On a Day-Long Workshop About the Heart-Brain Connection, a Bibliotherapy Webinar, and Why Books Belong in Hospitals — a writer’s diary entry, 22nd of August

Saturday gone entirely to a workshop, all of it, at the kitchen table with headphones on and the shutters half shut against the heat. Gregg Braden, on the heart. I went in with my usual arrangement, which is one part genuinely interested and one part sitting with my arms folded waiting to be annoyed, and the annoyed part did not get much of a day out.

The thing that caught me is that the heart has its own neurons. Something in the region of forty thousand of them, sensing and firing and hanging on to things, which means calling it a brain of its own is a piece of anatomy and not a lovely phrase for a retreat brochure. And most of the traffic runs upwards. The heart sends more signals to the head than the head sends back down. I sat there with my tea going cold and thought about every single time I have argued myself out of something my chest had already decided, and how pleased with myself I was each time for being sensible.

He had us do a practice. Hand flat on the middle of the chest, breathing slower than feels natural, about five seconds in and five out until the two of them settle into the same rhythm. Coherence, is the word. Then you ask a question and you don’t answer it for yourself, you just wait and see what turns up. I have been sitting still for years and I teach some of this, so I know how easily you can produce a mystical experience to order when a room expects one. This was flatter than that. What came was one dry sentence in my own voice about chapter one, which was not the question I had asked, and was obviously the answer.

Then on Thursday, a bibliotherapy webinar, an hour of it, badly lit, with a woman from a reading service in the north of England talking about groups she runs on hospital wards and in a day centre. They read aloud together. That is the whole intervention. She talked about a man who had not spoken in six weeks of sessions and then finished a line of a poem out loud, from memory, because he had learnt it at school in 1958 and it was still in there waiting.

This is the bit that gets under my skin. Books do something. Not in a vague way, in an actual measurable sitting-in-a-plastic-chair-on-a-ward way, and we mostly treat reading as a pleasant hobby for people who have the time. I have had women write to me about a poem they found on one of my pages, something I put together on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon without thinking much of it, and what it did for them in the worst week of their year. And still, if you say the word bibliotherapy out loud at a supper table, somebody will smile at you the way you smile at a person who has just mentioned crystals.

I wish more people knew. Not the readers. They know already, they are fine, they have their own arrangements. I mean the person in the waiting room who has been told to relax and hasn’t the first idea how, and would not think to try a book, and would be embarrassed to be caught doing it if they did.

Chapter one has been on the table all week getting the pencil. The moon is filling out, past the half and gibbous now over the fig tree, going toward the full on the twenty-eighth, and there is another eclipse coming with it. The moon this time, not the sun. Two of them inside a fortnight. Early, before dawn, low in the west. I have set an alarm, which tells you where I actually stand on all this, whatever I say with my arms folded.