My latest mixtape captures my attempt to get over the depression and anxiety that can accompany “The Gulp” in between when you finish something and finally push it out into the world. (Don’t worry, it has plenty of bops!)
It’s also the first time I’ve ever given a mixtape an epigraph. (From James Hollis’s Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life.)
You can listen to the mix on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube.
Filed under: mixtapes
In the first episode of Civilisation (1969), “The Skin of our Teeth,” Kenneth Clark takes on why the Roman Empire fell:
“However complex and solid it seems, civilisation is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed. What are its enemies? Well, first of all fear — fear of war, fear of invasion, fear of plague… fears that make it simply not worthwhile constructing things, or planting trees or even planning next year’s crops. And fear of the supernatural, which means that you daren’t question anything or change anything. The late antique world was full of meaningless rituals, mystery religions, that destroyed self-confidence. And then boredom. The feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity…”
In the book, Clark switches the word “boredom” to “exhaustion,” which is interesting to me. He continues:
“[Civilisation] requires confidence — confidence in the society in which one lives, belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and confidence in one’s own mental powers… People sometimes think that civilisation consists in fine sensibilities and good conversation and all that. These can be among the agreeable results of civilisation, but they are not what make a civilisation, and a society can have these amenities and yet be dead and rigid.
Jeez, alright K.C., so where does that leave the individual?
Here’s what Jungian James Hollis has to say in his book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life:
Each morning the twin gremlins of fear and lethargy sit at the foot of our bed and smirk. Fear of further departure, fear of the unknown, fear of the challenge of largeness intimidates us back into our convenient rituals, conventional thinking, and familiar surroundings. To be recurrently intimidated by the task of life is a form of spiritual annihilation. On the other front, lethargy seduces us with sibilant whispers: kick back, chill out, numb out, take it easy for a while . . . sometimes for a long while, sometimes a lifetime, sometimes a spiritual oblivion.
Hollis says that this daily confrontation “obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression.”
Faced with such a choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir, and depression a sedative. The former keeps us on the edge of our life, and the latter in the sleep of childhood.
To quote Kenneth Clark in the last episode of Civilisation, “One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.”
(I’m not quite sure yet if/how Hunter S. Thompson’s “fear and loathing” fits in, or Kierkegaard’s “Fear and Trembling,” which comes from Philippians 2:12: “continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”)
In his book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, the Jungian analyst James Hollis recalls being asked to speak to women’s groups who ask him to help them understand men:
I have suggested that women look at men this way: if they took away their own network of intimate friends, those with whom they share their personal journey, removed their sense of instinctual guidance, concluded that they were almost wholly alone in the world, and understood that they would be defined only by standards of productivity external to them, they would then know the inner state of the average man. They are horrified at this notion.
They then ask Hollis if there’s anything they can do, and he replies, “No.” (It is up to men.)
Hollis has told a variation of this story in several audiobooks and podcasts I’ve listened to and his diagnosis always chills me. I found myself recalling it to a friend yesterday on my bike ride.
One thing I find hopeful is that I think you can reverse-engineer a to-do list from this diagnosis:
Easy peasy, right? Ha. (Cries.)
As for being a man, finding myself a member in a club I never asked to join: Whenever I think that we’re making no progress whatsoever, I think about the fact that I have two friends, grown men my own age, who, unprompted, within the last year, have told me that they loved me. And I told them I loved them back.
It’s a start.
Here is the opening page of The Steal Like An Artist Journal painted by Heather Champ.
I wanted to start the journal with Mary Oliver’s quote because I felt that it summed up the whole project. It’s taken from her On Being interview:
I think we’re creative all day long. We have to have an appointment, to have that work out on the page, because the creative part of us gets tired of waiting, or just gets tired. And it’s helped a lot of students, young poets, doing that — to have that meeting with that part of oneself…
The quote took on greater meaning for me recently when I came across these words from James Hollis:
“We each have an appointment with ourselves, though most of us never show up for it.”
The way I show up for myself, the way I discover who I really am, is to make an appointment every day to show up to the page. If I show up to the page, I show up to myself.
Here are some diary doodles I drew from my notes on Jungian analyst James Hollis’s 1993 book, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Mid-Life. (I included them in my letter about Charlie Bucket’s mid-life crisis, “Quitting The Chocolate Factory.”)
After I shared these it was pointed out to me that Ted Lasso spies the book on the table in his therapist’s apartment (S02E08):
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