The lead character in my new novel, is called Fritha. She’s the daughter of a wealthy and influential Athenian family, her life’s every move mapped and plotted by her devouringly possessive mother. Midway through her engagement, and whilst visiting London, she begins a torrid affair with Nikhil, a banker of Bengali descent. Nikhil though, is not engaged. He’s actually married.
When Nikhil and Fritha are rumbled, they are both driven deep into themselves and into a period of introspection. And whilst Fritha is troubled by the harm the affair caused, to herself, to Nik and to their respective spouses, it’s interesting that she refuses to regret the affair, even for a moment.
It’s because, I think, she hopes that every action, even the most regrettable, has, at its origin, a seed of reason. That however mental her behaviour was, if you trace it back through the darkening forests of her psyche, you’ll come to understand why she did what she did. It will make sense. And she will begin to make sense, perhaps for the first time, to herself. I think this may have been what CG Jung was getting at when he said:
Until you bring what’s unconscious into consciousness, it will control your life. And you’ll call it fate.
CG Jung
It’s like if you don’t really understand yourself, you’ll do all sorts of mad shit and wonder how it happened, not realising that you made it so.
To regret her affair with Nikhil would be a way of disowning the inner logic she believes underwrites her decision to sleep with him. To regret the affair means to give up on salvaging any scrap of self-knowledge that the affair might illuminate. And she refuses to do this because, as her countryman, Socrates once observed, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” This affair could be her best shot at actually knowing herself, however unfashionable that’s become since the days of Socrates.
Her own life has long been lived unexamined. How else could her little sister, Elena, have taken her own life without Fritha having even an inkling that anything was amiss?
Her sister’s suicide then provides a second reason for Fritha to want to believe that every effect has, tangled up in its antecedents, its very own cause. If she can’t trace back to its origins the reason for her affair with Nikhil, then there’s little chance of her understanding why her sister took her own life. Fritha’s deepest fear then is the fear of chaos, of a universe without order or meaning.
As Fritha herself reflects in the novel’s 4th chapter;
If she regretted loving Nikhil, then all of this was utterly, utterly without point or meaning. And that was frightening; that things just happened, randomly. It would mean that Elena’s suicide…that she could not redeem Elena for having taken her life, or herself for her part in it because nothing meant anything.
In this respect, I think that Fritha and I are alike. We both share a desperate need to believe that there’s a point to our suffering. That it’s not all random but contains within it the seeds of its own understanding. In Fritha’s case, it was her external actions, her affair. In my case, it’s my inner experience of mental and emotional pain. As I wrote in my post Little Paths of Light earlier this month:
I have a desperate need to believe there is some intelligence, order and design in our inner and outer worlds. Because if there isn’t, if everything is random, then there’s no obvious reason or cause for this emotional pain I’m experiencing and, by extension, no obvious road out.
And that’s why Kelly Brogan’s book Own Your Self which I came across last week, has been an absolute, tub-thumping game-changer in my quest to find meaning in my experience of mental and emotional pain.
Brogan, a psychiatrist offers a radical, moving and counter-intuitive shot across the bows of our contemporary western culture and suggests that with all our depression and apathy and stress and fatigue, it’s not us who are out of whack, it’s the frenzied, fucked-up world we live in.
We are, in fact, the smoke alarm and if you shut off the smoke alarm without attending to the blaze, your whole house will burn down.
And it all begins with an understanding of the original meaning of the word, psychiatrist – Dr of the soul.
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