The Will to Heal

An observation: I am exhausted. Physically, mentally, emotionally. Spiritually. I wake up tired in the morning and drag myself through the day, out of breath over nothing, my limbs aching, assaulted by every noise, every movement, exasperated the moment someone asks me for something, or at the slightest inconvenience, or whenever daily life becomes more complicated and painful than simply: 1) showing up to work in a mental fog, 2) coming home to laze around for a few hours in growing filth and chaos that I feel powerless to fight, doing nothing meaningful with my free time either, then going to sleep. And waking up again, a little more drained of all energy and enthusiasm.

I can't seem to rest; clearly, sleep is not enough. I know I should, for a while, go to bed much earlier, eat better and less, reduce – if not eliminate – video games, background TV, music, my 150 various creative hobbies, all these intense stimuli that can keep a person constantly occupied around the clock.

That would be a good start; but I don't believe it would be enough. I dream of a kind of rest that likely doesn’t exist on Earth – a rest not just temporary, but scaled to match the entirety of whatever remains of my existence. A deep peace I must first find within myself, but which, unfortunately, would also have to exist around me – in others, in the ideas that circulate, in lifestyles, in the way society is organized, everywhere. I don’t like this era, I don’t like this world, I don’t like the people who inhabit it. That, too, is an observation. What to do with it?

I recently rewatched A Cure for Wellness by Gore Verbinski, a film I had found immensely bad, yet for some vague reason, it haunted me internally for months – with its sluggish, nightmarish pacing, its thousand disjointed sequences, and its fascinating Swiss castle settings perched atop a backwards little village, and a sanatorium like the kind you only see now on urbex websites. A kind of old-Europe kitsch, comparable to The Grand Budapest Hotel, but without the lightness or the humor. It’s a shame the film is such a failure, given how promising it seemed and how its settings alone could have served as the backdrop for a masterpiece. Anyway, I rewatched A Cure for Wellness, and in the end, I still think the same of the plot: it degenerates – from intriguing, Cronenbergian premises (the mysterious, threatening, irrational workings of the corporate world; the notion of illness and impurity to be cured; the medical world in general) – into cheap horror with jump scares and semi-dreamlike sequences that feel as sickly as they are unjustified... and finally, at the very end, into a sort of dark fairy tale, 100% supernatural and as heavy and kitschy as a big slab of Black Forest cake. Yet the film’s aesthetic qualities and the fascination stirred by its medical and spa imagery remain.

It struck me recently that I hadn’t seen Fight Club in a long time; a film that also has its flaws and easy outs (and its staggering hypocrisy, considering it’s played by Brad Pitt, the ultra-rich poster boy, who leads an anti-consumerist, anti-poster-boy rebellion). But at the time, it had left me first stunned, then exhilarated – scribbling page after page about all the things I could do to heal my life from depression, boredom, powerlessness, insignificance.

Both films, although treating the matter from very different angles, start from the same premise: modern life is unhealthy. Modern life is bad – morally bad, spiritually bad, physically bad, bad in every possible way.

In Fight Club, the protagonists heal by beating each other in a basement to rediscover the meaning of pain, of victory, to escape their robotic, underling lives. In A Cure for Wellness, the characters give in to the fantasy we all know: of quitting everything for silence, sleep, reflection, rejuvenation – set here in the age-old scenery of rural, mountainous old Europe, primitive on the surface and hyper-civilized underneath; the exact opposite of the United States, which (as someone once wrote) went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever passing through civilization – the land the protagonist hails from, and from which the CEO he's come to retrieve has fled.

“You don’t believe in illness until your body tells you something is wrong,” says Pembroke to young Lockhart. It reminds me of the kind of thing Laurence used to say – Laurence, with her fragile health, who was obviously right, back when I still believed myself strong and young. Over the years with her, I had to admit that everything was getting harder, more painful, more frightening, more confusing – and I didn’t even know why – over countless nights of discomfort and anxiety; that my body, like my mind, was rebelling against something, and that I would need to understand what, and how to fix it.

Laurence, whom I had accompanied on thermal cures – to Plombières and Vichy – where she went to try to ease, if only a little, the terrible digestive problems that made a normal professional life – and just life itself – so difficult for her.

I don’t know whether it’s coincidence or some obscure necessity, but both of these towns seemed frozen in time – Vichy with its quaint old-French charm inviting infantile regression – I wouldn’t have been surprised to see my grandmothers resurrected there, young again – and Plombières with its gray, crumbling, abandoned appearance, like a ghost town living on its memories, on the faded glory of the First and Third Empires, and more modestly, the postwar boom, with its shopfronts seemingly lifted straight from the 1960s.

Those few buildings, magnified by the snow, made it feel like something out of Syberia – a street in Valadilène or Barrockstadt... Syberia, the ultimate restful video game, in which essentially nothing happens – where history seems to have stopped decades ago, or for all eternity. A nearly empty hotel and shuttered shops on the outskirts, Barrockstadt University without a single student in sight, and Komkolzgrad – an abandoned factory... A whole imaginary world slowly succumbing to silence, stillness, entropy – and yet none of it is unsettling; quite the opposite. It’s profoundly soothing, like a blissful letting-go after a frenzy of activity.

I realize now, as I write this, that the game actually ends in a spa town...

I bought Syberia at a flea market in Saint-Mihiel, with Laurence. Before or after our first stay in Plombières, I no longer remember – and it doesn’t matter. It’s just another example of those moments when real life and fiction, the imaginary, meet, mingle, and enrich one another. Back then, those encounters were pure chance. Today, I try to bring them about. I’ll talk more about that another time.

In any case, in Plombières, we felt sheltered from the era – from its ugliness and vulgarity, from its pointless agitation, its endless sensory, visual, and mental assaults, from the end-of-civilization mood that defines the life we lead today. And rather than merely be an accompanying presence, I myself would gladly have spent weeks there in silence and stillness – soaking in baths, hammams, and saunas, feeling the hard, stone-like jet of water beat against my body in the showers. Especially in Plombières, where the facilities were underground and the corridors worthy of some dark cavern or Roman catacombs.

*

Passing thought: from warm, damp catacombs to the womb, symbolically, there's only a short step – and my obsession with baths, since not so long ago I took them daily, in the dark, sometimes even during nights of insomnia and anxiety – that obsession eventually revealed itself for what it is: a longing for the great original peace.

Yesterday was the feast of Saint Bernadette, and last Thursday was the feast of Our Lady of Lourdes.

"Accompanied by her sister and a friend, Bernadette went to Massabielle, along the Gave, to gather bones and dead wood. Removing her stockings to cross the stream and reach the Grotto, she heard a sound like a gust of wind. She looked up toward the Grotto: ‘I saw a lady dressed in white. She wore a white robe, a white veil as well, a blue sash, and a yellow rose on each foot.’ Bernadette made the sign of the cross and recited the rosary with the Lady. When the prayer ended, the Lady suddenly disappeared."

On February 11, 1858, took place the first of eighteen Marian apparitions that would turn this small town – whose history had long, perhaps always, been marked by the Virgin – into one of Catholicism’s great pilgrimage sites, scorned by everything this world holds of Protestants, heretics, professional skeptics, and ashamed Catholics, unable to see the beauty of these apparitions and of the very idea that the Virgin – the Immaculate One – might appear to establish a place where those – all mortals – who are far from immaculate and are born and live caked and sticky with sin, physically, morally, and spiritually sick from sin, might come in search of healing.

A healing that owes nothing to revolutionary fervor, nor to white or black magic, nor to medicine.

"Come drink from the spring and wash yourself there."

Just like in A Cure for Wellness, the modern world is obsessed with this notion of healing – with what Muray called the desire-to-heal. It looks for it everywhere: in medicine, of course, in nutrition, in meditation and other exotic techniques, in cocooning or in perpetual partying that suspends conflict and social inequality – even any form of difference. Or, at times, in bloody revolution, or in the most mindless reactionism – and in every case, in the persecution of whatever category it singles out – social, religious, or racial – suspected of blocking this beautiful healing of society, if not of causing the illness itself.

The world refuses to see that the only thing it is sick with is sin – and no medicine, no wellness technique, no intimate or political revolution, whether persecutory or reconciliatory, will ever be able to change that.

I was initially annoyed by the change of the film’s original title, A Cure for Wellness, to A Cure for Life for the French market – probably because Wellness is harder to pronounce and less immediately understandable for the average French viewer – but it felt lazy, shallow, meaningless. I was wrong. A Cure for Wellness fits perfectly within American ideology, to put it quickly, whereas A Cure for Life is an unfaithful translation but a theologically more accurate one: it’s not just about feeling better – it’s about ceasing to die and beginning to live. The only healing that truly matters is not of the body, nor even of the psyche, but of the soul – and sometimes, the other two are granted in addition. Naturally, the film offers the exact opposite, with its black magic lurking behind the desire-to-heal and all the medical trappings.