Gilbert White's Disposable Camera
Or, Why I Love Community
The practice of writing daily pages—three A5 sides of free flow thinking—has become very valuable to me. I didn’t realise just how valuable until the film project was nearly upon us and I had an extended period of being unable to write them. I find I’ve come to depend on these pages for a number of reasons.
Firstly, they allow me to get a better grasp on the aspects of my life that I have been overlooking or neglecting. Externalising my thoughts makes it harder for me to carry on lying to myself day after day. I can sense a momentary hesitation before writing certain sentences, and this often (though not always) means that I am coming closer to working something out.
When I’ve occasionally read back the pages (which I’ve written for the past few months), it’s been interesting to note just how many of the shifts in direction and the inciting ideas have originated there. This is another fact about them which I enjoy—yes, I am able to think critically about aspects of my life, but I am also able to conjure up new ideas for where I should be heading. Often, I’ll forget that I ever dreamed up these ideas first on paper, and so I feel surprised anew when I revisit them and see that the concentrated half hour it takes to write the pages seems to help more on average than the time I spend thinking without writing.
The pages also tie in with a broader thought which has struck me repeatedly for well over three years, now. Even with multiple exposure, however, it’s hard to locate or describe the thought exactly, but I’ll do my best.
I think a good place to start when describing this recurring pattern of thinking is an examination of what can constitute a ‘life well lived’. As someone who has struggled with mental health difficulties for a long time, the proposition takes on a meaning for me that it might not have for those who have not suffered the same or similar tribulations.
Because life for someone who has had psychosis isn’t really a continuum in the traditional sense. I feel that I have had breaks in my psyche—breaks, indeed, in my time—during which I was definitely present, but was so distracted from my normal tracks of thinking that I can in a very real sense affirm that they constitute gaps in the narrative that I call ‘myself’.
This pertains to the recurring thought which I am about to describe because the thought is accompanied by a feeling which is not quite jealousy, not quite regret and not quite sadness, but which bears a slight resemblance to all three at once. But it mixes in with those bitter notes a morsel of joy and a hope that things will right themselves again; that simply having a mind and a body is a sufficient foundation upon which to rebuild and for personal growth to resume.
When I think of these gaps I have experienced, and when I think of the amount of effort it has taken both times to claw myself out of the trench of psychosis, I do feel at a disadvantage to those who have not suffered these setbacks. But I also feel something else. I feel a gratitude that I have what I have now—my sanity—and that I was delivered out of thought that was only coherent to myself and back into the world of shared understanding.
What does a ‘life well lived’ look like when these gaps, these lacunae, break in and threaten to smash up all that had been so carefully constructed? The pages don’t help to answer this, but they do reflect back what life has been. The most recent time that the overarching thought I am still tapdancing around came to me was when I was with two dear friends. We were walking through the woods about a week ago and we were nearing a duck pond, and there it was again.
Here is the thought, then, distilled as much as I am able to:
What does knowledge afford us? and what kinds of knowledge are most useful or, more importantly, most valuable?
Now, those words do not resemble what I chew over silently when I think this thought, but they do get to the heart of what’s at stake in these moments of reflection. When I was walking in the woods with my friends, I was thinking about the deep value of local knowledge and how ‘book learning’ is a far cry from intimate and ancient understandings of, say, the place where one grew up. Both of these friends have great knowledge of the local area and of the natural world, and I would say that these far exceed my own.
Another time that this thought has come to me was when two other friends came round—incidentally shortly after my second episode of psychosis. These two people are distant friends of mine, really, and they are very learned and very bookish. Once again, I was struck by the feeling, the sadness and regret mixed with immense hope and inspiration, that is common whenever these moments come on. It occurred to me then that I would never be as knowledgeable or as clever as these people and yet even as I knew these things, I felt no distress. It is at times like these that I feel I can see myself most clearly. I am no longer defined by my desires to be ‘Angus the scholar’ or ‘Angus the fount of local knowledge’ or even ‘Angus the naturalist’.
Instead, where I had been striving for deeper and deeper understanding, I am able to take a step back and appreciate the importance of community, of shared knowledge and of people having different strengths. I feel, at these moments (and perhaps oddly) more like an artist than at any other time. When I am confronted with these troves of things that I have never considered and with which I wouldn’t know where to begin, then I feel the most excited to use the data of my life and turn it into something like art. It is here that the daily pages can re-enter.
The pages are not art. They are very far from it, in fact. But, they are a record of my thoughts for thirty minutes most days and they are a way for me to try and reconcile things with myself. There, I can reflect on the experience of gaps in my life—the way it feels as though I have lived three distinct lives separated by two catastrophic nightmares. I can dwell on the joy of shared knowledge—my friends spoke at length about the naturalist Gilbert White and his The Natural History of Selborne, which they have been reading. Above all, I can think over the good times and the times when deeper and deeper understanding comes to seem irrelevant—when all that matters is that I am present now with a dear friend and we are taking pictures around Cambridge with a disposable camera.
- Angus