Perdurabo (Notes from a Hard Knock Life)

Becoming hard is the really distinctive sign 

of a Dionysian nature

 

 

One of the things I hate being asked - usually in relation to my role as a full-time carer for an elderly parent with Alzheimer's - is: How are you coping? 

 

It's a question that entirely misunderstands my situation and reveals that the questioner has failed to grasp the fact that, for me, this is not about finding a way to cope, but is, rather, all about endurance ...

 

What's the difference? 

 

Well, I suppose we might say - borrowing a term privileged by Nigel Baines - that coping is the attempt to stay afloat when feeling all at sea; i.e., learning how to deal effectively with a set of challenging circumstances in order to manage and minimise one's own stress and keep one's head above the water. 

 

Endurance, on the other hand, is the ability to withstand an extended period of trauma and fatigue; an affirmation of suffering and a willingness to go under - at the risk of drowning - in order to explore the depths and confront the horrors thereof.   

 

In other words, whilst coping is a psychological technique for self-preservation, endurance is a philosophical test of one's physical, mental, and emotional reserves in the face of danger. That's why Nietzsche valued only those individuals who could endure: 

 

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures." [1]

          

That's a diamond-like teaching from Zarathustra's school of hard knocks. But perhaps my favourite quote in relation to this topic and the providing of care for a loved one, comes from a letter by the American writer Willa Cather to her younger brother in 1916:

 

"The test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please." [2]

 

Precisely! And those charcoal souls - always planning how best to cope - will never understand this ... 

  

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), section 910, p. 481.   

[2] Willa Cather, letter to Charles Douglas Cather (8 July 1916), in A Calendar of Letters of Willa Cather: An Expanded, Digital Edition, ed. Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout, The Willa Cather Archive: click here.    

 

Surprise musical bonus from the soundtrack of my life: click here. 

 

 

On the Limits of Staying Afloat

 Flying Carp Books (2019)

nigelbaines.com

 

To be fair, Nigel Baines defines himself as a cartoonist and illustrator, rather than a writer, and his graphic memoir, Afloat, which documents his experience of caring for someone with dementia, interspersed with reflections on his childhood, gerontology, and the death of a beloved parent (in this case, the woman he refers to throughout as mum), is more successful as a pictorial project, than as a written work.   

 

Indeed, one wonders why he didn't simply produce a wordless book in the style of Frans Masereel or Lynd Ward: I think that might have worked better. 

 

For I sometimes found the narrator's voice intrusive and slightly flippant in tone. I also think that the silence of the text would have nicely echoed the silence that the demented subject often slips into. Further, as Baines himself notes, often the most important thing in graphic novels - as in life - happens in the spaces between panels and the silences between words; that's where stories unfold.  

 

Having said that, perhaps it's necessary to provide some autobiographical background and maybe the personal element is something that's all too often missing in my own musings on this topic.

 

However, you have to exercise caution with such material. Otherwise, as is the case here, you end up telling us too much about yourself and not enough about the ravishing violence of dementia. In his attempt to stay afloat, Baines misses the opportunity - at the risk of drowning - to really plumb the depths of pain, loss, and the other profoundly monstrous aspects of life lived in extremis.    

Notes

 

Thanks to Catherine Brown for kindly gifting me this book. 

 

For a follow up post to this one on coping contra enduring, click here.