now and it is a relief to think how soon it will be autumn, my favorite season, full of the smell of rotting leaves and gloomy skies.

High Quality Filler

My brain is empty so, for your amusement, here is an excerpt from an old favorite, "This Side of Paradise." Please enjoy. (By the bye, it has been two months now since I started this thing...)

Young Irony

Amory was bored, as he usually was in the country. He used to go for far walks by himself—and wander along reciting "Ulalume" to the corn-fields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency.

A passing storm decided to break out, and to his great impatience the sky grew black as pitch and the rain began to splatter down through the trees, become suddenly furtive and ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacing crashes up the valley and scattered through the woods in intermittent batteries. He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally, through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the trees where the unbroken lightning showed open country.

Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a low, husky voice, a girl's voice, and whoever was singing was very close to him. A year before he might have laughed, or trembled; but in his restless mood he only stood and listened while the words sank into his consciousness:

"Les sanglots longs

Des violons
De l'automne

Blessent mon coeur

D'une langueur
Monotone."

The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a quaver. The girl was evidently in the field and the voice seemed to come vaguely from a haystack about twenty feet in front of him.
Then it ceased; ceased and began again in a weird chant that soared and hung and fell and blended with the rain:

" Tout suffocant

Et bleme quand
Sonne I'heure

Je me souviens

Des jours anciens
Et je pleure. ..."

"Who the devil is there in Ramilly County," muttered Amory aloud, "who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?"

"Somebody's there!" cried the voice unalarmed. "Who are you?—Manfred, St. Christopher, or Queen Victoria?"

"I'm Don Juan!" Amory shouted on impulse, raising his voice above the noise of the rain and lie wind.

A delighted shriek came from the haystack.

"I know who you are—you're the blond boy that likes 'Ulalume'—I recognize your voice."

"How do I get up ? " he cried from the foot of the haystack, whither he had arrived, dripping wet. A head appeared over the edge—it was so dark that Amory could just make out a patch of damp hair and two eyes that gleamed like a cat's.

"Run back!" came the voice, "and jump and I'll catch your hand—no, not there—on the other side."

He followed directions and as he sprawled up the side, knee-deep in hay, a small, white hand reached out, gripped his, and helped him onto the top.

"I have just made a great decision," said Eleanor after another pause, "and that is why I'm here, to answer another of your questions. I have just decided that I don't believe in immortality."

"Really! how banal!"

"Frightfully so," she answered, "but depressing with a stale, sickly depression, nevertheless. I came out here to get wet—like a wet hen; wet hens always have great clarity of mind," she concluded.

"Go on," Amory said politely.

"Well—I'm not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and rubber boots and came out. You see I was always afraid, before, to say I didn't believe in God— because the lightning might strike me—but here I am and it hasn't, of course, but the main point is that this time I wasn't any more afraid of it than I had been when I was a Christian Scientist, like I was last year. So now I know I'm a materialist and I was fraternizing with the hay when you came out and stood by the Woods, scared to death."

"Why, you little wretch—" cried Amory indignantly. "Scared of what?"

"Yourself!" she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands and laughed. "See—see! Conscience—kill it like me! Eleanor Savage, materiologist—no jumping, no starting, come early "

"But I have to have a soul," he objected. "I can't be rational—and I won't be molecular."

She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leaving his own and whispered with a sort of romantic finality:
"I thought so, Juan, I feared so—you're sentimental. You're not like me. I'm a romantic little materialist."

"I'm not sentimental—I'm as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last—the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't." (This was an ancient distinction of Amory's.)

"Epigrams. I'm going home," she said sadly. "Let's get off the haystack and walk to the cross-roads."

They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help her down and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mud where she sat for an instant, laughing at herself.