How We Are: How to Live Book 1

Introduction

We live in small worlds. At the beginning of most movies we are shown a status quo, more fully a status quo ante bellum, the state of things before the war. We are shown a routine and comfortable life, a small world, one that is soon to end. In screenwriting parlance, this normal, soon-to-be-over world is known as Act One, and the ‘inciting incident’ is the event that precipitates the move into Act Two, into the war of change and adjustment. And, usually, we prefer to maintain ourselves in the status quo, in comfort and predictable ease. It takes a lot to get us out of that – a compelling call, an overwhelming imperative. Or maybe we were pushed. But sometimes it happens. Things change. The movie-makers like to end Act One fairly quickly and get stuck into the spectacle of change and adjustment. That’s where the drama is, that’s what we pay to see.

In life, as in this book, the balance is different. Our Act Ones, our normal lives, tend to last for longer. We like it that way. We are creatures of habit and we live in worlds small enough for us to come to know their ways and to establish familiar ways within them. Unless we are uneasy, unless something disturbs us from within or without, we tend to work to keep things the way they are. That is the subject of this book’s Act One – Saming – how we creatures of habit work to establish and maintain our ways of life.

These ways of life, these routines, are not just habits of thinking and doing the same things in the same way, although of course that is part of it. But our habits are not only established internally, in muscles and nerves. As birds feather nests, so we also embed our ways of life in the places where we do our living. We beat paths through our environments and we surround ourselves with others, our tribes, who act as mirrors to remind us who we are and what we do. These, then, are the elements of our small worlds: the habits, routines, people, places and things that we have become accustomed to and comfortable with. That’s the terrain of Part One of this book, that’s where the journey starts. If you wanted to be scientific, and we will be at points, but not dauntingly so, we could call this part homeostasis. But let’s think in movies. As in a movie, Act One of this book shows us how this world is before anything happens, before the disturbance or unease of an inciting incident forces us to begin the difficult work of deliberation and adjustment.

Then, inevitably, something interrupts our routine lives, some ‘News from Elsewhere’. The war begins. The end of our small worlds can take many forms: more likely the gaining or losing of a job or a relationship than the mass geo-political catastrophes of the movies, but end they will. And so with some ingrained physiological inertia and reluctance, we leave normal and begin the uphill struggle of change, Act Two, the second half of this book.

Act Two – Changing – always begins with the difficult first moves of adjustment, those clumsy early days and first nights of becoming accustomed to a new way of being. It really is hard at first, that’s why we resist it. Beginnings, and ends, are terrible times. Now we are in the process of allostasis, of trying to re-achieve stability in the face of change, to reach a new set-point of comfort and familiarity, to get back to normal. Heightened arousal and attention are the hallmarks of these times of transition. They always accompany our attempts to adjust to the rhythm of the new, putting us under constant internal pressure to get back to normal, a new normal, as quickly as possible. During such difficult times it is often easier to fall back on the consolation of old habits, even though these will not get the job of change done. And it is here we glimpse the roots of much of our suffering. We are sometimes too keen to reach the end of the process of change, or not to begin it at all, or to avoid it whilst in it; we trot out our old responses when something new is called for, we keep saming when we ought to be changing. This is the ground we will cover in Act Two, following the arc of the drama of change through to Act Three, the establishment of the new normal, the new small world.

It’s a daunting prospect. There is a whole book ahead of me – of us. For my journey, like a climber off to scale a mountain, or a general off to battle, I prepared a detailed campaign. Even for this part I made some notes. I knew early on that I wanted to draw attention to the act of dedication that is necessary to initiate and sustain something as fundamentally improbable as the writing of a book. Only recently the notion came to me of swimming upstream, against the tide of decay and degradation, the slow and subtle ebbing away of order; the way that every day in every way you and I are getting worse, losing ground, memory, teeth, and the battle just to stay as we are, let alone get better. And this is all about getting better. I could even call it ‘Getting Better’. That would do. People, things, do get better. It’s unlikely, against nature and in the teeth of the second law of thermodynamics – the inevitability of disorder – but just occasionally, things improve. I believe that.

As a therapist, I have seen it, worked with it, seen people move upstream, struggle uphill. The physics of these metaphors is spot on – to work against the prevailing forces of habit, inertia and gradual decay, you really need to put in some effort. And that’s not easy, not right at the start. The first steps are all effort and no reward. Something else needs to keep you going until reward kicks in, until the road begins to rise to meet you. A cussed mixture of faith in the process, hope for change and a devotion to a purpose not dictated by the prevailing conditions. In sum, dedication. It’s hard at first.*

So why bother? What makes us change? Well, sometimes we have to, and sometimes we just see that things could be better than they are. We get a glimpse or have a vision of a future that is not just a continuation of the present. And if that vision is compelling enough, then desire kicks in, the yearning for things to be other than they are. You’re off to a good start there, with the vision and the desire. With them comes a quickening of energy, the beginnings of an urgency, the impulse to change. That’s quite a trio now – vision, desire and urgency – quite a team. But even then you could let it lie. Let the impulse die, the desire fade, the perception dim. They will stop bothering you, eventually, if you ignore them. How much choice we have there is a subject that we can come to, but for the moment let’s just say it feels like there are little moments when everything is in place and all we need to do is act. Do something about it. ‘Well, if that’s how you feel, why don’t you do something about it?’ You know those moments – we’ve all had them or seen them on television. A moment of decision. ‘OK, I will.’ And you do, you will. You manifest your will in an action, and things change. Maybe not much at first, but definitively. Things have changed. Something has passed from potential to actual; you’ve started something new, brought something into the world. It’s magical and relatively rare. Beginnings are terrible times, and so are ends.

On my campaign map (see Figure 1), I can see the road stretch in front of me: a thrilling and daunting prospect. There are ten chapters to cross in this book alone, and then, dimmer, more distant, two more books ahead of that.* May I not falter. I am dedicating myself to this project on transformation in the hope that it might be a transformative project. I am dedicating myself to the perception that, however unlikely, however against nature, improvement happens, people get better. I mean better at living, at being who they are, at handling life with grace, humour and courage. Some people handle life admirably. And other people really don’t. Some get stuck in hideous deforming places and postures and become ever more unbearable versions of themselves. This is not arbitrary – people become stuck or remain fluid and graceful because of the kind of beasts we humans are, and how we handle saming and changing.

Figure 1. Campaign Map

Professionally and personally, I have had a ringside seat at the theatre of change and I’m beginning to get an idea how it’s done – what it is that gets people stuck and unstuck. And we do know a lot about this; there are centuries of writing on the technologies of change, from the most ancient ethical and spiritual writings up to the most modern schools of therapy. Parallel to this run the descriptions of the human condition, from ancient souls, through early modern ids and egos to the brand new neural networks of neuroscience: descriptions of the beast the ‘stuckness’ and the change happens to. And I think I can bring all that together, seamlessly and clearly. That’s the vision. I think I can synthesize that into a coherent version of what a human being is like, how it works and in working gets worse and better, gets stuck or manages to free itself. I think it might help, that’s the desire. And I know I want to do this for me, to take stock, midway in my life’s journey, to see what wisdom I have acquired, and to use it to direct my future course, before it’s too late. That’s the urgency. To recap the story so far and move on more deliberately; drift less, get better. I am dedicating myself to this book.

And I am dedicating this book to Lenny, Sara, Sarah and Ben and Jamie, James, Andrea, Marc, Charlotte, Ish, Lilian, Isobelle and Hughie, Elayne, Stevie and Ian, to Abhi and Vicky.

But first, before Act One begins, a brief prelude – ‘The Beaten Path’. The making of ways is the central theme of this book: how our established paths define us, how we get stuck in them, how we struggle to make new ones. Throughout this book, we shall mostly keep the focus at the individual level, and will talk about people going through the kind of saming and changing that you and I do. In this opening prelude, we pan our camera out a little to see how the process of making ways underlies most of life.

How is a road beaten down through the virgin snow? One person walks ahead, sweating, swearing, and barely moving his feet … Five or six people follow shoulder to shoulder along the narrow, wavering track of the first man.

Varlam Shalamov*

Strange reciprocity:

The circumstance we cause

In time gives rise to us …

Philip Larkin^†

I. Urban planners and landscape architects describe a phenomenon they call ‘natural desire lines’ or simply desire lines. The new park near my old house had a striking example. The park’s planners had designed gracious curving paths, which walked the walkers around the borders of the newly planted lawns, through avenues of young shrubs and fledgling trees. The public were being instructed, guided on an improving and scenic detour. From the main road there was one path that led through the park to the entrance of a large supermarket. The park had, in fact, been built by the supermarket owners, placed between it and the road to mask this new and unsightly growth of commerce. This path was curved like a long archery bow, cutting a grey and gentle swathe through the young and vibrant grass, taking the public on a stroll on their way to and from the store, encouraging them to stop and smell the roses. Which of course we didn’t. Loaded with desire one way and bags the other, we chose expediency over prescribed detour. We voted with our feet. Gradually a line was worn through the grass, connecting the ends of the curve like the string of an archery bow. With use, this line gained definition, lost its green. Soon it was a solid beaten path, a taut and muscular line inscribed by desire and necessity. In fact you could say that this path was the record of a public decision and not only a record but a new suggestion, a new instruction, a new way of solving the problem of getting to and from the shops which was at odds with the official prescription.

II. So desire can inscribe itself on the landscape, make a big mark. No one planned it and no one sanctioned it, but still this mark upon the world happened. Massed desire expressed itself. There is, in a way, nothing remarkable about this process. All the paths that lead from here to there, all the places they connect, all are formations of desire. The political question would be whose desire – cui bono? – who stands to benefit from this particular formation? In the case of the park, the path is notable precisely because it’s such an anarchic gesture, though at the same time it also speaks of a herd urgency to rush to the pasture of commerce. Sheep also make desire lines to their troughs. The official avenues and park walkways of our premeditated built world stand as a polar, political opposite to this crude herd formation. But consider this desire-line urban myth, a fable of urban planning best practice: an American college campus has been newly built. Its buildings are scattered over a wide area, so paths will have to be built between them. Rather than prescribe or attempt to predict the ways the public will want to go, the designers decide to record them first. They sow the campus with new lawns, without pathways and let the students loose. Over the next year, the pathways of natural desire and necessity are worn down. Only then are they paved, their anarchic spontaneity memorialized in stone. And maybe this is closer to how the world was made, a strange reciprocity between the forces of natural human desire and those in charge of controlling and containing its expression, giving it form. In the infancy of any culture there will have been first steps in which desire and necessity will have sketched its rudimentary form onto the landscape. This form in turn directs subsequent desire as a riverbed does water. The worn ruts become ever more substantial and compelling, and the movements of the collective more coherent as a result. Deliberate human agency – the decision actually to build the path, or rather to endorse the path of common use – need not enter the process until fairly late.

III. What is at work here is a dialectic of force and form. The raw force of human compulsions, the lacks and needs that make us move – hunger, anger, sex, comfort, curiosity – are translated into movements and actions. These movements and actions are not arbitrary – some are more effective at satisfying our needs than others. A random sample: certain trade routes are more profitable; the river is more easily accessed at a certain point for travelling or fishing; there is a ‘best’ route to a neighbouring village. So certain movements and action will be repeated more than others, and will in their repetition become established and routine. These routines, these rudimentary formations of desire, will begin to leave marks, expressing themselves as paths or even as stories about the best way to build them. These marks – these semi-permanent forms, these tangible manifestations of desire – are what we call culture.

IV. In La Rabbia (The Rage), and in his films in general, the Italian poet and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini was constantly trying to discover how the earth looked before it was overlaid with the markings of desire. This is like wanting to see the dawn’s new snow beneath the over-trodden slush of lunchtime. This question runs through Pasolini’s work: what would we look like were we not overrun by culture, by what he calls in La Rabbia, ‘the old, bleeding roads of the earth’? He made a short film about his search for the locations for The Gospel According to St Matthew, the latter being a luminously simple telling of the gospel narrative. In it, we watch him and a priest visit the Church of Christ in Jerusalem. He is struck by how the magnificence of the temple stands in relation to the humble rock on which it was founded; how the grandiose architectonics of Christendom have been established upon a foundation of humility and simplicity. It is 1964 and Pasolini, a Marxist and an atheist, had been arrested for a film he made only a couple of years earlier, about a poor man, a film extra, dying on a cross on a film set depicting the Crucifixion. The Catholic Church had not liked this equating of the sub-proletariat with Christ, and had Pasolini charged with blasphemy. So he was wary. In his contemplation of this new cinematic life of Christ, he decided to consult a Vatican expert about his intentions before he began filming. His question for the Vatican was this: could he dismantle the edifice of Christendom and show the humble rock on which it was built? Or at least try? Can I do this, he asks the priest, as they stand by the temple, can I tear down the temple, can I show the luminous, simple, humble truth before it is overrun, over-built with all this grandiosity? Yes, says the priest, you can. You have the authority.

V. Like that other visionary poet, Rimbaud, Pasolini was suspicious of our thoughtless inheritance of the desire lines that we walk every day – these old, bleeding roads of the earth. The future is not conjured from nothing. The future is the past renovated, its paths thickened, embellished, reinscribed with a firm and then a firmer hand. The present is a kind of memorial of the past, both a living monument preserving its memory and a dead weight obscuring it. The present both preserves and effaces. Parents know this, as does anyone who has watched a growing thing. Each new version eclipses the one before: the child at five obscures the child at four, the adolescent effaces the toddler, but also preserves an essence we believe we see unfolding and maturing before us. The face more definite, the gestures more assured, the voice stronger. The present as the past once more with feeling.

VI. The pagan temple, then the church and now the hall for yoga and meditation: our spiritual communions have tended to take place in the same locations, on the same patches of hallowed earth. As with God, so with Mammon. The money tends to stay put. Witness how the mercantile areas of cities are ceaselessly renovated. The most recent advances in infrastructure and design are rushed to money like tributes to a monarch, with the advance of technologies fired by the desire to appease and facilitate the life of money. But while these parts of the civic body, these city areas, may be the most absolutely modern and shiny and new, they are also some of the oldest and most established. Indeed, it is the very age of their establishment that ensures their smooth running. The paths of money are well worn and constantly tended. ‘Beneath the pavements, the beach!’ ran the old French situationist slogan, reminding us, as Pasolini and Rimbaud did, that there was a before of all this building, all this enculturation, which we went through as a people and as individuals. Beneath the pavement is a well-established road; beneath that a track; beneath the track a path; and beneath that path a worn rut. Beneath the pavement a desire to move written in earth.

VII. Interesting to watch the new technologies at work. Consider the way a whole new network of paths has been established by the internet, and the way the old desires are re-emblazoned on this new land. Gossip and sex, money and violence, desire and desire for communion, all the old urges wearing down new electrical pathways.

VIII. It takes a lot to efface the traces of desire. Think of the gay districts of the major cities. These were once the cruising grounds of furtive criminals, the camouflaged haunts of outlaws. But they persisted for years at the same locations until, for now, the law assented to legitimize this particular desire and it became gradually visible. Now you can buy gay maps. How many lives would those maps have altered not so many years ago, when hardly anyone knew that such exotic lands existed? Think of all the coded, still-secret geographies, the subterranean, marginal or illegal currents that must traverse our lands. From drugs to freemasonry, from Elvis fans to swingers and doggers, every desire will have its map, leaving its marks for those who can read them, find them. It takes real destruction to efface the traces of desire. The Earth has habits too.

IX. I’m going to be learning to drive soon. I imagine the parts of my body that will become dedicated to driving as a field of virgin snow, a landscape as yet unmarked with desire. It will involve effort, willed and conscious effort at first. First steps always do. There are sequences of actions to be learned, routines combining and coordinating gross and fine muscular movements with a whole new set of sensory and judgemental processes. I’ll have to think a lot at first, to deliberate. My movements will be very conscious and clunky, klutzy; as long as they are deliberate, they will be bad. Only when the inner paths have been trodden and re-trodden, again and again – pure repetition – only through this effort, willed and deliberate and conscious and muscular, sweating and swearing and painful and clumsy repetition, only after this, only then will I become good, when it begins to get effortless, thoughtless, unconscious, automatic. I can’t wait.

X. ‘A walk in the park’ is a synonym for ease because the park knows how to walk. It does it for us. A good park anticipates our desire. Anticipated desire is the key to leisure. People have been paid and good money has been spent on figuring out what we are going to want to do. They care so that we don’t have to. The good hotel, the theme park, the penny arcade, the pub, the cinema – all of them relieve our consciousness of the burden of worrying about what to do next. Think of those early difficult days with a new thing – a computer or a mobile phone, a guitar or a car, or a relationship in which you now feel comfortable. Learning the right moves, what they mean, how to, when to, what not to, where to, repeating and rehearsing, experimenting and getting it wrong: ‘Poise and grace and assurance were not qualities inbred in me, but were things to be acquired, painfully perhaps, and slowly, costing me many bitter moments.’* We want to rush past our bitter moments, to a place of facility and ease, we want to be old at this new thing, but rushing won’t do it. Only time and repetition bring ease. Then it’s second nature, a walk in the park.

XI. Second Nature. A telling phrase – so what’s first, what comes naturally? A lot. It seems the snow is not so virgin after all, a whole host of routines are fitted as standard. The old and bleeding roads of the earth are emblazoned upon you. The vast and folded architecture of your brain and nerves are waiting for the world and have a strong presentiment of exactly how the world is going to be – waiting for space, expecting time, ready for language, anticipating movement and other people, prepared for sex and violence, fear and loathing. As the parks and cities are public records of millennia of problem-solving, of desire facilitated to the point of ease, so you are the repository of millions of years of very hard thinking about this world. You know the world already as your lungs know air and your kidneys water. Its weight and shape have determined your height and form, its light has demanded your eyes, its noises called for ears, its food and water shaped your mouth, your teeth and guts, its earth and roots and branches formed your grasping hands. You, the newest, shortest route between desire and fulfilment, are more intricately traversed by patterns and pathways than the entire world. Imagine the first attempts at hunger, matter desperately maintaining its structure through stealing other matter, the elemental stirrings, the prehistory of hunger. Clumsy, primitive molecular structures managing, just, to cannibalize the earth, to maintain and repeat themselves. Imagine hunger’s first steps, desire’s primal movements, life’s beginning. Look how good it’s got at it. Look how good we are at eating now, at maintaining and reproducing the integrity of a staggeringly complex structure, without even thinking about it. You just know. You were made for this world, by this world, of this world. You are the record, the embodiment of life’s ceaseless desiring, written in tiny molecular hand, transcribed and translated into flesh, from dust and water. Knowledge of a billion years of living in this world is folded up inside you, is you. You are the latest model, the most recent experiment in living.

XII. The world runs in our blood. The hunger within us is a billion years old. There are glimpses of this ancient in us. We have little intuitions of it when we hear phrases like the ‘reptilian brain’, or when we read how we are only a vehicle for our genes that have been around for a billion years. Meaningful parts of us really are millions of years old. Science tries to point out what is only fact, but must also struggle to make us feel that weight of years that it took to reach a point when a couple of buckets of water and a bag of earth became this you, here now, so blithely reading, turning pages, this earth made flesh, this flesh alive with vision and reason, this reasonable meat conjured from dust. It took that amount of effort over that amount of time to reach the point where there is some clay that can ‘see’ and ‘feel’ and ‘know’ and ‘think’. And that it does all this with such a lack of effort. This ease, the smoothness of the mechanism now, our hands moving to the places we want them to go before we have even thought to ask, they just know how. It took a long time, a lot of learning, more than just one lifetime, to get that good. How old is life? That’s how long it took for you to learn how to read and turn this page.

XIII. The first stirrings of life, the first response, the first repetition of an elementary gesture directed at the world in desire, the first hunger to persist. The first steps on the path of life. Can you imagine?

Darkness and concealment are the dominant characteristic of the primordial time. All life first becomes and develops in the night; for this reason, the ancients called night the fertile mother of things and indeed, together with chaos, the oldest of beings.*

XIV. Looking Back. Melanie Klein, the psychoanalyst, tried to imagine our beginning harder than most, tried to picture the start of our selves, the prehistory of ‘I’. She filled it with monsters. Neither self nor not-self, just – shit rage tits fear cock milk envy – an unholy conglomeration of parts and forces, like those foetus-like tumuors made of teeth and hair. For Jacques Lacan, another psychoanalyst, there is a body in pieces, dismembered limbs struggling to form a whole. Now the scientists trying to scry how much the baby knows, how much of the world is already folded up within us, waiting to unfurl, talk in terms of face recognition, object constancy, language recognition; still in terms of parts and forces, bits and pieces, with no idea of their binding, of what it’s like to be that incoherent mass of stuff we all once were. Looking back, we don’t see ourselves begin there, for we seem to start much later. Our first memories are of things out there, worldly happenings taking place in a world of circumstance, to this ‘I’ here, to this little self. Our real beginnings are veiled in darkness. Below the coherent order of the rational world, before the light of reason and reasonableness which illumines the world wherever we care to glance, beneath this familiar world, lies what? The scientists and analysts can only hint, guess or romanticize, but they seem to agree on this: that beneath the present coherence lies a time of chaos. Our sense of continuity, this coherence we rarely have cause to question, let alone notice, had to be formed, order had to be imposed, coherence grown, sense made. There was no ‘I’ to do it, because the ‘I’ was the result. At some point the ‘I’ that is you and me began to form the living breathing world that we now inhabit, at some point this world began to form an ‘I’. This strange reciprocity gave rise to us. What tumultuous energies must we have struggled to harness and tame, with what hideous strength did we bind and form those primal forces that also were us, hauling ourselves by the bootstraps up and out of the maelstrom into the beginnings of coherence and order? Into beginning. How do we begin? Where do we start?

XV. The beginning is always obscure. The first steps are effaced by all the subsequent ones, with the whisper of our beginning persisting but indiscernible beneath the clamour of our present being. But we can say something about it. Tie it up – and back to where we began – with desire lines. Those primal forces that made up the climate of our individual pre-dawn life, when the ‘I’ was without form and void, those forces achieved form through a consistent repetition, through establishing and maintaining routines. The word ‘routine’ derives from ‘route’, itself deriving from ‘rupta via’, meaning a road forged by force, a forced and beaten path.

XVI. Keep doing the same thing and eventually it makes a way, establishes a form with consistency, shape and coherence. A path is made and ‘I’ begins. From the impersonal forces, from the ‘It’, an ‘I’ begins to form. In learning to drive, walk, see or talk, in our very being, we are a massive interpenetrating collection of paths and routines worn by repetition; we are each a landscape, shaped by recurring patterns of force and formed by desire.

Vincent Deary

1. HOW WE ARE

How to Live

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

HOW WE ARE

List of Figures

Introduction

Chapter 1

The Beaten Path

Act One

SAMING

Chapter 2

The Automatic