this too
Friday, July 22, 2005
  Can't concentrate


Fewer tube trains - longer bus queues

Finding it really hard to do anything, hard to think anything, just wondering all the time what’s happening out there in the surrounding city, where the police shot someone dead this morning and the massive manhunt goes on. Wanting to run. I’ve been in London, and in other cities, with other bombers in earlier times. Indeed, once - now a far-off memory - in Lima, a Sendero bomber was caught about to bomb the building I was working in. But I’ve never felt so threatened, just wanted to flee, like I do now. I’m wondering why. On the one hand, this seems absurdly self-indulgent pondering. On the other, I can’t, right now, do anything useful about the danger, so why not?

I’m thinking: my heart, my emotions, my fear, are not so closed as they have been for much of my adult life. Why is that? Because I numbed myself for many years with work, with endless weary busy-ness, and no longer do that. Because at last, in late middle age, I think I’ve moved away somewhat from the childhood hurts that shut me down - I am more real, more present, and so I both experience stronger feelings and feel like I have more life, more loves to fear for.

And perhaps I do not rally in proud possessiveness to the ‘London United’ slogans because for ages now I’ve just wanted to get out of the place.

“We aren’t afraid, we’ll carry on regardless”, cry the headlines. It’s not quite how I feel. We’ll carry on, of course - there’s no alternative. But, rather than being unafraid, or trying to be unafraid, I feel closer to the friend who remarked that fear is part of life, always has been – this is part of how life is, something to practice with, to live and laugh in spite of, but not in denial of.

 
Comments:
Brava!

Y'know, to me the "we are not afraid" stuff is just a little too uncomfortably close to the frame of mind of the bombers -- refusing to entertain inconvenient, uncomfortable feelings of weakness & doubt is, I imagine, one of their most ingrained habits of mind.

It takes more courage to be afraid, I think, than to pretend not to be.
 
This isn't entirely related, but I keep thinking of Virginia Woolf, who lived in/around London during the Blitz. Whenever critics mention her "craziness," I'm tempted to grab their lapels: Who *wouldn't* be crazy in such an environment?

The term "shell shock" is one doctors invented when they couldn't otherwise explain why returning soldiers were suffering hysterical symptoms. Since "hysteria" has always been a term used to minimize the suffering of *women*, soldiers required a more manly term to describe why they, like Septimus Smith, continued to be traumatized by past events.

WHATEVER you call it (PTSD, shell-shock, jitters), it seems to me to be a natural response to an invisible enemy.
 
"...I think I’ve moved away somewhat from the childhood hurts that shut me down - I am more real, more present, and so I both experience stronger feelings and feel like I have more life, more loves to fear for."

I really relate to this. I know when I was depressed I had no fears, really, because I didn't care what happened to me. Better to be fully alive and present, but that also includes to alive to feelings such as fear.

I'm sorry for all you're going through there, Jean. I hope things calm down, and also that you can get out of there soon.
 
I agree with your friend.
 
Jean, thanks for putting it into words. I work in London, too, and there was something about yesterday and the day before that made me want to run home screaming. To stop doing "middle-class professional", cool and calm, and pretending it's not happening.

You're in my thoughts

Jan
 
Jean,
I'd like to send you a copy of my chapbook. Would you email me to ernestopriegor AT yahoo DOT com if you are interested? Cheers.
 
Jean,

It's interesting and very sobering to read your comments after all the recent needless events in London.

I'm sure there's lots of us thinking about you Londoners (and the people we know through) and what you must be going through, and wondering how we ourselves would cope, for what that's worth.

Poor old London! Inevitably under fire again, it seems.
 
There's much in what you say about the heightened awareness of late middle age - 'I am more real, more present, and so I both experience stronger feelings and feel like I have more life, more loves to fear for'. I have two young children so that provides me with a specific focus. But as certain vanities & insensitivities fall away with the last vestiges of more youthful perception, I find my defences more easily breached & my emotional reactions more easily provoked. So I can identify with both your desire to flee & your distaste for this ersartz blitz mentality that is being promulgated at present.
 
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