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“Anxiety is the parrot sidekick that rides on my shoulder and occasionally squawks warnings in my ear,” says Tim Clare, poet and podcaster and author of the book Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It. We talk about anxiety, cowardice, magic bullets vs silver bullets, the scary Bible, and seagulls.
Content note for discussion about mental health, unsurprisingly, and colonial and military harmful practices.
EXTRA MATERIALS:
Check out these lions in heraldic art!
Why do we call cowards ‘chicken’?
History of different terms for what is now termed ‘anxiety’. “Freud's etiological theory—now outdated—postulated that anxiety neurosis was caused by an accumulation of sexual excitation that could not find discharge in coitus.”
A Brief History of Anxiety: “They believed that anxiety's ‘hysterical’ behavior, such as panic, was in fact caused by the uterus, which (as male philosophers hypothesized at the time) wandered around the body ‘blocking passages, obstructing breathing and causing disease’ (Plato). It was also suspected to be affected by the existence of ‘female semen’, which, when stored in the body due to a lack of sexual intercourse, would turn to poison and make the women behave in a strange, high-strung manner. Sex, naturally, was then considered to be the cure.”
“The deterrent motivation behind these military executions was short term. That is, the posthumous punishment of being dishonoured for being shot as a ‘coward’ or a ‘deserter’ was designed to instil order and discipline in the fighting troops.”
Cowardice and Military Security: “Concepts such as the security dilemma, the belief that arms races are unavoidable for structural reasons, and realist deterrence doctrines all presuppose the strong and significant political impact of fear.”
Old term for ‘coward’: a ‘quakebuttock’.
Otherlusionists: there are a few episodes about mental health, and the one about complex PTSD goes into military PTSD a bit more; Dude has some more of that ‘intellectual effete urban man vs rugged country men’ trope; and the etymology of ‘panic’ is all the way back in the Latin Lives! episode.
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YOUR RANDOMLY SELECTED WORD FROM THE DICTIONARY:
yips, plural noun, informal: extreme nervousness causing a golfer to miss easy putts.
CREDITS:
Tim Clare is a writer, performer and poet. His latest book is Coward: Why We Get Anxious & What We Can Do About It. Find his work, including his writing podcast Death By A Thousand Cuts, and two free courses to help you in your creative writing, at timclarepoet.co.uk.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman. The original Allusionist music is by Martin Austwick. Download his songs at palebirdmusic.com and listen to his podcasts Song By Song and Neutrino Watch.
Find the Allusionist at twitter.com/allusionistshow, facebook.com/allusionistshow, twitter.com/helenzaltzman and instagram.com/allusionistshow.
