Law of perspective

Wintry weekend, went for walks,  made soups and casseroles, lay around on the sofa reading. Thinking about a quotation from Primo Levi’s If This Be a Man posted by a friend

“For human nature is such that grief and pain — even simultaneously suffered — do not add up as a whole in our consciousness, but hide, the lesser behind the greater, according to a definite law of perspective. It is providential and is our means of surviving in the camp. And this is the reason why so often in free life one hears it said that man is never content. In fact it is not a question of a human incapacity for a state of absolute happiness, but of an ever-insufficient knowledge of the complex nature of the state of unhappiness; so that the single name of the major cause is given to all its causes, which are composite and set out in an order of urgency. And if the most immediate cause of stress comes to an end, you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others.

So that as soon as the cold, which throughout the winter had seemed our only enemy, had ceased, we became aware of our hunger; and repeating the same error, we now say ‘if it was not for the hunger!….’ “

And if we could choose where to put attention? — this would echo for me  a dynamic I have seen in Buddhist practice, the  deliberate searching out  of a place  between aversion and craving, somewhere less reactive. We choose a small small  concern, sit there in the moment and  just stay with that  problem of  focusing on breath,  putting aside the  dentist’s appointment later, the looming loss of a job, the  near-certainty we shall drink  again later — just  stay with a  small here-and-now attention to the rise and fall of our breath, thereby creating the illusion we can  control the mind, we can choose which of our  fears and concerns we will work on for now.

The problem of ‘unhappiness’ in sobriety and  how our perspective on this may shift. There is a conundrum. I may be unhappy now but I tell myself that this is not as unhappy as the  experience of drinking and  that  I could be more unhappy next week  when something major  goes wrong, that the loss of a loved one could make me more unhappy, that I am happy enough now, this unhappiness  will pass, it has no substance. Am I my unhappiness, is that really part of me? Or circumstantial?

Is it minimizing to call this persisting  malaise, this angsty restless discontent and  emptiness ‘unhappiness’? A friend of mine said that she only felt better after eight years sober when she woke up one morning and  thought, ‘This is not just unhappiness, it is depression.’ And then, after the relief of naming the damn feeling,  it got worse for her she said, as if she had uncovered a dark well and  toppled into that well in  free-fall,  but eventually it got better, with medication and  therapy.

And in my first year sober I internalised a stubborn irreducible  knowledge of myself as  alcoholic, as  someone who would always be  at risk of relapse, who would never leave the alcoholism behind. In later years, I wanted to  make that constituent alcoholism ‘smaller’ or less significant — dislike of  having to forefront that concern all the time, bored with it, leaving it in the past seemed nearly possible. But  then the  times of anxiety and sadness would  arrive, sometimes through loss or circumstance, sometimes for no apparent reason — and it has always seemed to me that if I lose sight of that drinking self, I might forget I can’t drink, that I have this vulnerability that  could  reveal itself anew. That  if I  am not paying attention or  facing things, that  old longing might creep up on me, that I might find that I had been travelling down the  road towards drinking for weeks or months and that all that remained was in fact to  act on the self-defeating narrative and  begin to drink again.

What matters is to take in the opinions and  awareness of others on the same journey, so that I have a mind and consciousness open to  shifts in perspective, that I  allow my perspective to be corrected by others.

But as I go on thinking about Gitta Sereny, I think too of the writer Primo Levi and  his perspective on suffering, that place from which he emerged. Auschwitz. His experience of the Holocaust, his  surviving the Holocaust when so many others did not. To  emerge from genocide and make sense of human existence.

In 1946, he began working in a paint factory while still suffering from  malnutritional oedema and  severe PTSD as we would call it now. His friend Lorenzo who had shared rations and even his crusts of bread with Levi in Auschwitz ‘developed’ sudden-onset alcoholism and  died of it in 1952, a source of great distress to Levi. As Levi’s own fame grew and his continued involvement with camp survivors went on, he  fell into a severe depression. Although he wrote a great deal and was known as a scientist as well as a writer, the depressions were relentless and in 1987 he died  in a  fall that was determined as suicide. His friend Elie Weisel commented that Levi had died at Auschwitz 40 years earlier.

The law of perspective. What remains hidden and unresolved — I have always wondered about this — that we have a succession of crises or  urgent circumstances or  traumas that  demand our attention, one replacing the  other in a seeming hierarchy of needs and  obsessions or traumas — health, work, family, addiction. And somewhere behind there is the Beast in the Jungle, what cannot be addressed and  does not manifest itself but which will stay with us when the  suffering of cold or hunger or the fear of being  murdered have been appeased.

Levi’s son Renzo quoted a passage from  his father’s writings –

[And] a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals. It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly and brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses, and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed into chaos; I am alone in the centre of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command, of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, “Wstawàch.”

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