Like many children I was attracted to a certain type of mystical self actualisation fiction, starting with the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and moving on to Richard Bach’s Illusions and Jonathan Livingston Seagull; all books which formed part of our family’s sibling tradition.
I copied Richard Bach’s style and content for school English exams and for my university entrance exam, and inevitably the idea of one’s mind being the definitive engine of lived experience took root. No matter what your body is doing, I grew to believe, your mind can control, supersede, override. This idea was a metaphorical yet practical escape hatch that allowed me to side-step some of the mental challenges of life with a Neuromuscular Disorder (NMD).
Since I started taking the genetic treatment for my NMD that I have been writing about this last year, I have also, quite accidentally, been reading David Foster-Wallace’s essays, and have thus been exploring his long running, highly personal horror of solipsism – a rarefied philosophical concept, generally only deployed by performative philosophical pros, that says, in effect: the only reality that matters or can be verified is what goes on between your ears.
In The Empty Plenum: David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress Foster-Wallace describes the solipsistic state (tangentially, while actually writing about Markson and Wittgenstein, as only he can) :
“… persons must or at any rate do live in a sort of linguistic dream, awash & enmeshed in ordinary language & the deceptive “metaphysics” linguistic usage & communication among persons imposes… or costs.”
For Foster-Wallace, who lived with depression and eventually hanged himself, solipsism was far more than an abstract concept. It was an existence he dreaded. A trap he fell into, and eventually died within. In his vast mental universe, getting caught living most of your life in a state of internal mental churn and social isolation was perhaps the greatest risk of all; one which spanned his intellectual, emotive and relational landscapes. As it turns out, his personal solipsistic obsession was prescient of some of strange challenges kicked up by Covid-19.
During the early Covid lockdown days a lot of people said the following to me. ‘Wow, I suddenly realised this is how you live, Andy!’ Which I found irritating at the time, because, obviously, no. But once the itch had receded I saw that what they were trying to say was something like: ‘this is what it must feel like to be physically forced to live inside your head – to be involuntarily cerebral.’
Within this, it was fascinating to observe the counter-intuitive dynamics of individual and organisational solipsism evolve as Covid played out. We have all dreamed at some stage of not having to go out there. But living the dream seemed to result mostly in deepened solipsism: too much scrolling, clicking and lurking on social media and work platforms, and too little direct human contact. As Foster-Wallace understood down in his bones, while our brains might well be the only viable, provable reality there is, our grey matter can also often only be escaped by following mundane, predictable real world routines - including the bog-standard social obligations we often feel like we would rather just avoid.
An interesting philosophical / pop culture corollary took shape after Foster-Wallace’s death in 2008. As quantum physics entered the realm of mass-market pop science, one found, and still finds, a certain chestnut oft repeated: the idea that there is no such thing as objective reality without the presence of an observer. This is a hugely complex scientific notion that most people (self included) will never fully understand, but it chimes well rhetorically with those who say things like ‘there is nothing but consciousness.’
I have, as stated, always enjoyed this idea. However, one of the most interesting and complex dimensions of my journey with medication that fiddles with your genetic functioning has been the difficulty (impossibility, in fact) of breaking the feedback loop between mind and body. Having spent the better part of fifty years leaning into the solipsistic self as a way to escape the body, I now find myself unable to separate the interrelationship between mental and physical. Much like a split yet entangled photon, a nudge on one side creates equivalent movement on the other side, and vice versa.
Thus, as dubious as Goop life and the Wellness industry can be, going through this genetic treatment experience has highlighted the resonance of a key theme of holistic psychology and spirituality: that there is much to be gained from bringing mind and body into a state of balance. And that the idea of ‘body management’ has as much to do with face-to-face socialisation as it does with going for a jog or hitting the gym.
I have always scoffed lightly at the idea of mind / body balance. Not in contempt so much as envy. But it now feels undeniable to me that, if we want to enjoy life, we humans have little choice but to work on developing mind and body equally, and, most strange of all, we need to do this together with other flesh and blood humans, in the kind of group format that makes us feel awkward and odd, but, also, crucially, alive and connected to others.
Whether you’re working alone at home or trying to navigate the complexities of the office water cooler, I’m starting to think that, all these centuries later, there remains a surprisingly exciting range of possibility to explore within Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’. One of the reasons this line has been so powerful for so long is because it challenges the instinctive mammalian understanding of ‘I eat, therefore I am,’ effectively creating what can feel at times like an irresolvable paradox. But my recent genetic journey suggests to me that maybe the two notions aren’t that oppositional after all. Maybe, in fact, they’re simply another example of life’s quiet symmetry… of the ying and yang waves we all must learn to perceive, and eventually surf.