Disclaimer: The assertions made in this post are strictly personal. No scientific research was undertaken for the production of this article, nor do I claim to be an expert on mental health. A friend has pointed out to me that different strands of dementia result in different behavioural qualities exhibited by the patients – my subject just happens to be largely peaceful and content. No offence is intended to anyone who’s experiences dealing with degenerative mental health disease differ from my own.
My friend deserves a thank you for bringing this potentially harmful oversight to my attention, so check out her own blog. Her name is Hannah. Tell her I said ‘Hi!’
As an afterthought to my last post, about Eloisa to Abelard, and its fundamental message that being able to forget our pain and suffering would result in us being able to live a wholly happy existence, I came to a sudden personal realisation; what if we are, in fact, sometimes capable of this high degree of forgetfulness? What if it is actually possible for a human being to completely forget about the trials and tribulations of their existence on Earth, whilst still remaining on the Earth?
Not so many years ago, my Nan was diagnosed with dementia. As a degenerative mental health issue, dementia causes its ‘sufferers’ to live, so to speak, in the present moment, for the most part. My Nan appears to exist in a permanent state of contentment for the majority of time. In my understanding of life, human beings feel the necessity to strive to obtain love, wealth and happiness. And as I discussed in my last post, it is nigh on impossible to obtain the latter whilst the former two are present. In the case of my Nan, however, she has completely erased the need for wealth and love. Money isn’t an issue to her, and likewise she doesn’t seem to worry if her one true love is absent (as was the case recently). Personally I think it’s incredible that this is even a tangible phenomenon.
In the first line of the last paragraph, I wrote the word ‘sufferers’ in inverted commas because I’m not convinced that people do ‘suffer’ with dementia. If anything, it could be construed as a blessing for the patient, insomuch as they are now free to live ’til the end of their days in an almost unbroken state of contentment. All the pain, suffering, heartache and stress attributed to their preceding days on this planet have faded into nonentity. Dementia allows people to achieve what Eloisa thought she saw in the life of a nun; the ability to forget the world. However, Eloisa came to the conclusion that in forgetting the world, one must also be forgotten by the world, and in the case of dementia patients, that is not the case. Though they may be exempt from the roller-coaster of emotions that is love, their own families still exhibit this love for them. So in fact, it is humanly possible to eradicate the hardships associated with love in oneself, but in doing so the ones who love us experience deeper, longer lasting levels of anguish.
I didn’t speak much about the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in my last post, but it has become more relevant now, since it basically backs up my own reasoning. In the film, Joel and Clementine, a modern day Abelard and Eloisa, experience a whirlwind romance to begin with, before things go wrong, and Clementine takes steps to remove Joel from her memory at a special clinic. Joel finds out about this by accident, and it causes him so much unhappiness that he also takes steps to have Clementine removed from his memory. The emotional response experienced by Joel on learning that Clementine has removed him totally, eternally from her life, causes a similar set of circumstances to those caused in real life by dementia. The person with dementia, let’s call her Clementine, has the utter privilege of being unaware of the pain she has experienced, meanwhile her family, lets call them Joel, has their suffering amplified because they are no longer able to feel the warmth of love that they desire.
I think that Eloisa perhaps got her interpretation of the circumstances of the nun slightly wrong: I do not feel that the nun was happy, as such; I feel that the nun was merely content. On a scientific level, during high periods of stimulation, such as while experiencing love, or while engaging in sexual activity, endorphins are released into the body. These act as a natural opiate and result in an extreme feeling of exhilaration and an overall feeling of well-being. Let’s just suppose that a person, a nun is a good example, manages to live their life entirely painlessly, but in doing so ostracises themselves from feelings associated with love and sex. The endorphin rush associated with these activities allow us to experience an even higher degree of happiness than is usually attainable; we’ll call this true happiness. Excluding oneself from the pleasures and vices of life outside the convent removes the opportunity to experience these higher levels of happiness, thus I conclude that Eloisa was wrong to surmise that a nun is truly happy. I propose that a nun is merely content, in the same way that a dementia patient is also content. All that’s left to fathom is whether or not one would prefer to be eternally content, or to embrace suffering in order to experience the highest realms of happiness.
scripturient 