The big news for today is that I have remembered two things … er … one thing from the list of really important stuff that I thought about yesterday. I thought because I had managed to remember them both several times that I was not going to forget them. And what do you know; just thinking about them has brought the other one back. This one first then!
I was watching that nice Stephen Fry on the Secret Life of the Manic Depressive last night – a very brave thing do to. It struck me that maybe Bipolar Disorder (as we now have to call Manic Depression) is just a reaction of things deep within our nature to the modern world. It struck me as Mr Fry was being tailed around various shops by a cognitive therapist who tried to talk him through (though not out of) buying various things which he would never use. He mentioned the joy of discovering a long sought-after rarity in a shop and how the thrill of the hunt was much more satisfying than simply ordering the thing on the internet. I thought then, that the mania that he was displaying at that point was simply the redirection of the energy required for real, blood-spouting hunts all those millennia ago into some form of modern release. My theory fails twice, once when I try and explain where the depression comes into this and then again when I hold it up against my other similar theory that Autism is some sort of throwback to an older, less emotional time; one of things that sufferers from Bipolar disorder fear about being put on various medications (Lithium in particular) is that their top and bottom will be removed until they live their lives in an emotionless “letter box” (as Richard Dreyfuss put it). Maybe there is a link and maybe I am just talking speculative rubbish as usual.
The second thing I have in my head in reasonable detail though I cannot remember what started me thinking about it. (pause for quick browse through the Radio four listings). Got it! It was a piece on Word of Mouth yesterday regarding the euphemistic language used to refer to death and dying. This piece started with the wonderful sketch from That Mitchell and Web Look from last week where a criminal mastermind and his two henchmen were discussing how to kill someone who was getting in their way – “deal with the situation”, “he has become a nuisance” etc. This annoyed one of the sidekicks who kept trying to get them to say “Kill” and “Murder someone to death”. Very funny but quite incidental to what follows really. Through some minor route through my head, this led me to think about Heaven and how this place must be either a police state where every type of behaviour is checked and matched and compared with the ideal. The question is then who decides what is the correct way to make heaven … er … heavenly? This of course reminds me of the story that our headmaster used to tell us of a well known Korean hero, newly arrived in heaven who asked for a tour of hell. He was surprised to find that hell was exactly the same as heaven. Just before he ascended to his rightful afterlife, he was taken to where the people in hell ate to find them moaning and struggling because the chopsticks they had been provided with were 5 feet long, making it impossible to move the delicious food to the mouth. Glad to return, the hero goes to have his first meal in heaven and discovers that everyone there is provided with the same 5 foot chopsticks. The difference being that here, everyone is feeding each other. Heaven is made by how people interact with each other, not how they fit into the material world. This story of course says much more about how people behave in this life rather than in any possible, subsequent one.
None of this really tells you what I was thinking in detail about this. I would say more later but you probably wouldn’t believe me.
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