The Shapeless Unease Read online

  The urge to take a sleeping pill suddenly overwhelms me; to be free of thought, of amygdalas and tigers. Well gone four, too late to take a pill – they don’t work when it’s this late, when I’m adrenalised with fear. Besides, I take too many; they give you cancer, dementia, so they say. I am exhausted to my marrow and down to the tip of each nerve ending. I lie down again with the light off and see myself being chased through a forest in the dark, my skin cut and bruised from multiple falls. Running, running. Running from what, exactly? What exactly? Death, I suppose, where every path of fear ends if you follow it far enough. The single-petalled flower of not being here, which bloomed in every one of our cells the very moment we were born. My heart doesn’t thrup-thrup like it did at the beginning of the night; now it’s a more lumbering, fatigued beat and the muscles in my chest and around my underarms are sore. Running from what? What would it be to turn around and face it?

  So I turn, and stand. There’s something there but it can’t be fathomed and I don’t know the word for it. Some sort of invisible force as if that little death-charge in my cells is being magnetised to a force outside of me; there’s a sensation of static. I feel terribly small. Then the force takes form and becomes a red glow in the sky and assumes a spidery alien shape, and I realise to my dismay that it’s the malevolent force in the Netflix series Stranger Things. In my most earnest attempt at understanding and confrontation, this is all my imagination can come up with, a hammy schlock-horror image of apocalyptic fire and alien invasion.

  I begin to wonder if the makers of Stranger Things intended the series to be a metaphor for insomnia – the dark monotone world that is on the other side of this one, and the monster there that awaits you, a monster you must stare down. It will be getting on for 5 a.m. by now; I do a quick summary of which of the coming day’s plans I can get away with cancelling. Panic wells. Those demons from the beginning of the night, until now merely lurking, are beginning to close ranks. I see now that when I write about those demons they seem to be a glib and lazy metaphor, but I do in fact feel there are demons and I do feel their advance, only that I know they are elaborations of my own psyche. They are an act of internal sabotage, the mind’s attempt to rationalise and have control over a fearful outcome by bringing the outcome about. They’re no less real for that; they’re all the more real for that. And I feel them coming, and feel powerless to hold them off.

  When I was a child I went through a time of having tantrums that were self-fuelled and increasingly senseless and went on for hours. I remember sitting at the top of the stairs beside myself with nebulous anguish, wishing somebody would come and make me stop.

  My problem is that I always want somebody to come and rescue me. I am a coward. I have always been.

  Tennessee, standing in the shade in a steep, bouldered park, a clump of orange lilies on an outcropping, insects fizzing in the June heat.

  My friend tells me about a man in her neighbourhood who gave up his lifelong Buddhism when a skiing accident left him with an anger he didn’t think he should feel. All his life he’d practised the craft of Zen, of responding with equanimity and compassion. Yet the moment somebody skied into him, his response was rage and blame. So he gave up being a Buddhist and turned instead to God.

  I picture a little handbook called ‘Why Buddhists Shouldn’t Ski’. In general it is better for Buddhists to limit themselves to warm-weather sports and pastimes, the more sedentary the better. There is a reason why the Buddha is most often seen sitting. He was never found in the Rockies trying to outwit gravity.

  ‘Why, though?’ I ask. ‘Why would he give up a lifelong belief for one bit of bad luck?’

  ‘Because of his anger,’ my friend said. ‘Because all he felt was anger.’

  ‘But no Buddhist I ever met said you’re not allowed to feel anger.’

  ‘Imagine you spend your whole life honing your mind so that when trouble comes you can respond without conditioning, respond without a kneejerk reaction. You know? Unthinking reaction. That’s what he did, he spent his whole life trying to respond from a truer place in himself. Then, when trouble came, what did he do? He went straight to his conditioning. Anger, blame. Not truth.’

  ‘What if the truest place in him at that moment was angry?’

  ‘He wanted more for himself than that.’

  ‘Why? He wanted more for himself than to be a human feeling human things?’

  ‘Yes – yes. He wanted more than to always be trapped by the smallness of human things.’

  ‘So he turned to God.’

  ‘So he turned to God.’

  My friend and I can’t talk for more than six minutes before we get into the deep-and-meaningfuls. Small talk isn’t in our chemistry. For a while we wonder at the beauty of this little place, our grassy plateau, then the drop into the woody glade. It’s so hot. My friend lives on a mountain up above a city, a mountain partitioned and landscaped into dignified homes with preened lawns, pillared porches, verandas, coloured stucco. Cardinals flash red between maples. At dusk fireflies are floating embers in the darkness that collects between trees. Xibipiio-ing across the threshold of experience, here, gone. My friend has God. Whatever vanishes for her is held in the permanence that is Him. All of her steep, giddy drops have a landing place: Him. All of her belly-turning leaps are met with His open arms. All of her ecstatic soaring enjoys the safety of His tether. All the stale and eventless stretches of her life open into the wild drama of His love. My friend, standing here next to me, has all this, crowding her blood and bones in this moment, inflating her heart.

  ‘There’s a Buddhist image,’ I say, ‘it’s a mural of a snake, huge, lunging out of flames, and on the end of its forked tongue, a monk meditating. It isn’t about peace, a quiet life, not feeling things, not experiencing things. It’s about the shit hitting the fan, and having the courage to sit with yourself, not hide, not deny – to observe the tumult from the end of the snake’s tongue.’

  ‘But for me, God is there too,’ says my friend. ‘That’s the difference.’

  Her once-Buddhist friend realised, she said, that he was fed up with doing it all himself. Buddhism is lonely, a solitary struggle with yourself with the hope of nothing except the eventual aim of no longer being a self at all. Obliteration of one’s self out of being. All your struggle, just for that. All your years of trying to be a better self, only to be rewarded with that self’s extinction.

  And then it dawns on you that help is at hand. Far from being abandoned mid-piste with your broken ski, a fractured rib and a life’s worth of anger, you find yourself in company, not only forgiven for your anger, guided through desperation, pain, disturbance, but also safeguarded from non-existence. God is there with you on the tip of the snake’s tongue, on the cold of the slope, through the pain of illness, through the anguish of dilemma. He delivers a blossoming of being in life and after death – a process of becoming ever more gloriously yourself. A process of becoming ever-more, she said.

  How can I describe this feeling I have when I lie down to sleep and it’s as if I’m falling from a fifty-storey building, and there’s nobody, nothing, to catch me? See, that isn’t describing it. That’s describing something else – falling from a fifty-storey building with nobody to catch me. What use is there in coming up with a metaphor of something I’ve never experienced to describe something I often experience? How can I describe the sense that underscores my life – all life as I see it – that nothing is known? Nothing is inherently certain. Everything is bottomless. How can I get to the heart of that?

  You see, already the building metaphor doesn’t even work as a metaphor, let alone as some literal evocation of falling. With the fifty-storey building the fear, presumably, is in hitting the ground, when really my fear is that there is no ground. I heard somebody describe his abiding anxiety as that moment when you tip back in a chair and think you’re going to fall. That moment, but all the time. It’s that kind of thing – that tipping point. It’s not even about what’s going to hap
pen next, it’s just the vertigo of the moment, when all sturdiness falls away.

  Standing on this solid mountain of limestone on the border of Georgia and Tennessee, I envy my friend even as I try to argue with her. I can’t make myself believe in God, not because of cynicism or some haughty deference to science, but because God is sturdy, a form of certainty to a believer, and I’m constitutionally incapable of accepting certainty. My mind can only see the provisional, never the incontrovertible. I can’t help it. I’d like to help it but I can’t.

  We know that this table I lean on now isn’t solid at all but a mass of floating atoms that has no edge. We know that once we get down to the atomic level of things we don’t know, can’t measure and can’t predict very much. At its deepest reaches, experimental science becomes theoretical, abstracting from known observations and data to build explanatory models. Theoretical physicists are as much philosophers as scientists; amid the elasticity of their thinking is the central tenet: I do not know.

  I don’t mean to use pop-science to make a point. What do I know about any of this? I just see no evidence to believe in anything in the world except at a provisional and expedient level. And yes, to believe in things at a provisional and expedient level all the time, almost every moment of my waking life – but to accept that’s all it is: provisional and expedient, not absolute, not certain.

  One evening I was sitting in the pub with my sculpture group, a Wednesday evening; there was conversation which ran along usual lines – the project we were working on, the model we were sculpting, a lament at the state of the world, a rapture at some exhibition someone had seen, garrulous disagreement about what we ought to do next in the class. I was sitting on a stool. I suddenly felt that the whole thing was unreal. It crossed my mind that this scene I found myself in with these people in this pub might be a dream, or a hallucination stimulated by the prodding of some part of a brain in another dimension – my brain, my brain floating in some fluid somewhere, or my comatose body in a lab elsewhere in space and time, and the great solid solace of this pub, these people, was nothing. It was without substance. And these people, while seeming to constitute a safeguard against loneliness and isolation, were only synaptic notions produced by my disembodied brain, and were in fact proof of my isolation.

  When I look back I think this was shortly before my insomnia started. I felt ungrounded in the extreme. I was often frightened. My mind was trying to think its way into stability and was finding only an edgeless expanse. What is real? What can I cling to? What can I rely on? I was always a worrier, but I didn’t used to be anxious in this way. Worry is sensible to an extent, it has a practical dimension. I can’t understand the advice so often given: no point worrying about things that are out of your control. Of course there’s a point in worrying about these things. They are exactly the things to worry about; worrying about the things that are in your control is less practical since, instead of worrying, you could be doing something about them.

  Worry and anxiety are not the same. Worry tends to be more temporary, more object-focused, more concrete, less diffuse than anxiety. Anxiety often has no object and transmutes itself into worry by finding objects to attach to, in order to justify its existence. This thing, this iterative, self-referencing battle with one’s own thoughts, this is the strange being that is anxiety. I didn’t used to have that, and now when I look back to that time in the pub, I can see that I’d reached a point at which anxiety had become so pervasive I couldn’t perceive it was even there.

  The problem with beginning to wonder if everything is a dream or simulation or illusion is that there’s no proof either way. There’s nothing in the world or in your own body, mind or brain that you can point to as proof that it is or isn’t. In this sense, it’s anxiety’s jackpot. For me, the vertigo of it was terrifying; all my usual recourses to comfort were gone. What could I do? I could ask the person sitting next to me if he was real, and he’d say he was – of course he would. To himself, he could be nothing else. Everything in the world of the dream or simulation is programmed to believe in itself, otherwise the world would collapse. I could look inside myself for an answer, try to intuit or feel how something was as I’d done numberless times in my life, to feel the texture of things as they appeared to my mind, my trustworthy mind, my reliable heart, my logical brain. But no use consorting with my mind, heart and brain on the subject of their objective reality if they were a simulated mind, heart and brain that had been programmed to feel objective.

  I see all this as indulgent, self-centred and a little mad. I also see it as a reasonable response to an anxiety that had become deep and persistent. Every comfort I looked to was failing me. Other people were, are, the ultimate comfort – in others there is fathomless solace; just in their presence. Not in their capacity to do or be or say anything, but in existing, a human shape in a doorway. This seems the same for other animals too – sheep will stay together in a field big enough for each to have its own territory, cows will gather in the same corner, horses don’t like to be alone. Fish swim in shoals, birds fly in flocks. Flock is a lovely word. Originally flocc, and used only for humans – a group of humans living, moving and feeding together. Flock, also that softness of a tuft of wool or, once, a lock of hair.

  And then this sensation, of tipping back in the chair and finding nobody and nothing there to catch the fall. Or more recently, the feeling is of too much energy in my head, of some frenzied current feeding up and out of my head, my heart racing as my energy is pulled upwards when all I want is to find ground under my feet. The ground rushes away. In fright, my mind looks for its flock, the soft solidity of others, and finds only uncertainty. The mind in fright starts turning in on itself, finding ways to frighten itself so that it can justify being scared.

  Today an email arrives to my university address and it’s from an Episcopalian priest in the US who writes to say that he has composed a Sunday sermon to give to his congregation that is, in part, about me.

  He’d read my novel, The Western Wind, and was taken with it, so he looked me up online and found an essay I’d published about anxiety – about my anxiety and sleeplessness, but which then made a few wayward and tentative claims about anxiety in the Middle Ages. (This is one of the stranger aspects of being a writer, that people ask you to write essays about things and nobody seems to care that you don’t know anything about writing essays, or about the subjects your essays deal with, or about anything, frankly. Anything. You make things up for a living and then you make things up in essays and nobody minds. Although, equally, nobody pays you.)

  He sends me a copy of the sermon, this priest, and as I read it there is this displaced feeling I always get when a reader writes to me about my books. How can it be that I, here, dreamt up a world from some place in myself I can’t quite name, and a person, there, has taken that world into a place in them that they can’t quite name, and that unnamed place is moved and wants to convey it, and the conveying of it moves an unnamed place in me, and the echo passes back and forth.

  That, and also, in this case, that this solitary and largely private nocturnal suffering of mine should be falling any Sunday now onto the ears of a congregation in North Carolina. In the sermon he talks about my novel, a little, and my essay, whose premise was that perhaps, perhaps, anxiety was less prevalent in the Middle Ages, given how many ‘real’ worries people had to contend with. He picks up on the sense of anxiety I describe, that of something groundless and objectless, something that has to find objects to attach to in order to maintain itself, but which originates without those objects. The mind inflates with a shapeless unease, he says. I find myself going over that phrase again, the loveliness of it, the aptness, the fact that shapeless is a word that occurs to me often lately: the shapeless dark, a shapeless fog of thought, the shapelessness of loneliness as opposed to that human shape in the doorway, the shapelessness of a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded.

  He talks then about his own lifelong anxiety, there since childh
ood; his own shapeless unease. There is a caption in a scrapbook of his drawings and writing that reads, under a series of sketches, ‘Aged 4. Tense, unhappy period’ – that period, he says, continues into the present. This anxiety is given over to God; again and again he gives it over to God. And he petitions his congregation to think of Paul in Romans 8: ‘Don’t worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God.’

  ‘The Lord is near’ is the title of his sermon, and the words that precede Paul’s exhortation against worry. The Lord is near. Don’t worry about anything. In the Lord’s nearness the priest finds a consolation of the highest and purest order, an opportunity to hand over his troubles without dwelling on or drowning in them, and to know that the opportunity is always there, since the Lord is always there. In this knowledge the world, he says, turns out not to be lonely and hostile as our tendencies towards fear would have us believe, but a ‘sphere ruled by love’.

  The Lord is near, he tells his congregation, with a certain humble surety.

  Don’t worry about anything.

  The Lord is near.

  I speak to another friend. He says science is the thing. The grand consolation. He quotes Clifford: It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.

  There is so much more evidence for the belief that we and the universe exist in physical form than there is evidence to the contrary. It’s a question of critical mass; no single observation in itself could prove it, but the amassing of thousands, millions of observations that link together to form a set of conjectures that are verified and falsified and form a theory is something that begins to look robust, dependable.