The Coldness Of Death
I read my parents’ Pelican paperbacks of R. D. Laing at 17, shortly before going to university, which rather predisposed me to view the place as a psychic death-trap (which perhaps in some respects it was). I’ve always remembered the chapter of Self and Others titled “The Coldness of Death”, and was particularly reminded of it by the passages from Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing that k-punk quoted in a recent post.
Laing discusses the case of a woman diagnosed with puerperal psychosis, although the argument he wants to make is that her experience speaks more powerfully for itself than the diagnosis can begin to acknowledge. Here is an extract, to give a flavour:
To her, her skin had a dying pallor. Her hands were unnaturally blue, almost black. Her heart might stop at any moment. Her bones felt twisted and in a powder. Her flesh was decaying…
Why people go into states of this kind we do not know. The keynote of hers was “the coldness of death”. She never actually went through the door to feel that she was dead. She was different, remote, gone into another world. This world came to be that world. Her skin, her tongue, her hands, her lungs, heart, bladder, intestines, her blood, her bones, were drawn into the domain of death. She came back from that world of the dead and unreality, to this world of the living, in flashes of realization. She came back in the spring, after the strangest winter of her life.
But as she came back, she was released from more than the deathly captivity of the past five months. She felt in her successive realizations that her body had been occupied by the bodies of the dead…and that this had been the state of affairs for some time before she began to feel the coldness of death; and that through rediscovering her own body, which had become a sort of graveyard wherein were buried bits of her father, brother, and mother, she had in a sense arisen from the dead. She had come back to life, from the realm of the dead.
Then, a little further on:
Our habitual sense of being related to others, of being ourselves ‘connected’, of being real and alive, is often supported by a phantasy modality of which we are unaware [my italics]. Phantasy is not usually experienced as unreal. “Real” and alive, in contrast to “unreal” and dead, are more qualties of phantasy than of imagination. Being in love may be an experience largely “in” phantasy, and nothing may be more real and alive.
When she began to go into “the coldness of death”, Mrs A no longer felt a personal bond between her present self and her old world. She came uncoupled from that old world in which she could see her husband, children, and friends still were. this detachment was not the consequence, as far as I could assess, of any intention on her part. Even were she to have consciously intended to withdraw from the world, how did it happen to her when most people who wish intensely to get away from themselves and from the world cannot do so?
So – there are most of the major themes and questions of Cold World then…
Laing comments in passing:
I have alluded elsewhere to the possibility that what we call psychosis may sometimes be a natural process of healing (a view for which I claim no priority).
One of the things that very powerfully appeals to me about Ballard is that the psychoses of his characters, the eerie transformations they and their worlds undergo, are never portrayed as forms of suffering from which the novel will eventually permit them to recover, but are on the contrary acknowledged as affective projects, healing processes through which selves and their worldly commitments and connections are remade and renegotiated. I would even propose a Ballardian self-help technique, as an alternative to the orthodoxies of CBT: try to imagine yourself as the narrator in a Ballard novel, and treat your fantasies and perverse inclinations with the same generous detachment and almost fatalistic acceptance he permits his characters. Try writing Ballardian pastiche, with yourself in the fictional cockpit, and see where it takes you – you may find that you are able to articulate affective projects you didn’t know you had…