In Session (7) Hunger
Hunger is as dependable as the Postal Service
It was hard to imagine why this proper Englishman was worried about getting fat, so my snap diagnosis was body image issues. He was looking in the mirror and seeing a fat man, even though, in reality, he was lean, and his handshake confirmed he had muscles like steel cable. You just never know about people.
I used to entertain women by having them touch a random point on my body, and I’d make the muscle jump right where they touched. It wasn’t instantaneous. I had to be in a body trance, imagine the point, and then move that imagined point over the physical location. I would focus all my attention into the merger. It’s all about attention. He was paying attention to the red leather chairs with an eye for their value as collectibles but sat in the yellow one. I mentioned that he’s English.
When he settled into the yellow chair the contrast with his black suit made him look like an exotic bird.
“I am intrigued,” he said, crossing his long legs and pressing his fingers together as if in prayer. “I don’t know any psychiatrists, personally, but I assume you begin by getting a license to practice medicine?”
“I don’t claim to be a psychiatrist,” I said. “I wrestled professionally as, The Layman. I just moved it into the self-help field, which has always been my hobby. Why not improve yourself a little every day if you can?”
His tone was cool, a little aloof. “Every day in every way I am getting better and better?”
“Emile Coué,” I said. He nodded, impressed, I think, that I know the source material of psychiatry. He smiled genuinely for the first time and loosened up a little, continuing:
“Very popular with women of a certain age who had no actual power at that time. I suppose it’s better to have imagined power than nothing. I prefer something focused, like autogenic training. Takes it from the general to the specific.”
“Power feels almost like authority,” I said, “the way vinyl feels almost like leather. To your hunger issue, Mr. Cheese …”
He started right in, as if intending to get maximum value from his fifty minute hour.
“It began when I read that the way to extend one’s life is through caloric restriction. The less I ate, the more my metabolism down regulated. I was preserving myself, like one preserves meat or vegetables. Then one night I had a dream. It was very dark, but a light came shining in, and I realized I was in a cave, and the light was from the rising sun, shining into the mouth of the cave, and I heard my mother’s voice calling me. ‘John,’ she said. ‘It’s Spring.’
“I woke up ravenous, and I ate more than usual that day. I told myself I could regulate my metabolism up and down at will, and I was just ramping it up temporarily. But now I can’t stop, and I have to ask myself why.”
“Because you are suicidal?” I suggested. Most psychiatrists don’t talk about suicide with troubled people, but who else is interested?
“What other conclusion is there?” he asked. “Every day my appetite increases. I fatten as we speak.”
“I suppose I’ll be seeing more of you, then?” I asked. He hesitated, then looked at his watch.
Since I read this piece by A. Ritchie, I have been thinking about the quote she used from Coleridge: Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science. Poetry is opposed to science, and prose to metre. The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication of immediate pleasure.
