I remember, in my early twenties, lying in a warm bath with my hand on my right hip saying over and over again, to myself: my hip is going to heal, my hip is going to heal, my hip is going to heal. Putting my hand on the back of my head and saying over and over again: my head is going to heal, my head is going to heal, my head is going to heal. There was severe pain in my right hip and in the back of my head and often there still is. I have examined the problem from all angles yet I still don’t completely understand why. But I have come to understand that, at some previous point in my life, I decided it was better to simply live with the pain than to spend an enormous amount of time and energy trying to solve the problem with relatively little success. I have never felt completely certain that this was the right decision. Maybe there was some solution and I quit just before finding it. Maybe I should start all over again, searching from the beginning, as if it was the beginning, going through all the options one by one and once again seeing where they lead. I know one of the main reasons I don’t do this is because I find the process too depressing. And also because, the current evidence suggests, I am able to live with the pain. It is bearable and yet constantly leaves me with the open question as to whether or not this is best way for me to live.
In the bathtub I would repeat these sentences as mantras. I couldn’t ever quite bring myself to completely believe it, but I suspected there might be some purely psychosomatic aspect to my afflictions and wondered if anything could be changed through purely mental strategies. At the same time, I found myself wondering if such strategies were little more than a mild form of madness. We might give a name to this madness: the power of positive thinking. I thought: if I’m looking to the power of positive thinking for a solution I must really be lost. During this time I read more spiritual things, mostly poetry, to try to help me cope with the physical pain. I do not normally read spiritual materials. I am generally a rather negative person and positivity does not come easily to me. There was another aspect to all this. I’d had a certain amount of artistic career success very early on. I published books and made performances and this work all received a substantial amount of attention. I didn’t really have any strategies for dealing with this attention and also didn’t really have strategies for managing my own artistic desires in a way that would allow me to continue making work I felt good about. It became increasingly difficult to feel I was making the work for the right reasons. I had no way of knowing to what extent, if any, my physical health problems were connected to such artistic dilemmas.
Jacob Wren
Picture Édouard Riou