Week 2
"Icarus" by Henri Matisse
L(a e. e. cummings (1894-1962)
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
The poem above by e.e. cummings shows us visually something of the sensation of falling and of being alone in that fall. Neither the sensation of falling nor of being alone is necessarily bad, mind you, but there is something poignant and touching in the reminder of what is a fact for each of us, for eventually we all will fall, like leaves, from the great tree of life into some form, for lack of better words, of otherness. Meanwhile, we have our little falls and sometimes a breathless sense of being alone in the world that can be harrowing. We of course are not truly alone, but our minds can convince us otherwise.
The topic I had you read for homework is compassion, including its root–self-compassion, which involves a recognition and soft embrace of suffering, the kind that arises from life's unavoidable arrows, and from our responses to these arrows, what some call our "second darts" (Hanson Buddha's Brain). Another word for compassion is lovingkindness. With kindness and compassion we can soothe ourselves and allay some of the suffering to which our bodies and minds are vulnerable. Learning to be compassionate to ourselves and others in the face of difficulties is one aspect of caregiving, and a means to greater health, virtue, and wisdom.
Without basic caregiving we stand to suffer more, and may fall into depression, which the World Health Organization lists as "the leading cause of disability worldwide." There is a genetic component to depression, but it is just one of a number of contributing factors.
Andrew Solomon, author of several books on the subject, has first-hand experience of major depression and said the following:
I think depression is, above all, an illness of loneliness. I think the sense that you are unable to do things and that no one can help you — eventually, you go to a doctor and he gives you some kind of medication, or you go to another kind of doctor and he gives you psychotherapy, or, in fact, you go to a priest or a minister or a rabbi or somebody like that, who tries to encourage you and to keep you going through philosophical and theological argument — but you lose the sense of the inevitability of your own being alive. And that’s the most lonely, isolating feeling. ("The Soul in Depression" onbeing.org)
Another eloquent witness was William Styron. In Darkness Visible (1990) he wrote the following:
We learn to live with pain in varying degrees daily, or over longer periods of time, and we are more often than not mercifully free of it. When we endure severe discomfort of a physical nature our conditioning has taught us since childhood to make accommodations to the pain's demands–to accept it, whether pluckily or whimpering and complaining, according to our personal degree of stoicism, but in any case to accept it. Except in intractable terminal pain, there is almost always some form of relief; we look forward to that alleviation, whether it be through sleep or Tylenol or self-hypnosis or a change of posture or, most often, through the body's capacity for healing itself, and we embrace this eventual respite as the natural reward we receive fro having been, temporarily, such good sports and doughty sufferers, such optimistic cheerleaders for life at heart.
In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come–not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another–or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity–but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience–one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded.
Styron recovered, but almost succumbed to suicide, which he had carefully planned. He was, he wrote, pierced by a beautiful piece of music, the Brahms Alto Rhapsody, while lying in bed one night and then and there had the presence of mind to get medical help. The conclusion of this slender book reads as follows: "But one need not sound the false or inspirational note to stress the truth that depression is not the soul's annihilation; men and women who have recovered–and they are countless–bear witness to what is probably its only saving grace: it is conquerable."
Some videos we will try to watch today:
On the subject of emotional intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgUCyWhJf6s
and compassion: https://vimeo.com/153483613
- DEPRESSION: Stanford University professor Robert Sapolsky gives an introductory lecture in a biology class dealing with the disease of depression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were
ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and
diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer
where he lectured with much applause
in
the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became
tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I
wandered off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and
from time to time,
Looked up in perfect silence at the
stars.
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