Undone
“When crisis or collapse is happening, it’s almost impossible to recognize the unravelling, much less to honor it,” Chico author Susan Wooldridge writes in “poemcrazy,” a book about writing. “It can feel like being bumped backwards out of control and downhill into chaos.”
Her book is more than 10 years old, but I discovered it just a few weeks ago. Writing instructor Theresa Marcis read from it at a workshop Enloe Medical Center offers once a month to help cancer patients and their families find solace in writing.
I covered last month’s workshop and wrote it up for the E-R’s Health section.
Wooldridge believes there’s value in unravelling. In her book, she uses both science and religion to bolster her claim. “Belgian physicist Ilya Prigogine won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his theory of dissipative structures, a kind of chaos theory. He showed that a period of dissolution is necessary before any system — a cell, society, solar system or person — can jump to a higher level or organization. Seen this way, unravelling or disintegrating is a vital, creative event making room for the new.
“The Hebrew Kaballists wrote about this idea centuries earlier. They believed that to change from one reality to another a thing first must turn into nothing, where it reaches ‘the ring of nothingness,’ the state before creation when the egg has disappeared but the chick hasn’t formed. Chaos.”
This sense of unravelling, of coming undone, of descending into darkness is undoubtedly what takes hold of people who are thinking about killing themselves. They feel hopeless. They feel they have failed at something — or at everything. They are like the person the Canadian pop group The Guess Who sang about in the 1960s: “It’s too late. She’s gone too far. She’s lost the sun. She’s come undone.”
If, as Wooldrige suggests, these feelings are not only inevitable but a prerequisite for change, they offer a constructive way of looking at a process we are more likely to think of as a breakdown, bummer or bad trip.
Wooldridge writes: “Whenever I see what seems like disaster coming on, it helps to say ‘apokatastasis,’ from the Greek, meaning to set up again, to restore. It’s an invocation, referring to good fortune hiding in apparent tragedy. The word asks: out of apparent catastrophe bring blessing. As soon as I can remember to say ‘apokatastasis,’ I realize I’ll live through whatever bumping backwards I’m going through and come out in a better place.
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She suggests that we each make up our own name for this phenomenon. “Naming it may help make this undoing less frightening.”
“Apokatastasis” doesn’t cut it for me. After repeated efforts to try to pronounce it, I’ve given up. I’ve been looking for a word or a phrase that will roll off my tongue more smoothly, but still sound like an invocation. My top choice so far is “Doo Wa Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Doo,” no doubt influenced by a PBS TV show I watched recently about 1960s British pop music. Just saying the phrase will allow a little lightness to pierce my darkest mood.
This is a better approach to unravelling than looking at it as an unmitigated tragedy. Why not take Wooldridge’s advice and see it as a chance to find a better way. So what if you come undone? It doesn’t mean it’s too late, you’ve gone too far or that you’ve lost the sun.