Living in Flow

Let me tell you a secret. We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are a member of the human race. And the human reace, is filled with passion. Laws, medicine, (etc)…. these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love…. these are what we stay alive for.

(said John Keating in Dead Poets Society - screenplay by Tom Schulman) .

Poetry had a way of lifting a feeling or idea out of its routine so that it could be appreciated with fresh eyes.

(Diane Ackerman in Language at Play - an essay)

Last Friday (Oct.6) I went to a "buka puasa bersama" organized by my batch friends. I.e., we enrolled at Faculty of Psychology Univ of Indonesia in the same year. It’s a kind of an annual tradition for us. Almost 40 people showed up this year, which is a new record. We hanged out at the restaurant until closing time (which we’ve actually stretched for about 1 hour longer). When they really had to close, we slowly filed out of the restaurant. Some of us were heading home, some wanted to move to Cafe Oh La la Thamrin to hang out some more, but it turns out that we lingered in front of the restaurant for at least 1 more hour, chatting, laughing, catching up, teasing each other, insulting each other, pretending to get offended, laughing more, insulting back, took turns taking pics… It was just endless.

Coincidentally, at that time I was reading SAM’S STORY, a debut novel by Sri Lankan Elmo Jayawardena (Vijitha Yapa Publications, Colombo, 2001/2005). It was the 2001 winner of The Gratiaen Prize for the best literary work in English in Sri Lanka. Reading the book, one of the things I realize is that apparently the above phenomena is not exclusively Indonesian. I suppose it’s just one more simple reminder that people everywhere has more in common than we’d normally realize.

Excerpt from pp.145-146 of SAM’S STORY:

Sometimes these talks lasted well into the late hours of the night and spilled out even to the gate till they got into their cars. No one left in a hurry; everyone got up to go and lingered long.

‘That is the Sri Lankan good-bye Sammy,’ the Boy once told me. ‘From the seats to the verandah, from the verandah to the garden and from the garden to the gate, all small stops and small talk.’

These lingering Sri Lankan good-byes sometimes dragged almost to an hour.

I was always there at these evening gatherings; from the first car that came to the river house to the last car that left. From the first drink I poured to the first visitor to the closing of the gates. My ears always wide open to hear everything they said which at most times I thought was nonsense.

….

"I’ve been looking at you… because you look like one of my nieces," Anita Desai said to me when I asked her to autograph my copy of "Diamond Dust."

Alice W Flaherty, an American neurologist, in the middle of her adult life, suffered from hypergraphia –a puzzling behavioral disorder where one cannot stop his/her urges to write due to abnormal neural brain activities (talk about irony). Individuals who suffered from this abnormality writes literally ALL the time, ALL the where –on pieces of paper (including toilet papers), walls (of both home and office), clothes he/she is wearing, even his/her skin –Flaherty did all that, and still does.

Her investigation on her own experiences led her to some explanations not only on hypergraphic behaviors in particular, but also on writing behaviors in general. Her finding, among others, is that people shifts from manic states to depressed state interchangeably and that writing occurs when one is on depressed mode.

Flaherty found strong indication that depressed individuals tend to be much more introspective than those of manic. Put it shortly, depression stimulates anxiety, anxiety stimulates questions, questions stimulate explanations. Thus one has materials to write about.