August 2019 was a crappy month. I’m just emerging from nasty fevers of the body and mind and haven’t fully recovered yet. I’ve become more cynical in the last few weeks – which I didn’t think was possible – and the level of baseline depression has increased; simply contemplating the monotony of daily life has started giving me anxiety attacks. But even under this pall of gloom, I have found some reasons to cheer:
I bought a new Kindle. I was running out of space to keep my books, and since a friend tipped me off to the existence of a service called Libgen, I have decided to move my entire library to this little device. So far, so good. I’m currently reading Kellanved’s Reach, the third book in Ian C. Esslemont’s riveting Path to Ascendancy trilogy. Before this, I read Trick Mirror, a new collection of essays about the sense of self in the Age of the Internet by Jia Tolentino. I found the essays well-written though not particularly enlightening, but others could easily disagree.
I discovered community stackscripts on Linode in an embarrassing moment considering I’ve been using Linode for a couple years now. Stackscripts make life so much easier; I don’t have to bank on Runcloud or Serverpilot to install WordPress on a VPS anymore. The script by OpenLiteSpeed also bundles a Let’s Encrypt certificate and launches WordPress with LiteSpeed. I simply have to route the domain through CloudFlare and install Heatshield on the server, which is cache, SSL, CDN, WAF, all under five minutes and for $5/mo.
Tool released its new album on August 30. I’ve been listening to it in bits and pieces – travesty, I know – but just this morning, I listened to the whole thing in one go. Thirteen years is a terribly long time between albums but it would seem Fear Inoculum was worth the wait. August 30 was also a good day to release the album; I was in terrible shape that day. I particularly enjoyed the track called ‘Descending’, which I thought was a little strange because a song of the same name by Lamb of God is one of my favourites and I’m wondering if this is simply an affinity to the word itself.
I utterly detested one of the few epiphanies I had last month (which precipitated the first wave of depression) because it caused me to stop blogging. But I started writing again late last week, about unexpected things collected under the page ‘Definitions’ (link in the menu and here). Nothing clears the fog in my head like writing has for nearly two decades now, so not being able to do it for whatever reason can become quickly maddening. The ability to produce words is where I locate the ultimate potency of my being.
It’s a strangely unsettling experience to read about research on an affliction that one has, to understand how scientists are obtaining insights into it using a variety of techniques that allow them to look past the walls of the human and into their mind, so to speak, with the intention of developing new therapeutic techniques or improving old ones. This is principally because it suggests, to me, that we – humankind – don’t scientifically know about X in toto whereas I – the individual sufferer – claims to understand what it is like to live with X.
Of course, I concede that the experiment in question is an exercise in quantification and doesn’t seek (at least if its authors so intend) to displace my own experience of the condition. Nonetheless, the tension exists, especially when scientists claim to be able to model X with a set of equations.
Do they suggest I’m a set of equations, that they claim to understand how I have been living my life for eight years using a bunch of symbols on paper through which they think they could divine my entire being?
I have been learning, writing and reading about physics for the last decade and have been a science journalist and editor since 2012. Experiences in this time have allowed me a privileged view (mostly for the short span in which it could be assimilated) of what the scientific enterprise is, how it works, how scientific knowledge is organised, etc. As a result, I believe I am better placed to understand, for example, the particular mode of reductionism employed when scientists simulate a predetermined part of this or that condition in order to understand it better.
This isn’t a blanket empathy, however; it’s more an admission of open-mindedness, such as it is. While not speaking about a specific experiment, I have come to understand that such de facto reductive experiments are necessary – especially when the evolution of certain significant parameters can be carefully controlled – because the corresponding results are otherwise impossible to deduce through other means, at least with the same quality. In fact, in my view, this is less reductionism and invisibilisation and more ansatz and heuristics.
This is why I also see a flip side: the way scientists approach the problem, so to speak, has potential to redefine some aspects of my relationship with the affliction for the better. (It was a central part of my CBT programme.) To be clear, this isn’t about the prescriptive nature of what the scientists have been able to conclude through their studies and experiments but about the questions they chose to ask and the ways in which they decided to answer, and evaluate, them.
For example, on June 17, the journal Nature Human Behaviour published a paper that concluded, based on reinforcement learning techniques, that “anxious or depressed humans change their behaviour much faster after something bad happens”, to quote from an explanatory post written by one of the authors. They were able to do so because, “for each real person – those with mood and anxiety symptoms and those without – we [could] generate an artificial computerised agent that mimics their behaviour.”
Without commenting at all on the study’s robustness or the legitimacy of the paper, I’d say this sounds about right from personal experience: I display “mood and anxiety symptoms” and tend to play things very safe, which often means I’m very slow to have new experiences. Now, I have the opportunity to conduct a few experiments of my own to better ascertain that this is the case and then devise solutions, assisted by the study’s methods, that will help me eliminate this part of the problem. As the same note states, “Developing a deeper understanding of [how] symptoms emerge may eventually allow us to close [the] treatment gap” (with reference to the success rate of CBT ∪ medication, apparently about 66-75%).
Which brings me to the other thing about research on an affliction that one has: it exposes you. This may not seem like a significant problem but from the individual’s perspective, it can be. When a discovery that is specific to my condition is broadcast, I often feel, if only at first, that I am no longer in control of what people do and don’t know about me. Maybe “it’s textbook”, as they say, but I will never acknowledge that about myself even if it is, at whichever level, true, nor would I like others to believe that I am as predictable as a set of equations would have it – but at the same time I don’t want anyone to believe the method of interrogation employed in the study is illegitimate.
Thankfully, this feeling often dissipates quickly because the public narrative, at least among scientists, who are also likely to be discussing the findings for longer, is often depersonalised. However, there is that brief period of heightened apprehension – a sense of social nudity, as it were – and I have wondered if it tempts people into conforming with preset templates of public conduct vis-à-vis their affliction: either be completely open about it or completely closed off. I chose to be open about it; fortunately, I am also very comfortable with being this way.
2017 was a blast. Lots of things happened. The world became a shittier place in many ways and better in a few. Mostly, Earth just went around the Sun once more, and from what we know, it’s going to be doing that for a while. But here’s to a roaring 2018 anyway!
As of January 2018, this blog is nine years old. Thanks for staying with me on this (often meandering) journey, even when its name changed a billion times in the middle of 2017. The interest many of you have been nice enough to express vocally is what has kept me going. I published 113 blog posts this year, up a 100% from 2016. I also had 70 articles published in The Wire. I’m quite happy with that total of 183.
I think I will continue writing more on my blog than for The Wire through the first half of 2018 because editing freelancers’ submissions will continue to take up most of my time.
This is a consequence of two things I tried to do differently last year: publish more reported stories and get more writers. So given the limited monthly budget, and the fact that opinions are cheaper than reports, the published story count (3901) was lower than that in 2016 – but the stories themselves were great, and we also got almost twice as many science writers to write them.
In 2018, I hope to expand the science journalism team at The Wire. We’ve also been planning a new-look section with a more diverse content offering. I’ll keep you all posted on how that goes. (If you wish to work with us, apply for a suitable position here.)
Personally, 2017 was full of ups and downs but since it ended mostly on the up, that’s how I’m going to remember the year. I did little to quell my anxieties and got back on antidepressants – but then I also moved to Chennai and started playing Dungeons & Dragons. Life’s good.
I’ll see you on the other side soon.
1. This excludes reports syndicated from publications The Wire has a content-sharing agreement with, republished content and agency copies.
Featured image credit: PublicDomainPictures/pixabay.
On May 12, 2014, about half a week before the Lok Sabha election votes were to be counted, ahead of the result that would catapult the BJP to power with an overwhelming majority in the lower house of Parliament, H.R. Giger passed away. I didn’t hear about it until two days later, on May 14. I remember dropping whatever I was doing – which was quite a bit because Counting Day was almost upon us – rushing over to the Sunday Magazine desk and pitching an obituary for Giger to Baradwaj Rangan. I was commissioned 20 seconds later, and I was done two hours later.
As far as I was concerned, it was very, very bad news. With his death, Giger’s repertoire was finished, complete, finito; there wasn’t going to be any more new material. I could complete his obituary in such a short span of time not because I was familiar with his creative output – familiarity would imply I understood what was going on; I didn’t. If anything, I was just a kindred soul – with many fears and terrors, and little faith in solace or hope. It was a world, and worldview, that Giger the artist had helped validate.
Yesterday, I’d met a friend for coffee and – as our conversation about the future of science journalism meandered on – we happened to be talking about sci-fi Netflix, Alejandro Jodorowsky and, soon, Giger. I don’t remember how we got there except that one of us had mentioned Dune and the other had been very excited to meet a fellow Dune fan. We hugged. After exchanging a few notes about having had a childhood equal parts traumatised and enlivened by the Necronomicon, my friend mentioned that there was a documentary about Giger released sometime in 2014. I couldn’t believe I’d missed it.
So yesterday, I completed all the tasks on my to-do list, grabbed some early dinner, and shut myself off in my room. I’d decided that for old times’ sake I was going to gift myself some masochistic mindfuck: I was going to watch the documentary, called Dark Star: H.R. Giger’s World.
[One hundred minutes later] I’m incredibly glad I did.
[Early next morning] No excuse is weak enough for me to revisit, rediscuss, reanalyse and reconsume the brilliance of Giger – as if being able to enjoy an old and favourite track for the first time. And Dark Star was a fecund, almost extortionate, excuse.
For example, fifteen minutes into it, a few lines – spoken by Hanz Kunz, a poster-maker, and Leslie Barany, Giger’s agent – confirmed what I’d suspected about him for long: despite the intricate methods and symmetries depicted in his images, Giger didn’t have an artistic process; he intuited his symbols and their placement on his canvas. Barany: “I thought he was channeling something and I don’t believe in those things.” Stanislov Grof, a psychiatrist: “Giger was the medium through which Another World was introducing itself to us.”
That intuition was akin to a mysterious agent speaking guy through him, call it your subconscious or your true self or whatever. Giger really tapped into that, terrified himself with it, remained terrified with it as he worked; as he says, “When I put it on canvas, I have some sense of command over it. It’s healing for me.” Carmen Maria Scheifele Giger, his wife, says, “Giger’s art has the same effect as nigredo, the blackness, an alchemical ritual that begins by looking at the dark night of the soul.”
Li Tobler, Giger’s first partner and who committed suicide in 1975, embodied the struggle that he had won as a little boy of six – the struggle to recognise and acknowledge what it is that we’re truly afraid of, the struggle to not self deny, the struggle to honestly explore reprehensions. She had had a Catholic and puritanical upbringing but her lover was an artist so gleeful when, on the sets of Alien, he explains to someone that though he had to change the opening of the xenomorph’s egg from a vaginal slit because the producers hoped to be able to air the film to Catholic audiences as well, he was pleased that he could give the opening four flaps to “doubly offend the church”. But when he says in Dark Star that his art could not do much to help her deal with her depression, it’s as if his art was all he had to give her. That is a silencing moment.
H.R. Giger speaks in a scene from ‘Dark Star’
In fact, Giger had a rare set of privileges: to have been able to explore the darkest recesses of the human condition, to have confronted those demons through his art, and to have ultimately reconciled with the shape of those horrors. His paintings and sculptures extend us – the viewers – that privilege. Sometimes that makes me wonder if there is something to be said for the creative process Giger uses, if that takes away some of the edge since Giger has visualised his demons from scratch. Is he as terrified as one of his fans when he beholds one of his finished products? Or, to Giger, is the process of creating his demons more therapeutic than is the moment of beholding his demons frightening?
Nonetheless, his privileges prevail. As I wrote in his obituary, Giger’s extensive journeys through the wombs of horror revealed that rotting corpses and camisado surprises are not the stuff of fear. We are. Our terrors are of our own making – fevers about the peri-normal, about what we’ll find when we open new doors, break taboos, burst into life from tabula rasa unto the innate. Kunz/Barany: “His art has this quality, an element of reality combined with his own fantasies, and what makes it stronger is the reality, not the fantasy.”
The metal in his paintings and sculptures twisted and bent in ways that no metalsmith would attempt to achieve. Semblances of humans, human forms, caught up in the workings of otherworldly engines, monochrome lips and spring-loaded breasts grafted around solenoids, crania tubula labia shot through with tentacular electric cables, Tesla coils and Jacob’s ladders of homuncular bullets. It was easy to get lost in this frightening order of symbols, for each one of us to behold this visage and to take away a seedling of serial nightmares. Giger’s visualisations were all together pareidolia as public good – where except faces you saw something you didn’t want to see, something you’ve known all your life but hidden away…
And in Dark Star, Giger himself looks terrified, as if he knows something is coming. There is a remarkable scene where his assistant says Giger’s house is big enough for the ageing artist to disappear into, to become one with the house itself, that he can’t be found unless he wants to be found. Right after that, the cinematographer goes looking for Giger in the house, slowly exploring passages, corridors, crawling with building apprehension through tubes crisscrossing the house in much the same way Giger contemplated perinatal misgivings.
It can be difficult to communicate the brand of horror that Giger stood for, a deep existential visceral soulful tension, an unassailable yet unspeakable awareness of a darkness, a knot of shame festering in our hearts and minds. But explore Giger’s house with the impending frightful sight of a terrified old man who’s seen the faces of hell and it will unseat you somehow. Whence that fear, that anxiety? What do we fill in the blanks of our reality with?
Featured image: H.R. Giger in a scene from Dark Star.
It exposes flaws in your thinking – This is the equivalent of bouncing your ideas off a friend before you explore them further. Writing about the ideas has a similar effect because when you put down your reasoning, it’s easier to jump between different parts of it and pick out inconsistencies. This is harder to do when your ideas are just in your head. Writing more often to hone your ideas, and ideation, can also sensitise you to alternate perceptions and train you to be your own devil’s advocate.
You’re likelier to remember something if you write it down – And when you write about current affairs, scientific research and history, you quickly build up knowledge that you’re unlikely to forget anytime soon – knowledge that you can recall easily when you feel you most need it. The process of writing fosters a measure of introspection that can encourage you to be vocal about your knowledge, too.
You can do it very right or very wrong, you’ll still learn something – There’s no perfecting writing, whether it’s fiction, non-fiction, anything in between or something beyond. Writing will always teach you about how to structure your paragraphs, which words to use where, what style or voice or inflections to adopt, or how best to tickle your audience.
Despite the timescale required to perfect it (if at all), you’ll sense progress – No serious writer is going to ever admit that he or she has perfected the art of writing. Perfection in writing is impossible. At the same time, you’ll see yourself scaling this infinitely high mountain. With every subsequent piece you write, you will be able to tell how you did better than the last time you did it. Writing affords you the chance to see yourself getting better and better and better, all the time.
It’s cost-effective – To write, it takes a pen and paper or a text-editor. The point is not that it’s monetarily cheap but that it’s accessible in terms of resources, not that there’s very little by way of an excuse not to write on that front but that there are more incentives to take it up.
It can be addictive – If it’s addictive, it becomes a habit much faster. Writing does take a bit of time to become addictive but if you do it with the right kind of discipline, it can really stick. All you’ll feel like doing when you’re bored (or not) is writing after that.
It’s not picky to your moods but the other way round – Even when you’re feeling down, there’s that down-in-the-dumps sort of writing that many writers have honed (Bukowski, Hemingway, Heller, Plath, etc.). If you’re angry, writing can often be the perfect weapon with which to display it. There have been times when I’ve looked forward to a mood-swing so I take advantage of the inherent catharsis to finish writing a story. It can be an abusive relationship.
A body of work is always uplifting to look at if you’ve nothing else to hold on to – As a depressed person, I cannot overstate how thankful I am to have a blog that I’ve been writing in since 2009. When my day-job leaves me tired and/or feeling drained of soul, when all I want to do is shutter myself in my room and turn off the lights, I often also open my blog and just read through old pieces. It feels good then to be reminded that I have been up to something and that not all was for nothing.
It can be all these things as well as a career – It may not pay much and it can be a grueling road to the top. When I was in the Middle East and enjoying the conversion rate in 2010, content-writing for corporate establishments fetched from Rs. 9,000 to Rs. 20,000 for a week’s work. It wasn’t fulfilling work but it paid the rent, kept the lights on, etc. while I got to work on a bad but nonetheless satisfying novel. It’s not a bad place to be because you get to write all the time.
Featured image: A Stipula fountain pen. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
