Trip to JB

滞在ビザの切れる日。ＪＢに行ってきた。入国の際、「観光者扱いだから日本行きの航空券を見せろ」と文句を言われる。買い物に行くだけのシンガポール人だって、観光者だろうが。彼らにも航空券を見せろと言うのか！去年も違法入国だと言われたことがある。菊の紋章のパスポート、なめんなよ！気分悪い。シンガポールへの再入国は問題なし。“Last time, working yah?” とやさしく言われただけ。

昨日だったか、おとといだったか、携帯電話の着信音を変えた。どんな音でも鳴ると心臓が止まりそうにびっくりするので、「音なしバイブレーション」にしていたが、バイブレーションでも十分ドキドキさせられ、子供がケタケタ笑う「cackle」にしてみた。よろしい。

… Cervantes wrote a novella, The Glass Licentiate, about a man who believed himself to be made of glass. Indeed such a misappropriation was so common that it is referred to by some doctors of the time simply as “the glass delusion.” It occurs as a phenomenon in the popular literature of every Western country at about this time. A number of Dutchmen were persuaded that they have glass buttocks and were at great pains to avoid sitting down lest they break… Ludovicus a Casanova wrote a long description of a baker who believed himself to be made of butter and terrified of melting… (p. 305)

自分は自分を何と例えればいいだろうか……。

I can remember, in my own depression, being unable to do ordinary things. “I can’t sit in a movie theatre,” I said at one stage when someone tried to cheer me up by inviting me out to a film. “I can’t go outside,” I said later. I didn’t have a specific rationale for these feelings, didn’t expect to melt at the movies or to be turned to stone by the breeze outside, and I knew in principle that there was no reason why I couldn’t go outside; but I knew that I couldn’t do it as surely as I now know that I can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound. I could (and did) blame my serotonin. I do not think that there has been any convincing account of why the delusion of depression took on such concrete form in the seventeenth century, but it would seem that until scientific explanations and treatments for depression began to emerge, people devised explanatory armatures for their fears… (pp. 305-306)

出掛けたくないんだ。ホントに。植物園にでも行けばホッとするかも、と思うけど、体が動かない。

The great transformer of seventeenth-century medicine, at least from the philosophical standpoint, was René Descartes… In effect, a Cartesian biology came to dominate thinking; and that biology was largely wrong. Cartesian biology caused considerable reversal in the fate of the depressed. The endless hairsplitting about what is body and what is mind – whether depression is “a chemical imbalance” or “a human weakness” – is our legacy from Descartes… (p. 306)

Scientific explanations of the body and of the mind developed at a vastly accelerated pace throughout the eighteenth century. But in an Age of Reason, those without reason were at a severe social disadvantage, and while science made great leaps forward, the social position of the depressed made great leaps backward… So the melancholic would be now not a demonic but a self-indulgent figure, refusing the accessible self-discipline of mental health… (p. 308)

Among philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard is depression’s poster boy. Free of Hegel’s commitment to resisting despair, Kierkegaard followed every truth to its illogical final point, striving to eschew compromise. He took curious comfort from his pain because he believed in its honesty and reality. “My sorrow is my castle,” he wrote, “In my great melancholy, I loved life, for I loved my melancholy.” It is as though Kierkegaard believed that happiness would enfeeble him… While earlier philosophers and poets had spoken of the melancholic man, Kierkegaard saw mankind as melancholic. “What is rare,” he wrote, “is not that someone should be in despair; no, what is rare, the great rarity is that one should truly not be in despair.” (p. 316)

Arthur Schopenhauer was an even greater pessimist than Kierkegaard because he did not believe that pain is ennobling him in any way; and yet he was also an ironist and an epigrammatist for whom the continuity of life and history was more absurd than tragic… The depressive, in Schopenhauer’s view, lives simply because he has a basic instinct to do so “which is first and unconditioned, the premise of all premises.” (p. 316)

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who actually attempted to bring these views back to the specific question of illness an insight. “I have asked myself if all the supreme values of previous philosophy, morality, and religion could not be compared to the values of the weakened, the mentally ill, and neurasthenics; in a milder form, they represent the same ills. Health and sickness are not essentially different, as the ancient physicians and some practitioners even today suppose. In fact, there are only differences in degrees between these kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state.” (p. 317)

キルケゴールにしても、ショーペンハウアーにしても、ニーチェにしてもだ。「考えることだけ」を「仕事」とする人らに日常の苦労が理解できるとは思えず。楽ちんな人たち。

けさは、財布の中の２ドル札か、４ドル札が半分に切断されている夢を見た。財布とジーンズの後ろポケットにも切られた跡があった。その前に、実家近くの「第三軍道」が琵琶湖疎水と交差するあたりで、「タフそうな」バイク乗りの集団と出会っていた。何の話もしなかった。ただ、彼らはそばにいた女性を追っているようで、歩いている自分は無視して去っていっただけだった。切られた札を見て、「あいつらは、麻薬中毒者だ」と言った人がいたが、誰だかわからない。

高校で何か行事があったらしく、「打ち上げパーティー」に招かれた。白いクロスが掛けられたテーブルが並んでいたが、出されていた食事は「なまこときゅうりの酢の物」で食べなかった。誰も着席していなかったのも不思議。すぐそばには工事中の一画があって、波板フェンスに開いた穴からのぞいて、火花を散らして作業している人を見た。

昨日書いた「不適格相談相手」に関連するが、女性問題を抱える人になぜＱとのことを批判されなければなれないのか、まったく理解不能だ。