What gets called mental disorder or illness, mild or severe, shows itself as a misplaced fear of others. Personal relationships break down, followed by an inability to form and maintain new ones. The sufferer becomes progressively more emotionally and cognitively isolated. Madness results from our failure to constantly update and modify our mental map of the world. If we do not ‘test’ our predictions, beliefs, dreams, thoughts, internal dialogue, fantasies, hypotheses, plans, ideas about how the world is, and what the people within it think and feel, our map becomes rapidly out of date. If we act with an out of date model of the world - we will look mad to others, and they will treat us as mad. If others don’t share a large part of our model of reality we are emotionally and cognitively isolated. We need an accurate map; by sharing we come to have a more complete understanding than we could ever achieve alone. The ability to doubt and live with uncertainty, and hence know that we must constantly test our vision of the world - is sanity. To control and fix our view is the first step on the road to disaster and the way an unchanging outlook is maintained is by isolating oneself from any evidence that might contradict it. An unmodified and out of date model of the world is one where our thoughts and feelings are anchored in the past, hence our predictions of the future may be hopelessly wrong.



Thursday 5 August 2010

An imagined spiritual journey


The first scene always begins when I walk into a railway booking office and ask: ‘Please could you tell me the price of a single ticket from Penzance to Berwick-upon-Tweed?’

The journey begins when I am nineteen years old and ends, well, whenever it ends. The staging for the journey is England in the late 1920’s.

The journey is the walk from the actual start to Penzance station; by railway to Birmingham Snow Hill, from Birmingham New Street to Leeds, Leeds to York, from York to Berwick-upon-Tweed, and the walk to my final resting place.

Readers familiar with the early English church will know the actual start and finish points, plus the ‘stations’ on the journey, but may be surprised that the route appears to be being taken in the ‘wrong’ direction - but then, I am a left-handed person in a right-handed world!

In reality the route passes within fifty feet of my present home, within a quarter of a mile of my second childhood home, within two miles of one of my adult homes, within ten miles of my birthplace, within two miles of my father’s birthplace, within a few hundred yards of my paternal grandfather’s workplace, and within four miles of my first childhood home. Physically knowing the route from the late twentieth century, and having a knowledge of railway history, allows the staging to appear real in my mind.

Throughout the journey I carry a copy of Q’s anthology (soft leather cover, printed on India paper with gold edging). It is open at John Clare’s ‘I Am!’

It’s a journey through a constantly changing landscape; speed (the measure of time) also changes, but I for the most part, remain stationary.
The journey begins with the going down of the sun on one day, but ends with the dawn of another.


(At the time of writing I appear to be starting the journey for the fourth time. I am forty-eight years old.)

Nick Hewling 12.8.07