Showing posts with label The weather's been reasonable. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The weather's been reasonable. Show all posts

Sunday 12 May 2013

The Agent Apsley on depression

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


12 May

To open* :



Since I Tweeted this, I shall say more (to @stephenfry, or - as he may not - anyone who cares to listen) :



What did this refer to ? :

Depression isn't a straightforward response to a bad situation, depression just is, like the weather.


Where I saw it, it wasn't properly punctuated (unlike here), and no source was given (true elsewhere) :




Excuse the poor quality of another's reproduction of his letter, but it seems that he wrote something similar, just at more length, to someone called Crystal seven years ago (10 April 2006**), shown at http://missbeautifullydepressed.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/depression-is-like-the-weather/


But is Fry right, or do such analogies hamper us 'getting to grips with' the negative thinking, patterns of self-depreciation, and modes of cataclysmic reaction, which might make life better, in time ?


If I'm wrong - and Fry's right - then people like Wilhelm Reich with his cloud-busting*** just has no place in a world where a crap day is a crap day, but it will pass... Forget Reich, but, as some will also know, clouds can be seeded - and so, in this respect, we can manipulate when (and so where) rain will fall.

That doesn't destroy Fry's analogy : it's the message, though, of sheer helplessness that he seems to convey in :

In the same way that one has to accept the weather, so one has to accept how one feels about life sometimes.


You'd think that no one (who can afford to) spends the winter in (what they hope will be) warmer climes - or even just (with a car) drives out of the rain (or into it, for that matter).

Staying with this powerlessness of just waiting for things to get better, or just feeling myself going low and allowing it to happen, is not what I spent a dozen or so sessions with a psychologist for, or why I read parts of Paul Gilbert's book Overcoming Depression, about compassion, self-hatred, and the like. 

No, I believe that @stephenfry's message is a negative and unhelpful one for anyone and everyone to hear - I have experienced being able to seed (or bust) those clouds, and I want to escape from this meteorological notion of the inevitably of depressions and cold fronts, which is, as far as I am concerned, not 'reality', as Fry claims, but barometric.


End-notes

* Quoting the spirit of Words and Music, one of Beckettt's plays for radio.

** He seems to favour the ever-encroaching US format for dates... He also writes (about the weather) It isn't under one's control as to when the some [sic] comes out, but come out it will. One day.

*** An experience that Kate Bush alludes to in 'Running up that hill' (from the album Hounds of Love), probably drawing on Peter Reich's (Reich's son') book.


Saturday 3 December 2011

The weather's been quite reasonable recently, hasn't it?

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


4 November

Yes, a quite usual British piece of padding for - or for avoiding - God knows what, but the weather can only be reasonable (just like a run of luck), and it makes no sense to call it 'unreasonable' weather in this idiom of British English.

Oh, fair enough, we have the verb 'to bury' now, but the pair, 'to disbury', has been lost, and we have to resort to 'to dig up' (or 'to disinter', for specific purposes), but this is not one of those: it never was possible to say the opposite of 'he has reasonable skill as a tennis player'.

This bloody word 'reasonable', being so reasonable that it has no pair, no man on the Clapham omnibus (why Clapham? why should he ever have been going to - or coming from - Clapham) who isn't reasonable. No, we have to go to unpronounceable Wednesbury for unreasonableness, for decisions so unreasonable that no reasonable panel could have made them.

And there's nothing in-between - it's either the officious (a much misused word, outside the courts) man on the omnibus, saying to two people about to make a contract 'I say, what if Z happens?', or this hopeless lot in Wednesbury, making their artless unreasonableness itself a form of art by being so damn'd unreasonable.

Well, I'm not convinced that we should say 'It has been unseasonably / unseasonally warm of late' - I'm going to go right out and accuse the weather of being like that lot in Wednesbury, so unreasonable in attaching terms to the licensing of something like a cinema that they made a name for themselves.

Damn'd unreasonable the weather we've been having, you'll hear me say (avoiding God knows what)!