The editors of Anxiety recently asked the Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai to contribute to the series. Below, in the author’s words, is “a lyrical essay about the terrible meeting between boorishness and aggressiveness,” a meditation on a type of violent person who produces in him “the deepest personal anxiety.” It was translated by George Szirtes from the Hungarian.
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I’ve been living in complete silence for months, I might say for years, with just the usual dull sounds you hear at the outskirts of town, the occasional echo of steps in the corridor and, further off, in the stairwell, someone dragging a sack, a carpet, a package, or a corpse, God knows what, along the ground; or the sound of the elevator as it slows, stops, opens, then closes and starts to rise or descend. Every so often a dog barks briefly, someone laughs or shouts. But everything dies away, soon lost in the constant low-level murmur of the street outside. That is what complete silence is like round here.
There are of course times I put on a Zelenka mass or listen to one of Schiff’s “Wohltemperiertes Klavier” interpretations, or take out Spoon, Karen Dalton or Vic Chesnutt, but after a few bars I turn it off so it may be quiet again, because I want to be ready and I don’t want anything disturbing going on when he arrives and finds me. Read more…
It happened by degrees, a series of imperceptible gradations, slow and steady, a sort of “Picture of Dorian Gray” in reverse, or rather, in the natural order, wherein the picture stays the same but the man degrades.
My problem isn’t as luxurious as aging. I’ve had my summer, and don’t begrudge the autumnal tumble of leaves or the crunch of frozen winter coming. And there’s nothing wrong with me health-wise, at least not that I know of. I get over colds in a day and, while I practice my daily routine of martial arts, even come off as physically gifted. Yet there’s obviously a corruption, a slow, unidentifiable toxin seeping into my life.
I’m a creep.
Toyin Odutola I know this because people — mostly but not always random strangers — tell me so. Read more…
Middle age arrives not with a birthday, with 48 candles on an angel food cake, but with a sudden unbidden insight in the middle of a sleepless night. You roll over and eye the clock and see all at once that the phrase “anything is possible” is not true. That is, it is no longer true for you, if it ever was. You are not going to become a doctor, or run a marathon or have a baby or sail around the world on a solo voyage documented by National Geographic. You simply haven’t the time, the feet, the eggs, or possibly even the desire required to mount such elaborate dream sequences.
Anxiety itself is not going to kill you, any more than a sleepless night does. But it makes life so much less enjoyable.
In a way, this comes as a relief. When possibilities stop being endless, you can narrow the choices. Indeed, you can make hard choices, without resorting to dreams, without relying on maps, without abandoning duty. Is that not what wisdom is? Knowing when to unload what one will not need or use before approaching the next bridge. Read more…
“You want to cultivate the crackling intensity of the ninja,” Daniel Ingram told me. Ingram made a living as an emergency doctor, but his real passion was teaching advanced meditation. It was day one of a 30-day solitary retreat, and this was my first meditation instruction. We were sitting in Ingram’s straw bale guesthouse, a squat round building next to the main house at the end of a long country road in rural Alabama. Behind the house a thick forest buzzed with insect life.
I learned about ‘stream entry,’ a Buddhist term for initial enlightenment, and I wanted it.
Ingram stood and began to walk, arms outstretched and eyes shock-widened, as though his entire body was communing with the humid air, which it probably was. “Feel the weirdness and wonder of everything.” He took a step in slow motion. “Notice the moving, the physicality, the contact with the ground, the air on your skin, your joints balancing, the planning of the next step, the room shifting around you.” He made strange guttural clicks as he moved, like the bionic man. “It’s the same when you sit — notice every detail of the sensation of breathing in the abdomen, as fast as you can, as many frames a second as possible. If you notice everything from the moment you wake to the moment you sleep, there will come a time when everything congeals into a single 360-degree fluxing field of awareness.”
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Year: 2007
Location: St. Louis, Mo.
Participant(s): Subject (F; 42), Bystander, Emergency Medical Service Technicians, Luggage Porter, Flight Attendant
Environment: Airport (interior)
Observed Event(s): Subject is observed walking in an agitated manner, burdened with carry-on luggage.[1] Subject enters a ladies room, sits on toilet and begins to sweat and breathe shallowly. Subject suffers a prolonged bout of diarrhea. Subject exits ladies room (after washing hands) and lies down on a bench. Bystander approaches, expressing concern. Subject says she feels “very unwell.”[2] Bystander leaves hurriedly. E.M.S. Technicians arrive and take Subject’s vitals while asking Subject about her current condition. Subject expresses regret, shame and embarrassment. Technicians offer Subject a ride to the local hospital, which Subject declines. Technicians procure orange juice and suggest to Subject that she eat something “solid” as soon as possible. Luggage Porter wheels Subject’s luggage to gate. Subject boards plane and takes her seat. Flight Attendant presents Subject with in-flight turkey sandwich. Subject eats turkey sandwich. Subject falls asleep.
Overall Affect: Subject appears anxious.
Conclusions: Subject is prone to escalating, same-day panic attacks. Public nature of distress and any special attention intensify rather than alleviate symptoms. NOTE: Airline food may be indicated as an effective treatment modality.
[2] Subject reports having had a milder attack that morning in a motel restaurant during which she remembered thinking that an overly solicitous waiter “looked like a giant egg wearing a tie.” Subject was unable to eat anything and suggested to the examiner that low blood sugar may have contributed to later airport episode.
Connor Willumsen Read more…
The series is featuring occasional works of fiction. This is one.
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When the world ends, you and the handful of other survivors are going to fight each other for what’s left. There’s going to be a little food and potable water, and a bit of inhabitable space. Maybe people speak the same language, or maybe they don’t, but words don’t matter anymore. It matters who is lucky and cunning and ambitious and strong. People eat things that you, here and now, would never dream of touching. Ultimately it doesn’t matter because the world is about to end, but if nothing else, you have a strong survival instinct. This is why, when you see something that appears to be edible, you don’t know whether to starve to death or risk being poisoned. They’re two means to the same end.
It’s not that you want to die. But to disappear would be so nice.
That’s what every meal feels like to you. Someone offers you a cracker and all you see is processed flour and cancer. They offer you fruit, and all you see are pesticides and E. coli. And forget about organic. Everyone lies. Everything is tainted.
A few months of this obsessive compulsive thinking has you wearing the J.C. Penney pants you wore in ninth grade. You’re tiny. Everyone tells you that you look skinny and you don’t know how to respond. Thank you seems inappropriate because it’s not a compliment, but what else are you supposed to say? There’s poison in my food and we’re all dying?
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Once upon a time a friend told me about a retreat house in the hills of California. I drove three hours north from my mother’s home and came upon an 800-acre spread, with golden pampas grass tumbling down to a great expanse of blue 1,200 feet below. The place was radiantly silent — save for bells tolling three or four times a day — and I was so far from telephone and laptop that I could lose myself for hours in anything at all, or nothing. At dusk, deer stepped into my private garden to graze; an hour later, I stepped out of my room and found myself under an overturned saltshaker of stars.
Rachell Sumpter The retreat house was the rare place where it seemed impossible to be fraught. All my worries of the previous day seemed about as real and urgent as the taillights of cars disappearing around headlands 12 miles to the south. I started to go to this place of silence more and more often, and one spring day, on my way to two weeks of carefree quiet, I told my old friend Steve about it. Much to my delight, he booked himself in for a three-day stay that would coincide with my final weekend in the sanctuary. Read more…
Five-year-old Miriam huddled in the back corner of my Lower East Side yoga classroom, wrapping herself in a spongy mat like a blanket. She was having another panic attack, screaming so loud others could hear down the hall. I was scared by her anxiety yet it was familiar. At 28, I was the charter school’s first full-time yoga teacher. A product of upstate New York and family with Methodist roots, I’d been a student of Buddhism since college at New York University and, more recently, yoga. I now taught 200 inner-city kids from ages 4 to 12 how to use the tools of mindfulness all day. But secretly, I was having my own panic attacks, at night.
When I first met Miriam she was new to kindergarten, both of her parents were in jail and she had just moved in with her grandmother. A small Hispanic girl, she had recently converted to Islam along with the rest of her family and sported a new dark blue hijab around her serious face. Read more…
The series is featuring occasional works of fiction. This is one.
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Some years ago my husband and I rented an apartment in Paris to celebrate our twentieth anniversary. On the morning of the afternoon we were to leave I packed, putting our clothes and books into two suitcases. I stashed our money and other documents in a leather wallet with many compartments, some hidden within others. I dropped this clever wallet into a quilted backpack. Then, wearing the backpack, I went out for a last stroll on the Boulevard Saint Michel. There, at a kiosk, I bought a lacey shawl for my adored aunt and some oversized hoops for my ears. I came back. I threw the backpack on the bed. And discovered that the clever wallet and its contents, including, God help us, our passports, were gone.
I peeked into the living room at the kindly man I’d married, who was patiently making his way through Le Monde. Was the kindly man to end the vacation, not to mention the marriage, by strangling me? Leaving the backpack on the bed I ran back to the kiosk where I had bought the lacey shawl for my accursed aunt and the hoop earrings for my ridiculous self. I’d paid with money from the clever wallet – I’d had it then. I begged the proprietor to return it. He retorted that he didn’t have it. “Those gypsies,” he shrugged. “Perhaps this is yours,” handing me a red scarf. I tied it around my head, knotting it at the nape. Perhaps this disguise would encourage the gypsy band to accept me as one of their own, and I could filch my clever wallet from them. I retraced my steps to the apartment, my eyes on the sidewalk. No clever wallet. No gypsies either.
“Oh, dear,” murmured the probable strangler when I told him my – our – plight. A moment earlier I’d thought I couldn’t feel worse. His kindness was my undoing, and I burst into tears which for the next several hours I never quite burst out of.
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I’ve been feeling freshly conscious of an aspect of being human that’s so constant and fundamental it seems weird to me that it isn’t a subject of everyday conversation. It’s simply this: that at the background of all my activities and interactions, behind all the containers I pour myself into from moment to moment, is my awareness of the boundless ocean of awareness itself.
They huddle in the back room, waiting to seep through some hidden cat-door and flood the room I live in.
I feel it as an amoeba-like latency, an unruly sea of infinite possibility, lurking in the back room — exciting, ominous, darkly beckoning. It conjures up the image Jonathan Franzen uses in his novel “The Corrections” of an impending thunderstorm: “big spiders in a little jar.” Only the jar in this case is infinitely vast, the spiders correspondingly enormous. They huddle in the back room, waiting for the lid to come off. Waiting to leak or seep or sneak through some hidden cat-door and flood the room I live in.
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