This Little Piggy Took Gardening Leave

As I began this morning by finishing the first draft of a short story and am feeling overwhelmed by my own productivity, I'm indulging in a little hedonistic blogging.

Every time I give up social media I feel the benefit - tasks get done that otherwise would languish in guilt-inducing purgatory, I exercise more, I pay attention when my husband's talking to me instead of nodding and going 'Uh huh' while scrolling through Twitter memes. And yet, in the last week I've relied several times on the fact that I got said husband to block Twitter on my phone, laptop and the communal computer. I literally typed 'Twitter.com' into the navigation bar, knowing that I would get a notice saying... something or other, basically that it couldn't connect.

I feel like the internet expanded the amount of bad news that we get to a scale that we just didn't evolve to cope with. Many times Twitter reminds me of the bit in The Happy Prince, when he gets moved to a high plinth where he can see all the poverty and suffering in the city that he used to be blissfully ignorant of. The internet brings hundreds of injustices and tragedies to the time-line that has taken the place of our village street, and then it gives us, as tools, the tweet button and the Facebook post.

I think a lot of the time when I posted stuff on Twitter or Facebook I was doing it in a blind urge to change things. Which of course was futile. But it didn't feel futile, because the feedback that should have come from seeing change, came instead from likes and retweets. Little kicks of endorphin, detached from anything meaningful. Imagine if you were using a console to control something important - a power or food supply - and when you hit certain buttons, you saw gauges giving you positive feedback. But it turned out the gauges weren't connected to anything, they were just random lights.

There's an experiment that's related about a pig who received random gifts of food as it moved about its stall. The pig started associating particular movements with the food, believing that it could somehow cause the food to appear if it made certain steps. I think you're meant to laugh at the pig for being superstitious or something but really it was just working on the information available to it. A kind person would sit the pig down and explain to it that it has no way of influencing the supply of food. The pig would then sigh and talk about the days when pigs did control their own fortunes to a slightly greater degree, foraging in the forest for acorns and beech-mast, and perhaps both person and pig would agree that some kind of happiness and usefulness is only to be attained when aspirations and abilities are more or less matched. Maybe to be happy we need to search for the place where our activities can have effect.

Maybe it's just cynicism to think that arguing on Twitter about politics and the environment is the equivalent of headbutting an indifferent food-chute, but I don't feel cynical planting nursery plants for moths in the garden. It feels a bit sad, because I genuinely care about all those bigger things. But it feels good to do small things that I actually can do.

Dandelions

I've given up Twitter AGAIN. Mainly because it eats my brain. I spend far too much time on it and when I'm off it, I think about it. Oliver Burkeman has written about the vortex effect of Twitter in a very good and funny article here.

But I also gave it up so I could get a job done. I'm supposed to be working on some drawings. I don't know how common this is for other PWDFL (People Who Draw For a Living but don't like the word 'artist') but I begin every project with the same paralysing wonder at how I ever managed to draw anything in the past, given that I clearly cannot draw anything now. I take hours reading unnecessary background research (dandelion pollen is mostly sterile, you say, well, I must go and read up about that before I sit down to draw one), I sit looking at the object I'm meant to be drawing, I stare at the empty page. And this is when I log on to Twitter. All the anguish at finding that I am unable to draw slides away as I scroll for half an hour or more through various nonsense. Of course Twitter brings its own anxiety - people spoiling for a fight, depressing news, the abyss of dreadfulness that is popular culture - and when I log off not only have I not drawn anything, I've wasted a half an hour (alright alright, it's almost always more). Stress sitting on top of a mound of guilt.

So I had to force myself to stay with my own gnawing doubts and get the fecking drawing done. Which I have. I've been drawing to a constant barrage of teeth-grinding memories and self-criticism but the first drawing is done & emailed to the client.

My usual technique for drowning out bad thoughts is to listen to audio books, but if a drawing is in any way challenging I can't do it while listening to books or podcasts, although I draw better with music than without. I ended up listening to an album I love, Behold and See by '60s psychedelic band (or were they?) Ultimate Spinach. Strangely and refreshingly for a psychedelic band (or were they?) the lyrics of the album all seem to boil down to 'Get over yourself'. (The lyrics of Where You're At being a good example). Which is the kind of bracing kick up the arse I think I needed.

Years ago when I gave therapy a go the main misgiving I had was the tendency I believed therapists had for facilitating the blaming of people in the client's life for the client's problems. Obviously sometimes it's just a fact that certain people have been badly harmed by others and they need to talk about it, but it does seem that, even when we haven't been maliciously treated - when it's just the case that people around us have been no more than thoughtless or selfish in the ordinary way, and that's not where our own problems started - we nevertheless try to pin point the person and action that made us who we are.

I mention it because I think that maybe we do that because two desires are in conflict: the desire to change and the desire to be consistent. Changing on our own accord implicitly involves an admission that we are in some way faulty. Maybe blaming someone else for our current state of mind gives us an excuse to change - it's like solving a puzzle, or like the crisis in a storyline that causes the character to evolve. An alternative way of thinking about changing could be to think of the brain or mind like a complex machine, which you've been using through trial and error, with a lot of errors, and now you've picked up a sheet from the missing manual.

Here's the best piece of advice I ever came across. If you take it, you too can be as mentally healthy as I am!

There were once upon a time two sausage machines, exquisitely constructed for the purpose of turning pig into the most delicious sausages. One of these retained his zest for pig and produced sausages innumerable; the other said: ‘What is pig to me? My own works are far more interesting and wonderful than any pig.’ He refused pig and set to work to study his inside. When bereft of its natural food, his inside ceased to function, and the more he studied it, the more empty and foolish it seemed to him to be. All the exquisite apparatus by which the delicious transformation had hitherto been made stood still, and he was at a loss to guess what it was capable of doing. This second sausage machine was like the man who has lost his zest, while the first was like the man who has retained it.

The mind is a strange machine which can combine the materials offered to it in the most astonishing ways, but without materials from the external world it is powerless, and unlike the sausage machine it must seize its materials for itself, since events only become experiences through the interest that we take in them: if they do not interest us, we are making nothing of them.

The man, therefore, whose attention is turned within finds nothing worthy of his notice, whereas the man whose attention is turned outward can find within, in those rare moments when he examines his soul, the most varied and interesting assortment of ingredients being dissected and recombined into beautiful or instructive patterns.

- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

This has been a bit of a babbling post. Probably because I've been saving up all my Twitter babbling. Well, it had to go somewhere.