Akshi Singh – Solitudes: Past and Present https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk Research on Pathologies of Solitude, 18th – 21st century Wed, 01 Mar 2023 10:25:14 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.1.8 ‘A Keen Vision and Feeling of All Ordinary Human Life’ https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/blog/a-keen-vision-and-feeling-of-all-ordinary-human-life/ Mon, 15 Mar 2021 18:20:14 +0000 https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/?p=2205 Sarah Garfinkel and Akshi Singh discuss loneliness and solitude through the lens of Sarah's work on interoception, the perception of sensations from inside the body. Their conversation, filmed during the second COVID-19 lockdown in England, covers emotional mirroring, empathy, and neurodivergent loneliness, and is followed by Akshi's suggestions for further reading and listening.

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During the UK’s second period of national lockdown, we sat down with Sarah Garfinkel to discuss solitude. Sarah is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscientist at UCL, but listening to her speak, one may be forgiven for thinking that she is also working on creating a nuanced poetics of the body. Sarah’s interest in the body is informed by interoception, the process by which we sense the inner experience of our body; however, her research also speaks to literary and philosophical accounts of the organs as seats of emotion, feminist arguments about not splitting intellectual activity from embodied experience, and recent psychoanalytic work on infants and their caregivers. You can watch our conversation with Sarah here.

Much like the work of our own project, Sarah’s work contributes to our understanding of the complex inner experience of solitude and, in particular, the embodied physical experience of being alone. For those interested in thinking about this experience further, we would suggest the following texts, all of which show how, in the experience of solitude, mind and body, and self and other, are (to borrow Sarah’s words) ‘intrinsically and dynamically coupled’:

  • The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation by Daniel Heller Roazen – an account of what has been variously called the inner touch, the master sense, or, in Brian Dillon’s review of the book, ‘the sensation of sensation’, this book offers a journey through the rich philosophical and literary tradition of thinking about this everyday, immediate but also elusive sense.
  • The Hands of the Living God by Marion Milner – a book that allows us to think about the conditions required for such a sense of being a self to exist, and the ways in which this would shape the ability to experience solitude.
  • ‘Motherese in Interaction: At the Cross-Road of Emotion and Cognition?’ by Marie Christine Lazanik et al – a psychoanalyst working with infants likely to receive a diagnosis of autism, writes about the effects of ‘motherese’ or ‘parentese’ (the particular prosodic intonation of surprise and delight that parents or their substitutes use in speaking to infants) in shaping the infant’s ability to respond to an other.
  • Brain-body interactions underlying the association of loneliness with mental and physical health‘ by Lisa Quadt et al – a narrative review of current research on the manifold interactions between loneliness, affective symptomatology, neural and embodied processing relevant to physical health, mental health, and neurodiversity.

 

Sarah Garfinkel (@DrSFink) is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL and a ‘Nature Index’ 2018 Rising Star. 

Akshi Singh is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

 

You can listen to Sarah Garfinkel on our ‘Space of Solitude’ podcast here

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‘Alone Miracles’ https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/blog/alone-miracles/ Tue, 01 Dec 2020 12:51:19 +0000 https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/?p=1972 Rachel Long speaks to Akshi Singh about inspirational women writers, poetry collectives, and writing as a way of being alone, before reading from her Forward-prize nominated collection 'My Darling From the Lions'. This conversation was filmed during the second COVID-19 lockdown in England and is followed by Akshi's reflections on Rachel's poetry.

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1.

 

As if by accident, I find my head
Washed up window-side of his bed.

Is there a park left in South-East London, I wondered, where women have not stood talking about ‘Thanksgiving’? I was walking back from Peckham Rye, rain beading hair and wool scarf, glasses fogging up. Natasha, her baby and I got locked into Ladywell cemetery. We climbed out through a hole in a fence that a man pointed out with the bottle in his hand, and we jumped down a wall. Lucky we didn’t have a buggy. In Peckham Rye, still giggling, it was time to say goodbye. And Natasha, smiling baby strapped to her chest said: that poem you sent me, I’ve been thinking about it.

I’ve been thinking, she says, of that space in the poem:

I’ll leave not a mark
On his pillow, papers,
Knife, DVDs or wineglass.

That space of absence, of disappearing – is there something appealing about it? An absence from which something just might emerge, the pleasure of vanishing or — she bounces the baby — does it just feel dreadful, awful?

And then we say — ask — together: or both?

We can’t embrace so we stamp our feet on the ground in some sort of dance. And then as I’m walking home I think, already in Hilly Fields Marcella and I were talking of the poem. And Clare has spoken of it to Hetta and they live in south London too. And Carmen! Her hair so abundant and gold as we sat conversing on Telegraph Hill.

All the women I love, one, two metres apart, as we pass Rachel’s words between us.

This whole time, I’ve been holding,
squeezing, wringing, folding,
bending, nodding, thank you, God,
for giving me someone who makes me hold
my breath. I will be so light
upon his life he won’t realise
he’s kept me.

 

2.

 

The first section of My Darling from the Lions is called ‘Open’ through which five poems with the same title are spaced at almost even intervals. Each draws the attention of the reader to the layering of meaning and interpretation, even in the briefest of instances. Something can be more than one thing. Both, and. Like all of Rachel Long’s poems, they make a claim to the pleasure of ambiguity.

It is lonely, I think, to be just one thing. This is the loneliness of forms, checkboxes, where are you really from. Rachel’s book is an antidote. What it might be to be open.

 

3.

 

At my first academic post-seminar dinner in London, I sat listening in to a conversation between the famous academic who had just spoken to us, and the convenor of the seminar. It was a Thai restaurant with a set menu. The convenor asked her where she lived and she said, oh Holloway Road. And someone else said: oh that’s a really nice part of London, isn’t it.

And she said: it’s not that nice, there is a Poundland just down the street.

I didn’t know Holloway Road, but one of the bits of advice I was given when I moved to England was to find, and remember, the location of the Poundland.

I wasn’t embarrassed, I just thought — what is your world?

You’re kidding
If you think that a box of wings and chips
Won’t be eaten over your fresh weave,
Leftover finger-grease used to smooth it.

Hey! I know that place, I thought. I walked past it. I’ve let someone, distracted, burn me with wax because of the crepe roll of her belly and way she lets it press against me. Sometimes I wonder if London is some sort of city of mirages, the men in suits, the women at the seminars just can’t see the jackfruit, can’t see the fresh coconut, can’t see the okra by the bowl. Sometimes I want to grab people by the shoulders, they’ve been here years longer than me, and say: where, where have you been living?

Sometimes I imagine I will have a daughter in this city, and I will tell her: never trust a neighbourhood without yams.

When Rachel writes about hair, an entire city comes into view.

 

4.

 

Her writing is open to ambiguity, and it is open to dreams.

After that I had a sleep-dream
In which I grew a bright green face;
Granny-smith hued, high polished.

In the early twentieth century psychoanalysts, anthropologists, men with offices spent years wondering if people — people outside Europe (and America) — had dreams. They asked, found out. Yes, they dream too. But were these dreams just their myths? Easy to read against a code, ready-made for deciphering?

Sometimes when I read a book review, watch a writer being interviewed I wonder—these journalists, writers, people with words—are they still asking this same question? What is your book about? How is your book shaped by your experience of…?

In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes that every dream has a navel, or umbilicus, linking it to the unknown. A dream squats on the unacknowledged, and it rises like a mushroom from its mycelium.

Sometimes I imagine I will have a daughter and I will tell her: never trust a book without a mycelium.

 

Rachel Long (@rachelnalong) is a poet and leader of Octavia Poetry Collective for Womxn of Colour. Her book My Darling From the Lions was shortlisted for the 2020 Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Akshi Singh is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

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Walking with Marion Milner https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/blog/walking-with-marion-milner/ Wed, 20 Feb 2019 12:00:26 +0000 https://solitudes.qmul.ac.uk/?p=444 Our postdoctoral researcher Akshi Singh writes about Marion Milner's sense of an adventurous solitude and the inspiration she might provide for diary writers of today.

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We were walking across Hackney Downs. For the past two hours, we had sat in a café, reading the second chapter of Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own. In ‘Keeping A Diary’, Milner describes her experience of attempting to record her desires, and moments of happiness. Milner’s commentary is interspersed with generous extracts from her diaries, and we soon learn that what she writes is not confined to accounts of want or joy. The very first diary entry she quotes in this chapter says only: ‘rather oppressed with the number of things to be done’.

Walking, we spoke of what we’d just read. My companions and I were all diary-writers, and we’d been friends for some years. We’d seen each other write and understood, at those moments, to not interrupt. I think we were all surprised to find that Milner’s chapter on diary keeping had left us with an unexpected sense of relief and freedom.

Milner records details that seem mundane: ‘I was thinking about my new frock and shoes’ or, ‘no impulse to write, cold in the head, constipated, too much to eat’. The ordinariness of these entries led us to notice that there had been an unspoken injunction operating when we sat down to write our diaries – the demand that we write something of significance, that we reckon with our inner selves.

Writing a diary is widely considered a private act. That said, it is also a practice that draws attention to the dialogues we engage in when alone, conversations with the others who shadow our solitude. Who are we writing to? Who do we want to exclude when we close our diaries and put them away? And who stands over our shoulder, judging what we say? In his essay ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ Freud wrote:

in the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent.

Perhaps the question of solitude then is also the question of who accompanies us in our solitary moments.

My friends and I discovered that we shared our moments of solitary diary writing with a rather bossy presence who demanded we put on our best intellectual clothes when writing. A dominating figure who didn’t want to be seen thinking of digestion. Maybe that is why our diaries often lay neglected for months on end – because it wasn’t much fun hanging out with this judgmental character. But here Milner was, encouraging us by example to allow ourselves our inconsequence.

As she writes, Milner begins to discover that ‘possibly the thing that matters, the you are looking for, is like the roots of plants, hidden and happening in the gaps of your knowledge’.

What Milner is looking for, as the title of her book indicates, is a life of her own. She has varied ways of conjugating this: ‘a standard of values that is truly one’s own and not a borrowed mass produced ideal’; ‘trying to live one’s own knowledge’; ‘knowing with the whole of my body’.

At stake in Milne’s project is the question of solitude as the capacity to think for oneself, to recognize and take responsibility for one’s desires. Also involved is solitude as discovery—of fears, pleasures and wants that emerge when we are alone. And yet, as Milner’s writing suggests, these explorations of solitude are closely tied to relationships with others—more often than not, others who are not even embodied, let alone physically present at the scene of writing.

Sometimes these are people are the imagined voice of a collectivity. Milner writes:

One day I’ll make a list of points of conflict with the herd. One is – ‘They’ assume that what happens is what matters, where you go, what you do, things that happen, the good time that you have. But often I believe it’s none of these things, it’s the times between, the long days when nothing happens, the odd moments, perhaps when you open a letter, or sit alone in a restaurant, or exchange the time of day with a stranger…

Here Milner is thinking against the collective voice of public opinion – ‘the herd’ – to discover her own opinions, and the things that matter to her. But this is not ‘thinking’ as concentrated effort. Later in the book Milner will note that she ‘had been brought up to believe that to try was the only way to overcome difficulty’ and that it was a challenge for her to give up this attitude of effort. Milner’s discovery of herself is connected with letting go of the effortful, watchful self, and entrusting herself to a part of her that by knowing less, can find out more: ‘only when I stopped thinking would I really know what I wanted’.

Milner allows solitude to be an adventure, and one amongst many rewarding paradoxes that we can take away from her writing is that experiences of solitude are shaped by the company we keep when we are alone.

 

The Marion Milner Reading and Walking Group meets once a month, on a Sunday. All are welcome.

 

Akshi Singh is a postdoctoral research fellow on the ‘Pathologies of Solitude’ project at Queen Mary University of London. 

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