It has taken me longer than I expected to recover from moving house, from moving away. Perhaps this is due to the amount of times I moved in my twenties, the constant reorientation establishing an insecurity of dwelling in my sense of self. With no centre, the surrounding world falls prey to a nauseating equality – every place is on the same ontological level, with no inside and out to speak of. Thus the privacy of the home becomes a site of invasion from the outside world, a grotesque outcome. I now concede that Bachelard is right: "Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home." These days, I am now distanced from crowds, cities, and all modes of community: my future a prolonged convalescence in unpopulated landscapes. Not being found is spiritually renewing. My body can breathe in this remote space, its bridges to the past life of “things” gently vanishing.
Through this, I have returned to a thought from R.D. Laing. One thought concerns me. Speaking of ontological insecurity, he adds: “A further factor is the discontinuity in the temporal self. When there is uncertainty in time, there is a tendency to rely on spatial means of identifying oneself” (p. 109). Laing’s claim attests to a desire on behalf of human life to presuppose linear duration in the sense of self. The self is thought of as an arc, in whose folds, past experiences neatly dovetails into the present. But there is spillage, fragmentation, and the residue of a past that falls short of the present. Great beacons of spatial mass come to the foreground, their sheer bulk a reminder that there is a self in the first place. Included in this nostalgia for continuity is the body itself. A patient of Laing's tells us:
I forgot myself at the Ice Carnival the other night. I was so absorbed in looking at it that I forgot what time it was and who and where I was. When I suddenly realised that I hadn’t been thinking about myself I was frightened to death. The unreality feeling came. I must never forget myself for a single minute (Ibid.).This report, the logic of which is easy to identify with, reminds us of the narcissism of anxiety. Without self-presence, time loses its relationship to the world, and the existence of the “I” suffers from radical fragmentation. Constant vigilance over self-consciousness ensures that the self is “seen” by its own self. More than this, however, the passage points to a loss of trust in the reality of time. For the patent, turning away from the self constitutes a different rhythm, and thus the origins of a discontinuous self.
As I have done in the past, I am again thinking through this relationship between anxiety, time, and selfhood. The strange clump of mass - the "I" - that finds itself in the present seeks to organise itself with respect to its past. Here, the body turns on itself, its memories a source of disruption. In this turn to anxiety and time, I returned to Gaston Bachelard’s The Dialectic of Duration. I admire this book very much. Its emphasis on the spiritual value of rhythm and repose is vital. Here, for instance, is Bachelard’s pre-emptive gesture toward existential psychotherapy: “A sick soul – especially one that suffers the pain of time and of despair – has to be cured by living and thinking rhythmically, by rhythmic attentiveness and rhythmic repose.” And here is the striking thing: against Bachelard’s gentle nostalgia in The Poetics of Space, in this earlier book, his tone is unforgiving toward “false permanence and ill-made duration,” his polemical thrust directed toward Bergsonian duration, above all else. In a word, Bachelard’s “cure” for the sick soul is live alongside the lacunae in one’s life, discerning even “Baudelairean correspondences” in the dark night of the soul. Is the self a product of neurosis? This is the question that Bachelard forces me to ask (myself). The only way to answer this question would be to indirectly observe the phenomena that outlasts the self when that same self forgets itself, such as that of the Ice Carnival the other night.
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