The body is a simile of the reality where it lives.
When throughout the world the confinement closed the streets, we began to suffer physical and mental contractures.
We somatize grief as pain, and anxiety is an increasingly palpable sequel to this narrow and endless parenthesis.
Fear, tensions, the weight of work and the sediment of loneliness are translated into a language of flesh in our legs, stomachs, hearts and heads.
This boxed discomfort has ancient roots;
"Anguish" meant in Latin "gorge, narrow place, abyss."
The same happens with the tension that oppresses us: “stress” comes from
strictus
, in the sense of "strict, tight, constipated."
Sadness strangles the air, mutes the voice.
Until suddenly, like in a spell, certain words allow us to leave the frozen passage and find relief.
How many times, trying to lift our spirits, do we talk to ourselves to ward off fear, just as we whisper to the fearful child in the dark.
We tell ourselves that it is necessary to trust, to be strong, not to give up.
This ability to unfold into a serene self that tries to appease the other self is a surprising and ancient feat.
Homer already told in the
Odyssey
that, sometimes, crying shook Ulysses, and then he hid his face behind the cloak, silently moistening the cloth.
Returning to Ithaca, the navigator found his palace occupied by strangers and had to beg in his own city.
Defeated, he said to himself: "Sweetheart, be patient, on other occasions you suffered harder setbacks, but you held on."
For the first time in our culture, a human speaks not with his peers or with the gods, but with himself.
The intimate dialogue was born that way, with a call for calm and tranquility.
During these stormy times, amputee duels have exacerbated our discomfort.
CS Lewis sensed that grief over the death of a loved one is often expressed in the language of heartbreak.
With more than 50 years, the devout Oxford professor agreed to marry the American poet Helen Joy Davidman - Catholic, divorced and communist - who asked him for help to avoid expulsion from the country when his residence permit was denied.
Surprisingly, that marriage of convenience in adulthood led to an unexpected and deep infatuation, which soon after would truncate cancer.
When she died, Lewis wrote in
An Observation Grief
: “No one ever told me that grief was lived as fear.
The same agitation in the stomach, the same restlessness.
I'm not scared, but the feeling is identical.
I hold on and gulp.
Before so many roads and now so many dead ends ”.
What is moving is that those reflections he wrote down in notebooks, his notes on sadness, became a book that would help him - like so many people still today - to escape from the narrow street, from the circular trench.
Anxiety is a narrow room.
Luis Buñuel explained it in his film
The Exterminating Angel
, where some friends meet for dinner in a luxurious room and later, for an inexplicable reason, they cannot cross the threshold to leave.
According to the filmmaker, they would have been attacked by a mysterious and unnameable plague.
Desperation and surreal humor unfold within these four walls: a tragic comedy about suffocation and unease.
When the tunnel imprisons us, laughter widens the lungs with fresh air.
Speaking with Spanish exiles in Mexico, the director pointed out the key: “Men increasingly agree less and that is why they fight each other.
But why are they not understood?
It's the same in the movie, why don't they come up with a solution together? "
According to Buñuel, it should surprise us not that the characters are unable to leave, but that they do not try to collaborate.
Today, more than ever, it is necessary to observe the sorrows, speak with the heart, laugh in the gorge and dare to seek help.
It takes courage to unleash caged words.
We do not always understand how much strength it takes to live in fragility.
