Arising and passing away: antinarrative attention

It is as a smell at dusk, that it first arrives. One evening, the scent of darkness changes. The moment itself shifts year on year; late August perhaps, or early in September, but undeniably the air at the end of a particular day is suddenly different. Round-scented summer’s sweat-flecked evenings give way. All that green, too lovely to last long, begins to rot and fructify. Earth announces and reclaims itself; with a gentle stink of brackeny chill, autumn arrives. And yet, each year, I’ve played the same game of denial—a deep-down childish hope that this summer will be eternal. Somehow, therefore, its inevitable arrival always feels suddenly unexpected. Autumn turfs me out and away from myself, blows through me like some low sad warning. I am hollowed in an instant, unhappy and alone.

I’ve long struggled with an autumn sadness. I always felt I should be the sort of person who loves the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Its russety colours are my favourites, and body and mind, I am lumpily calibrated for chunky knitwear and romantic melancholy. It’s impossible to deny the draw of a fireside, a cool day, and a country pub. Of all the kitchen’s quiet alchemies, the pleasures of bottling and canning the final fruits of the harvest season, are uniquely lovely to me. Nonetheless, each year, a deep sadness inexorably arrives, pulls up a chair beside me, and sets in as the seasons rustle and shift and the summer empties out.

And for almost as long, I’ve understood this to be a storied strain of sadness. Autumn is too obvious a metaphor: everything fades, cools, dies, as we tilt away from the sun. Seasons are constructions, of course, but even then, spring and autumn never seem as in-themselves as the others: they’re B-features, preparing the way, rather than arriving as the main event. And that is something of the awfulness, I suppose. Just as summer nobly gifts spring its expectant exuberance, so winter’s inevitable coming bequeaths autumn its ominous tone. I imagine that death itself—at least being dead—won’t be so bad, insensible as we’ll be of having ended (or ever having begun). But dying retains its sting, awake to our coming destruction. Likewise, winter darkness, while more objectively bleak, never—for me at least—holds the pain of autumn’s dying of the light.

So far, so storied—primeval and predictable. Not exactly natural but metaphors so near the surface of experience as to be obvious. Unimaginative. Cliché. I can go further, and particularise the stories. I am both an August birthday, and son of teacher parents. Early on I learned this storied pattern: to heave grumpily into September, when the freedom of the summer’s revels ended, and obligation heavy-heartedly arrived. On top of this, there are more particular and more potent quirks of biography. Though it was February which finally claimed my mother, when I was aged eleven, it was the autumn months that harrowed most, in which her body ate itself from the inside, when she went mad, convulsed and cracked apart her living, rotten bones. A decade later I was submerged in another family crisis through the autumn months: one of accusation, old unhappy secrets, complicity, a pantheon of lies, ignominious separation and the hot stink of shame. It resolved, almost as well as was possible, but the cost was high. These stories were written in the autumn, and years later, I wondered why I’d not seen sooner that this might explain an annual sorrow of the darkening months.

It’s well over another decade again since I first joined the dots and explained the seasonal sadness as a dwelling in stories through these months. I still suppose these self-diagnostic insights are ‘correct’, though—as more often than we’d generally admit—understanding in itself has been of precious little use. Identifying that I dwell within these stories as a cause, doesn’t cure the sadness. What’s more, it helps to fix both the feeling and the stories themselves. In noticing the story, I understand myself to have lived those histories, I see those resonances. In telling myself familiar stories, I reanimate them, and give the past current potency. September ushers in some months of misery, that’s just the way it is, so runs the meta-story. In recognising the link, I understand the outcome to be natural and inevitable. Such is the logic of the story, and such is the limit of story-spotting. If we accept the internal logic of a story as it presents itself to us, then identifying it can serve, not to shift it, but to preserve and sustain it.

This autumn has been somewhat different. In July, I spent 10 days on a silent retreat, learning vipassanā meditation and have been practicing it (almost) daily since. It is a painstaking practice designed to enable insight and build equanimity through the close observation of sensation, within the framework of body. It potency lies in experiencing all sensation, pleasurable or unpleasant, and indeed all phenomena present within consciousness and its contents, as having the quality of arising and passing away. With its roots within the teachings of Siddhattha Gotama, known as the Buddha, it offers experiential insight into the so-called noble truth of impermanence. From this perspective, suffering is caused by craving for pleasure, or aversion to pain, both of which are flights from our fundamentally ambiguous condition, which can be approached with peace through the practice, and the concomitant building of equanimity.

This is a fundamentally different story of the change observable in autumn than the one I have habitually read autobiographically. It was narrative that peaked my curiosity in vipassanā in the first place: the examination of the impermanence of all phenomena leads to skepticism about the reality of the self, and so alights on similar territory to narrative antiessentialism. Vipassanā promises insight beyond the storied fictions we take to be reality, but this ‘equanimous’ dwelling within the reality of our impermanence, offers insight to the nature of storytelling itself, as discussed by Simone De Beauvoir:

In telling a story, in depicting it, one makes it exist in its particularity with its beginning and its end, its glory or its shame; and this is the way it actually must be lived. In the festival, in art, men express their need to feel that they exist absolutely. They must really fulfil this wish. What stops them is that as soon as they give the word “end” its double meaning of goal and fulfilment they clearly perceive this ambiguity of their condition, which is the most fundamental of all: that every living movement is a sliding toward death. But if they are willing to look it in the face they also discover that every movement toward death is life. In the past people cried out, “The king is dead, long live the king;” thus the present must die so that it may live; existence must not deny this death which it carries in its heart; it must assert itself as an absolute in its very finiteness; man fulfils himself within the transitory or not at all. He must regard his undertakings as finite and will them absolutely.

- Simone De Beauvoir,
The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Philosophical Library, 2015:137)

Vipassanā has not, of course, led speedily to my enlightenment, and I remain sceptical both of its ability to deliver such an end were I to practice for a lifetime (though that, I currently intend to do). Other than as an abstraction which is provocative and illustrative, I am not certain of its desireability. Life remains a difficult thing to do. Nor has my practice, so far, obliterated the sadness of this time of year. But it has shifted how I can experience it, integrating at the level of experience, what at an intellectual level had no power to displace the tight-wound stories with which I approached the season. In short, it has not removed the stories but changed my relationship to them.

The link between careful, meditative attention to changing sensation in the body, any sort of meaning-making shift, and the stories we tell ourselves is not, perhaps, obvious. By way of example, earlier I popped out to the shops to buy some missing ingredients for dinner. Although buttoned up against the seasonal elements, I was not consciously aware of the dynamics discussed here, but as I opened the front door, that same autumnal scent in the air hit me and I experienced a familiar wave of sadness cover me. But by my recent training, I observed this reaction as it happened, and noticed my equanimity collapse. As I turned out the gate, I returned my attention to the sensations in my body as they were: the feeling inside my nostrils of that same air, the skin of my face, suddenly unevenly cold, the vacant echo of my stomach which had turned over, other apparently unrelated sensations, a flicker under my right eye, a slight creak in my knee, a stretch of muscle in my leg, an itching on the back of my neck. These things I was now consciously experiencing directly, and by choice of open attention, in themselves. I experienced sensations not my storied reactions to them. I hadn’t chosen the sadness, nor needed to consciously recall to myself all my implicated stories. Rather, a constellation of sensations occurred without my conscious awareness, which was elsewhere, but bodily awareness of the autumnal air short-circuited to a deep well of despair. Storytelling persists by means of its economy: a weight of memory and association is known in an instant emotional reflex. But then, by deliberate in-the-moment action of consciousness, fortified by regular practice, by focussing attention deliberately, alertly, attentively—not passively and reactively—I experience the same sensation, consciously, this time. I experience it in itself, not as figure in a storied chain, but as it is. My engagement with the world, therefore, shifted again, and equanimity was regained. I stepped outside my stories. I found a way to go on. I made my way to the shops and back with a quiet but vivid curiosity about my embodied experience, not reactively ricocheting around a set of stories experienced reactively as a cloud of emotion.

Stories have an uncanny and mischievous ability to present themselves to us as telling the truth. If, as Molly Andrews, after Jean-Paul Sartre, suggests, they trade in not just ‘the real’, but also ‘the not real’ as well as ‘the not yet real’ then there is no reason why narrative should necessarily contain any truth at all. They exist in the realm of fiction, so may be truthful, but are far from so automatically. Vipassanā offers an experience of that which De Beauvoir describes: in examining not the content, but the form of the stories we tell, we find something true about existence more broadly - that it is impermanent.

Our storied project then—and mine particularly in apprehending my own stories of autumn—is to see what they tell us about truth. Previously, though I understood seasonal sadness as storied, I engaged with the fictional content of those stories as if it were true. Returning to the dense defence of narrative offered by De Beauvoir above, vipassanā can be a helpful counter-narrative strategy in responding to these stories because, from its perspective, it offers the chance to “clearly perceive this ambiguity of [my] condition, which is the most fundamental of all: that every living movement is a sliding toward death.” But rather than accepting the content of my autumnal stories—which is that this slide is desperately sad—I can, with some measure of equanimity, apprehend what De Beauvoir suggests all stories express in their form. That “the present must die so that it may live […] it must assert itself as an absolute in its very finiteness; man fulfils himself within the transitory or not at all. He must regard his undertakings as finite and will them absolutely.”

So, this autumn, a practice as seemingly mechanical as slowly becoming aware of physical sensation arising and passing away in my conscious body has reconfigured the stories I tell about this season, autumn’s symbolic reality, and my personal history. The opportunity of the season, its deaths within life, is to step beyond autumn, and experience it as it is—possessing and embodying the quality of impermanence. That everything has the quality of arising and passing away, and what’s more, that this is the transcendent opportunity of stories themselves.

This is the productive paradox: detaching from specific stories, the fictions of my history, and loosening my self-understanding, makes it more possible to engage with the quality of impermanence that I feared and mourned as the leaves fell — and to apprehend a reality in stories themselves. My old stories are not defeated, but incorporated, into broader understanding. I have the opportunity to experience the dying of autumn, indeed the fact of dying at all, not as an affront to my living and being, but as the grounds for it. And so this year, this season of arising and passing away, is proving itself more mellow than autumns past, and more fruitful than the stories in which I have lived for so long.