‘Human behaviour is dictated by need not logic,’ writes Clare Kilroy in her novel Soldier Sailor while, her chief character’s observation as she coaxes her toddler into taking medication against pain.
I’d add, not only by logic, but also by desire.
Need might come first but how close on its heels, trots our wish for comfort, for pleasure, for relief. Our desire.
I do not need that glass of wine I enjoy each evening with my meals. A glass that might rise to two. I do not need it, but I want it. Pleasure and relief follow the taste and the lifting of spirits that comes with every sip, predicated not so much on need as desire.
But need can couch desire and the other way around. Even as logic tells me the wine is not good for me, something else drives me to pursue the comfort of my desire. And so, it is for so many things in life, not all of them malignant.
Take my desire to write. It can also feel like a deep need emerging from some habit formed long ago when I first found comfort in expressing myself on the page. This comfort helped me gain some deeper equilibrium. Without it I find myself feeling slightly unhinged, as if I’ve forgotten to brush my teeth, or left home without my wallet or these days my phone.
I do not need my telephone. I can survive without it but the impulse to carry it everywhere becomes so great because I have formed another habit of attachment whereby without my phone nearby I feel a great hole.
And an absence, at least of the deepest type, as Winnicott tells us, becomes a malignant presence. Not just a void but the presence of something so painful we will do anything to avoid it.
Too much absence in infancy can lead a person to breakdown in later life when triggered to madness as a defence against the breakdown that never happened. This breakdown could not have happened when we were tiny and helpless hell-bent on survival but as we grow, we find ways of the great antidote to all this pain of loss and absence is love.
And love can be so hard won, so hard to come by that when we feel a snippet of it we can suffer extraordinary pain. The painful thawing from a frozen or paralysed state. It hurts to come back to life. The opposite of Jonie Mitcell’s words in her song Big Yellow Taxi,
‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.’
It’s opposite when you know what you’ve got, for the first time a taste of real love and care it can feel so excruciating given its past long absence for the best part of your life that all you want to do is run away from it.
Many a damaged soul has pushed away the warm care and love of another because it feels too much. Too much because like a person deprived of food for far too long, we need to reintroduce food slowly otherwise their gut will seize up in pain.
In running from love, as in running from pain we get locked inside the pain of the non-requited.
But let me lighten the mood here. My words feel heavy and do not reflect the state of mid I’m in retesting new gasses that unfortunately slip too easily off my nose and need adjustment.
My husband reads the newspaper each morning, the old-fashioned way in full spreadsheet form. He reads from start to finish, bypassing only the advertisements and some of the sporting results. He reads with the intensity of a person determined to understand better what goes on in the world. Unlike me, who tends to skim world events online and only when a subject holds my interest do I read the entire article.
Yesterday onto his second cup of tea, he looked up briefly chuckling. And read out loud to me from Monty Python’s Holy Grail. King Arthur approaching the castle of a French man and asking for food and shelter in their search for the holy grail.
The French knight argues he already has a grail withno need of another. Then show it to us. The Frenchman refuses Arthur’s threats, ‘You don’t frighten us you English pig dog… I fart on your general direction. Your mother was a hamster. Your father smelt of elderberries.’
A term of delightful derision that makes my heart sing.
Such clunky words put together to enlist outrage in the other while we the audience laugh our hearts out at the ludicrousness of it all.
Love and loss, life and death. You can’t have one without the other writes Julia Samuels and if you block out he pain you also block out the joy. You lose your sense of humour as you squash your desires, but if you refuse to recognise your actual needs and replace them only with whims and desires then you also get into reverse trouble.
Like a junkie hooked on heroin. Your own natural capacity to find joy in life is slowly eroded and you find you need more of whatever it is you’re addicted to as a replacement for the stuff that lubricates your body and mind.
So again, the philosophers are right when they espouse moderation in all things, with occasional outbursts to spice up the flavour of our lives, like salt on a hard-boiled egg, strangely one of my favourite foods.
Must be a throw back to childhood when eggs were such a novelty we were only allowed one each Sunday for breakfast.
Wowserism is as dangerous as excess. Let’s hear it for the boring middle road with occasional digressions into glorious lookouts over great joy and love notwithstanding the inevitable ruts in the road and moments when the firm ground turns to mud or sand.
Life is never even but it can be manageable if we share the load with others. Seek out their help when needed and offer it back at other times when other folks’ needs might supersede our own.