TAKE A DEEP BREATH by Igor Goldkind, reviewed by Belinda Subraman

TAKE A DEEP BREATH, Living With Uncertainty, is an illustrated collection of essays, poetry, and short stories confronting the pandemic in personal terms. It will provoke, entertain and stimulate your thinking into deeper realms. There is philosophy, questioning, comfort in shared experiences and a little sex too.

I will offer up a few lines few lines from various pieces in the book to give you a taste of his writing and perspective, hoping you will seek out more. You may watch a video and hear the author read and hopefully you may order the book. 

In “San Diego Beat Poets”  he writes

“We can play our songs on air violins and/
Summon the rain to drown our sorrows in a sea of greater uncertainty.” 

In “Death is in Life’s Garden” He says

“She holds his weight against her body,/
Until Death sighs and buries his head between her thighs/
So that she is certain he will return to his labours on the morrow.” 

From “Being is Becoming Still” 

“I am fearful of fully failing myself, and yet/
I love myself best when I am alone with eternity.” 

From “What Happens After You Die” 

“Our mind no longer fathoms./
So we have to leave our mind behind —/ 

To finish this sentence and fly.” 

In “He Said What She Said,” after a younger woman insists on phone sex with him but rejects meeting him in person the next day because of his age he writes:

“Later that morning, I dyed my hair black/ 

and left dark stains in the porcelain sink.” 

From “TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF SELF” 

“We are like Nietzsche’s tightrope walker, balanced between the polarity of our historic, known self and our potential, unknown self, poised in balance our entire lives above the unknown. Zarathustra’s observation of the tightrope walker includes the will to surrender one’s own will to gravity, to calibrate two independent directional forces into one balance? “

Igor Goldkind

Interview:

Be: What is your ultimate aim in Take a Deep Breath? Is it to just “go with the flow” or maybe just use what you’ve got where you are and live in the moment? 

Igor: No. The ultimate aim of Take a Deep Breath is learning how to live with uncertainty. For some time now we have had a crisis in authority, a distrust and dissonance of truth. This is because much of the world we have been sold on as the “Real World”, isn’t. But each of us has the innate ability to recognize the difference between the so called ‘RealWorld’ and the actual world we live in. 

It takes discipline and practice to focus on the actual world by not being distracted by the ‘real world’ . 

Be: How do you feel the art relates since is is mostly abstract? Is it meant to connect somehow to the unspoken or unknowable? Did you have the artist to illustrate totally from his inspiration from your words? 

Igor:  The best way to think of art is like stained glass windows in a cathedral. The source of the light the truth of our experience, can often only be conveyed indirectly, through allegory or narrative, music or image; much as if you stare at the sun all you can see is blinding white light. But through the contrived colors of the stained glass window, the artist is able to prism the light into discernible and relatable components, so as better to apprehend the truth of experience. And yes, the illustrator Rian Hughes, read the book and interpreted the narrative content visually, to offer another stained glass for the account to pass through. 

Be: Was this writing therapy for you in addition to the Zen quality of the process of creation? 

Igor:  I think any act of creation is therapeutic. To compose a song or a poem or paint a painting, choreograph a dance, is all a deep reflection of our complicity and collaboration in the cre- ation of the experience of the world that we are having. Our imaginations both collectively and singularly, are in-the-world. It’s important to be self aware of our participation in our own experience. We are not spectators for or of, our lives; we are the ones who create our own lives. It is useful to be conscious of and remain aware of that constant process. 

Be: Is this a creative text to encourage people to use writing as therapy, an inspiration for the individual to explore their deeper realms or is it simply a sharing from your “deeper realms or both? 

Igor:  I think my book is intended to encourage people to better understand themselves in their relation to the world, others and their unconscious selves. So much of the outcomes of our reality is dependent on unconscious forces within us that play on the world almost as if we were more than one person. Writing helps us integrate those various selves into an integrity we can recognize and identify as our self. I use my own experiences as an example as a demonstration of what I prescribe. 

Be: Do you or have you worked in the field of psychology? 

Igor:  I studied both psychology and philosophy at university and had the privilege of studying with the French post Structuralist Michel Foucault at La Sorbonne in Paris. Much of my thinking is Lacanian but I fall back more on practical philosophy, than psychology. I find that psychology is too often focussed on treating symptoms rather than exploring causes. 

Be: Ultimately how would you like people to react to your book or what would you like people to take away from what you have offered? 

Igor:  I hope it helps people. I hope it serves like a tap on the shoulder and a ‘hey, look over there at that’, which is so often what we really need when we’re fixated on anxiety or depression. I also want people to think carefully about suicide. Not dismiss it or be scared of it, but to realize that most people at one time or another have thoughts of suicide and it is important to know how to process those thoughts rather than suppress them. 

As I say in Take a Deep Breath, if you can’t get around something or over something, you have to go through it to get past. 

Or as the second chicken replied to the first chicken on the opposite side of the road when he asked him how to get to the other side: 

“But you are on the other side of the road!” It’s recognition that counts.