skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A painful incident from last June has given me something to add to the article about distress signals attracting predators and the article about physical damage caused by energy vampires. It also provides a good example of how evil operates by the rulebook.
It happened just after I had become so upset while thinking about the past and the loss of some prospects for the future that I crossed over into the danger zone. I knew very well that it is best to stay at home when feeling this way, but I wanted to get some supplies in first so went on a shopping trip. My distress signals attracted a predator and I was too overwhelmed to be able to defend myself.
As always, if I had been able to detect a potential attacker and take evasive action I wouldn’t have needed to!
I was on the return journey when someone asked me to help her lift her pushchair off the bus. I reacted automatically; I said, “Of course” and lifted one end. It was extremely heavy, and I soon realised that I had badly injured my lower back.
My life was sabotaged. It took months before I was back to normal. All my plans for the summer, including some day trips to the seaside that I was really looking forward to, had to be abandoned.
Being mostly housebound once again - this time because of the coronavirus restrictions - has brought it all back. I have been replaying this incident in my mind and think it worth recording on here, not because of new insights and more lessons learned but because there are some familiar elements and it provides further confirmation of existing theories.
Warning signals seen retrospectively
This woman asked for help. This is not usually necessary: as I have seen many times, people will offer to help get prams, shopping trolleys etc. on or off the bus without being asked.
She asked me rather than any of the other, more suitable people who were standing around.
She homed in on and spoke to me when I was feeling very under the weather and was in a strange, detached state.
She sounded sour, gloomy and disapproving. She gave me the impression of being under a cloud of negativity.
I now see her as a disconnected person. I have the idea that she was a strategically placed pawn and that this episode was no accident.
Feelings of depression and of being psychically poisoned are not the only problems faced by suggestible and impressionable readers.
When reading the previously mentioned biographical material, I have often felt exasperated by the subjects’ negativity, melodramatic outbursts and self-indulgent behaviour, lack of common sense and blindness to the cause of some of their problems.
Some writers’ chronic money troubles for example could often have been avoided. As for the messy relationships, why did they get involved with such awful people in the first place? Why did they never learn from experience? Why couldn’t they see that they were their own worst enemies!
Reading other books just for their uplifting effect is not enough here: something more is needed. So what are the best solutions?
Stella Gibbons’s solution
Stella Gibbons became so exasperated by the doomy and dismal books of Mary Webb and similar writers that she wrote Cold Comfort Farm both as a parody of rural melodramas and a remedy for the plight of the characters.
She transmuted tragedies into comedies and showed how common sense, determination, good advice and a positive approach could be used to produce solutions for the problems of many miserable and apparently doomed people, transform unsatisfactory lives and bring order out of chaos.
I started an article about Terry Pratchett’s witch Tiffany Aching by saying what a great relief it was for me to turn to his books after reading a lot of depressing biographical material.
This introduced one of the problems that reading certain books can cause together with a good solution.
While other articles cover the sometimes devastating effects of putting ideas and experiences into the context of other people’s lives and looking at the total picture, this one is about being badly affected emotionally or even psychically rather than mentally.
Reading about the lives of writers such as August Strindberg, Stella Benson, Mary Webb, Ouida, Jean Rhys and Antonia White, who have all been featured or at least mentioned on here, can have a very bad effect on impressionable people.
Some people are very good at getting inside books, sharing the writers’ viewpoints and living the lives and stories. This can be a two-edged sword: when reading certain books, such people are in danger of getting sucked in, overwhelmed, trapped and poisoned by psychic contagion.
Some of the harmful effects come from picking up the writers’ inner states from the material: general negativity and feelings of misery, agony, abandonment, depression, desolation, disconnection, doom and despair can be infectious.
Counterweights and antidotes
By far the best solution is to read very different books, ones that have on the whole a very positive effect. They can be inspiring, educational and informational or just entertaining.
Children’s and young adults’ books are often ideal; old friends, comfort reading and new books by a favourite author are all good too.
The Three Hostages is the fourth in the series of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay adventures.
It was first published in two instalments in the (London) Graphic Magazine in April and May 1924 then as a book in June 1924, so this month is the 96th anniversary of its first appearance.
The Three Hostages has already been the subject of one article, and there are references to the evil Dominick Medina and his powers of hypnotism in a few others.
So what more is there to say about this story?
There are two minor scenes that inspire commentary; one is rather painful to read and one is amusing. The first is where Richard Hannay is very reluctantly recalled to action and the other is where he reveals to the enemy that he has been playing a part all along.
A point of particular interest is that Dominick Medina behaves like a cult leader.
Back to the battlefield
People who have had similar experiences will understand how Richard Hannay feels when he is asked to leave his beloved home, family and farm to take part in an investigation.
He receives a letter that destroys his peace of mind. It is as if his Eden has been invaded by a snake:
“I…felt very angry. Why couldn't the fools let me alone? As I went upstairs I vowed that not all the cajolery in the world would make me budge an inch from the path I had set myself. I had done enough for the public service and other people's interests, and it was jolly well time that I should be allowed to attend to my own.”
