The Power of Place on Mental Maladies: My Own and Others
The source of my long-gone anxiety attacks.
The Power of Place on Mental Maladies: My Own and Others
Have you ever heard of Jerusalem syndrome? That's when tourists to the Holy City become convinced they are prophets or even the Messiah. Israeli mental health pros have identified three gradations of the malady:
1. Bipolar or schizophrenic people also afflicted with messianic fervor who travel to Jerusalem, usually alone, to further their aims. Examples included an American man who became convinced he was the Samson of the Old Testament and traveled to Jerusalem in order to repair the Western (Wailing) Wall, a South American Protestant who traveled there hoping to touch off Armageddon by provoking a religious war between Jews and Muslims, and the Russian writer Gogol, who lost his mind in Russia and went to the Holy Land believing in a personal revelation that had informed him that if said the right prayers at the right places his mind would be restored to him. It didn't work.
2. Religious people often as not in a group. Little Christian and Jewish cults for the most part. For example, there are at least three small groups of Jews attempting to create an uber-holy "red heifer" they believe necessary to exist in order to be sacrificed or merely touched by entrants to the Holy Temple who wished to be truly pure.
Or you have individual zealots like a German academic who had spent years shopping about for the one true faith, cycling through various Christian sects and eastern religions before settling first on Judaism and then something like messianic Christianity, or, as he himself put it, "“primitive Christianity — the religion of Jesus before Peter and Paul ruined it."
The British Journal of Psychaitry picks up his tale:
He now felt it imperative to bring this message to the people of Jerusalem, and set about preaching it at every opportunity. One day, on a visit to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, he succumbed to an attack of psychomotor agitation and started shouting at the priests, accusing them of being pagans and barbarians and of worshipping graven images. The confrontation developed into a violent struggle; eventually, the subject started to destroy statues and paintings. The court ordered admission to hospital at the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Centre for observation and psychiatric evaluation. However, examination by experienced psychiatrists, including the District Psychiatrist of Jerusalem, revealed no psychopathology, not even the mildest personality disorder, all they could find was obession with the fixed idea described above. Follow-up three years later again failed to indicate mental disorder, and the subject continues to work in his academic position, to believe in the same religion and to spread his message, regretting only that he was unable to do this in Jerusalem.
So, in other words, perfectly sane but possessed of a certain idée fixe.
And then you have type three, the surprise time-bomb type. This fellow -- always a man -- arrives on a package tour and unravels in a prototypical seven-step progression:
He becomes agitated, and then trickles away from the group. Third, he becomes obsessed with cleanliness -- bathing compulsively and taking meticulous care of the nails of fingers and toes both. And then comes the toga: invariably they fashion one out of a bedsheet, always white, and take to the hotel lobby, delivering the gospel and chanting psalms and singing hymns. Should their progress not be arrested by hotel staff, they will then proceed to a holy site where they will deliver a generally confused homily to passersby on the necessity of them straightening up and flying right.
Forty-two cases of this strikingly similar pattern have been documented, and in each of them, once the stricken was removed from Jerusalem, they returned to normal. Interestingly, 40 of them were Protestants from highly religious backgrounds, and one was a Jew who feigned Protestantism to avoid Nazi persecution. Only one was Catholic.
I spent a few days in Jerusalem and was not afflicted but if you go there, you can see how it happens. I've powerful memories of scenes of fervor. I'll never forget the sight of a tall and long-bearded black-robed Russian Orthodox monk stalking into the Holy Sepulchre, blue eyes rapt and aglitter in his Rasputin-like visage, and prostrating himself before the shrine. In my mind, I conjured that he had walked there from some Siberian village and died there in this Holy of Holies, a tormented soul at last contented. (He'd probably flown in from Moscow like everyone else.)
I did have a momentary lapse into religious freakery in Israel, way down south on Kibbutz Yahel. While working on some construction project or other, I picked up a long and heavy wooden plank. Since I had a long way to carry it, I placed it across my shoulders and threw my arms over the beam....And then caught a glimpse of my shadow on the rocky sands of the Judean desert, a perfect image of Nova, Crucified. I literally cried out and dropped the plank before collecting myself and picking it back up.
Such is the effect of place on our minds. It brings as much to us as we bring to it. And some places are far more powerful than others.
Take New Orleans for example. New Orleans is not really a place, it's a religion. Those born into it just sort of endure it. As with natives of Jerusalem, they don't really know how irrational the place is because it's all they know, but they do mock its shortcomings freely.
On the other hand you have the move-ins, who did know they were making a decision that defied logic in converting to New Orleansism. With the proverbial zeal of any convert, they will lecture you on all the tenets of their new faith -- how to second-line, how sidewalks are not called sidewalks but banquettes, nor are medians called anything but "the neutral ground" and so on. It's the only city I know of where people act that way.
And I understand it: I have felt its pull many times over the years, and found myself acting like the New Orleansist converts after just a few days in that bewitching city. I even found my accent altering to that weird Brooklynese that natives speak there...It's a city that can give you a syndrome in 72 hours. (In another post, I'll talk about how profoundly moved I was by traveling there with my dad and stepmom at around seven or eight -- it felt like the first time I'd been abroad and I think made a traveler of me.)
I've also been afflicted for twenty years with a variation of what I've only learned tonight is a named malady: Stendhal syndrome, which, per the planetary hive-mind at Wikipedia, is defined as: a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations, allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty.
Some call it Florence syndrome, and some others, like this Jonathan Jones pillock, believe that only the artwork of Florence is capable of bringing it on.
What a load of bollocks.
First of all, what is described after "psychosomatic condition" above is not a unique response: it is, quite simply, a panic attack of the sort made famous by Tony Soprano. A real-deal panic attack. If you've had one, you know what they are like.
I have had several though thankfully none in the past decade or longer. For me, they got milder after the first. Once you learn what to call them, some, but certainly not all, of their terror is gone.
But that first one...ah, you never forget your first. Mine came a day or two into the millennium. My aunt Ellen and her friends had arranged for the entire extended Taylor clan to rent cabins and lodges on the Frio River, so that perhaps we might survive the apocalypse of Y2K.
We did, of course, though I'd done so much drinking in the run-up to New Year's Day I somewhat regretted it by January 2. And it was on that date or the day after that we convoyed back to Houston and rendezsvoued in the old Alsatian town of Castroville, where we were to eat lunch en masse.
If you've ever been to Castroville, you'll know that it's old town is about as Old World European as Texas gets. More so than New Braunfels or Fredericksburg, as it is less trampled by tourists. Or at least was so then. So about 20 of us -- John Henry, Jacqueline and I; my grandparents; several aunts and uncles-in-law and their kids, and old family friends, all piled in to the town's one remaining Alsatian restaurant: a low-ceilinged affair in a stone building not far from the town's lofty and imposing 19th Century Catholic church.
And after a cup of coffee, while a waitress was fussing away over at the other end of the table, I was suddenly seized with an overwhelming sense of impending doom. My heart fluttered; seemed to lose all meter, and I was absolutely crushed with the sense that I was going to die, right there, right then, in front of my wife and child, God, and all of these family members. I remember thinking how embarrassing and ending that would be for me as a 29-year-old man, to die so ignominiously, here in this Alsatian restaurant during what should have been a time of celebration.
After what seemed like an eternity my heart slipped back into meter and I was able to breathe. I mumbled something to Jacqueline and staggered outside and sat down on the ground. I studied ants going about their workdays and listened to sparrows chirping nearby and eventually, slowly, realized that I was going to live. But not eat -- I picked at my share of the sausages and cheeses and various krauts that comprised Alsatian fare and spoke not a word of that black curtain that had descended over my soul for days or weeks.
It happened again, though not as severely, in a gallery of Impressionist paintings at the MFAH, and another time, while I was in my favorite class at UH: Dr Harry Walsh's Russian literature in English class. As I said, once you know what is happening, they are not quite as terrible, but there is still this crushing sense that your moment had arrived and the reaper was calling you to eternity. I was just able to collect myself a little better during subsequent attacks.
And that was when I noticed two common factors: each time, I was in an environment suffused with European art or architecture or cuisine or some combination of all of those; and each time, I'd just consumed coffee, or, in the latter two cases, specifically espresso. And at the time, I was a hard-drinking man.
So remember, this was the early 2000s. Eventually I started watching The Sopranos and...well, I found Tony very, um, relatable. No, I was not the murderous overlord of a harried criminal enterprise, but I was a big guy with a problematic mother, a small family of my own.
And a bad case of nerves, for he, like me, had panic attacks, though his were worse than mine. And through those therapy sessions with Dr Melfi, he learned why he was triggered by ducklings flying away, or cold cuts, or the face of Uncle Ben on a box of converted rice.
So what were my triggers? European paintings, food, literature, and coffee, apparently. But why was that?
Well, here it is, as near as I can tell.
When I was 12, I went to Europe with my grandparents, uncle Tom, aunts Charlotte and Libby, and my grandmother's aunt Julia. We'd planned to start our adventure in Rome: Intercontinental to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Rome: Bam, easy-peasy.
Such was not to be. Thanks to a baggage-handler's strike in Rome, our journey wound up being Houston-Amsterdam, Amsterdam-Geneva, and then we switched to trains.
After a four hour layover in Geneva's train station, we boarded a slow, almost empty train bound for Milan. By then we were exhausted. Even full of the vigor of youth, I struggled to stay awake as we passed through gorgeous Alpine vistas of blinding white snow streaked with bluish rocks and those villages I thought only existed in Heidi fairylands.
And then around dusk, it seems now, we hit Milano. If you've ever been there on a train, you will recall the station. It is immense. Vast. Intimidating -- a cathedral of booming station announcements and screeching steel. Strange and wondrous and vaulting architecture.
And all of us stumble bleary out of the train.
And I promptly got lost among the swooshing electric groans of the trains and the sing-song hurlyburly of the station announcements.
Oh my god, what a weird sensation that was. To be untethered to all you knew in a building like that while exhausted and in a truly foreign country for the first time. I am sure there is a term for it in some language, but it created in me a sensation that is hard to describe. Existentialism, maybe? Derealisation? I felt as if I simply did not matter; I was in a dreamlike free-fall. Watching hordes of people I could not understand hustle past me, none caring a whit about me or my plight, I realized life on this planet was much older and bigger than me, and it would continue long after I was gone, and nobody cared if I was around one way or another.
At some point I was reunited with the family. I don't remember there being much of a fuss about me being gone; they were locked in a debate over whether those little cups of coffee were properly called expresso or espresso, and seeing as we were all so tired, even I was allowed to have one myself, a little orange-frothed demon of a caffeine-bomb. And then we found ourselves in conversation with an American couple -- an attractive upper middle aged woman and her morbidly obese husband, a man who had about the best excuse for that condition of anyone I'd ever met: he was a survivor of the Bataan Death March. I was very respectful as I'd read up on it and seen footage and I also remember that he was as kind as he was fat.
And about 12 or 16 or 24 hours later, our final train finally reached Rome, and that was when I started getting exposed to serious art, from the Vatican on up to the Uffizi and various shrines and cathedrals on the way, all suffused with the smells of baking bread and...espresso. I had developed a habit after my first shot in that vast Gothic pile of a train station up in Milan, where my soul had become untethered from meaning for ten minutes that felt like an eternity.
And in that low-ceilinged restaurant in Castroville, Texas, the smell of espresso lingering in the air, I was taken right back to that time my soul spiraled off into nothingness in Milano Centrale in 1982.
You don't have to be in Florence to get Florence syndrome, or even Italy, or even anywhere else in Europe. Medina County, Texas will do just fine.
I have experienced my own version of this: I get constipated whenever I visit Humble. Go figure.
This sensory thing, I just read (listened) about it in the book What Happened To You, where a kid has an adverse reaction to his teacher, and nobody knows why, and it turns out to be because the teacher and his father both use Old Spice deodorant. Teacher switches, things get better. And then this other kid in a coma has his heartbeat go way faster or way slower when exposed to the clothing of one man, and then another, from his past. FASCINATING STUFF!