I think our potential to ask the unanswerable questions that Hannah Arendt knew are the heartbeat of civilization is intimately associated to our capability for dwelling in a specific state of being past the realm of our compulsive doing. Bertrand Russell referred to as it “fruitful monotony.” Adam Phillips referred to as it “fertile solitude.” Walt Whitman referred to as it “loafing.” The Buddhist custom describes it merely as presence. No matter we might name it, amid a tradition of filling the existential void with cultish productiveness and an countless stream of dopamine-laced distractions, it’s nothing lower than a countercultural act of braveness and resistance to enact such states of being — states wherein our internal voice turns into audible, the voice with which we sing the music of our lives.
The Pakistani-British psychoanalyst Masud Khan (July 21, 1924–June 7, 1989) calls this mode of being “mendacity fallow” and unfurls its psychological tendrils in a brief, brightly penetrating essay included in his 1983 assortment Hidden Selves (public library).
With an eye fixed to the dictionary definition of fallow as “floor that’s well-ploughed and harrowed, however left uncropped for an entire yr or extra,” Khan considers his alternative of compound phrasing:
By way of the metaphor of an lively verb, I want to point out that the temper I’m attempting to debate is just not one in every of inertia, listless emptiness or idle quietism of the soul; neither is it a flight from harassed purposiveness and pragmatic motion. Mendacity fallow is a transitional state of expertise, a mode of being that’s alerted quietude and receptive wakeful lambent consciousness.
Noting the unusual deficiency of our language in describing “optimistic nonconflictual moods” — a language with an unlimited lexicon for conveying stress and friction — Khan defines mendacity fallow not as “a neurotic, conflictual, or misery state” however as “a wholesome operate of the ego within the service of the person,” a kind of “intractably silent states which we affiliate with the wholesome particular person.” Radiating from this notion is a reminder that we’re infinitely complicated totalities solid by a strategy of slow incubation and incremental becoming, and that how we govern our interiority — how we are inclined to these processes as they form us — shapes each outward expression of our lives. Khan writes:
The capability for mendacity fallow is a operate of the method of personalization within the particular person. This strategy of personalization achieves its sentient wholeness over a gradual interval of development, improvement and acculturation, and its true matrix is a hierarchy of relationships… This can be a lengthy course of and it’s waylaid by many a traumata — private, familial and social. But when all goes nicely — and it does, most of the time — what crystallizes and differentiates into the separate standing of grownup selfhood is a customized particular person along with his personal privateness, internal actuality and sense of relatedness to his social surroundings.
Noting the acute cult of the person in Western society, with its militant deal with self-help and self-improvement, Khan provides:
On this extreme zeal to rescue and luxury the person, we have now maybe missed a few of the fundamental wants of the particular person to be non-public, unintegrated and to lie fallow.
Observing that all of us expertise mendacity fallow “continuously in fleeting patches” — in our moments of procrastination between duties, in our states of idleness and our stressed sense that we should snap out of this “benignly languid passive temper” — he considers the rewards of surrendering to relatively than fleeing from this state:
What does the fallow temper obtain for us? The reply is a paradox: a terrific deal and nothing. It’s a nutrient of the ego and a preparatory state. It provides the energic substratum for many of our artistic efforts, and thru it unintegrated, psychic suspended animation… permits for that larval internal expertise which distinguishes true psychic creativity from obsessional productiveness.
Mendacity fallow is, in different phrases, the antidote to the deadly trap of efficiency. Khan outlines the 5 options of the fallow state:
- A transitional and transient temper
- A nonconflictual, noninstinctual, and intellectually uncritical state
- A capability of the ego
- An alert wakeful temper — unintegrated, receptive and labile
- A largely nonverbal and imagistic state, kinaesthetic in expression
Within the historical past of artistic tradition, many nice and enduring inventive productions have arisen out of this state — proof that mendacity fallow is just not a type of idleness however “a cogent capability in a well-established, disciplined and customized particular person.” Half a century after Bertrand Russell admonished that “a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation… in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase,” Khan writes:
Mendacity fallow is, above all, the proof that an individual will be with himself unpurposefully.
However whereas mendacity fallow is the antipode of productiveness, additionally it is, paradoxically, the antipode of leisure. In a passage of extraordinary prescience given our current epoch of countless social media streams supplanting each second of stillness with a reflexive hit of on-demand leisure, Khan writes:
It’s a unusual and uncanny results of city civilization and the affect of know-how on human expertise that leisure has turn into a pursuit and an finish in itself. It has progressively turn into an business, a occupation and an crucial social want of the people in trendy societies. Everybody strives for increasingly more leisure and is aware of much less and fewer what to do with it. Therefore the emergence of a colossal commerce in organizing individuals’s leisure. This want is maybe one of many actual absurdities of our existence at present, and it displays the decay of some essential value-systems… in every type and sorts of human beings. The pursuit of frantic leisure… is maybe one of the dissipating qualities of the technical cultures. The person on whom leisure has been imposed in huge doses, and who has little capability to take care of it, then searches for distractions that can fill this vacuum… A substantial amount of the misery and psychic battle that we see clinically… is the results of a warped and faulty expectancy of human nature and existence. It’s the omnipresent fallacy of our age that every one life needs to be enjoyable and that every one time needs to be made obtainable to get pleasure from this enjoyable. The result’s apathy, discontent and pseudo-neurosis.
[…]
A longing for leisure, and the concomitant craving for distractions to fill the void of given-leisure, is the results of our failure to grasp the function and performance of the necessity to lie fallow within the human psyche and persona… We’ve industriously misinformed ourselves in regards to the necessities of human nature. We’ve confused the need to alleviate human poverty and distress with the demand that every one life needs to be enjoyable and kicks. The leisure media of recent cultures have additional exploited this leisure void for business achieve and flooded residents with ready-made switchable distractions, in order that no consciousness of the necessity to develop private sources to deal with fallow states can actualize as non-public expertise.
The consequence, Khan cautions, is that we have now developed a narcissistic persona fashion — one which makes myriad outward calls for on the world with “little comprehension of the need of the accountability for an internal relation to its personal self.” Below this warping of the soul, we have now come to our core existential issues — loneliness, distress, grief, alienation — “with no inkling of perception into the particular person’s major human accountability for a dedication to maintain and nourish himself.” Mendacity fallow is how we start to nourish ourselves, how we start to take accountability for ourselves as transient miracles of aliveness and artistic brokers of future.
Complement with Could Sarton’s stunning poem about the relationship between solitude, presence, and love and Hermann Hesse on solitude and how to find your destiny, then revisit two centuries of titanic minds, from Kierkegaard to Sontag, on the spiritual and creative rewards of boredom.
