Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘experience’ post of the week. These are personal reflections - basically just thinking out loud.
Best,
Sam
ON THE LOADED WORD ‘SPIRAL’
When there’s a conversation about how an acquaintance is doing - this is particular, probably, to the neuroses of people in their 30s - the word to be dreaded above all others, the word that makes people’s heads really shake in empathy and pity is the loaded word ‘spiral.’
What it tends to imply is that so-and-so had some bad break, a career setback, a relationship falling apart, a health issue, and that person ‘spiraled’ - or ‘went into a loop,’ ‘into freefall,’ ‘got into their own head,’ etc.
This is contrasted to an acquaintance who is ‘in a groove,’ ‘killing it,’ ‘crushing it,’ ‘on fire,’ ‘a machine,’ and who is usually metaphorized as a paragon if not of dominance then of ineluctable forward movement.
There was always something that struck me as odd in the narrative about ‘spiraling’ - the understanding that a ‘spiral’ was sort of the worst psychic affliction that a person could have. Part of it - superficially - was my boyhood association with the ‘spiral’ in football, which is one of the highest aesthetic achievements in team sports (and announcers sound suddenly very un-jocky when they wax poetic about a quarterback’s ‘tight’ or ‘picture-perfect’ spiral).
Of course it wasn’t worth extrapolating too much from the physics of a football - which has its very peculiar shape. The ’spiral’ that everybody was talking about was basically a metaphor for a plane crash, the idea being that the weight of the plane would create its own loop, would nose the plane irrevocably downwards. And the discourse on spiraling, as opposed to ‘cruising’ or another oppositional metaphor, was drawn from aeronautics. (It’s worth some much longer essay, by the way, to explore how clusters of metaphors originate in the technology of a particular era - all of our metaphors about nightlife, for instance, seem to center on the language of electricity, the early 20th century and the conquest of the night; while our language about success derives disproportionately from the golden age of aviation; and our language about cognition is rooted in computer science.)
But while I certainly got what everybody was talking about - and the resonance of the metaphors - something in me rebelled at it. The people in the successful stages of their lives seemed so nice and dumb, just plowing forward - and there was the connotation of guileless violence, also, in the reflexive descriptions of how well they were doing. And the attendant qualities of the spiral - rumination, looping thoughts, obsessions, regrets, struck me as being much more human.
Much of it was that the qualities of myself that I liked best - or, at least, felt to be closest to my authentic self - had elements of the spiral in it. I had always had an obsessive streak - I liked to learn by inhaling some subject matter in great gulps; the work I enjoyed doing always had the aspect of an all-consuming project. And I had always, in contrast to many people I knew, had a pretty close relationship to the past - was fascinated by history, by the ways in which the past interwove with the present. That connection with the past - which I valued very much - had a tendency towards rumination built into it, a certain risk of regrets.
The secret to life, definitely as espoused by my colleagues and acquaintances and, to a surprising extent by therapist types, was to steer clear of all of that - to be, as J. M. Coetzee had written in a different context, “like a blade cutting the wind.” This was the logic of the marketplace, in which one always has to be nimble and adaptable. It was the logic of relationships, in which one has to be extroverted, light, quick to forget and forgive. And it was the logic of ruddy good health - of the dictum attributed to Freud that, after all the morbidity and the past-excavation of the therapeutic project, the goal, simply enough, was to be adept at work and at love.
I didn’t especially dispute the wisdom of any of that. So what was it exactly that made me dislike my affable colleagues so much at the moment when they shook their heads and said that so-and-so was “in a bit of a spiral but should pull out of it soon” and made me always want to start arguing with them at the whistle of approbation when they said that so-and-so was really ‘killing it’? The feeling, I guess, was that I was atavistically convinced that there was more to being a human than being ‘a blade cutting the wind’ and felt, at the same time, that I was closest to some truth of myself when I was willing to ruminate, to loop, to run the risk of some degree of spiraling.
I wouldn’t have come close to claiming that the spiraling I got into made me happier - I was like anybody else, I felt happier with a wind at my back, being nice and dumb, plowing forward in the world. But - and this was the silent argument that I’d have with my colleagues, that I never articulated out loud - I felt that there were values in life distinct from happiness. There was an intrinsic value in being connected to the past - to meditating on the past simply as a mark of respect for the past as opposed to utilizing the lessons of the past in some way to inform the present. There was an intrinsic value in obsession - in allowing oneself to become consumed by some project or activity or other. (That was the path, incidentally, to real excellence.) And there was an intrinsic value, actually, in spiraling, in the sensation of ‘hitting bottom,’ of being pulled into some sort of a loop of regrets and ruminations. It was in these uncomfortable, unpleasant thoughts that a person had the most acute sense of what their life had really been, of what they made of their responsibilities extending out into the world.
There used to be public forums to explore this set of ideas. Religious traditions emphasize sin, reflection, the ethical compass, an accounting of one’s actions, a sense of one’s life as a ledger. The consensus in secular countries seems to be that the religious traditions took this much too far - turned people’s lives into a maelstrom of guilt and terror. But the cheery sensibility of the market and of the therapists has its own issues - a tendency to circumscribe human beings, to focus only on the present, on adaptation, on success. And, by the same token, there are fewer psychic resources available for when people actually experience setbacks or eddies of confusion in their lives. The religious traditions have an ability to treat life as a sequence of peaks and valleys, to speak the language of redemption, salvation, etc, to see some sort of intrinsic worth or truth in suffering.
I am not, at the moment, arguing for the superiority of religious over secular traditions. What I am saying is that the secular mindset - a mindset that has no higher truth in it than ‘success’ - has bracing limitations, an inability to contend meaningfully with suffering, a tendency to reduce the variety of human experience to only that which is pragmatically useful, and a difficulty even in conceiving of values other than utilitarian happiness, of recognizing, for instance, that even the ‘spiral’ has its own peculiar beauty.
Am recommending every body with the idea of cybernetics as it was composited out of some "blades cutting" project outlines at MIT in 1969 , and cmpstd out of "ideas of other minds" in order to run grooves in what alive behaviors could contribute to IO computing to read Jeremy Campbell's Grammatical Man book from 81 83. So called popularizing book but take my hint after all Joseph Campbell's best book is a short survey book the Flight of the Wild Gander and I can do without the rest.
Love this. Without context, we are interchangeable components; with it, we can bring unique strengths and weaknesses to work together.
Also, it's interesting to consider what we *lost* when we became more secular (we gained a lot, too, in moving away from guilt and abuse!), but you're right: secular structures haven't reliably replaced "a place where contemplation is valued and accepted."