REVIEW ESSAY: Shakespeare’s emotional turn

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Una McIlvenna

Dr Una McIlvenna is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of Kent. From 2011-2014 she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, based at the University of Sydney, where her project investigated the emotional impact of execution ballads in early modern Europe. Here she explores two new edited collections about Shakespeare and emotions for the History of Emotions Blog.

Shakespeare and Emotions: Inheritances, Enactments, Legacies, eds. R. S. White, Mark Houlahan and Katrina O’Loughlin (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)

The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, eds. Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015)

In November 2015 the Queen Mary Centre for the History of Emotions marked its seventh anniversary. The Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development In Berlin has also been around since 2008, and in Australia, the national Research Council funded a Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions in 2011. So with all this research what have we learned? What sort of impact have three international research centres had on the study of emotions in the past? Two recent publications on emotions in early modern literature offer an opportunity to take stock, to assess whether the ‘emotional turn’ in the humanities has provided a genuinely new way for literary scholars to approach our discipline.

At a grand total of 32 essays between them (not including introductions and afterwords), these two collections on emotions in literature are testament to the vibrancy of interest in early modern emotions. They also demonstrate the diversity of approaches that can be brought to the subject, not surprising when literature can be argued to be the pure expression of emotion itself. This diversity likely explains why both volumes break up their essays into three somewhat similar sections, devoting the first section to the cultural influences on, and sources used by, early modern writers; the middle section to the assessment of emotions in the literary works themselves; and the final section to performance and cultural engagement, both historical and present-day. In some cases a single emotion, such as happiness or regret, or a key word, such as spleen, have been thoroughly investigated to understand what they might have signified 400 years ago; in other cases, contributors look at a single play, text, or even scene through the lens of emotion; while others provide an assessment of the approach to emotions used across a writer’s entire oeuvre.

Given the large number of essays and the range of subjects they cover, it would be hard to give each the thorough review they deserve. Instead, I approached each essay with two core questions in mind. First, does the research offer me new insights into the play, text, or author that make me read it again with new eyes? And second, given that the true mark of the success of a new approach to any discipline is based on how much it changes the study of it in the classroom (in the way that, say, gender studies has done), could I set the essay as recommended reading for my undergraduate students? In other words, was it written in accessible language and with enough focus that it would enlighten them as to deeper significances of the play or text they were studying?

The struggle of any edited volume is to appear as a coherent whole, and at twenty-three essays Shakespeare and Emotions was probably never going to succeed in that endeavour (even White in his introduction refers to it as an ‘eclectic collection’). However, its diversity is also a strength, and it will be a useful tool on the bookshelf of any Shakespeare teacher, who can use many of its short essays to bring the study of emotions into the classroom. Part I is titled Emotional Inheritances, and looks at classical, folk, religious, and political influences on Shakespeare’s oeuvre. The most convincing pieces in this section are Brid Phillips’ discussion of Ovid and Andrew Lynch’s treatment of Measure for Measure. Philips explores what she calls Shakespeare’s ‘sinister revision’ of the Ovidian locus amoenus in Titus Andronicus. In a brilliant piece of close reading, Phillips identifies that in Act 2 scene 4, Lavinia’s very body becomes the desecrated locus amoenus, a metaphor for the consequences of extreme emotion. Lynch argues that if Isabella were to be reimagined as an early modern development of the traditional virgin martyr of the Golden Legend and other similar hagiographical stories, her emotional attachments would become easier for a modern audience to understand. These female martyrs were praised for their defiance of unjust power and often found themselves the victims of sexual predation by male authority figures, a clear analogy with Angelo’s exploitation of Isabella. This essay offers valuable insight into a character whose sexual attractiveness to men is not based in modern ideas of appearance, but rather in a medieval tradition of chaste unattainability.

Other essays explore a range of sources and influences on Shakespeare. Danijela Kambaskovic analyses the two kinds of ‘love madness’ in the Sonnets, both for the young man and the dark lady, from a Platonic perspective. She finds that, although Plato felt that male homosexual love was superior to heterosexual love, Shakespeare’s ambiguity allows both to be acceptable. Ciara Rawnsley explores the influence of fairy tales on the fantastical plot-line of Cymbeline, recognising that the wager on Imogen’s faithfulness recalls such a wager in Boccaccio’s Decameron and a similar prose tale called Frederyke of Jennen. Shakespeare’s amendments to these sources transforms the story into one about Posthumus’ sexual anxiety, giving his far-fetched actions a much-needed emotional grounding. The fairy tale origins, Rawnsley argues, paradoxically expose the real-life emotions at work in the play.

Stephanie Downes looks at ‘Frenchness’ in Henry V, and argues that Shakespeare’s sophisticated use of French throughout the play, even when it is broken French, articulates shared anxieties about war, victory, and defeat, as well as the more well-known shared sexual jokes. This ‘commingling of language, learning and sex’ reveals the intertwined Anglo-French friendship and enmity both at the time of the play’s writing and the time in which it was set. Representations of Margaret of Anjou in an account of the year 1460 in a London chronicle (MS Egerton 1995) and in 3 Henry VI are compared by Mary-Rose McLaren. The chronicler recounts an event in which Margaret was robbed by one of her own men, depicting her as betrayed, poor, and powerless. Shakespeare, 130 years after the events, recasts her for dramatic effect as unnatural and bloodthirsty, gloating over the death of a child. The contrast is striking, yet were there stronger evidence that this was one of Shakespeare’s sources this comparison might have been more productive.

Probably the most useful section for the classroom, because it focuses on emotional work in the plays themselves, is Part II, ‘Shakespearean Enactments’. Ruth Lunney explores Shakespeare’s experiments with the depiction of the historical figures of Talbot, Richard of Gloucester, and Richard II, revealing how the playwright exploited different values to provoke different emotional responses in his contemporary audience. His most challenging depiction, that of Richard II as a ‘debatable’ character, signalled, Lunney argues, a major development in characterisation in Renaissance drama. In a related analysis of the history plays, Martin Dawes argues that the Henriad offers us examples of emotional education, in particular what he calls ‘the holy trinity of fear, love and wonder’ that kings needed to master in order to appropriately reflect their status as divinely ordained. Henry V, unsurprisingly, is the character who most successfully manages to both exploit and inspire these three emotions. Two essays deal with Troilus and Cressida. Alison V. Scott sees Troilus’ unusual comment ‘I am giddy’ as a significant moment of emotional self-assessment, when he rationally appraises his passions and decides how he will act. This is in contrast to the usual early modern definitions of giddiness, where it is depicted as a failure of masculine rational control; Troilus, on the other hand, manages to make it a virtue. In an essay that stands as a challenge to the other volume under review, Ronald Bedford provides countless examples from Troilus and Cressida to show how consistently Shakespeare uses aspects of humoral theory in the play to express characters’ emotions, and how the surfeit of unbridled appetite throughout leads to the disorder that characterises Shakespeare’s retelling of ‘the most famous war in Western literature’.

The emotions that motivate specific characters are explored in other essays: Anthony Guy Patricia uses queer theory to examine the emotions of same-sex love in the representations of Antonio and Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice. The most intriguing aspect of his argument is that Antonio’s melancholy at the opening of the play stems from the fact that he has been unable to secure long-term financial security for Bassanio and that this is why he is so eager to fund his younger lover’s trip to Belmont. Jennifer Hamilton’s analysis of the storm in King Lear argues that Lear, initally struggling with the shame of his own mortality, eventually succumbs to the storm’s pitilessness and power, which enables him to admit his shameful mortality and ultimately to revel in it. The play, she argues, explores sovereignty and the theory of the king’s two bodies from an emotional perspective.

Other essays deal with the emotional expectations of the contemporary audience. Christopher Wortham provides a cartographically informed reading of Othello, which reads Othello’s account of how he seduced Desdemona with his stories of cannibals and Anthropophagi through the medieval T-O map and a morality play that identified moral attributes with the cardinal points of the compass. The south’s identification with sins of the flesh, Wortham argues, means that Othello’s stories of the creatures located there signals his and Desdemona’s journey into the realm of fleshly lusts that will destroy them both. Heather Kerr looks at tears, specifically, the sociable, ‘fellowly drops’ that Prospero exchanges with Gonzalo in The Tempest, to question whether this phenomenon is a precursor to eighteenth-century discourses of the sympathetic imagination. She concludes that in this scene they are a demonstration of how early modern passions pass from one person to another, in a kind of ‘mimetic contagion’. And finally, in an essay that could as well have been included in the next section, given its interest in performance, Peter Groves reveals how close attention to Shakespeare’s complex metre can illuminate moments of heightened emotion, in particular the silent beat that offers an opportunity for the actor to fill it with action.

The third part of the volume, Emotional Legacies and Re-enactments, explores Shakespeare’s legacy in our modern world. The most helpful of these contributions is Susan Broomhall’s review of the British Museum’s 2012 exhibition Shakespeare: Staging the World, which attempted to ‘get inside the heads’ of Shakespeare’s contemporary audience via early modern objects both grand and everyday. Broomhall correctly notes that the curators described early modern encounters with the New World as ‘cultural exchange’ rather than the more challenging ‘cultural exploitation’. The fear and wonder that underpinned English engagement with the world translated into violence and coercion enacted upon the indigenous peoples of the Americas, an emotional approach that the curators could have used, she argues, to enlighten modern audiences to the enslavement in works like The Tempest.

In another intriguing analysis of modern interpretation, Rosemary Gaby explores how regret was the foregrounded emotion in the 2012 BBC series of four films of plays from the second tetralogy called The Hollow Crown. Surprisingly, given the series’ link with the ‘Cultural Olympiad’, these adaptations do not dwell as other previous ones have done on popular Falstaffian hedonism and humour, but instead highlight moments ‘where looking back is associated with negative emotions’. In an attempt to truly understand early modern performance, Andrew Lawrence-King argues that a new analysis of a seventeenth-century Recitative-song penned by Samuel Pepys’ house-composer Cesare Morelli could offer us an example of how early modern people actually spoke. Other essays in this section feel less coherent with the volume as a whole. Simon Haines uses the Hegelian term Anerkennung (or ‘recognition’) to analyse moments of recognition in Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra, only to conclude that Hegel’s term simply doesn’t seem adequate to capture Shakespeare’s evolving approach to the idea. Elizabeth Schafter investigates how nostalgia and space interacted in Geoffrey Rush’s 1987 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which he set in the Brisbane suburb of Windsor c. 1947. Philippa Kelly offers a very personal account of what it’s like to be a dramaturge which, while moving, reads more like a magazine article than an academic analysis.

With only nine essays the other volume, The Renaissance of Emotion, is understandably more cohesive. The editors’ introduction argues for a new approach to the study of early modern emotions, reacting against the humoralist approach that has predominated in early modern literary studies since Gail Kern Paster’s seminal work Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespeare Stage (2004) and the work she co-edited with Katherine Rowe and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Reading the Early Modern Passions (2004). While at times it overstates the exclusivity of the humoral approach (I don’t think Paster et al. assumed it was the only way of understanding how emotions worked), it does offer a much more rounded and complete way of thinking about the many ways in which early modern emotions could be stimulated, influenced, and expressed. They choose the three most important areas of influence: religious and philosophical belief, linguistic and literary form, and political and dramaturgical performance.

This volume’s focus on religious belief in Part I ‘The theology and philosophy of emotion’ is a real asset, as our modern secularism can often lead us to forget the quotidian nature and pervasive influence of religious practice in early modern life and emotions. In particular, David Bagchi’s essay reveals how the Book of Common Prayer ‘framed and tamed’ the often confusing emotional world of the Bible for everyday English Protestants. In a useful comparison with Susan Karant-Nunn’s findings about German Protestantism, Bagchi finds some interesting differences; for example, in the BCP Jews were less vilified as ‘Christ’s killers’ than in German sermons, and the ‘quietness’ so praised in both linguistic traditions did not, for English Protestants, necessarily denote the absence of high emotion. In another helpful essay, Sara Coodin analyses Shylock’s motivations in The Merchant of Venice, in particular via the speech he gives about the Biblical story of Jacob’s success through his deceptions of his uncle. Shylock views Jacob’s actions as a clever means of thriving or ‘eudaimonism’ that he attempts to emulate, while his critics view such an attitude as pure greed and usury. Coodin argues that we should understand the complexity of Shylock’s relationship to Jacob and realise that criticisms of him in the play are voiced by those who have caused his suffering.

Erin Sullivan offers fresh insight into that oft-cited manual of early modern emotions, Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall. Sullivan argues that although Wright’s Jesuit training has led some critics to disregard his views as not normative, Wright’s acknowledgement of the possibility of disembodied affective experience makes his work more representative of the period than one might think. Other fresh insight is offered by Mary Ann Lund into Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Instead of focusing on its well-known exploration of sadness, Lund instead analyses its sensuous meditation on happiness derived from the vision of God’s beauty, offering an alternative reading of the emotions it explores.

In Part II, ‘Shakespeare and the language of emotion’, Nigel Wood investigates the use of the term ‘spleen’ in Shakespeare’s comedies, and offers a useful catalogue of the multiple uses of it throughout his oeuvre. Wood notes that ‘Shakespeare does not use it in any streamlined or predictable way’, and its multivalency as a term perhaps explains why this essay would, I think, be difficult for students to follow. Similarly, Richard Meek looks at the development of the terms ‘sympathy’ and ‘sympathise’ as they are utilised in Richard II, a play about a king for whom it can be hard to feel sympathy. Richard Chamberlain’s essay on happiness in Hamlet examines the linked terms ‘hap’, ‘perhaps’, and ‘happy’, revealing that the play conceives happiness as serendipity or chance, as opposed to the totalitarian, organised, administrative systems which Claudius’ new reign introduces. This essay is most helpful when it discusses the play itself, showing us the often simultaneous multiple meanings that characters can exploit when using the terms, but less so in its contentious, and at times ahistorical, argument that happiness must be a social phenomenon rather than a personal one.

Unlike the previous volume, the third section of this volume on ‘The politics and performance of emotion’ is very cohesive, perhaps because it concentrates instead on early modern performance rather than modern. Andy Kesson provides a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Shakespeare’s most popular predecessor John Lyly, by looking at how emotions were stimulated and exploited in Lyly’s works. Kesson persuasively argues that Lyly’s reputation for cerebral, static writing is misplaced, and that instead his dramatic and literary works campaign for an active, passionate participation by the audience. His works aim to ‘move’ audiences, actors, and readers in the literal, physical sense as well as the mental, emotional sense. Ann Kaegi looks at the female characters of Richard III, showing how Shakespeare reworked cultural expectations about the performance of grief. She reveals that the women’s emotional outbursts only become productive in the play when they cease to compete with each other like merchants taking stock of their accounts of grief, and instead focus their curses on Richard.

Frederika Bain examines how the performance of emotions was depicted in early modern accounts of public executions, using plays, ballads, and pamphlets to reveal how these were often intertextual, each using and developing conventions found in the other forms. My only quibble with this essay was its use of accounts of regicides as representative of execution narratives, when these used a completely different emotional register to all other accounts. Finally, R. S. White and Ciara Rawnsley discuss the theory of discrepant emotional awareness through the close reading of scenes from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Cymbeline. It is an analysis that is persuasive in its reading of TGV, but less so for Cymbeline as, while it explains Shakespeare’s motivations for the long, fantastical denouement, it cannot get around the fact that audiences have rarely been persuaded to engage with it emotionally.

In his afterword, Peter Holbrook argues that this collection shows how early modern writers imagined human life as capable of emotional freedom: freedom from the overwhelmingly physiological aspects of humoral psychology, and freedom to act upon one’s individual sense of agency. It is an argument that celebrates the diversity of human action and feeling in the early modern era, but it reflects the challenge that the study of the history of emotions sets for us all: how can one single approach hope to adequately address the countless ways in which humans interacted and felt in the past? It is this diversity that the editors of these volumes have had to tackle and, while occasionally it results in a lack of cohesion, overall we are provided with new tools to help us read these 400-year-old works with fresh eyes.

Follow Una McIlvenna on Twitter: @UnaMcIlvenna

Religion and the arts as collective improvisation

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Jules Evans

Cave-painting from Lascaux, from approximately 30,000 BC

I’m interested in the idea of religion and the arts as forms of collective improvisation – play-areas where people can let go of their normal ego-construction and social situation, and play at other selves and other worlds. This is, in the words of Brian Eno, ‘the central human trick’. He said in his Peel lecture last year:

If you watch children playing what they’re doing mostly is let’s pretend. Let’s pretend this stick can change you into a frog…what they’re really saying is let’s imagine. Imagining is possibly the central human trick….We can imagine worlds that don’t exist…You think about this world by imagining alternatives to it.

Altered states are central to these shared alter-worlds – through ritual, we enter into highly suggestible hypnotic or trance states, in which our ego-constructions become fluid and alterable, we get immersed or absorbed in the collective play, in alter-selves and alter-worlds. Our imaginings seem really real.

Other animals also seek out altered states (moose get high eating fermented apples, for example). But only humans create collective alter-worlds, through words, symbols and songs. Think of early humans creating the shared Otherworld of the cave at Lascaux – a decisive moment in evolution, a window into a new level of existence. Humans can make the imaginary collective, turn it into art / religion, and thereby make it real. It becomes real in our emotions, in our ethics, in our bodies, in our relations, in our societies.

Then the Otherworld culture becomes material for new improvisations, new riffs, new songs – we absorb the old material into our imagination and sing new versions of the stories for our own time. For example, the 14th-century mystic Margery Kempe gorged herself on devotional literature, until finally her inner world spilled out into the outer world, Jesus appeared to her, she becomes part of the Christian story. Religion, in this sense, is a form of massive-world fan-fiction (a point made nicely by Helen MacDonald last week).

CS Lewis actually had a chapter in Mere Christianity called ‘Let’s Pretend‘, where he wrote that when we pray the Lord’s prayer ‘you are dressing up as Christ…Let us pretend in order to make the pretence a reality’. The arts are also a sort of ritualized play, which can be made real in our lives. This is what Hippolyta means in Midsummer Night’s Dream, when she says:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy,
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

The play ‘grows to something of great constancy’ because our minds are ‘transfigured so together.’

Pippa Evans (second from the right) in Showstopper

Pippa Evans (on the right) in Showstopper

I’m interested, then, in improvisation in the arts and religion, their connection to altered states of consciousness, their therapeutic power. I’ve been reading Tanya Luhrmann on charismatic Christianity as a form of collective improv, Keith Johnstone on mask-play as a means to trance states and possession by ‘other selves’ or alter-egos, and Ken Campbell on comic play as a form of catharsis, a shame-release of the madness inside us. To explore further, I interviewed the wonderful Pippa Evans, who is both a highly accomplished improviser (she stars in Showstopper! a very funny musical improv show now on in the West End), a stand-up comedian (for which she’s often used an alter-ego, Loretta Maine), and one of the founders of Sunday Assembly, the Godless church. She also runs a course, Impro Your Life, using improv workshops to help people develop their interpersonal skills.

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What makes a good improviser?

A really great improviser is open, switched on, and able to deal with pretty much anything that’s thrown at them. They’re like a footballer who’s body is a trampoline; things can just bounce off them! A great improviser listens closely to their partner. They hear everything – words, tone, silence. Improvising is 100% a social skill.
And for me, the biggest thing is being able to throw away your ideas – to have 10,000 ideas of where a scene could go, but if your partner says something that doesn’t relate to your ideas, you throw them away and never look back.

What is a ‘gift’ in improv?

A gift is when someone gives you specifics about the scene you are in, which you can then play with. So if we’re doing a scene together and I say ‘Dad, remember I only eat salad’, I’ve just given you loads of information (or ‘offers’) about the scene, rather than me coming on and saying ‘hi’, and leaving you to do all the work. We were doing an exercise called ‘QVC’ – two people have to improvise a shopping channel. And sometimes people say to their partners ‘why don’t you tell us about the product?’ That’s an empty offer – they haven’t helped their partner at all. They haven’t even named the product. At least say “Tell us about the shampoo!”

The one improv technique I’ve heard of is ‘yes…and’. What is that?

‘Yes…and’ is a building tool. It’s great for blue sky thinking. You have to agree with your partner (say ‘yes’) and add to the idea (that’s the ‘and’).
Let’s make a cup of tea!
Yes and we’ll have cake too!
Yes and we’ll share it with our neighbours!
Yes and they will high five us!
Yes and we’ll have a big group hug!
Yes and we’ll break the record for group hugs!
Yes and everyone will get a medal.

The energy of improv is obviously enthusiasm. Is that quite different to the energy of stand-up, which is often the energy of the cynical outsider?

Pippa as Loretta Maine

Yes, it’s very hard to do stand-up and suggest everything is great. People don’t want to hear that. I struggle with that sometimes, because I am quite happy-go-lucky. I think that’s how I ended up inventing this character called Loretta Maine, an American singer-songwriter. She’s like a real person, and I can slip into her really easily. She’s a fun alter-ego to have, because she’s the complete opposite of me, she’s pretty horrible, quite aggressive and really hates life. She says things everyone thinks but no one says. People love her!

So alter egos give people permission to let out other sides of themselves?

Yes. I suppose Loretta came out of an angry place. A frustrated place. She gave me permission to go on stage and connect with the worst part of everyone. I have a song called White Wine Witch, about how awful women are when drunk on the grape juice. It gets a massive response.
Character work is kind of cathartic as a performer, like a kind of masked confession.

The catharsis of shame-release. That’s a massive part of what the arts and religion can do.

What I love about stand-up is that you get 500 people in a room who don’t know each other, all laughing because they’ve all met or been the White Wine Witch. Impro is also about overcoming shame and self-consciousness. I was brought up to be good and do everything right and not upset anyone. And to suddenly go on stage and say whatever falls out of your mouth is so invigorating. So dangerous!
There’s an exercise called ‘endless box’, where you pull objects out of an imaginary box and have to name them. I always say to people ‘don’t worry, the worst thing you’re going to say is c*** and I’ve already said it’. You can see people physically worried about what they might say. It’s actually good to get all that stuff out of your mouth. We store all these weird, dirty, nasty things in our brains, and you can get them out in a little exercise, it’s good for you.
It’s great to watch people slowly shedding their hang-ups and fears that really hold them back. When people come on the Impro Your Life course, they say things like ‘I just want to be able to say what I mean in a meeting’. It’s awful that people need a class to say what they want. Impro is very good at that.

Did Loretta ever come out in real life?
Yes, there was this time a man was pestering me in the street, and I became Loretta, and just told him to back the fuck off. She’s terrifying. I felt my body changing entirely.

Did you eventually get sick of her?
Yes, I stopped doing her about a year ago. I was doing her every night, and I got frustrated. I switched to doing solo shows as myself. But I needed that five years as Loretta to get back to being myself. I learned the skills of stand-up while being someone else. And I still let her out occasionally, which means I can really enjoy her.

It seems like a lot of improvisational ability is to do with working memory. Firstly, your memory of particular musical styles and story structures. But also your memory of what has happened already, and how you weave in spontaneous occurrences into the story. Why do we get such satisfaction when a comedian does that?

When I do stand-up, I’ll often name-check someone in a song who’s been mentioned before, and they can’t believe you remember and they’re now part of the song. We’re just impressed with anyone who can remember anything. Also it’s the feeling of completion. Like I told you about an elephant in the first scene, we haven’t mentioned an elephant, then at the end an elephant saves the day. The audience goes nuts. It’s satisfying. The great circle of life, and all that.

It might go back to the roots of culture in the oral tradition – the poet or rhapsode who can remember an incredibly long poem, and who maybe weaved in new elements too.

Particularly with impro, it’s also proof that you were listening and that the show is improvised.

One thing I noticed about Showstopper was your real skill as story-tellers. You’re obviously so familiar with story structure, with the ways stories usually go. So the audience doesn’t feel it’s completely off the wall, it does feel like a story arc, and that’s satisfying.
Yes, we’ve studied story structure. We’ve read Story, Save the Cat, all these books on film craft. When we started, we’d do the Hero’s Journey quite often. Now, because it’s all so ingrained in us, it’s almost 100% done on feeling.
“It feels like now we need something bad to happen to your character”. Or “It feels like now we need the moral message”. Sometimes we know there are things we want to hit, as it were. But we’ve done shows where it’s been completely different, where we really don’t know where it’s going or going to go. That’s when you get to this flow place, this crazy, beyond-your-brain place, where you just have to be in it, and have to literally, as Frozen says, ‘Let It Go’, because if you even try to contemplate what the fuck is going on, you will destroy the hivemind magic. That’s when you have to be ‘yes and’ mentally.  We did a Showstopper set in the Vatican, but an American senator had come to make it more glamorous. It made total sense in the end. Keith Johnstone said “An improviser is like a man walking backwards, he doesn’t know where he is going but can always see where he has been.”
During the performance, you have to trust what came before rather than trying to guess where it’s going. You can’t judge it till the end. They’re the best shows. Because you can’t phone it in. You have to be on, alert and focused the entire time.

Some of impro is clearly thinking on your feet and being adept. Some of it is also unconscious – ingrained skills and patterns. And then is some of it a sort of altered consciousness?

There’s a conscious level, where you’re consciously steering and making decisions. Then there is this other level, which is where all the muscle memory is, where all the skills are ingrained. And then, when I’m working with certain people, and have worked with them a long time or have a certain connection with them, you do find yourself singing songs and you don’t know where it’s coming from, but it sounds amazing, and you can’t believe it – you feel like you’re floating above it watching this lovely moment.
It might not be the whole show, just a moment in it, where you know you’re connected with someone. It’s some combination of the freeness of your brain and the connection with the music and the character you’re playing giving you freedom…and you really believe. I remember singing a song with Andrew Pugsley, it was the last Showstopper at the Apollo, the song was called called ‘When’s My Birthday Dad?’ I was his daughter, he worked on the Bakerloo line. The line was ‘You know all the tube stops but you don’t know when my birthday is’. And it just fell out of my mouth, and the whole audience went ‘Ohhh!’. They believed this little girl, being played by a 33 year old woman, was real. They believed that my Dad, being played by a 33 year old male, was real. And our troubled relationship touched them. There was this moment of creative connection, truth connection, a realness.

It’s one of the strange things with creative performance – you get a moment of ‘realness’ when you’re on stage playing an eight-year-old. Imaginary play seems to give people a greater sense of realness and connectedness than normal life, sometimes.

Sunday Assembly

I think it all comes back to…we want the Other, the God, the feeling there is something bigger than us. We sometimes get that in moments in Showstopper when everyone in the room feels connected together. There was a show when my mother (not in real life) was trapped in a tree – she was suddenly revealed at the end during a song. Again – the audience were hushed. We shared this moment, this shared emotion of lost parents, or family. We grieved together. And then we sang a chorus.

You don’t know quite how it happens, where it comes from.

And you don’t know if you’ll ever get that feeling again. How can we ever find this again? There’s no formula.

So is religion a form of improv? Christianity could be seen as a collective extemporisation, an ‘as if’, a collective imagining or creative play based on certain standard themes, stories, symbols, which people draw on and riff in new directions.

Seriously long-form improv?

Yeah. Or like fan-fiction – you feed deeply on the stories, then imagine yourself into them and riff off them.

Pippa with Sunday Assembly co-founder Sanderson Jones

When I went to church, I knew a guy who wrote worship songs, and they were really over-complicated, and I remember saying ‘your hymns are really complicated, you should write something simple’. And he said ‘God is so with you’. And I was like ‘what do you mean?’ He said ‘that’s a message from God’. And I sort of believed him, but now I think it was just us being really in tune and connected.

What they call God and the Holy Spirit, others would call being in tune with each other.

Yes, being so present and attentive. I’ve met performance artists who have the air of monks or nuns because they’re so focused on their art, they don’t care about any of the trimmings. You do feel they’re slightly on another level.

Do you find something in the arts to what you used to find in the church?

Yes. Showstopper is like a family in a way, it gives you a feeling of belonging in a group, being very honest and emotionally available with each other. It’s a very intimate group, because of the stuff just coming out of your mouth. When I used to go to church and do the Holy Spirit stuff and shake and fall over, I think that’s a very similar feeling to when we’re doing a scene and we don’t know where it’s going, and we come off stage and feel really euphoric and literally can’t sleep because we’re so excited at the mystery of what happened.
And the guidance too – the older improvisers are teaching you and you’re teaching the younger people. And, now I think about it, improv can be a bit like religions in that you have different groups insisting on different rules. You have Johnstonians, who follow the teachings of Keith Johnstone and do an improv based often in games, then you have the way of Second City, which follows Del Close. And sometimes groups fall out, which is really painful. Or choose a different path. Or split off into new groups. It’s the Judean People’s Front all over again.

Literature and mental health

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Jules Evans

Jonathan Bate and Paula Byrne

On Monday, a new free online course is starting, exploring the mental health benefits of literature (you can sign up here). It’s made by the author Paula Byrne and her husband, literary academic Jonathan Bate, and features interviews with Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry, Melveyn Bragg and others, about how poetry has helped them through difficult times. Paula and Jonathan have also launched a new book, Stressed, Unstressed: Classic Poems To Ease the Mind, and a bibliotherapy charity, Re:Lit. I headed to my alma mater, Worcester College at Oxford, where Jonathan is provost, to ask Paula about the project.

JE: What inspired you to do this?

PB: Our daughter sadly and unexpectedly lost her kidneys when she was five. She was rushed to hospital, and we had this awful conversation – ‘your daughter’s probably not going to survive the night’. What do you read when your world is completely and unexpectedly tilted. I was conscious that there was nothing to read when you’re on your own in such a terrible night. In fact, I had a poem in my bag, coincidentally. I read it and felt it very much got me and her through the night. I’d been fermenting the idea of what one reads in hospitals – having spent a lot of time in them, I don’t want to read Hello magazine, particularly not a back-dated one from two years ago. What is there to read when you’re worried, anxious, waiting for an operation, and feeling the dearth of nutritious literature.

What was the poem?

It was actually a prayer by Julian of Norwich – ‘all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’. I just kept saying it as a sort of mantra. I felt there was something very important about holding on to words when there are no words, and someone else gives you the words you can’t find.

Is your daughter OK now?

Yes she pulled through, bless her. She then went on to have a transplant and she’s six foot now. Touch wood she’s doing very well. But we’ve obviously spent a lot of time in waiting rooms where there hasn’t been any literature, and it’s just been frazzled parents and frazzled children. Your stress levels go through the roof. The other thing that made me think of this project was that I had very bad stress, because of my daughter’s illness but also overwork, and it manifested itself as pain in my hands. Having ignored it for so long, I finally went along to my GP and said I have this terrible pain in my hands, I think it’s something horrible. He just said, it’s stress. I said, but it hurts. He said yeah, stress really can hurt. I said, so what do I do? He said, I’m going to give you a prescription. I’m going to prescribe you a book. And he prescribed me some haikus. The pain completely went away. And I thought, there’s something in this, and if more GPs and medical professionals had a creative approach to stress, maybe poetry could be something in the tool-kit that helps some people. I did research into bibliotherapy, and realized poetry has been used in eastern and western cultures for thousands of years – Aeschylus said ‘words are the physicians of a mind diseased’. So, eventually, I decided to start a bibliotherapy charity.

How is poetry therapeutic?

How it works for me is a form of curious alchemy. I think it’s repetition, it’s very soothing, there’s something reassuring about repetition and rhyme. Coleridge said poetry is the best spoken words in the best order. Sometimes when you feel stressed you can’t find the words yourself, and you feel very alone. In all the research I’ve been doing for this online course, the refrain over and over again is ‘I thought it was just me, and then I read this poem, and felt oh, that’s exactly it’.’

Let me give you a specific example. As you know, we’re launching a poetry and mental health course on February 1st, we have 11,000 people signed up already. And each week we’re taking a different theme – heartbreak, trauma, and so on. I wanted to move trauma away from military-related PTSD, and include things like female trauma from miscarriages. I had a miscarriage with my first baby, and the only thing that made me feel better was a poem by Katherine Philips from the 1500s. This was a woman who lost 14 children, as you did in Tudor times. She finally gave birth to a beautiful boy, who died after two weeks. And she wrote a beautiful poem to her son Hector. And it’s so modern, resonant and contemporary, you feel she could have written in yesterday.

Twice forty months in wedlock I did stay,
Then had my vows crowned with a lovely boy.
And yet in forty days he dropped away;
O swift vicissitude of human joy!

I did but see him, and he disappeared,
I did but touch the rosebud, and it fell;
A sorrow unforeseen and scarcely feared,
So ill can mortals their afflictions spell.

And now (sweet babe) what can my trembling heart
Suggest to right my doleful fate or thee?
Tears are my muse, and sorrow all my art,
So piercing groans must be thy elegy.

Thus whilst no eye is witness of my moan,
I grieve thy loss (ah, boy too dear to live!)
And let the unconcerned world alone,
Who neither will, nor can refreshment give.

An offering too for thy sad tomb I have,
Too just a tribute to thy early hearse;
Receive these gasping numbers to thy grave,
The last of thy unhappy mother’s verse.

I really like that. Woman to woman it spoke to me about what it feels like to lose a baby. And the power of words, the catharsis, making sense of it. It also shows there’s nothing really new under the sun. With all the advance of medicine, I still know how she feels. It’s not just me, but I couldn’t say it that well.

And I guess we’re a post-religious society, not everyone wants to turn to the Bible, but poems are sort of substitute for prayer-books, the Bible, rosaries etc?

I think that’s right. So often at funerals people recite poems. It seems there’s something about that art form.

Do you think poetry can do that more than prose?

I love prose too, but I do think there’s something about that particular art form, the concentrated language. It demands concentration in the way prose doesn’t always. You may not understand it, it doesn’t matter, you can just feel the rhythm and sense the symbols.

And it’s close to song, isn’t it, so it has an incantatory quality.

That’s right, and the rhythm can be like a heartbeat.

Do you usually read to yourself or out loud?

Usually to myself but I love hearing it being read out loud. We have Ian McKellen reading a Wordsworth sonnet in the course, and he has such a beautiful voice, hearing him read it took me to a completely different place, a different space.

Do you think academic literary studies tends to be a bit blind to the possible therapeutic benefits of literature?

I do. One journalist was quite critical of the project – he said poetry is high art, it’s not therapy. I thought, what a snobbish attitude. Bibliotherapy is a very ancient idea. In Chinese and Japanese culture, there was a tradition of getting away from the court, going to the country, and using poetry to get into a different headspace.

That’s interesting, the idea of poetry as an inner retreat – it can help one find a restorative depth, even in a hospital.

I really believe that. You could be in a high-rise flat, but feel like you’re in a garden, if you’re reading Wordsworth or Marvell. It enriches your inner life. Poems on the Underground was a really brilliant idea – on a busy tube, you read a poem and it transports you. You’re in a different space.

Harold Bloom talks about the importance of memorizing poetry, making it a part of your inner speech as it were.

Yes, my generation was taught to learn poems by heart. There’s all sorts of interesting studies, particularly with dementia, that people who learn poetry by rote can still remember them when they have dementia. I interviewed Melvyn Bragg for the course – his mother got dementia, and when nothing reached her, she’d still respond to Wordsworth’s Daffodils. One of the problems with dementia is that people are very frightened. Anything that stops people feeling so frightened is beneficial.I do. It’s an interesting expression – by heart. It goes in your heart. Then you can remember it in times when you don’t have a book to hand, and be comforted.

So you have launched a poetry for therapy book, a bibliotherapy charity, and this forthcoming FurtureLearn course on poetry and mental health. What is the long-term goal?

Definitely we want to raise awareness. We’re working with prisons and schools, using poetry for relaxation and well-being. My long-term plan is to get the anthology into hospitals and surgeries when they’re in stressful situations. It could be helpful for people to have access to nutritious literature. It’s food for the soul as opposed to fast food. Words have a particular power. They can give hope too.

I’m interested in the FutureLearn course and how one sets one up.

11,500 thousand have signed up for our course already. It’s the first time a mental health course has been launched, I think they’re quite staggered by the sign up rate. Around 2000 are already chatting to each other on the forum, sharing what poems they love. There’s some really interesting anecdotal evidence of people saying ‘this poem really helped’.

How is it structured?

It’s a six week course, with six themes and six videos. Most of the videos are 10 minutes long but some of them were so good – Stephen Fry was so good talking about Keats for an hour, we couldn’t cut it. We have a medical expert talking about each theme, like heartbreak, for example. We get the medical angle. And then we might look at Sense & Sensibility, and how the two sisters deal with heartbreak in different ways. Each week, we look at two or three ppems, and passages from novels. We also give lots of recommendations for extra reading. Then people can also discuss the poems or any other questions on the forum. Jonathan and I are giving feedback each week. We’re very much supporting the learners.

Is this the first online course you’ve done?

Jonathan has done a Shakespeare course which did very well, so he has thousands of MOOC [Massive Open Online Course] followers. It’s very global – people right across the world have done the course.

How easy is it to make a MOOC?

I’m a creative fellow at Warwick. They’re very forward thinking, they realize MOOCs are the way forward. The main platform is FutureLearn, which is part of the Open University. Each university signs up via the FutureLearn platform. Warwick is very professional, very good at filming and editing. I think they’re really at the forefront, and it’s very good for their impact and outreach.

Bowie’s genius versus Eno’s scenius

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Jules Evans

This essay asks if there is such a thing as ‘individual creative genius’ or whether it’s a product of socio-cultural networks. It associates these two views with David Bowie and his collaborator Brian Eno, respectively.

In the mid-19th century, the grand old sage of Victorian culture, Thomas Carlyle, was worried that Christianity was wearing out, that the West needed a ‘new mythus’ to bind us together and connect us to the infinite. Carlyle decided that a substitute for the worship of Christ might be the worship of heroes, ‘these great ones; the modellers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain’. He had in mind prophets like Mohammad, poets like Byron and political leaders like Napoleon. Worship of genius would become ‘the final religion’, as Will Durant would put it. Carlyle’s vision came true – throughout the 19th and early 20th century, we saw the rise of the cult of the national hero or genius – Napoleon, Garibaldi, Ataturk, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Putin, and so on.

Then, at the very end of the 19th century, Oscar Wilde adapted Carlyle’s idea to create the modern cult of personality, or celebrity. As he wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray, ‘personalities, not principles, move the age’. Wilde realized you didn’t need to establish a nation or religion to create your own cult of personality. You just needed to be beautiful, witty, fascinating and well-publicized. Where Carlyle saw genius as this deep, spiritual connector to the divine, Wilde suggested a celebrity could be an empty amoral mask – and still be fascinating. ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances’, declares the aesthete Lord Henry. ‘The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’ Where the Victorian Carlyle strove for sincerity and earnestness, Wilde embraced wit, irony, epigrams, paradox, the play of masks – the only sin is to be ugly or boring. In Wilde’s aesthetic vision, the wit, the dandy, the actress and the supermodel are the creative elite, the new gods, those allowed to live by their own rules and explore every facet of their personality and desires, to realize that ‘man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations’. Meanwhile, everyone else – the boring masses – copies the gods, emulates them, not really living their own life at all, they become ‘an echo of someone else’s music’.

Wilde self-consciously established himself, when still in his early twenties, as a new god, a genius, the guiding spirit of his age, the Grand Fascinator, its pre-eminent critic, author, wit, personality and trend-setter. His life would be his greatest work of art. But life-as-performance-art has its risks – when you turn yourself into a work of art, you commodify and objectify yourself. You live and die in the eyes of the public. One senses a deep terror of being exposed, shamed, ostracised and scape-goated in the author of Dorian Gray. The public might not like certain aspects of you, you may have to hide some of yourself which then gets revealed (as Dorian’s shadow eventually gets revealed). Or you may find yourself stuck on your pedestal, stuck playing a role, like the Happy Prince. You might be like Sibyl Vane, the actress that Dorian Gray falls in love with, but only when she is performing a part. As soon as she is herself, he dumps her. This situation would play out in real life later, when Wilde’s young lover Bosie wrote to him: ‘when you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting.’ There is a moral anxiety running through Dorian Gray – is life really just a play of appearances and masks? Is there never a moral reckoning with what’s within? The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard saw this same problem with aestheticism in his book Either / Or, which is a sort of dialogue between an ethicist and an aesthete (between Carlyle and Wilde, if you like). And the ethicist says:

Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it?

Wilde was terrified by this midnight hour, and you can see him in his art trying to work out the two sides of his personality – the ethicist and the aesthete, the Platonist and the Sophist, trying to be beautiful and fascinating, but also yearning to be spiritually whole and good. Dorian Gray is a brilliant portrayal of the self-division and corruption of living your life as a work of art, and in his children’s stories you see him trying to evolve, to go beyond being a beautiful mask, to embrace his shadow and become whole and individuated (there are several Beauty and the Beast-type stories where the hero meets and takes pity on a tramp-figure, and this leads to a magical transformation). But Wilde failed to evolve, and ended up condemned by the public – his inner psychodrama played out on the public stage, horribly.

Wilde predicted how British culture would develop after WWII, after the decline of the cult of Christianity and the cult of empire. Britain became what Dominic Sandbrook called the Great British Dream Factory, forging identities and attitudes for the world to gaze at and buy into. Pop culture became a new religion – as John Lennon would say, the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. David Bowie was very conscious of pop as cult – ‘til there was rock you only had God’, he once quipped. He embraced the Wildean idea of life as art, and modelled himself – or Ziggy Stardust – as a Wildean hero, a great man, a genius, a pattern for the masses to follow. He was an advanced being, an alien from the future, a starman, a homo superior, a catalyst, a funky instigator, what Shelley called the ‘legislator of the age’ and Ezra Pound called ‘the antenna of the race’. And, as in Wilde’s vision, the masses are just replicants or zombies. The genius makes a gesture, and the masses copy it like zombies – this is the message of the Fashion video. This cult of personality easily becomes fascistic. At the height of his cocaine-psychosis in 1976, Bowie declared: ‘I’d love to enter politics….I will one day. I’d adore to be Prime Minister. And yes, I believe very strongly in Fascism. The only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air at the moment is the progress of a right-wing totally dictatorial tyranny and get it over with as fast as possible’. From the self as art, to society as grand canvas for the genius’ dreams. And so Bowie existed for a while in the midnight hour between Sally Bowles and Hitler. But Bowie was too restless to stay long in his own cult, too inventive, he was constantly excommunicating himself from his own religion. ‘As soon as you’re on safe ground, you’re dead.’ He relentlessly smashed his own idols. Fans turned up to gigs dressed as Ziggy, and he was already on to the next one. He managed to maintain an outsider perspective, throughout his career, and this is part of the secret of his long fecundity. As Jonah Lehrer wrote in Imagine: ‘outsider creativity isn’t a phase of life, it’s a state of mind’.

For eleven years, from 1969 to 1980, Bowie was the white heat powering the Great British Dream Factory, as it pounded out the ch-ch-ch-changes, relentlessly mass-producing new poses, new attitudes, new lifestyles for the youth market. It was an astonishingly creative period – he wrote a classic album every year, each in a markedly different style, each inspiring a whole subculture. It is comparable to Bob Dylan’s creative peak, from 1962 to 1966, or the great creative spurts of geniuses like Coleridge and Wordsworth, or Walt Whitman, when they channel the spirit of the age, before the creative daemon departs as abruptly as it arrived. We recognize it as genius. But what is genius? What is this power that sometimes appears in certain people in certain scenes at certain times? Where does it come from? Where does it go? Is it within, in genes, in the individual’s soul, or without, in their socio-historical circumstances? I’m going to argue it’s both – it’s in the interplay between a genius’ unique psychology, and the unique lucky circumstances of their time.

The Myers-type genius as mediator between the subliminal and the supraliminal

One of the best psychological theories of genius I’ve come across is from Frederic Myers, the great British psychologist who developed what William James considered the most comprehensive theory of the subliminal mind, by which he meant those aspects of the psyche which are beyond ordinary consciousness. Myers defined geniuses as those who are particularly receptive to ‘uprushes’ from the subliminal mind, in the form of flashes of inspiration, insight, vision and epiphany. People like Nietzsche, who wrote: ‘one can hardly reject completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, or mouthpiece, or medium of some almighty power…One hears – one does not seek; one takes – one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like lightning’. Myers speculated the subliminal mind might be particularly associated with the right hemisphere, and there is now some evidence that creative insights are born there, but it’s early days for that theory. In any case, the barrier between the subliminal and the supraliminal is unusually permeable in geniuses, as in psychotics. Their openness to the subliminal explains why geniuses may often be quite nutty, and fall prey to nutty ideas – Newton believing in alchemy and apocalyptic prophecies, Nikola Tesla’s quasi-erotic obsession with pigeons. But rather than being overwhelmed by the contents of the subliminal mind, as a psychotic is, a genius is able to order them into a scientific theory or a work of art, using their supraliminal mind (ie their reason, discernment and will). Geniuses are ‘amphibian’, as Seamus Heaney described the poet Robert Lowell, able to descend into the slimy depths like Orpheus, and come back intact. They may use certain techniques to invoke their subliminal mind – reverie, dreams, visualization, self-hypnosis, meditation, drugs, the occult – or they may simply know when to stop thinking and go for a walk, as Charles Darwin did.

Bowie as Tesla in The Prestige

While some contemporary psychologists like Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso thought geniuses were pathological degenerates, Myers thought geniuses were actually instances of the evolution of homo sapiens. The subliminal mind was, he believed, not just personal but suprapersonal – it extended outwards to other people (he believed in telepathy and clairvoyance), to the dead, and to the past and future. It contained the seeds of the future, and the genius’ hyper-sensitive antennae pick up the frequency and relays it back to their own time, in the form of new ideas, new visions, new worlds. The genius is supernormal – ‘something which transcends existing normality as an advanced stage of evolutionary progress transcends an earlier stage.’

The genius is able to live and work at the jagged edge between the subliminal and supraliminal minds

Bowie fits Myers’ definition of genius. Where his half-brother Terry was overwhelmed by the contents of his subconscious, and committed to a mental health facility for schizophrenia, David managed to maintain an uneasy dialogue between his supraliminal mind and the volcano of the subliminal. ‘I’m quite Jungian’, he said in an interview for Uncut magazine in 1999. ‘The fine line between the dream state and reality is, at times, quite grey. Combining the two, the place where the two worlds come together, has been important in some of the things I’ve written.’ He was prone to hallucinations, even before the cocaine psychosis of the mid-1970s. The lyric from Oh You Pretty Things (from the 1971 album Hunky Dory) – ‘crack in the sky and a hand reaching down to me’ – described a vision he’d had. He also opened up to the subliminal using techniques like meditation, free association, the occult, Surrealist techniques like cut-ups or Eno’s oblique strategies, sleep deprivation, and long drug-binges. He thought of his waking dreams as prophetic for his era. ‘The idea of having seen the future, of somewhere we’ve already been, keeps coming back to me’. He played out his waking dreams in archetypal figures – Ziggy was, he said, ‘an archetype’, so was the astronaut Major Tom, the alien Thomas Newton, the Pierrot, the thin white duke. They were all aspects of his psyche, his personal psycho-drama. The psychologist Jerome Bruner thought one of the secrets of the creative personality was a willingness to explore the drama between aspects of the self. Bruner wrote in On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand:

There is within each person his own cast of characters — an ascetic, and perhaps a glutton, a prig, a frightened child, a little man, even an onlooker, sometimes a Renaissance man. The great works of the theater are decompositions of such a cast, the rendering into external drama of the internal one, the conversion of the internal cast into dramatis personae… It is the working out of conflict and coalition within the set of identities that compose the person that one finds the source of many of the richest and most surprising combinations. It is not merely the artist and the writer, but the inventor too who is the beneficiary.

The risk with Bowie’s psychodrama, as with Wilde’s, is that it was played out so very publicly, with the deafening feedback of public adulation. The personae his subliminal self threw out were then taken up and adopted by the adoring masses as identities. So he’d create and put forward one particular persona – Ziggy – and the audience sucked it up, consumed it, and demanded it again. The drug of public adulation, and the money and power-games that come with it, can imprison the artist in one role, which they have to fit into while hiding any parts of their psyche that don’t fit that role (Ziggy is brash and confident, but Bowie was more complex than that). Each beautiful mask you put forward creates a shadow, a dark doppleganger, of all that is left out. Bowie says he felt haunted by Ziggy – ‘that fucker wouldn’t leave me alone…I think I put myself very dangerously near the line’. He came so close to self-destruction, so close to losing himself. Yet he managed to let go of each mask and confront and recognize the shadow, as he describes it in the very Jungian song Shadow Man:

Look in his eyes and see your reflection
Look to the stars and see his eyes
He’ll show you tomorrow, he’ll show you the sorrow
Of what you did today
You can call him his foe, you can call him his friend
You should call and see who arrives
For he knows your eyes are drawn to the road ahead
And the shadow man is waiting for you round the bend
Oh the shadow man o o o
It’s really you

Bowie managed, unlike so many rock prophets before him, to ‘keep formation, mid the fall-out saturation’. And that was partly through a spiritual seriousness, behind all the irony and masks. He ultimately put spiritual wholeness higher than the screaming feedback of fame. If you want to hear an artist taking themselves to the very brink of madness and dissolution, and coming through it, listen to Station to Station, made at his very lowest, when he was psychotic on cocaine and obsessed with the occult, conjuring demons who threatened to devour him. And listen particularly to Word on a Wing, where he kneels to God and begs for his help, with seering sincerity and desperation:

In this age of grand illusion, you walked into my life out of my dreams
I don’t need another change, still you forced a way into my scheme of things
You say we’re growing, growing heart and soul
In this age of grand delusion, you walked into my life out of my dreams
Sweet name, you’re born once again for me
Sweet name, you’re born once again for me
Oh sweet name, I call you again, you’re born once again for me
Just because I believe don’t mean I don’t think as well
Don’t have to question everything in heaven nor hell

Lord I kneel and offer you, my word on a wing
And I’m trying hard to fit among your scheme of things
It’s safer than a strange land, but I still care for myself
And I don’t stand in my own light

‘The demonic and irrational have a very disquieting share in that radiant sphere [of genius] and that there is always a faint, sinister connection between it and the nether world’. Thomas Mann, Dr Faustus

That is the sound of Dr Faustus at the midnight hour, miraculously being saved rather than torn apart. And what you get in Low and Heroes (the albums which followed Station to Station) is a sort of spiritual triumph. I fucking made it through! As he put it: ‘I saw a light at the end of the tunnel, and it wasn’t a train coming.’

But if Bowie had an unusual openness to the subliminal mind, he also managed to shape and steer it with his supraliminal or conscious mind. This is the difference between the genius and the eccentric or psychotic. Bowie had amazing powers of control and discernment in the artistic process, even during Station to Station, ‘a work of precision and focus and exquisitely controlled power’, as the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis wrote this week. He was very open to the unexpected and spontaneous – king of the first take – but he also knew what he didn’t want. He had discernment. The inventor Jacob Rabinow said that if you want to be an original thinker ‘you must have the ability to get rid of the trash which you think of’. Nietzsche agreed: ‘All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.’

Brian Eno’s Scenius

The Romantic myth of the solitary genius in a garrett

Bowie, then, was a genius of the Myers-type – able to live on that jagged edge between the subliminal and supraliminal. But is this model of genius too individualistic? Are we indulging the Romantic myth of the solitary genius alone in his garrett, like the figure on the cover of Kierkegaard’s Either / Or which Bowie seemed to nod to in his final video for Lazarus? There is another, more collaborative, model of genius, which Bowie’s ‘soul-mate’ Brian Eno has outlined, called ‘scenius’. This refers to ‘the talent of the whole community’ – Florence in the Renaissance, British pop culture in the last half-century – when ‘new ideas are articulated by individuals but generated by the whole community’.

Bowie as sponge-brain

Bowie was this kind of ‘scenius’ too. Firstly, he had a sort of sponge-brain, able to soak up and retain impressions and ideas from his environment, as a cloud absorbs moisture until it bursts in lightning. Different cities were important to his creativity as inspirations – New York, LA, Berlin. He absorbed these environments like a fly stuck in milk, as he put it. In this, he was like David Byrne of Talking Heads, who has described cities as his ‘muse’: ‘If you look and listen in a city, then your mind gets expanded automatically’, Byrne says in Lehrer’s Imagine.

Sponge-brain Bowie had an amazing memory-bank of ideas. He said:

I’ve always found I’m a collector. And I collect personalities, ideas…Everything I read, every film I saw, every bit of theatre, everything went into my mind as an influence. I’d think ‘that’s going in the memory bank’.

This vast memory-bank enabled him to assemble ideas and impressions, and then bring them together into unusual combinations – sci-fi, Dietrich movies, French chansons, continental philosophy, rhythm and blues, Bertolt Brecht, German techno, the occult, mime, Gnosticism, Japanese theatre. Memory is key to creativity – they knew this in the Middle Ages, when invention was understood to be closely tied to the inventory or storehouse of the memory. Medieval monks and Renaissance magi used memory-training techniques like the ‘mind palace’ as a way of storing information to use for composition. Mozart was also apparently so prodigiously creative partly thanks to his memory. He wrote in a letter: ‘When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out my bag of memories, if I may use that phrase…For this reason the committing to paper is done quickly enough.’ This miraculous memory – he was said to be able to memorize an entire symphony having listened to it just once – enabled him to improvise new combinations. We see that power in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, a play about genius, when Mozart instantly recalls Salieri’s composition and immediately begins improvising something better out of it.

Bob Dylan also puts his creativity down to his juke-box memory, able to file away songs and ideas to draw on in his own compositions. He said in a fascinating speech last year:

For three or four years, all I listened to were folk standards. I went to sleep singing folk songs. I sang them everywhere, clubs, parties, bars, coffeehouses, fields, festivals…If you sang “John Henry” as many times as me – “John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.” If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written “How many roads must a man walk down?” too…There’s nothing secret about it. You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that’s all enough, and that’s all you know.

The secret of creativity, Dylan suggests, is ‘love and theft’ – curating your own inner juke-box or storehouse, and then shamelessly plundering it. Oscar Wilde agreed: ‘It is only the unimaginative who invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.’

To be a great artist, you need to be a great critic, or rather, a great fan, loving what other people do, able to draw off them, absorb their influence without being possessed by it, and able to shake off or exorcise that influence when it’s time to move on, as Dylan channelled and then exorcised Guthrie, as Bowie channelled and then exorcised Dylan. And part of Bowie’s ‘scenius’ was also his genius for picking amazing collaborators – his wife Angie, Mick Ronson, Tony Visconti, Carlos Alomar, Robert Fripp, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Brian Eno. He could be incredibly generous in his support for other talent he considered overlooked, like Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. But there is also something agonistic in his collaborations – agon as in struggle. Harold Bloom understood the extent to which creativity is agonistic – there is another artist we admire, either living or dead, and there is a struggle to emulate and surpass, and creativity comes from that struggle. Lennon wrestles with McCartney, the Beatles wrestle with the Stones. Brian Wilson hears Sgt Pepper and makes Pet Sounds. And so on.

Bowie’s genius, then, was both internal – a product of his unique personality, the volcano of his subliminal mind matched with the cognitive power of his supraliminal mind – and external, in the circumstances and partnerships in which he found himself.

The dangerous cults of pop and religion

So what about Blackstar? What does his final testimony mean? As an early stab at it, I’d suggest it’s an exploration of his oldest theme – the cult of pop culture, its relationship to the older cult of religion, and how both can turn people into zombies. In the video for Blackstar, we see a jewel-encrusted skull in an astronaut suit (the remains of Major Tom?) which is carried solemnly into a circle by a devil-priestess with a tail. ‘On the day of execution’, he sings, ‘only women kneel and smile’, which reminds me of Dylan’s ‘they’re selling postcards of the hanging’. The skull is placed in a circle of women, who go into a sort of possessed trance, and dance – cut to three figures also dancing, possessed, in an attic. The dance they do is just like the dance done by the zombie-fashionistas in the video for Fashion, which Bowie described as being about how young people can be like ‘lemmings’ following the ‘dictatorial will’ of trend-setters (‘listen to me, don’t listen to me’). Bowie seems again to be suggesting that pop culture can be fascistic, that religious cults like ISIS can also be fascistic – we end up zombies following false prophets like Ziggy (who had ‘screwed-up eyes’ like the blind prophet in the Blackstar video), who only lead us on a road to nowhere. In Blackstar, he sings like a huckster-priest luring us to Syria:

I can’t answer why
Just go with me
I’m-a take you home
Take your passport and shoes
And your sedatives, boo
You’re a flash in the pan
I’m the Great I Am

The irony is, we’re all now dancing round his skull, obsessed and possessed by him, just like he predicted. We all need something to worship and copy, it saves us from having to think for themselves. But there’s a risk of worshipping false idols – is there a higher light behind the blackstar? Bowie said in 1997, ‘there’s an abiding need in me to vacillate between atheism and gnosticism. I keep going back and forth between these two things’. I hope he found a light and can tell us all about it in the next Bardo.

Here’s an interview I did with Brian Eno a couple of years back, on how the arts and religion help us surrender and go beyond the ego. And here’s one I did with David Byrne on how the arts help us achieve a post-religious ecstasy and catharsis.

Letting Go and Holding Tight

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Jules Evans

This is a guest-post by Dr Julie Walsh, global research fellow in sociology at the University of Warwick.

yellobluepink by Anna Veronica Janssens (image from Wellcome Collection)

Forgetting a word, a dream … I look for it, I don’t find it, it will come back to me. We have trouble admitting that what took place in us, was ours, can, like that, abruptly move away, vanish, be erased, disappear, not to be saved, dying. Falling permanently into the forgotten.

J-B Pontalis, Windows

A lost dream is a common complaint. Perhaps it seems wasteful that the vivid and surreal experiences that may occasionally delight us in sleep begin to fade before we’ve even woken up. If dreaming is taken as evidence of everyman’s latent artistry, then why wouldn’t we want to retain proof of it?

Ann Veronica Janssens’ installation work, yellowbluepink, and Broomberg & Chanarin’s Every piece of dust on Freud’s couch are two recent London exhibitions that allow us to think about the hazy distinction between dream states and waking life. Both works question the limitations of ordinary sense perception: Jannsens’ by obfuscating that which should be as plain as the nose on your face, Broomberg & Chanarin’s by reminding us how the small matter of the past leaves its trace in the present. I offer the following reflections on these two art projects by way of an engagement with psychoanalysis, a discipline that works in the service of trying to see things clearly. Sometimes this involves the close investigation of a minute particle of a patient’s material – days, if not months and years, might be spent splitting a single hair on the couch. But sometimes, seeing clearly requires a less forensic approach: to allow everything to fall out of focus, to loosen our grip on familiar and intimate objects, in order that they can be reencountered in a different state of mind.

yellowbluepink is the title of Ann Veronica Janssens’ installation work, which is first to feature in the Wellcome Collection’s ongoing series States of Mind. The colours of Janssens’ title refer to the play of pastel light diffused throughout approximately 180 square meters of gallery space that you enter via air locked doors. In between the mists of yellow, blue and pink hang green, orange, red, indigo – enticing you to roam around the colour spectrum, experiencing the collapse of background and foreground, surface and depth, characteristic of dream states more so than waking life.

yellowbluepink by Anna Veronica Janssesns (image from Wellcome collection)

By way of preparation for the disorienting effects of the installation, you are advised to move slowly once inside, not to lie down at any point, and if you do feel uncomfortably off-kilter to make contact with a parameter wall and follow it round to the exit. These words of advice are welcome for this is indeed a rare and immersive space which suspends ordinary perceptual registers, and in which you are invited, somehow, to lose yourself. As an aesthetic experience that speaks directly to the body, yellowbluepink provokes a degree of disembodiment – people negotiate the space with their arms stretched out in front of them, as if their eyeballs had dropped down to their fingertips. Consequently, you’re likely to emerge from the experience affected: perhaps bewildered, agitated, or quietly contemplative. The sensory immediacy lingers once you have walked back through the air locked doors and are confronted with the change of mood – your own, and that of your immediate environment. On the occasions of my visit, I overheard descriptions of the installation’s dreamlike or filmic qualities; a woman remarked to her companion that it was like being dropped into Monet’s Water Lillies, and a small boy explained to his carer that he was ‘warmest’ in the yellow, but now he needed his coat back on.

If, as I have interpreted it, Janssens’ work can be taken as an invitation to lose oneself, then we might imagine that it stages similar pleasures (and problems) to those rehearsed in childhood when, through variations of peek-a-boo and hide-and-seek, we begin to experiment with the phenomenon of vanishing.

When I visited the installation with a friend, we kept playing a game together: we would stand side-by-side somewhere in the centre of the room, before one of us would walk away from the other. After only a few steps, the walker would glance back over their shoulder and, already, the other one wasn’t there to be seen. As soon as the space opened up between us, the coloured mists rushed in to obscure that which we expected to remain in view.

Conversely, in this generalised myopia, people came into focus too suddenly, an entire body and face – a stranger’s face – would abruptly break through the magical distance of an arm’s length, and place itself within reach. ‘I didn’t see you there!’ I could have said to the ghostly figures that seized my attention with their unexpected proximity. All of this to-ing and fro-ing, this peek-ing and boo-ing, put me in mind of the famous ‘Fort/Da!’ game that so intrigued Sigmund Freud.

‘Fort/Da!’ is the game Freud observed his eighteen-month old grandson playing: The child was amusing himself by repeatedly throwing a wooden bobbin over the side of his cot in order to declare with delight that it had ‘gone’ (fort), before using the thread still attached to the bobbin at one end and secure in his small hand at the other, to pull back the object he’d vanquished just moments earlier, declaring with equal delight its return (da!). The pleasure that the child takes from playing disappearance and return with his toys is understood as the pleasure of mastering the absence of a loved object. Because mothers, like all loved objects, are always threatening to remove themselves from the child’s presence (cue ‘separation anxiety’), then the capacity to dictate the movements of a substitute object – indeed, to keep the substitute object hanging by a thread – is understood to satisfy the child’s need to assert his command over his environment, and perhaps satisfy his desire to punish those elements of his environment that disrupt his easy play.

It was me, rather than my friend, who initiated our game of disappearance and return, and me who insisted on doing most of the walking away. I found there to be something strangely addictive about the glance over my shoulder that confirmed that, at a distance of just a few feet, my friend already wasn’t there to be seen. It was as if I’d disappeared her. And how I enjoyed my little magic trick! But as novel as this was, it was also intensely familiar.

Around about the same time as Freud was watching his grandson’s tireless engagement with the wooden bobbin, he was developing his account of the uncanny (un/heimlich). Though expressing some caution regarding the application of his science to the field of aesthetics, Freud clearly felt he could contribute to the extant literature on the topic; primarily, he suspected that it was not sufficient to say that the uncanny was ‘something one does not know one’s way about in’. The peculiar, contradictory sensations experienced under the sign of the uncanny could not, for Freud, be satisfactorily accounted for on the basis that ‘the better orientated in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it’. In other words, environmental adaptation doesn’t cut it, for no matter how rehearsed we are – how many times the child throws down and then retrieves his toy – there is something that cannot be mastered. Which means that to identify ‘intellectual uncertainty’ as the ‘essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness’ is to miss the point.

But what, then, is the point?

Only the vanishing point of death. Freud supplements the story of his grandson’s ‘Fort/Da!’ game with a further example from the child’s repertoire: this time, there is no bobbin, just the child and a mirror. The mirror, we should imagine, is free standing on the floor, with just enough of a gap at the bottom so that the child can crouch down low and remove his reflection from his sight. What next? Why, exactly the same! Disappearance and return. Freud comments that his grandson takes great joy in making ‘baby gone’, as if his early experiments in erasure are a lesson to us all.

Perhaps we are necessarily short-sighted with respect to death. Because even if we’re staring it in the face what can we truly say to it? Never enough. Can we ever, in fact, advance on ‘baby gone’? Death is the one state of mind (or state of non-mind) that we cannot know. And yet how hard we try to know it.

Broomberg & Chanarin’s Every piece of dust on Freud’s couch was commissioned by the Freud museum, the Hampstead house where Freud (and his couch) found respite in their final years of working life. Like any self-respecting domestic museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens assures its visitors that key areas have been maintained in the manner of their original usage. With the couch as its centrepiece, the museum privileges Freud’s study as the site that remains ‘preserved exactly as it was in his life time’.

The artists behind Every piece of dust deployed a team of forensic scientists to undertake an analysis of the Persian Qashqa’i rug that has adorned Freud’s couch for the last 125 years or so. Predictably, in amongst the household dust retained in the rug’s pile was protein from skin, hair, and cloth fibres containing human DNA. These findings were captured in a series of high-resolution radiographic quartz images, which then provided the visual template for a set of large woven tapestries constructed to the same dimensions as the original rug upon which Freud’s patients famously lay. Throughout October and November of this year, the first of the woven tapestries could be viewed in situ on the couch at the Freud museum representing an ‘abstracted portrait of one of its sitters’.

Every piece of dust on Freud’s couch, The Freud Museum, London, 2015, image © Broomberg & Chanarin

Within the context of a familiar homely aesthetic – the dark furnishings, the rugs on the floor, the heavy velvet curtains, the stone busts, the leather armchair, the shelves lined with books, and Freud’s treasured collection of antiques and curios – the temporary technicolor couch cover strikes an odd note. Reminiscent of a gaudy beach towel perhaps, thrown down by the scientists from the future seeking to colonise the most sought-after lounger at the Freud hotel.

It is fitting that Every piece of dust foregrounds the psychoanalytic truism that rarely do we know what lies beneath the surface, for so much of what is noteworthy in this artwork remains, necessarily, out of sight. Most obviously, we don’t get to see the process behind the final piece: the point at which the forensic team entered the museum in their protective white suits, with their tools in their gloved hands, and gathered the evidence for inspection. Nor do we receive much insight into the rationale behind the project; what did the artists imagine would be revealed in their capture of the microscopic life of the couch? And how might the work of bringing such matter to life be in keeping with the activity of psychoanalysis (or, for that matter, museum curatorship)?

Now, of course, it might be said that because the artwork is obliged to speak for itself, my desire for the artists to make plain something of their background thinking is entirely besides the point (though where better to confess this desire than in front of Freud’s couch?). However, it mattered to me what the conceptual coordinates were for this project: how forensic science was being brought to bear on a space of dreaming and fantasy; whether the often misguided notion that technology helps us to know more – to see more clearly – was being challenged here, or simply reproduced. It also mattered to me that the guiding metaphor might be that of material evidence: the idea that the closer we get to something – the more evidence we have – the better equipped we are. But equipped for what?

The accompanying text to the exhibit explained that the human DNA extracted from the rug’s pile ‘may include traces of Freud’s early patients such as ‘Dora’, and the ‘Wolf Man’. What are we to make of this? Surely such an assertion could only excite the type of fetishist for whom ‘evidence’ has become the sought-after object. And isn’t this precisely the type of fetishist that now populates our public discourse; the man of science who is looking for proof of his existence – in his brain, in his genes, in his DNA. Fantasies of detection abound in psychoanalysis as elsewhere. Like the reconstruction of a crime scene, the trick seems to be that we can piece it all together if we locate the right evidence, and hold on tight to it: then, once we’ve found ourselves, we can close the case!

The framing of Janssen’s yellowbluepink installation moves us in a different direction; it is a space that contains the potential to play with the experience of vanishing. Although it isn’t in fact possible to go so very far without being brought back to the common boundaries of everyday life: the plug sockets at shin level were discernible from about three meters, as were the lines where the wall panels joined, and, when you looked up, the infrastructure of the lighting was easily detectable. Personally, I resented these reminders that I was in a curated and finite environment which would, in time, be dismantled and returned to the mundane laws of the everyday. I came away from Janssen’s installation wanting to be set further adrift from my friend, and further adrift from myself. A deeper immersion in the mist would have meant a more intensive disconnect from the horizons of my mind’s eye – further to fall, in other words, and a more prolonged rehearsal in letting go.

yellowbluepink is on at the Wellcome Collection until 3rd January 2016. Every piece of dust on Freud’s couch is no longer viewable at the Freud Museum, though dates have been announced for its tour in 2016-17 on the artists’ website.

Crying in the archive: The story of Diana Bromley

Posted on December 21, 2015 by Sara Hiorns

Sara Hiorns is a doctoral researcher at Queen Mary University of London. She was awarded an AHRC studentship in 2013 for the project, ‘The diplomatic service family at home and abroad since 1945’ which is joint supervised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Queen Mary. She has worked for HM Diplomatic Service since 2004, and is working on a novel that attempts to deal with the aftermath of the Kindertransports, via children’s memories of migration. You can follow Sara on Twitter: @TheHiorns. In this post Sara reflects on her own British heritage and the experience of unexpectedly crying in the archive while undertaking historical research.She is currently writing a book on Diana Bromley.

This blog post is about the day I cried in an archive.

As I get older, I’ve found myself being moved to tears more often, but like some of Mass Observation’s lachrymose cinema-goers of 1950 who appear in Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia, I too feel self-conscious, embarrassed and foolish when this happens. If you were to ask me why I feel this way, I would make the telling joke, “It’s because I’m British.” People often remark on my pronounced Britishness. They say it comes out in my well-made cups of tea and my sense of humour.

When I left the British Library (where the unfortunate incident took place) that day I bumped into Rhodri Hayward from the Centre for the History of the Emotions. I felt washed out and that my mascara had suffered (and also hugely moved but never mind about that) so I invoked my humour immediately “You’ll be interested in this,” I said, “I just wept freely in an archive.” “Write us a blog post,” Rhodri said.

C. R. W. Nevinson’s 1940 painting captured the Blitz spirit. It was entitled, ‘Cockney Stoic; or Camden Town Kids Don’t Cry’.

Although I’d said I’d think about it, I had no intention of writing a blog post. Dixon comments in Weeping Britannia that throughout his lifetime “stiff upper lips have been slackening” (p. 4) and though I wouldn’t imagine there’s a huge difference in our ages I’d say that process has largely passed me by. My older parents had both lived through the war (my Dad in the Western Desert, my Mum in the London blitz) and had not so much conveyed as hammered home to me that crying was, in their favourite expression, “weak-kneed”.

Later, at home, the content of the material that had made me cry kept coming to mind, along with my unusual reaction to it and I began to see that there were similarities between the people I’d been reading about and myself. We shared national characteristics (and the spectre of a world war), we shared a career and we shared a reluctance or inability to express ourselves adequately. Curious, I thought I would write a blog post after all, and this is it.

Sitting in the British Library Newsroom in front of a microfilm copy of The Daily Express for 5 December 1958 I wrote in my notebook:

Diana – at home

Tom – at Cabinet Office

Boys – at school. 13 days left alive

Since 2013, when I took a sabbatical from my Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) job to begin a PhD on the children of British diplomats in the postwar period, I’d been aware of the story of Diana Bromley. My supervisor, QMUL’s Helen McCarthy, gave me a sneak preview of the final chapter of her book Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat which begins with a description of the Bromley case. Bromley, a wife and daughter of British diplomats was, according to the Senior Medical Officer at Holloway Prison, suffering from ‘melancholia’ when she killed her two sons, Martin aged 13 and Stephen, 10, and tried to kill herself on 18 December 1958. The murders gave rise to a greater interest in (hitherto neglected) pastoral care for Foreign Office families and led to the formation of the Foreign Service Wives’ Association in 1960.

I found it difficult to find direct relevance in the Bromley case. I felt it was a tragic catalyst for positive change, but in no way a typical example of diplomatic family life. It was difficult even to advance the theory that the Foreign Office was in some way to blame for what happened. A 10-minute court hearing on 18 February 1959 found that Diana Bromley was unfit to plead due to insanity and that she had been treated in mental hospitals three times in the past: her mental illness was an established fact.

Then, in August this year James Southern, my FCO/QMUL colleague who’s working on social diversity in the Foreign Office, sent me part of an interview he’d conducted with two elderly retired diplomats. Talking about the phenomenon of the Foreign Office wife, they stressed the need for resilience in unfamiliar and demanding climates, and within the negligent and equally demanding hierarchy. Their generation of wives had managed well, they felt, because they had lived through the war. But they mentioned one exception, a woman they described as “Eurasian”, and not “pure” British, who “hadn’t known how to integrate”. She, they said, had become very isolated and depressed and had killed her children and herself.

An image of Joan Hunter Dunn (later known as Sir John Betjeman’s muse) as headgirl of her school in the 1930s. (c) John Morrison, via The Today Programme website.

I was fascinated by what I read. The FCO seemed to have given rise to not one, but two child murderers: it seemed impossible. But I also knew that Diana Bromley was the daughter of an extremely distinguished British diplomat and well known specialist in the Far East, Sir John Pratt. There was no way, I felt sure, that Bromley could be described as “Eurasian” – that outmoded catch-all for people who weren’t quite-quite – what we’d now describe as “mixed race”. It was extremely unlikely that someone who had had a Foreign Office career in the early years of the twentieth century (Diana was born in 1918 while the Pratts were in China) would have made an inter-racial marriage. In my mind’s eye, I persisted with a very English image of Bromley: a Joan Hunter Dunn, raw-boned and gawky. I couldn’t believe that she might lack resilience. Maybe, I speculated, her status as an old hand made her scornful of the new wives, maybe they had been in awe of her pedigree – maybe it was a class thing?

It was also an interesting situation from a research point of view, illustrating as it did the limitations of the oral history interview, a method that has formed a large part of my research. Surely it threw into question the integrity of the recollections of those who’d lived long and full lives? I went around making discreet inquiries about a second set of child murders related to the Foreign Office but got nowhere. In the end, I asked James if he could go back and ask the woman’s name and they told him it was Diana Bromley.

As soon as I heard this, I became desperate to see a picture of her, the Eurasian thing was a red herring I’d decided. James’ correspondents were mixing her up with someone else. This is why I elected to look at The Daily Express in the British Library. I’d glanced at The Times coverage in the past and found it an informative but dry account of the murders. I hoped The Express would be more detailed and that it would include photos.

But I know now, after a great deal of reflection, that I chose The Express for a reason. In her brilliant article “Touching the void: Affective history and the impossible”(2010) Emily Robinson attempts to unravel the “intensity of the archival encounter” by examining the historian’s emotional responses to archive material (and the archive itself) and suggesting possible explanations for them. It’s Robinson’s contention that “Emotions govern both our choices of topic and the ways in which we approach research.” Even those historians – like many of those I’ve encountered in Whitehall, who set great store by their objectivity – approach their goal in an emotional way, investing objectivity with emotion, making it “a kind of historian’s super-ego” as Robinson nicely puts it.

I didn’t, I realise now, choose the Daily Express for reasons of objectivity. Quite the reverse. When I was growing up it was my Dad’s paper of choice and he had read it throughout his life. In 1958 he would have read it sitting in the home he shared with his first wife, smoking his way through the 60 cigarettes he dispatched every day. He was forty three that year. As I wound through December 1958 I was aiming for a sense of what it had been like to live in England at the time but soon realised that I already had a good idea. My Mum, who had turned twenty three in August, had been enjoying life, and, a great teller of stories, had peopled my childhood with the characters who appeared regularly in the pages in front of me.

A 1958 Schweppes advertisement.

Thus I knew that in 1958 Duncan Campbell was the fastest man on earth and that there was still huge affection for Winston Churchill. As blondes went, Diana Dors was the home grown favourite while Jayne Mansfield received more coverage than fellow American Marilyn Monroe. My Mum had been a great fan of comedy. As I was growing up, we listened to and endlessly quoted The Goon Show and Hancock’s Half Hour – all of whose players were riding high. Peter Sellers was appearing in Brouhaha at the Victoria Palace, Hancock had gone on holiday “to the continent” with his wife. Suez still occupied the international news and the shaken public consciousness. Schweppes mixers were popular (“Have a schwepping good Christmas!”) and Babycham seemingly essential. The price of turkeys was down, setting Britain on course for its best Christmas dinner since the war. At the top of the hit-parade was Lord Rockingham XI with “Hoots Mon” (There’s a Moose Loose Aboot this Hoose) and I suddenly remembered my Mum once saying “That bloody song was everywhere one Christmas.”

As I read I thought about Diana’s sons, Martin and Stephen, at prep school in Kent, getting ready for the Christmas holidays. I wondered if they’d liked the silly pop song, the sort of thing that boys like. They must have been preparing end of term shows, singing carols, getting excited. According to reports they’d last seen their mother in November when she visited them for half term. If her depressive illness was obvious to them in the way it had been to others, did they get a chance to articulate this in the inexpressive prep school environment? Did they, like many of my interviewees when they remember their boarding school days, worry and feel responsible for her? By this time, Diana’s father Sir John was 82, and was becoming anxious and forgetful. She was his only child and they had spent a lot of time alone together after her mother’s death in 1937. The letters he wrote to her in the late fifties show his mounting concern. He urged her to come and stay with him: the spare room was comfy, he said. He tried to tempt her to London from her Surrey home with theatre tickets and lectures. He complained that when he telephoned she didn’t answer.

Tom Bromley, Diana’s husband, was the subject of the Daily Express headline on 20 December 1958 “SECRETS MAN FINDS HIS SCHOOLBOY SONS LYING DEAD.” (At this point Diana herself hadn’t been implicated.) Also included on the front page was the Bromleys’ wedding photo and I saw it with what Emily Robinson, describes as the “intense jolt of recognition” that accompanies “the shock of archival discovery” (p. 514). Diana Bromley was not the English type I had imagined. She was very beautiful and there was no doubt that she was mixed race. She stands in direct contrast to her husband’s pasty, cheerful Englishness. Even the article comments slyly on her “Eastern type of dark beauty.”

That sudden sight of Diana Bromley on the front page of a national paper made me cry. Robinson writes that “uncovering a key piece of evidence… confirming or unsettling a narrative will be familiar to any historian” (p. 507). If it makes sense at all, I felt that the confirmation of something unexpected had unsettled me. And yet, as crazy as it may sound, I felt that I’d always known how she’d look, almost that I’d seen her somewhere before. I was fascinated, then, when Rhodri sent me “Touching the Void” to read that Robinson posits psychoanalytic theory and, in particular, Freud’s theory of the unheimlich, the uncanny, as one possible explanation for the intensity of the historian’s reaction to archival material. She writes: “For Freud the unsettling nature of phantoms and coincidental repetitions is not their strangeness but their repressed familiarity” (p. 514).

As soon as I saw Diana Bromley’s photo and related it back to the remarks about her not being “pure British” I felt I knew that the way she looked, her “Eastern type of dark beauty” had in some way contributed to what had happened. She had become isolated. Why? Possibly because people talked behind her back about her being a “halfcaste”. I pictured my Dad, who took and failed the Civil Service exam in his teens, expressing horror that the kind of men he admired, ensconced in Whitehall – that supposed great powerhouse of the intellect – got married to women who could commit such visceral acts. I imagined the newspaper readers taking in details about the Bromleys’ home and lifestyle and reacting with wicked envy, having their suspicions about the callous way the upper class treated their children confirmed.

The sight of Diana Bromley provoked from me a gradual, then unstoppable flow of tears. Because I’m not a practised weeper I don’t have a ready formed strategy. I thought briefly about leaving to cry more privately in the Ladies, something suggested by Algo60, an online presence quoted in Weeping Britannia, who wrote “If you need to blub, go into the bog and do it privately” (p. 4). Algol60’s language is interesting, dated yet schoolboyish, suggesting a frustrated prep-school type. Rejecting the sudden exit, hand over face (something that often happened at my girls’ school) as further “making a show of myself” I hunched up and let the tears fall into my lap, wiping my face with my knuckles. Of course I didn’t have any tissues because I don’t often cry and I didn’t have a cold that day. I even formulated a story in case anyone was un-English enough to come to my aid (no one was, thank God). “Oh no,” I would have said, “I’m not crying – it’s a problem with my eyes which is exacerbated when I look at a microfiche machine.”

When I’ve spoken to people about Diana Bromley, some have suggested I have more sympathy for her than for the sons that she killed, or the others who were left behind. While I don’t for a moment condone what she did, I don’t blame anyone else in the case either. I think that the culture that held them is largely to blame. In particular the entrenched emotional stoicism of British culture of the late 1950s, 8 years after that sample of British society, some of whom had identified a difficulty, an unwillingness to express their feelings in response to the Mass Observation questionnaire about crying at the movies.

Diana Bromley’s two sons were probably so well steeped in the prep-school traditions of obedience to hierarchy that they were too well-trained to refuse to take the barbiturates she gave them on the day they died. Her elderly father was concerned for her but unable to say so, referring in letters to her three psychiatric hospital admissions as “The upset you had a little while ago.” The culture of the diplomat is in some way linked too; we are always looking for a “form of words”, a set precedent, rather than speaking our minds. Very little exists to indicate the feelings of Tom Bromley following the loss of his family. Newspaper reports of the 10-minute hearing state that he often turned around to look at his wife, and one paper says – heartbreakingly – that he smiled at her. His Times obituary read: “Tom Bromley was a cultured, sensitive and intensely private man. … Inevitably, with his wife committed to custody, he withdrew from society but was able to go on to occupy more ambassadorial posts than are given to most diplomats.” At first I resented him for his continued career, his seeming lack of emotion. But what else was available for him to do in the circumstances? If he had chosen to give up work, to sit at home alone, he might have been driven to drastic action too.

Diana Bromley and her family were products of the culture of putting up and shutting up and hoping for the best. Of not having the space to articulate cultural or mental differences and of – probably – not crying. They were people who were unused to speaking plainly and unwilling to do so. They were unfamiliar with expressing emotions: and they were finally blown apart by a hateful excess of belated expression that left them all bereft.

NOTE: Since writing this further research has revealed that Sir John Pratt’s mother – Diana’s grandmother – was Anglo-Indian. Diana’s Great Aunt – her grandmother’s sister – was Anna Leonowens who wrote the book “The English Governess at the Court of Siam”, which inspired the musical, The King and I. Leonowens went to inordinate lengths to conceal her mixed race background. It’s possible that Diana’s looks “skipped a generation”.

The Big Dream survey

Posted on December 18, 2015 by Jules Evans

Over 500 people filled in a survey about their dreams. The results suggest people have ‘big dreams’ which they find insightful and adaptive, but very rarely, usually in times of crisis. Such dreams sometimes involve a visit from a deceased loved one.

Colin Ludlow was a successful TV writer in his 50s, when he went into hospital to have a tumour removed from his bowel. After the operation, he contracted pneumonia and MSRA. He spent the next month in intensive care, very close to death. During that time, he had a series of very vivid dreams. He never used to recall his dreams, but he can still remember these dreams today, and felt compelled to write a book about them, Twenty Four Dreams Before Dying.

His dreams were quite cinematic, slightly flowery and romantic (several of the dreams involve medieval knights or World War II heroes), and often centre around a voyage (in one, he rides a tricycle to heaven), a great undertaking, a battle. In the last dreams in the series, the battle is won and he returns home, across the sea, to the land of the living. He’s not sure what to make of the dreams, but feels they helped him to face death, and that he’s less afraid of death and more open to the possibility of an afterlife as a result. They helped prepare him for the journey, like a pre-flight safety video.

I went to the launch of Colin’s book, and was struck by his story. Personally, I rarely remember my dreams, or find them particularly significant, except for one period of my life, when I was traumatized and my psyche was quite dissociated (ie there were traumatic memories I struggled to integrate). I had a series of dreams in which I was pursued by a terrifying tramp-figure, who was trying to kill me. In the final dream, I was in a lorry with the tramp driving, and we crashed through the side of a barrier on a cliff. I manage to pull the tramp to safety just before the lorry crashes over. I feel those dreams helped me through a crisis, by helping me recognize and accept the dissociated parts of me, which is what I take the tramp to symbolize. I also think the dreams were prophetic – a few months later, I crashed through a barrier on a cliff, while skiing, and had a near-death experience which helped to heal me of PTSD.

At Colin’s book launch, I asked the neuroscientist Chris Frith (a friend of Colin’s) whether neuroscience presently believed there is any meaning to our dreams. He said no. In fact, this is not quite true. While the old, rigid psychoanalytic interpretation of dreams is not widely accepted anymore, there are several ‘dream labs’ in universities, who have arrived at various conclusions as to why we and other animals dream. They’re now considered a form of ‘threat rehearsal‘, and also a way of solving problems and consdolidating memories – when I was taking my finals, I dreamt my essay plans were assault courses over which I had to clamber.

Big Dreams

I’m still curious about the phenomenon of ‘big dreams’. Carl Jung came up with the phrase. He wrote: ‘Unlike ordinary dreams, such a dream is highly impressive, numinous, and its imagery frequently makes use of motifs analagous to or even identical with mythology.’ And a big dream may not be just about you, it could be a ‘collective mythological dream’ for your tribe.

The ‘big dream’ fits with what was known in ancient culture as ephiphany dreams, in which a god or dead person visits you and tells you some important information. Epiphany dreams were rare, and the examples passed down to us usually occur to famous leaders, with gods telling them to invade a country or establish a city. But there was a democratic culture of epiohany dreams too – you could spend the night in a dream-cave to get advice from the god Aesculapius. Galen, the great medic, says he became a doctor after Aesculapius appeared to him and also to his father in a dream.

Sebastiano Ricci’s Dream of Aesculapius (1710)

However, the ancients and medieval Christians thought that most dreams were ‘mundane’, ie caused by the body and basically meaningless, and some could come from the ivory gate of false dreams. In any case, they were not considered easy to interpret, so dream interpretation manuals were always popular, like the Atharva Veda, which is full of such pearls of wisdom as ‘If, in a dream a flat-nosed, dark, naked monk urinates, there will be rain.’

Survey results

I thought it would be interesting to ask you about your dreams. I wanted to test the hypothesis (1) that there are ‘big dreams’, ie dreams that seem unusually vivid, significant, and insightful, (2) that such dreams are rare, and (3) that they particularly occur in times of crisis and transition – like Colin in intensive care, or me struggling with PTSD, when the psyche has a lot of work to do to adapt. I would suggest that in times of crisis, particularly confrontation with death, our subconscious ‘wakes up’ and communication with the dream-world becomes more vivid.

I made a SurveyMonkey survey and sent it out via my newsletter, Facebook and Twitter, and to the members of the London Philosophy Club. I received 508 responses – thank you! Obviously there are methodological problems with this survey – the pool of respondents are probably mainly middle-class British and Americans in their 30s-70s. However, the results are still interesting.

Firstly, it’s clear that people do have dreams which they find significant and insightful (79.5% do), and that such dreams are rare – 27.8% have had less than 10 such dreams in their life, 18% said they’d had such dreams more than 10 but less than 100 times, and only 17% say they have such dreams very often.

Secondly, as I hoped, such dreams particularly seem to occur at ‘moments of transition / deep change / crisis, as opposed to ‘a time of my life that wasn’t particularly special or unusual’ (which is the second answer) or ‘all the time’ (which is the third answer).

And thirdly, 62% of people felt that these ‘big dreams’ had helped them adapt to that crisis:

What were the contents of these significant ‘big dreams’? Well, some of the replies suggest the sort of collective mythological content which Jung predicted (one lady dreamt she was a male martyr being impaled on a tree while vikings rode round her on bisons, which is…kind of mythological). A few of the ‘big dreams’ were about collective political situations – responding to the Paris attacks, for example. But not many. Most of the ‘big dreams’ people reported were about personal relationships, sometimes indicating subconscious feelings and bringing the insight that the relationship is not a goer:

Once in a relationship I was dissatisfied with, I had a dream it was the wedding day, I was at the end of the aisle with my dad about to walk down it, turned to him and said “I just can’t do it dad” and ran out of the church! Ended relationship soon after!

I would very often dream of my partner who had in the dreams the face of one of my male friends who has a more suited personality for me. It was like I couldn’t even be happy with my boyfriend in my dreams! I knew It had to stop… I broke up and immediately I felt a shift in my life and regained my joy and confidence.

Dreams about stressful work relationships and work crises were also quite common:

I was having issues at work with two people, I dreamt I was locked in a cell and they were throwing poo at me. Summed up the situation and scared me if I’m honest

Rather than alchemical or mythological symbols, dreams seem to be pragmatic in their symbolism – they’ll use whatever metaphor or symbol seems to fit the situation.

In my dream I was operating on my boyfriend, taking his organs out one by one (like in operation game) and studying them to see what they told me about him. this was painful for him. when I woke up I realised this was what I was doing to him by asking questions I felt I needed the answer to (about previous relationships). I realised this was hurting him & that it wouldn’t tell me anything. this realisation enabled me to let go of this need – and helped save our relationship (for a while).

Dreams also seem to help people become aware of (and potentially change) their relationship to themselves. They will often use the metaphor of exploring a big house:

“I was in my house, and came across a door that led into a part of the house, with more rooms, that I hadn’t known was there. It was when my marriage was breaking down, and I was facing life as a single parent. I had the dream three or four times, and when I woke, it was with a sense of awareness that there were new places in my lufe to discover snd live in, and where I would be safe and at home.”
“At times when I feel insecure, I often dream about my house being broken into. This is a recurring dream. Having fine lots of research down the years, I understand that the house is symbolic, in that it represents the ‘mansion of the soul’ and or a play on words as has been my experience, where the question could be – ‘Is your house in order?'”

Another recurring metaphor is water / swimming pools / drowning / facing a storm or tsunami / crossing a river:

I dreamt I was trying to swim across the river Mersey with my friends with all my clothes on, so this made it difficult, my friends were helping he along. It was around the time I was going through an acrimonious divorce. I knew that everything would eventually turn out “all right” as my friends gave me support in my dreams and in real life.

Dreams, death and bereavement

One of the most common types of ‘big dreams’ people remembered involved meeting loved ones who have passed away – 43% of respondents said they’d met a deceased loved one in a dream, of which two thirds think this was their memory, and one third believed this was the actual loved one’s spirit visiting them:

These spirit visitations helped people adapt to the crisis of bereavement

my father had died and I vividly met him in a dream where I felt that he was acknowledging me as a person and showing his acceptance and deep love for me 🙂

Or to adapt to an upcoming bereavement:

When my toddler nephew was dying, I had a dream of him as an infant, and there was a group of relatives / ancesters standing along a river some on one side and me and others one the other side of this very nerrow river maybe stream. On my side of the river we passed infant Mike down the row of relatives till he came to me I then gave Mikey to an ancester on the other side of this river with the understanding he was “with us now, and we will take care of him.” I woke up and I heard a disimbodied voice saying “he is no longer of this earth and will be at peace now.” I knew then he wasn’t going to make it through his cancer treatment and would die. He died one or two days later.

Or sometimes the visit was simply an ancestor spirit offering support in a later crisis:

my late dad giving me a hug & telling me everything would be alright because i’m strong. This was a very bad time as i had just been diagnosed with ms. the dream was very vivid – i could see, hear & sense my dad very clearly & it left me feeling calm & comforted.

The anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor thought that dreams were the origin of religion and belief in the soul – because it feels like the soul leaves the body (33% of you say you’ve had an out of body experience while dreaming), meets the dead, and receives messages from some other dimension. People are more secular in their interpretation of dreams today, but interestingly, 47% of respondents still believed that some dreams come from God or a higher spirit:

I also asked people if they’d ever had ‘prophetic dreams’, ie dreams about events which subsequently happened. I only thought of this question after the initial release of the survey, so the data pool is smaller (138 people), but the results are still interesting – 38.2% said they’d experienced prophetic dreams, also often about relationships:

“Soon after a new man came into my life I had a series of vivid dreams witha common theme: he was driving to pick me up and I noticed someone sitting in the rear of the car; we were in his flat and he wouldn’t listen when I said I thought someone was in the kitchen…reader, he was married and playing away from home. My dreams quite often warn me of things that I don’t want to admit consciously”

“I kept on dreaming my partner was cheating. (he was)”

“Dreamt would be broken I to over Christmas. Was so vivid could see their faces. Put extra locks on front door. Got robbed anyway.”

“I dreamed my late father told me I was pregnant. I took a test the following day and I was!”

“I have twice dreamt the result of a sports event, taking place the following day. One was a 5-4 win in a football penalty shootout and the other a Six Nations game. Both were correct and I won money on the second one!”

Before you jump out of bed and accuse your partner of infidelity or put £100 on Nancy Boy in the 3.15 at Epsom, remember the warning of the ancients – it may be a false dream from the gate of ivory!

Lucid dreaming experiences were common among respondents:

And clearly we’re not embarrassed to discuss our dreams with others:

And 30% of respondents said they had some sort of ‘dream practice’ – usually trying to remember their dreams in the morning, often writing them down in a journal, and sometimes discussing them with a therapist. One person with tinnitus says she uses her dreams to manage her physical condition, while another said they can tell from their dreams when their iron level is getting too low!

What about sex? Well, Freud would say all your dreams are about sex (Jung would say they’re all about alchemy). That doesn’t seem to be the case. But there’s some transgressive sex in there too – 50% of you who reported yourself as either heterosexual or homosexual said you’d dreamt of a sex experience contrary to your usual preference, which makes me wonder if we’re all bisexual or trisexual in our subconscious self. We’re not that faithful in our dreams either – according to the Monstreal dream lab, women only dream of having sex with their partner 25% of the time, the rest of the time it’s sex with someone else; with men, only one sixth of their sex-dreams involve their partner.

Conclusion

So, to return to my initial hypothesis, it does seem that people have ‘big dreams’ which strike them as unusually significant and insightful. Such dreams are rare for most people. They usually happen in moments of crisis and transition. They are pragmatic in their use of metaphor and symbol, using ones that fit your situation, although there are symbols and metaphors that reoccur quite often. They seem to be relatively transparent in their meaning. And they seem to help people adapt to the crisis. They particularly give people insights into relationships – to oneself, to loved ones, to people at work. And they quite often involve a visit from a dead loved one, which helps people adapt to loss and bereavement.

Here, by the by, is a New York Times article looking at how dream-labs are now studying such ‘big dreams’, particularly dreams of visits by dead loved ones.

Three funded PhD studentships on ‘Living With Feeling’ project

Posted on December 9, 2015 by Thomas Dixon

The Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London invites applications from outstanding post-graduate students wishing to pursue doctoral research into aspects of the histories of emotions and health. The deadline for applications is 31 January 2016.

These studentships are offered as a core element of a Collaborative Humanities and Social Science research project funded by the Wellcome Trust. This interdisciplinary project is entitled ‘Living With Feeling: Emotional Health in History, Philosophy, and Experience’. Candidates can read more about the project below.

Applicants will normally have attained (or expect to attain by the end of the academic year 2015-16) a Masters qualification that will equip them to pursue doctoral research in this area.

The Centre for the History of the Emotions has a strong commitment to undertaking engaged research of a kind that connects with work in other disciplines and with many aspects of contemporary life, including the arts, education, healthcare, and public policy. We will especially welcome applications displaying a similar commitment.

Prior to completing an application, potential candidates should make email contact with Dr Thomas Dixon, Dr Rhodri Hayward, or Dr Elena Carrera, to establish whether a suitable supervisory team will be available.

Up to three studentships will be awarded. These will include tuition fees, a budget for travel and research expenses, and an annual stipend of £22,278. The studentships will commence in October 2016 and run for three years.

Applicants should follow the instructions for how to apply for a PhD place at the QMUL School of History, and indicate their interest in the Wellcome Trust ‘Living With Feeling’ studentships in their online application. You will be asked to provide a one-page personal statement explaining why you would like to pursue a research degree, a research proposal (no more than 1,500 words), and a CV.

Further Information about the ‘Living With Feeling’ Project

In the twenty-first century ‘emotional health’ is a key goal of public policy, championed by psychologists, the NHS, charities, and economists. Those lucky enough to enjoy good ‘emotional health’ are considered less likely to suffer from a range of mental and physical disorders, such as depression, addiction, anxiety, anorexia, irritable bowel syndrome, or heart disease.

But what is the perfect recipe for emotional health? Who decides which emotions we should feel, and when, in order to be healthy? Living with Feeling will explore how scientists, doctors, philosophers, and politicians – past and present – have engaged with human emotions such as anger, worry, sadness, love, fear, and ecstasy, treating them variously as causes or symptoms of illness or health, or even as aspects of medical treatment.

The project will connect the history and philosophy of medicine and emotions with contemporary science, medical practice, phenomenology, and public policy, exploring three overlapping meanings of ‘emotional health’:

The emotional dimensions of the medical encounter between patients and doctors, including the experiences of those suffering from chronic conditions, and the roles of empathy and compassion within this relationship.

The emotional factors influencing physical and mental health, focussing on emotions as contributory factors to both illness and wellness, engaging historically with recent findings in neuroscience, immunology, psychotherapy, and public health.

Emotional flourishing, understood as a state of healthy balance in an individual’s emotions; including historically and politically contingent assumptions about meta-emotional capacities such as empathy, self-control, self-esteem, mindfulness, and resilience.

You can read announcements about the grant on the Centre for the History of the Emotions website, the QMUL News page, and the Wellcome Trust’s website.

Sarah McNamer on affective scripts in sacred and secular literature

Posted on December 4, 2015 by Jules Evans

Sarah McNamer is Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Georgetown University. Her primary interest is in the relation between literature and the history of emotion. Her book, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion, published in 2010, looked at how devotional practices use ‘affective scripts’ to help readers cultivate emotional states. She is working on a book called The Poetics of Emotion in Middle English Literature, which explores the use of affective scripts in secular medieval poetry like the Pearl poem. Sarah recently came to our Centre to give the History of Emotions Annual Lecture for 2015, on the place of literary studies in the history of emotion. She has an article, “The Literariness of Literature and the History of Emotion”, forthcoming in PMLA October 2015.

In your lecture, you argued that the Pearl poem is a sort of guided therapeutic meditation.

Yes, it is a sensual and affective experience designed to take the listener from ‘woe’ to ‘weal’, in the context of grief for a young child.

Guided therapies are usually repeated, so that the balm sinks in, as it were. Was that the case with this poem?

Yes, it does seem that the musical qualities of the poem are designed to be therapeutic, to be soothing, to draw the reader back in to the poem over and over again. Barbara Newman, in her wonderful article ‘The Artifice of Eternity’, says the Pearl poem is ‘the most intricate in the English language’. And she’s right. The poem is perpetually admired because of its beauty, its highly-wrought quality. It has a virtuosic triplicate rhyme scheme, with alliterative rhyme, with end-rhyme and with concatenation. It’s a kind of verbal music, related to what the French poets called musique naturelle, produced by the sound of the spoken voice alone. So listening to the poem again and again would have been a soothing experience, related to a medieval poetics of ‘sweetness’ , a kind of persuasiveness through the sound of the poem.

I think of consolation scripts in ancient philosophy, like Seneca’s Consolation to Marcia for example. They were on the whole quite rational and cognitive. But you suggest that part of the therapeutic power of Pearl is not just cognitive, it’s something deeper and less rational.

Right. In the opening canto, the father comes up against the limit of reason and faith. At the end of the very first canto, he’s struggling to understand his situation in terms of reason and faith, and he simply cannot. The poet figures that forth by having him faint on the grave of his child. And then he wakes into this gorgeous dream vision. The dream vision enables the poet to take us into another space, which is about the senses and the emotions , and it’s not fully rational. It’s a space where the affective and the cognitive can come together in a dream vision, which is a literary invention.

Do you think that there’s something poetry can do that normal prose can’t in terms of its therapeutic or persuasive power over us?

That would be a challenging question to answer, but I have looked into some grief therapies, and was struck by one set of discussions having to do with metaphor. The metaphors that people grasp onto when they’re grieving can be very helpful for them. There’s also something in contemporary therapeutic practice called the ‘juxtaposition experience’, which unlocks the emotional brain (this is described in Bruce Ecker’s book Unlocking the Emotional Brain). This poem seems to be offering an experience of art which juxtaposes loss with something vibrant, beautiful and healing.

You explored the notion of ‘addubement’ in the Pearl poem, which can be translated as embellishment. There’s an idea that something man-made and artificial – a beautiful intricately-constructed poem – can be therapeutic in the face of bereavement. How does that work?

The poet is striving to do what verbal art can do, which is enliven a space of imaginative play, colour and light. The embellishment that the poet comes back to again and again is signifiying a kind of recognition of the poet’s power to generate in the brain of the reader a display of glittering luminosity. It seems that the poet is placing a lot of emphasis on that as a way of moving beyond grief – the experience of an imagined display of colour and light can move one to an affective space that is positive and beneficial.

So it’s an assertion of the healing power of art as opposed to the Holy Spirit?

Absolutely. It seems that this poet is seeking to mark that difference. The poem keeps coming back to the actual crafting that human artists can do which effects healing.

You suggest that the poem was written specifically for the context of the court of Edward III, whose son lost a young daughter. If I was that son, I’d want to know – is this just a story, is this just an imagined space, or is my daughter really in heaven? That would matter to me.

The story in the poem is a story but it also has belief behind it – the Christian belief in the afterlife is very powerful there. But there is also a layer of the story which is pre-Christian or more than Christian, a desire to know where that child is, a desire to ‘place’ her in a safe and happy elsewhere that can be vividly imagined and experienced as consoling, even if not ‘true’.

There was a debate, wasn’t there, about medieval visualisation meditations on the Passion – some critics felt meditation books encouraged people to embellish, to add their own details to the Passion in a way that was un-Biblical and potentially heretical. How conventional or Biblical is the Pearl poet’s vision of heaven?

Well, just to take up the issue of imaginative visualisation meditations, one of the texts that I’ve worked most on is the Meditations on the Life of Christ by an anonymous author usually called Pseudo-Bonaventure. Historically, that text set a template and authority for imaginative practices. It tells people to imagine these scenes from the life of Christ with all the embellishments that you want to add, and ‘give authority to the imagination’. So this devotional text is very assertively saying that the imagination has authority.

The Pearl‘s afterlife is modelled on known images of the afterlife. It’s a very elaborate and beautiful scene that comes partly from Revelations but contains many of the poet’s own embellishments, including this lovely, touching scene of the child depicted as ‘my little queen’ playing with her friends. She’s in motion, in movement, with this ‘jolly pack’ of friends.

The idea of the ‘authority of the imagination’ in the 14th century – was that a new and controversial idea?

It wasn’t a new idea. If we look back at the tradition of affective meditation, the setting of the scene, the invitation to situate yourself there at the foot of the cross for example, is present much earlier. Because of the affective usefulness of imaginative practices, it became a very widespread notion.

Did people ever criticise such practices?

There certainly is critique. One place I’ve noticed this is various early adaptations of the Meditations on the Life of Christ. I discovered a short Italian version of the Meditations which I think is the original version, which was then added to while some parts of it were suppressed. And in that movement between different versions of the text one can see critique. There is a worry about whether imaginative practices were leading people to overly humanise Christ. There’s an effort in later versions of the text to curtail imaginative practices that dwell too much on the vulnerability of Christ.

These affective scripts aimed to create emotional effects, but did they ever have more powerful impacts, where they actually shaped people’s visionary experiences?

Yes, absolutely. One can see that in very many instances, for example Julian of Norwich, and Margary Kempe, and others.

So you’re looking at affective scripts in contemplative texts, and now also in secular poetry. What is the relationship between those two traditions in the Middle Ages?

It’s a good question, and one I have only begun to answer. I think the secular texts were influenced by the devotional texts. Devotional texts and ways of reading were so widespread that they provided a very robust template for what other literature might do.

Louis Martz’ Poetry and Meditation argues that secular poetry starts to do things that contemplative poetry used to do in the 16th and 17th centuries, and almost that secular poetry becomes an alternative contemplative practice for lay people. You’re saying that process began much earlier, at least as far back as the 14th century?

It seems to have. It’s under-explored at this point.

To what extent did medieval contemplative texts use poetry?

Most of the early vernacular affective meditations are lyrics. They’re easy to memorise, they’re short, they’re rhythmic. For example, the lyric Sunset on Calvary, it’s just four lines:

Now goes the sun under the wood –
Pity, Mary, thy fair face.
Now goes the sun under the tree –
Pity, Mary, thy son and thee.

This lyric immediately places its reader at the foot of the cross as a feeling participant. In the original Middle English, the lines rhyme, and would have been easy to internalize.

You talked about the musicality of Pearl. Would some of these affective scripts ever have been sung?

Some of the lyrics certainly would have been. In the 13th and 14th century, some of the lyrics have accompanying notation.

I guess a type of affective script that becomes very key is hymn-singing, or indeed psalm-singing – they guide our emotions together through music and lyrics.

Indeed.

What are the key differences between affective scripts in religious and secular contexts? You suggest secular poetic scripts are more playful, more ambiguous, more ‘polyvalent’, and perhaps more inclined to draw our attention to the skill of the craftsman?

I think we see that with the Pearl poet. He’s an interesting figure – resolutely anonymous, but brilliantly crafting something that brings all poetic skills to bear on the listening experience. Perhaps the freedom of writing outside the devotional realm enabled that. In devotional texts, there’s often more pressure to avoid overly ornamental flourishes.

‘Don Quixote reading novels of chivalry’ by Gustave Dore

This idea of literary texts as affective scripts – where else could one apply it? For example, romantic love poetry like Ovid’s Art of Love could be a type of affective script, teaching us how to love.

Right. And to take the example of Eloise, her mind was so well-stocked with poetry and impassioned rhetoric….

Or Madame Bovary….

…you can see how real feeling is fostered and nourished by having poetry in the mind.

And I suppose the novel then creates figures whose emotions have been nourished by romance and fable, then coming into comic or tragic dissonance with a more prosaic world. That’s what happens in Don Quixote, or Madame Bovary.

Yes, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey explores similar terrain. But in the Middle Ages there’s a very different attitude about the relationship between artifice and reality. There isn’t a dichotomy between artificial and real feelings. Artifice is valued as a way of generating real feeling.

And there’s less of a distinction between inner imaginative worlds and outer reality too.

Yes.

Sometimes, texts are not written consciously as affective scripts for others to follow, but they become them. They get taken up. For example, Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, or Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloise. Or even, say, Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange then becomes a violent script that some young people choose to follow. Your research focuses on intentionally-crafted scripts for others, but sometimes this happens non-intentionally.

Yes, that probably does happen. For example, in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, you see that Troilus thinks that he might be tragic lover, and her refers to tragic lovers of the past, and then he becomes a tragic lover. He has to, according to the script fixed in his mind.

There’s also the question of how ancient affective scripts affect people today, and how people can use them today. Can we still use medieval contemplative texts today?

I’m not sure. They’re historically bound in many ways. It’s an open question.

To what extent is there an ‘affective turn’ in literary studies?

That was named eight or ten years ago, and it certainly is happening across various forms of literary criticism. I think of the work that’s been done on the novel and empathy by Susan Keen, or Patrick Colm Hogan’s work on literature and emotions. There’s a much more rigorous assessment of how literary texts produce emotions, but that work hasn’t been situated historically that much. I’m seeking to root particular texts in particular historical circumstances, to ask how literary devices embedded in a certain genre seem to seek to produce emotion in a given historical context.

How do you situate your work relative to the history of emotions?

That’s one thing I explored in my talk yesterday. There is a way that the history of emotions has a double structure. One meaning of the ‘history of emotions’ is a very encompassing one that has a kind of capaciousness within it, that sees literary studies as part of an effort to engage with the emotions of the past. But there is also a narrower meaning of the term ‘history of emotions’ which really does function as a sub-discipline within the discipline of history. Literature is not very visible at all in publications within that narrower definition. That’s one opposition that I’m working to overcome.

Does the study of emotion naturally tends towards or even requires inter-disciplinarity? I think of Martha Nussbaum’s work on the philosophy of emotions, which also brings in political science, psychology, literary studies, music studies, architecture, urban planning and economics!

I think that’s absolutely the case.

The big, messy tent of modern Stoicism

Posted on November 12, 2015 by Jules Evans

The modern Stoic movement, which brings together atheists and theists, is one example of a new friendship and alliance between people for whom metaphysical disagreements are less important than friendship and spiritual practice. The New Atheism wars are over, and a new messy spirituality has emerged.

Massimo Pigliucci converted to Stoicism last year. A prominent atheist philosopher living in New York, he felt stuck in a rut, lacking in purpose and worried by death. Secular humanism, he decided, was more of a ‘patchwork of liberal progressive positions than a coherent philosophy of life’. He didn’t want to go back to the Catholicism of his youth, but explored virtue ethics as a western alternative to Buddhism.

That’s when he came across Stoicism Today, a project that’s been running for the last three years, involving a group of British classicists, psychotherapists and philosophers (including me) who are interested in exploring Stoicism in modern life. Massimo was persuaded, and announced his conversion in a New York Times article, which went viral. He even got a Stoic tattoo. Last Saturday, he joined us, along with 300 other Stoics from around the world, for our annual gathering, Stoicon.

Stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy that first appeared in Athens in around 300 BC, is enjoying a modern revival. As Christianity recedes in western societies, people are discovering they still need a life-philosophy to help them through life’s inescapable suffering. Many have turned to eastern philosophies – indeed, an all-party parliamentary group on mindfulness last month more or less anointed secular Buddhism as the UK’s official religion. But others are looking for something a bit closer to home, and Stoicism is in some ways a homegrown alternative to Buddhism, offering similar practical advice in how to control one’s thoughts, guide one’s value judgements and heal one’s negative emotions.

Derren Brown holding forth on Stoicism

At Stoicon, we had presentations on Stoic virtue, Stoic friendship, Stoic therapy, Stoic visualization, and also critiques of Stoicism. One of the hits of the festival was a talk by Derren Brown, the stage magician, who proved to be deeply versed in the intricacies of ancient philosophy (he’s writing a book on it). For me, the highlight was meeting Stoics from around the world – some had travelled from as far afield as Hong Kong – and hearing how philosophy has helped them through adversity. ‘I owe my life to philosophy’ wrote Seneca, over two millennia ago. That’s still true for many people today.

The attempt to create a modern community of Stoics is relatively new, and somewhat paradoxical – there was no Stoic community in the ancient world, no collective worship or festivals, except for the ‘virtual community’ of rational souls. There have always been people drawn to Stoicism, from Montaigne to Frederick the Great to the novelist Tom Wolfe. But they tended not to congregate, or even know about each other.

That changed in the late 1990s, thanks to the internet. Fans of Stoicism started to connect, particularly via an organisation called NewStoa.com, and subsequently via Facebook and Reddit. Personally, I got into Stoicism in my mid-20s, through Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. I discovered CBT was directly inspired by Stoicism, and decided to embrace it as a life-philosophy. I joined NewStoa and also got a Stoic tattoo (of the Stoic emblem designed by DT Strain). It seemed like the right thing to do.

We tried a first gathering in 2010, meeting in San Diego for a weekend of sun, sand, surfing and Socratic self-examination. It was not an entirely auspicious start. There were only 14 of us, yet we still managed to have our first schism, between those who embraced Stoicism as a theistic religion, and those who detested the very word ‘religion’.

Still, the grassroots revival of Stoicism continued, on the internet, in philosophy clubs, and in bookstores, thanks to books by Alain de Botton, William Irvine, Oliver Burkeman and Ryan Holiday. It proved particularly popular with US military officers, with entrepreneurs like Tim Ferriss, with comedians like Adrian Edmondson and John Lloyd, and with sportspeople. I run an occasional philosophy club for the players and coaches at Saracens, winners of the rugby Premiership last year, while Ryan Holiday’s book was widely circulated among the Patriots, winners of last year’s Super Bowl.

Academia has until recently been snooty about the idea that ancient philosophy can actually help people (it smacks of the Bottonisation of the humanities). But in 2012, academia got into the revival, when the Stoicism Today research project launched at Exeter University under the leadership of Professor Chris Gill. We ran a public engagement project called Stoic Week, in which people could download a free handbook and follow Stoic exercises for a week. We asked participants to fill in well-being questionnaires before and after the week, so we could assess the well-being impact of Stoic exercises (in brief, there is one). To our surprise, the project caught the public imagination, and this year 3,300 people from all over the world enrolled in the online course.

So what is modern Stoicism, and how does it differ from the ancient philosophy? Firstly, not everyone into modern Stoicism necessarily identifies as a full-blown Stoic – many of us are, like Cicero, eclectic in our approach to wisdom traditions. But we all agree that Stoicism has some wise and therapeutic insights into human nature and how to heal suffering, which were mistakenly neglected by academia for a century or so. Martha Nussbaum, the leading philosopher of emotions, says Stoic thinking on the emotions have ‘a subtlety and cogency that is unsurpassed in the history of western philosophy’.

Modern Stoics agree on the core therapeutic insight of Stoicism – ‘it’s not events, but our opinion about events, that cause us suffering’, as the philosopher Epictetus put it. We can’t always control or change external events, but we can control our opinion or attitude, and that gives humans a measure of self-determination. We also agree that the most important foundation for a good and happy life is not money, fame, power or pleasure, but a good character.

Mark Vernon discusses a theistic interpretation of the Logos at Stoicon

What of the Logos, the universal soul that ancient Stoics believed connected and guided all things? Modern Stoics agree to disagree about the Logos. Some embrace it as a sort of pantheistic God, others accept the idea that the cosmos obeys rational laws, others don’t give it much thought. Rather like mindfulness, modern Stoicism has flourished partly by parking the metaphysics and focusing on the ethics. Perhaps in the future, modern Stoics will engage deeper with physics, and with the Stoics’ intriguing idea that the universe is a web of interconnected consciousness.

So why a revival now? Perhaps Stoicism tends to flourish in times of global upheaval, when people lose faith in governments and look to self-reliance instead. As the psychotherapist Vincent Deary noted, taken to an extreme, modern Stoicism could become a toxic political ideology of ‘sucking it up’ when the government or company makes cuts. But there is also a long tradition of Stoic resistance to power, from Cato to Nelson Mandela, who was inspired by the Stoic poem Invictus while in prison.

Personally, I no longer consider myself a card-carrying Stoic. Yes, every time I strip off at the beach, a part of me regrets the giant Stoic tattoo on my shoulder. But as Seneca almost said, life is too short for regrets.

There’s a lot that Stoicism misses out – music, dancing, imagination, sexual love, ritual, spiritual ecstasy, a loving relationship with God. I find it somewhat over-rationalistic, over-individualistic, and lacking in hope for the after-life. But I still owe it big time for helping me through the toughest period of my life.

And I love that Stoicon brings together people from many different cultural and religious traditions – this ecumenicism is a relief after the bitter fights of New Atheism. Stoicon featured theists like me, and atheists like Massimo and Derren Brown. It also welcomed Christian Stoics, Buddhist Stoics, Islamic Stoics, Aristotelians, Platonists and one lady into ‘vibro-acoustics’, who told me Seneca had appeared to her in a dream. We came together to celebrate our common love of wisdom. The eclecticism reminds me of the humanist circles of the Renaissance, back when ‘humanism’ meant ‘love of wisdom’.

Perhaps modern Stoicism is a big messy tent, typical of what David Bentley Hart calls the ‘incoherent bricolage’ of contemporary ethics. But I’ll take friendly messiness over fierce ideological coherence any day. And perhaps this very messiness illustrates a new sort of friendship between theists and atheists, who are less interested in doctrinal purity and denunciations, and more interested in friendship and practice.

I see this new spirit in places like the RSA’s Spirituality project, in the Sunday Assembly, in the How We Gather project, and in the rise of contemplative studies in academia. Friendship and practice first, doctrinal difference second. Hooray for the new messy spirituality.

The History of Emotions Blog

Conversations about the history of feeling from www.qmul.ac.uk/emotions