When I stopped to think about it, I realised that although I was familiar with the phrase ‘lifelong learning’, I didn’t know what it meant in an organised or official sense. I did a swift search on the topic and see that it refers to adult education and night classes – that’s what it means in an official sense. It is to this educational sector that the term belongs.  It’s like saying that ‘dissociation’ belongs to psychiatry and ‘nausea’ belongs to medicine or ‘Au’ belongs to the periodic table of the elements and chemistry.

This is all a very long way of saying that I have my own private, subjective understandings of all the above, and sometimes these internal meanings bear only a passing relation to the mainstream understanding of the terms. ‘Au’ will reliably get me thinking about Latin, ‘dissociation’ instantly triggers ideas about boredom and ‘nausea’ relates more quickly to abhorrence than it does to any dim recollection of morning sickness or three days puking in Cairo.

My understanding of lifelong learning is rather straightforward though. I saw a TV documentary during the week about the buyout of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America during which one of the contributors stated that no corporation can stand still, that if such an organisation isn’t growing, it’s stagnating. It seems to me that the idea of lifelong learning, the real heart of it, is about growing and not stagnating. It’s a lot less toxic too than what Bank of America bought into with the acquisition of the elite Wall Street brokerage firm.

I’ve referred to it here on the blog before but one of the losses unemployment makes me feel most acutely is the loss of access to learning. When you’re in the midst of your everyday job you mightn’t notice that you’re learning, but you are. A colleague’s recommendation of a film or a book or a play, someone else’s recounting of a good night out, even a bracing exchange of political views springing from last night’s TV – all learning. That’s quite apart from the challenges that work itself presents and I suppose that’s why the workers of Mediastan do it for often lousy wages and short term contracts: it’s the endless, captivating variety.

So thinking such thoughts, on Saturday I gladly closed the door behind me and headed off to the Dublin Writers Festival. One woman, one day, six hours of writers and books and other adults – bliss! I don’t believe in hero worship, never have, I see my own flaws and know that they’re replicated throughout our species, so while I believe heroes exist, I don’t believe in the worship of same. Still, when Prof. Declan Kiberd takes his seat on the podium alongside Sarah Bakewell and Ruth Padel ahead of the talk entitled ‘How to Live’, I find myself drifting back through the years to Theatre M, UCD and undergraduate English. As with Proust’s madeleine there’s one significant thing that triggers this memory rush: Kiberd takes off his watch and places it on the table in front of him as I’d seen him do at the university lectern many times when I was only a girl and, with his heroic guidance, discovering ‘Ulysses’ for the first time. All at once I am in learning mode again, all eyes, all ears, delighted to drift like thistledown on the updraft of new ideas.

The theme of the talk works sweetly: all three writers have recently produced work that looks at how writing from other centuries has relevance in contemporary times. Bakewell’s book is about Montaigne, the original blogger, whose entire oeuvre was a sixteenth century instructional on how to live written from his intensely personal perspective. “The ordinary is the proper domain of the artist. The extraordinary can safely be left to journalists and poets” says Kiberd quoting Joyce before going on to argue persuasively that Ulysses offers a manual for living a more complete and humane life. Ruth Padel, poet, conservationist and novelist, is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin and through the prism of her reading of Darwin’s letters and work, one sees that Darwin’s true virtuosity was in reading and interpreting the world – he wasn’t a scientist by training, he was a seer, a thinker, an understander. Padel reads from her novel Where the Serpent Lives about a confrontation between one of her characters Richard and a female king cobra “Looking down at his feet like a boy confessing to a broken rule, Richard stood immobile for what seemed like a very long time. He concentrated, as only a scientist or poet can, on precise names for the leaves he was looking at. He felt her eyes upon him. He was in the hands of the living god, of neurosynapses in a reptile brain”.

By the end of this talk my eyes had brimmed and cleared and brimmed again such was my joy and relief at being in the presence of ideas once more.  I went home with a bagful of books bought with money I can’t afford but vital if I’m to survive this recession with my head intact. This is what I understand by lifelong learning – some of life’s greatest consolations and liberations can be accessed through reading.

Back when I was one of Declan Kiberd’s students, my dad used to drive me demented with his regular commentaries on all he had learned at “the university of life”. These sermons caused me to sigh and roll my eyes – how could admonitions like “never leave down a scissors in long grass” or “Christmas presents are mutual bribery” possibly be as useful as finding out the meaning of ‘ineluctable’ or feeling the fear and reading Finnegan’s Wake anyway? After I graduated and was splendidly unemployed my father used to shake his head in a cod- rueful manner and tell me that my glorious education was now complete.  Of course, I didn’t get what he meant then, I didn’t understand that reading about how to live can only be truly assimilated by living, that, as Declan Kiberd said, “You may forget what you read but the bits of reading that remain are ratified by your experience”.

I hope I have years of learning ahead of me. I don’t ever want to drift into that formless state called retirement, I don’t want to go on cruises, I want my eyesight to the end and interesting people to talk with and wonderful books.  In my humble way I want to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

[More about Sarah Bakewell's work here. More about the Dublin Writers Festival here]

[I also watched the excellent film Up in the Air in recent weeks. In it, George Clooney plays the role of  Ryan Bingham, a corporate downsizer who uses the carrot of lifelong learning ahead of the stick of involuntary redundancy.]

I’ve said that one of the purposes of this blog is to examine what it is like to live now. Amongst the most complained-about aspects of modernity is time poverty. We live in an age of time-consuming information overload: we are permaconnected to the web, social networks and mobile phones. Recently, as earthquake hit Mexicali, Twitter lit up with live on-the-spot commentary and photographs. All this information makes constant demands on our time and concentration. It contributes to the internal noise in our heads and I often think, that for all the absorbing magnetism of the digital age we’re still stuck with that old human conundrum of being neither able to see in deep or out far. That in being permaconnected, we’re more disconnected than ever from our interior selves: the public, hastily communicated versions of ourselves transmitted on Twitter or Facebook or in texts is at once true and frustratingly reductionist and it makes us think in something akin to soundbites.

What time poverty means for me is the lack of time available for introspection although not of the navel-gazing kind. You know the lines from Wordsworth’s Daffodils “For oft, when on my couch I lie,/ In vacant or in pensive mood,/ They flash upon that inward eye/ Which is the bliss of solitude”. I believe that for optimum mental health, to be at one with yourself, you need to have the time to access vacant and pensive moods. It almost goes without saying that attempting to understand the ‘self’ (that inward eye/I) is vital in attempting to understand the ‘other’ and the world at large.

I have always loved to write and to me it has forever been a much more satisfying way of communicating than talk. Particularly when confronted with difficulty, I have found that putting my argument in writing reflects better what I want to say than all my verbal wooliness in speech. Equally, in years of writing TV or radio scripts or reviewing books, it was only in committing thought to paper that I could satisfactorily establish what trope I wanted to follow: to find out what I think I have to write it down.

In 2001 I interviewed the Scots novelist and short story writer A.L.Kennedy and in describing the process of writing she said “There’s this whole concept of the writer being in control but it’s a daily process of picking up stuff that you’re given by chance or that you’re looking for because you’re in a state of mind that makes it more visible. But after a while you’re aware that you’re sort of surfing and that most of what you’re surfing on you’re not providing. You just have to keep your balance.” This image of the writer surfing on subconscious thought has stayed with me ever since and seems to me to be at the centre of human creativity whether in words or art or music.

It’s a curious serendipity then that a couple of weeks ago I picked up a book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves by American author, Siri Hustvedt whose novels I’ve devoured avidly ever since I read What I Loved some years back. In this non-fiction work Hustvedt sets out to examine the sudden arrival of an all-over body tremble which strikes her most often in addressing conferences or making speeches. The perplexing aspect of this outbreak of shaking is that it bears no relation to performance anxiety or any neurological lesions visible on fMRI. The mysterious arrival of what seems like an unknowable subconscious self sets Hustvedt on a journey to examine the relationship between brain and mind, psychiatry and neuroscience, emotion and rationality.

These days, what used to be called hysteria is categorised as a conversion disorder and it’s still something that’s mostly identified in women. At its simplest, a conversion disorder of this type is characterised by physical symptoms that may be traced back to an earlier emotional stressor. Thus, Hustvedt wonders if her periodic shakes are related to the death of her beloved father two years previously. She asks, “Was I thrown into a subliminal realisation that his absence was permanent, irrevocable, without being aware of the turn taken inside me?”

Hysteria, the notion of it, has a horribly debased currency. No woman wants to be labeled as hysterical nowadays, it conjures up images of Bronte’s madwoman in the attic, a harridan bent on deranged havoc or poor Alice James, as bright as her brothers Henry and William, but a lady invalid and bath chair inhabitant all her adult life. Hustvedt begins to wonder though, if hysteria ought to be rehabilitated and re-examined. Perceptively, in looking at the history of hysterical disorders, she sees that traumatised soldiers could not be accused of being hysterical like a gaggle of girls. No, for men, the disorder would come to have the much more respectable, less loony title of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Siri Hustvedt

It’s difficult territory even for a writer as elegant as Hustvedt: navigating the abstruse jargon of psychiatry (which perforce one must use) is one thing but writing about mind is also a difficult job of translation even into one’s own native language. It’s difficult because, in the course of a self-examination as opposed to an objective overview alone, one confronts the idea that writing is mind and that it’s slippery and mercurial. This fact isn’t lost on Hustvedt and the most absorbing theme of this book is her examination of how, for her as a writer, memory and imagination combined in the act of writing trigger mind in a way speech never can. It’s like the concept of automatic writing (an idea debased by its relationship with supernatural hocus pocus) where you do not know exactly what aspect of mind you’re channeling until you write it down and it relates directly to that quote from my A.L.Kennedy interview almost a decade ago and to my own experience of writing.

In beginning to wonder if her shaking is psychosomatic at a level well below primary consciousness, Hustvedt makes the discovery that in some cases people with a conversion disorder may present with many of the same physical symptoms as those who have suffered brain injury or organic brain disease. In other words, the subconscious mind can make the brain mimic symptoms of brain injury. My understanding, slim as it is, of this area stems from my own faltering and failed relationship with 1st year Physiological Psychology at university and a later reading of The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat by neurologist Oliver Sacks. In that book Sacks presented case histories of patients most of whom had an underlying brain injury or organic condition which manifested outwardly as aphasia(the loss of the ability to speak or understand speech) or agnosia (the inability to recognise objects visually or by use of the other senses) to name but two.

In Hustvedt’s researches she comes across case histories like that of Justine Etchevery who, over a century ago, witnessed the deaths from disease of many of her siblings, then suffered assault and attempted rape and later was badly burnt when she fell into a fire during her first convulsive attack. When Justine arrived in hospital she was suffering from a lack of sensitivity on her left side which was followed by the paralysis of all her limbs. Eight years later, she inexplicably recovered from her paralysis and was able to move and walk again. From an article in Brain in 2001 Hustvedt quotes the experience of an Algerian woman who flees a shooting where family members were murdered only to end up with a partially paralysed left arm after a later more ordinary upheaval in her everyday life. Neither of these women had any organic reason for their symptoms nor were they putting it on or looking for attention or any of the other accusations leveled at those whose social compliance is in question.

For all the complex theory the whole idea is really quite a simple one, and even the ancients knew it – the truth will out! No matter how we suppress or process the experience of stress and trauma, it finds a way round the dam. To encounter this in one’s own life, is to meet an alternative you; a frightening, undisciplined self who takes over unbidden by any conscious thought. Sometimes the surfacing of the alternative self, the sudden sneaking perception of duality is so unacceptable that many who experience it greet it with ‘la belle indifférence’ refusing to acknowledge it either publicly or privately. It’s almost like the internal narrator, the creator of internal monologue finds the instinctive, mammalian core self repellently and embarrassingly simple-minded.

If you’re interested in how humans think particularly when that thinking relates to writing, Siri Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman is a must-read. It persuaded me out of a default overly-scientific view of mind as a processor or an internal computer, something knowable, predictable and mechanistic. I thought again of all the many times I’ve covered mental health issues as a producer in television and radio and my recognition then that mental illness is only a baby step away from so-called normal functioning and therefore unfairly maligned by being socially stygmatised (especially here in Ireland). The crowning delight though is to be reminded again how very mysterious we are to ourselves, how relatively uncharted (and possibly unchartable) the human mind is, how mystic is the relation between mind and self and creativity. I’m glad I made the time to read this book and then to be vacant and pensive retreating, as Hustvedt puts it, “to the place where we hide without being seen by others, the refuge we seek when we’re afraid and the dark sanctum that makes lies possible, but also daydreams and reveries and bad thoughts and intense internal dialogues”.

The Shaking Woman or A History Of My Nerves by Siri Hustvedt (Sceptre) £12.99/€16.90

Since writing this post I’ve come across an interestingly sceptical view of neuro-realism by Ben Goldacre.

Arts Lives • 23/03/10 •

It took me 3 years as producer to raise the funding to make a TV documentary about crime novelist John Connolly. At long last, the time has come and it premiered on RTE 1 on March 23rd. Here’s some background information about the documentary. Continue Reading…