SISYPHUS

SISYPHUS is a magazine that focuses on contemporary issues surrounding art, culture, and language.

Everything Meant Only Itself

by

Only madmen and mystics live without metaphors.
—Patrick Harpur

 

The story:

 
Once upon a sabbatical, a hermit rented a small hut.
He yearned to be a mystic, discover God or,
failing that, learn what it meant to be alone.
 
Settling in, he found he liked the little tasks
of living, keeping to himself, keeping
silence, keeping sane.
 
On his walks, he took the woodland trails,
but he wasn’t a thief, he always returned them—
circling the lake, un-circling it.
 
No snakes to his knowledge (or else very quick).
No knowledge, either. Everything meant
only itself.
 
Hunting season came and went. He was game;
he stuck it out. Winter followed.
And loneliness.
 
Soon he was pacing, cursing squirrels,
casting them into outer darkness.
When they kept coming back,
 
he praised their persistence. Spring
arrived. Then summertime. Time
to return to the world.
 
The world, he found, had done well
in his absence. He praised
its persistence.
 
The End.

 

                       
The exegesis:
 
The tricky element in every story is the I,
with its iffy implications of integrity or irony.
 
Should the I prove unreliable, what holds true?
A chalice? Cupped hands? The blue bowl
 
of heaven? Something must hold true.
God?
 
God, I’m told, can use a stone as easily as a saint.
Does this make God a Mason? a magician?
 
a madman? Protagonists, too, are tricky. Take,
our young hermit, is he a stand-in for the body;
 
our wannabe mystic, a stand-in for the soul?
Together, are the two of them a stand-in for you.
 
Are you nothing more than a stand-in for me?          
Did you think I would know?
 
So, tell me, are we finished here? Or shall we
rattle on a bit until we hear a voice
 
praising our persistence, or until
there comes the sound of one God clapping?
 

Altricial/Precocial

by

“Altricial/Precocial” originated out of conversations with relatives I’d long depended on–before I could recognize my own dependence on them–when I was recently switching residences and discussing what has changed about the process of changing homes. 

she gives us a pot of thyme and mints
says they’re the easiest to keep alive
and later I hear her, taste her hoping
through the mildewed fence, the screened-in porch, the plastered walls
that we’ll mention our new garden
sprung only from her welcome gift
so we all can talk of water or light
when we step out to walk the dog, take out the trash, check the mail
and I can feel her thickening hope
opening a box in an open garage
that still does not seem my own
but just a possession belonging to a time, a history, a generation
who actually talked of things
in a manner that embossed
them in a rich love that I,
altricial, struggle to know past my child, my dog, my parakeet

 

 

 

 

(Ed. note: Altricial animals are hatched or born in an undeveloped state, requiring care and feeding by the parents, while precocial are hatched or born in an advanced state and able to feed themselves almost immediately.)

Liberty’s RNA

by

@ZephaniahSole

 

Given recent events in our nation I often find myself meditating on the “stuff” of Liberty; its RNA so to speak. The American strain of Liberty is a highly infectious and resilient meme that branched off European variants in the 17th and 18th centuries, crossing the Atlantic via the writings of suspected index carriers you’ll see to this day in Political Science 101: Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. We know from historical contact tracing that these carriers’ writings were responsible for Liberty’s aggressive transmission when they infected a group of super-spreaders, many of whom have names we don’t have to wait until college to learn: Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, Hamilton (this is the perfect place to quote lyrics from “My Shot,” but that would violate a copyright or two).

After these guys participated in a few superspreading events in 1776, the Liberty meme mutated in America over the subsequent two and a half centuries into a variant known for the intense sense of Individualism it induces in its host. An Individualism so absolute it often, paradoxically, threatens to tear apart the social fabric on which the host, and hence the meme itself, depend. You can see this in any news broadcast of Americans’ recent activity on either the right-wing or the left. But if you want to directly observe a more quotidian, and far deadlier sample of the self-destructive Individualism the American strain of Liberty induces, take a drive down a California freeway. It’s like Super Mario Kart out there.

I often wonder why the American strain of Liberty evolved as it did. Especially considering how other variants developed. 83 years after the superspreading events of 1776, John Stuart Mill, continuing the memetic propagation initiated by his aforementioned European forebears, published On Liberty over in England. Mill is pretty clear from the jump that he believes, “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” (15) (Go easy on the man, this is way before the days of non-binary pronouns.) But Mill also strongly reinforces two conditions on the exercise of individual liberty. First, that one’s actions bring no harm to others (Mill 18). And second, that there must be consistent, open-minded discussion amongst those with differing beliefs, so that truth can eventually be revealed through rationality (Mill 27-28). Imagine that.

Mill’s utilitarian restraints didn’t quite make it into the core memetic material the dominant strain of individualistic American Liberty comprises. It’s not too crazy to posit that Liberty had some interesting interaction with other memes in the American petri dish, like Racism and Nativism, that contributed to its current make-up. (Remember, when On Liberty was published America was gearing up for its Civil War.) But it’s also helpful to return to the thoughts of the above mentioned index carriers – Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau – to examine Liberty’s RNA and see why it was so susceptible to evolving into such a self-destructive strain in the first place.

In the initial variants of the Liberty meme you’ll find two fundamental constructs in its RNA: the State of Nature and the Social Contract. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau varied in their ideations on the State of Nature, but they all saw it as the original, natural condition of humanity, where individualistic people possessed a form of pure and unfettered Liberty; an unfettered Liberty these hypothetical first humans mutually agreed to constrain when they left the State of Nature to join the Social Contract that would better preserve their lives and Liberty as a whole (Hobbes 87-89; Locke 70-71; Rousseau 69-70). “…even the wise saw the need,” as Rousseau put it, “to sacrifice one part of their liberty to preserve the other, just as a wounded man has his arm amputated to save the rest of his body.” (70)

The problem is, none of these oh-so-brilliant men were very good anthropologists, so the meme they propagated had a fundamental flaw; this State of Nature they discuss never existed (Fukuyama 29). It wasn’t until 2011 that Francis Fukuyama strongly pointed out in The Origins of Political Order: “(Rousseau), Hobbes, and Locke were wrong on one very important point. All three thinkers saw human beings in the state of nature as isolated individuals, for whom society was not natural… it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history… modern biology and anthropology… suggests… there was never a period in human evolution when human beings existed as isolated individuals…” (28 – 30)

What Fukuyama does not specifically delve into, and what I wonder now, is if the index carriers were so fundamentally wrong about the State of Nature, what does that mean for our understanding of Liberty? Fukuyama’s assertion supports the idea that there never was an individualistic State of Nature to leave and that Social Contracts, to some extent, always existed. If that’s the case, then Liberty was never something humans had to compromise or constrain in order to enter the Social Contract. Social Contracts were always there, and Liberty, complete and- as Jefferson said – inalienable, was always there too. But, and this is a big but, it also means that Liberty, instead of being something that was inherently tied up with isolated Individualism, was something that was inherently tied up with the workings of society. Liberty was not something to be tailored, reshaped, or modified in its transition from some in vivo State of Nature to an in vitro Social Contract, but it did always operate within the context and constraints of social activity.

I suspect the flawed concept that Liberty’s original and natural context is some individualistic State of Nature is the source of a glitch in the way most Americans think about Liberty. A glitch that induces equating the exercise of Liberty with uncompromising Individualism when it should actually be equated with cooperative prosocial interaction. A glitch founded from a fundamentally inaccurate notion propagated over the past 400 years; that it is natural for humans to be isolated and alone. It is not. We are inherently social beings. And the exercise of Liberty is an inherently social dynamic. Perhaps we should consider what this means for our political and quotidian affairs. Perhaps we could purge Liberty of this glitch. At the very least it would help our Californians become safer drivers.

 

Works Cited

Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Cambridge: at the University Press, 1904.

Locke, John. The Second Treatise of Government. The Liberal Arts Press, Inc. 1952.

Mill, John Stuart. Three Essays. Oxford University Press, 1975.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.

To Love Everyone as Equals

by

 
Imagine you were Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish existentialist. Then there would be nothing confusing about the remark: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
 
In a letter to his fiancée, Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard wrote, “Freedom is the element of love.” Love presupposes freedom. All those who are free can love. Freedom is liberation from something that is obstructive: hatred or ignorance.
 
Even though Kierkegaard was a devoted Christian, he didn’t have any confidence in the official religious institutions of 19th-century Denmark. The priests, Kierkegaard said, spoke on behalf of a god with whom a person—any person—can only have a private relationship. God, he said, can’t or shouldn’t be institutionalized.
 
Freedom, then, requires not only the courage to stand against dominating and controlling norms or ideals represented by the church but also the imagination to believe that another approach to life is possible—including a personal relationship with God.
 
Each one of us is free to explore what is true and what isn’t. It means each one of us is forced to face our troubling self-doubt. For the same reason, Kierkegaard described “truth as subjectivity”; truth can be seen as a foundation on which one can stand without sinking. Hereby, he illustrated that one’s self, as in “yourself,” is constituted by both the relationship one has with oneself and how this relationship relates to a third party: a god, for example. Even for the
nonreligious, there is always something bigger than the individual.
 
This is important to keep in mind because how I love myself can easily turn into narcissism. Today, many are in love with their fantastic self-images. Thus, freedom also means liberation from how many people try to appear attractive in the eyes of the others. They lose their relationship with themselves being too eager to be loved or liked by the many. And if we don’t create normative ideals ourselves, then society would often do it for us, telling us to be smart, thinner or sexy in a particular way that is easy to consume. It can, of course, be difficult to know whether a person’s desire really is his or her own, or whether they are being seduced. Still, my Kierkegaardian point is: if one can’t leave one’s self-image alone, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to surrender oneself to something greater—like love.
 
Freedom is liberation from what hinders a more direct and honest relationship with life as such. Without honesty there is no love. All who have been in love know how love can knock one over and make one act ridiculously. Yet if one is not free, then one might be afraid of losing face or afraid of losing status/prestige. In Works of Love, Kierkegaard spends a lot of time elaborating on the remark, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” He speaks about our duty to do so. He makes love something normative.
 
Kierkegaard angles the argument around two themes. First, love is what is. He makes love ontological. Second, love is edifying; it builds up what is broken. To justify both claims, he makes us recall our own experiences with love. He understands love as generosity, kindness, and compassion—for example, when a person shares their food with you or when someone gives you a hug or smiles at you. He then proceeds to say that although some people experience more than others, we have all experienced enough to know love’s power—what he refers to as edifying or healing—and once we have enjoyed the fruit of love, it is our duty to share it as much as we can within our limits.
 
Kierkegaard used the remark “Love your neighbor as yourself” to manifest his attack on the church and common political practices. He asserted that far too many people understand the term “your neighbor” as referring to “my people,” “my gender,” “my nation,” or “my faith.” That’s a mistake. “Your neighbor” refers to all people: women or men, black or white, and people of all religions.
 
If we are not free, we can’t love all people. An unfree person is one fueled by hate or stupidity—for example, one who thinks that men are better than women, one ethnicity is better than another, and so forth.
 
Kierkegaard attacked, with good reason, our all too human generalization tendency— for instance, when some claim that “all X are …” Whatever the term “X” represents, we can be sure that the argument is not only stupid but also packed with fear—the fear of what is strange or different.
 
To love everyone like oneself, as I see it, doesn’t suggest that it is our duty to love all equally; rather, it is our duty to love everyone as equals.
 
I can accept the command love everyone as equals as worth striving to do, especially since it doesn’t hinder me in loving some people more intensely.
 
 

 
 
 
 
 

Salvador and Albert Walked into a Bar

by

 

You would think that at least one of them would know when it was time to duck…

Consider if Dali and Einstein had conversations about time. It could’ve happened. Dali was a mere 25 years younger than Einstein. Could either man have discussed his obsession with not obsessing about time without using time to do it? For Albert’s part, it may be that matter can be neither created nor destroyed but what about time? And does his theory of relativity extend to how we choose to use our time?

It is a Friday in a suburban high school, a day that exists with more time built into it for non-productivity, as evidenced by the casual Fridays trend. I see paraprofessional Nick Stern sitting at a desk at a hallway intersection evidently on hall duty. Nick attended the same school where he sits now, thirty years later, keeping the hallways safe for democracy. He is a robust gent who fits gingerly into the student desk outside the corner photocopier room. I miss seeing Nick shelving books in the library where I patiently serve our adolescent future. As much as he lumberingly complains about the Sisyphusian task of shelving library books (remarkably reminiscent of Eeyore of the Hundred Acre Forest), I do believe that he used to enjoy the daily banter in our humble institution within an institution. Our Mr. Stern was wearing a rarity, a newish sweatshirt in a lovely shade of Wildcat purple. I asked him if he had an allegiance to Northwestern University and, in fact, he said that NU was his favorite team – in all sports.

So I had stopped to chat with Nick and time commenced to alter for us both. People might say that time flew or time dragged; but in these instances of deliberate expenditures of personal contact for the enriching purpose of adding a drop of humanity to a beaker-full day of perfunctory salutations, it feels rather that time expands and starts to float. Some might say that it flows. What other elements are interacting that together create a condition that fosters a decision to stop and chat?

Did Einstein consider that the molecules in the atmosphere alter relative, not only to scientifically measured temperature, but also to the change in temperature caused by humans interacting in a socially acceptable and pleasing manner? What if there is a pattern to be found that can connect his work with Brownian movement of molecules, relativity, energy, matter, and time?

Why stop there? How about Dali’s melting clocks showing us the complete relativity of time? Was Salvador’s admiration of Freud based on the aspect of time in dreams and hallucinations or merely on the body of work that is his legacy? I would like to see Dali’s clocks blown up like balloons and stuck in the tree branches instead of hanging there, melting away. Maybe Magritte would paint the floating clocks like so many orbs in the sky.

Nick and I could have talked about college sports, our high school teams, and so much more. But Nick knows that I have to stick to the bell schedule and I judge my time with him and his counterparts as best as I can. Of course, my predilection to continue to visit with staff has its’ own cause and effect. My time to sleep is reduced; I arrive at school between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. every morning so that I can get a good head start on my own work before the rest of the world wakes up. I struggle with the paradox of my appetite for high touch repartee. Time simultaneously floats away while squeezing the productivity out of my day.

Ah, well. Back at the bar, maybe Salvador and Albert were going to meet Sigmund and Rene. Imagine the looks around the table, time standing still while they wait for someone to pick up the check.

 

Finding Satisfaction, Knowing When to Stop

by

 Go, go, go! In the name of progress, we can’t afford to slow down or feel contented; we are here to make progress. Having been programmed to strive since birth we can’t stop now, not even when our survival is at stake, so we keep drilling and fracking even as ice melts from mountain peaks to seas and more of our homes are lost to firestorms, droughts, floods, and other extreme weather.  We keep releasing more greenhouse gases every year, even as more of us die breathing lethal particulates. We keep removing trees even though they offer our last hope of averting climate collapse. Is this collective denial, or death wish, or madness?

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the ancient Chinese classic, Laozi (also known as the Daodejing or Dao Te Ching) was written to ponder just such questions.1  Over a dozen of its eighty-one verses address the boundlessnes of human desire that keep us from feeling satisfied and depriving us of the wisdom to know when enough is enough. Of these poems, Verse 32 posits that we must know when to stop in order to preserve as much as we can. The next verse puts forth the idea that the ability to quiet the mind is critical for vanquishing desire and feeling contentment.  We cannot rely on ingenuity to solve the problem of excess. The subtext is that we must be careful what we take from nature, since once we have tipped its delicate balance, we can never restore it and our survival will be jeopardized, even though nature will keep evolving long after the human species has gone extinct. But what shall we do at this time?

Along with Confucianism and Buddhism, the Laozi‘s reverence for nature had been observed throughout Chinese civilization. Later, the imperial powers came to pillage and carve up China, whose people were so humiliated that they turned to science and technology to save their nation. In the process, they turned their backs on the ancient philosophies and joined the technological rush to develop what is left of nature for prosperity and convenience, pushing human survivability right to the edge. At this time, it may still be worth our while to contemplate what the Laozi offers us as a way to head forward and to make peace with ourselves. To that end, I am putting forth these two poems reflecting on our place in nature.

In my translations and analyses, I use its transliteration of sinograph Dào rather than its literal, more banal, meaning as “the path” or “the way,” since the Laozi has assigned it to represent the unknowable, indescribable, and nonconscious mystery that created the universe and continues to guide the transformations of nature. I also eliminate punctuation in order to emulate the form of the earliest texts, whose five thousand characters ran continuously without punctuation or breaks. Instead, I insert line and stanza breaks to make the text more comprehensible. Chinese and English words are aligned side-by-side so that those who do not read Chinese can see the repeating characters and parallel structures.

Commentary for Verse 32

The balance between human progress and pristine nature is precarious. If we could manage to maintain this balance, we could continue to thrive along with all the other species on earth. However, once the natural balance is tipped, it is impossible to restore and as a species, we will be in grave danger: such is our present situation.

Introductory Stanza

The poem begins with the phrase: “The constant Dào has no name” (dàocháng wúmíng 道常無名), which nearly repeats the first line of Verse One: “The constant Dào is unspeakable.”2 The word “constant” (cháng 常) connotes immutability as the Dào is the only permanence, while “nameless” (wúmíng 無名) connotes enigmatic. This means the Dào is an unchanging and unknowable principle that guides all cells and objects in the universe, is an enigma, undefinable and unclassifiable.

The Old Master uses the sinograph “unhewn, primitive piece of wood” (pǔ 樸) to represent the pristine wilderness and unadorned simplicity of nature, untouched by humans. It also denotes the natural state of the mind when we are infants, as this passage of the  “Horse Hooves” chapter of the Zhuangzi illustrate:

Equally without knowledge, one’s virtue does not part. Equally without
desire is called the simplicity of an unhewn piece of wood. With the simplicity
of an unhewn piece of wood, people attain their own nature. (ZZ 9)3

Like the Dào, pǔ is ubiquitous and ineffable. But as we evolved into bipedal creatures, we began to use our hands to shape pǔ into artifacts or tools (qì 器)4. There is a zero sum game between pǔ and qì. For thousands of years, indigenous cultures managed to preserve an abundant pǔ, until they too were decimated along with the pǔ.

As we create more qì, more pǔ is destroyed forever. Once we have obliterated enough pǔ to tip the critical equilibrium, we have also brought our survival into question. I am afraid we may be at just such a junction, perhaps we have even exceeded it. Psychically, pǔ also represents the natural state of mind with which we are all born. That is the mind of a newborn, before learning anything in the human realm. It is a state that the Old Master treasures for its innocence and emptiness. It is a state of mind that notices fleeting thoughts without holding onto any desirable ones, nor evading the undesirable ones. Therefore pǔ is a frame of mind that sees all things coexisting interdependently as one without distinction. Such a condition is too contradictory for words. Language would invariably lead us astray.

In the second line, the word pǔ is followed and modified by the characters “even though small” (suīxiǎo 雖小). During the Old Master’s time, pǔ abounded, so how could it possibly be small? The adjective “small” (xiǎo 小) has a wide range of implications, such as “subtle,” “intricate,” or “delicate” as in the “delicate balance” among all species in our web of lives. Another inference is “inconsequential” as in the interdependence of species that is often dismissed or overlooked. Once the delicate balance is upset, it cannot be regained. This is the essence of the second line:

As delicate and insignificant as the natural order may seem, we must abide by it in order to survive.

Second Stanza

If those in power kept their subjects from living in excess, everyone could live equitably and continue to enjoy a hospitable climate. The second line ends with the binome “ambrosia” (gānlù 甘 露) that represents timely rain and genial climate. This utopian view is similar to a passage in the Commentary on Decision (tuàn 彖) from the (qián 乾) hexagram in the Classic of Changes (Yijing 易經)5: 

Clouds flow by sending rain to bequeath all creatures their distinctive forms . . .

Qián transforms all things according to their true nature to ensure Grand Harmony. Their

pure nature comes from their primordial creation, keeping all nations safe and peaceful.

This commentary and the poem esteems water for its life-giving quality and its moderating quality. Water meandering downstream is aesthetically pleasing because of its graceful, effortless flow according to gravity. However, historical strongmen were fond of diverting the flow of rivers to flaunt their might and modern despots are eager to show their prowess by building colossal dams even they though know the calamitous results. 6 “Grand Harmony” (taihe 太和) signifies perfect equilibrium in the ecosystem, similar to the Old Master’s pǔ.

Third Stanza

The binome “fabrications” or “systems” (social, economic, political, and other) (shǐzhì 始制) refers to all the human nomenclatures (yǒumíng 有名). The idea of growth has been touted as a virtue pushing the human race forward, but our inability to stop sends us on a linear trajectory strewn with extinct people and creatures. When pǔ was ubiquitous, all lives could thrive with moderation and renewal; with pǔ all but vanished, we find our own survival endangered because the climate we have created cannot sustain us. We use  language to divide and categorize things, priding ourselves on cleverness for conquering nature.  Our inability to stop makes us the most invasive of species. We are never short of creativity, only our lack of insight into our place on earth is glaring. The Old Master teaches us to be thrifty in order to consume less of nature. Internally, he urges us to work toward the pǔ state of mind that is similar to this opening passage of Confucian Great Learning (dàxué 大學):

Knowing when to stop permits one to settle into steadiness, which in turns offers one tranquility, which
brings a sense of wellbeing, where one can deliberate carefully, which helps one to reach one’s goal.7

Concluding Stanza

The Old Master’s utopian vision returns to this stanza along with the water theme telling us that we must stop wanting more in order to preserve as much pǔ as possible to create a harmonious ecosystem infused with the Dào. In such a world, all things could flow smoothly as ice melts and dew drops form in the valleys of the headwaters before flowing into rivers and out to the seas.

Summary

Civilization was able to maintain a reasonable amount of pǔ until the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But since then, we have so thoroughly destroyed pǔ, we can no longer restore it. The best we can do is to stop our mindless destruction and let trees, billions of them, rescue us. If we cannot sustain our existence on earth, perhaps it is time to mourn the extinction of species and indigenous peoples that have fallen victim to our “progress,” as well as the paradise that we have destroyed, knowing life will go on evolving, only without us.

 

Commentary for Verse 33

This verse shows us that knowing when to stop requires internal cultivation to allow ourselves to feel satisfaction. Knowing when to stop is critical to our survival for it can help us avoid the calamities brought on by desire. This musical poem uses parallelism to repeat the character zhe 者 in every line as an internal rhyme throughout. Its sound ta ʔ appears eight times in this six-line poem. Both the MWD and FY texts end every line and half line with the sinograph yě 也 as an additional end-rhyme throughout the poem. This sustained sameness of sound heightens the theme of preserving nature, maintaining its enduring qualities in the face of human greed.

Introductory Stanza

The Old Master forms a thematic matrix with the first halves of these lines addressing the external while the latter halves focus on the self – It is fine to know and vanquish others, but we must first get to know and control ourselves.

To change our behavior, we must start with the heart-mind. But most of us value only our mind and esteem cleverness (zhì 智), spending years attending school to gain knowledge. We try to take charge (yǒulì 有力) of people after figuring out their modus operandi, not realizing self-knowledge (zìzhī 自知) is far more potent, though not as glamorous. Self-knowledge allows us to cultivate strength (qiáng 強), to develop magnanimity and equanimity, eventually leading us to tranquility where there is no need to exert control. When we experience this Oneness, we are enlightened (míng 明).

Expository Stanza

The first line states that feeling sufficiency and contentment (zhīzú 知足) makes us opulent. In the second line, the word “strength” returns to say that we must apply our strength internally, never outwardly to force our way in the world. Likewise, we must treat the word “will” (zhì 志) at the end of the line as self-determination akin to fortitude, rather than exerting our will over nature and others. We should abide by the natural order, letting affairs develop spontaneously according to the Dào.

Concluding Stanza

The verse closes with a pair of parallel lines that circle back to the psychic development mentioned in the introductory stanza. If we manage to uphold the fruit of our internal work along with self-knowledge, we could attain immortality (shòu 壽), since our essence will “persist beyond our deaths” (sǐérbùshī 死而不亡). The spirit of these ideas will be remembered long after life has left the body. Knowing ourselves is no different from knowing the universe, or the Dào.

Summary

The Old Master advocates quietude as a means to cultivate ourselves by purging desire. Once we have calmed the heart-mind, there are no others to vanquish, as we can see we are all interconnected as one in the web of nature. In this unitary state, there is no duality such as self or other, good or bad. This is what he calls “nothingness” (wú 無), similar to what the Buddha calls “emptiness” (kōng 空). In this unitary state, one would feel a serene connection and interdependence with all beings in the universe.

 

 

 

1      The book Laozi is a text composed of 5,000 sinographs written in eighty-one verses. Laozi 老子 (Lao-tzu in the Wade-Giles Romanization system of Chinese Mandarin) means literally the “Old Master,” the putative author conventionally credited with having written this eponymous text. He was believed to have lived sometime between the end of the Spring and Autumn era (770-481 BCE), but no verifiable facts can be established about the existence of such a person, so the “Old Master” has become a mythical cultural legend that has traditionally served the “author function” for the text of Laozi. (See Paul Rabinow, Ed. Foucault Reader, NY: Pantheon Books, 1984, 101-120)

2      Traditionally, the received texts of the Laozi refer to texts of Heshang Gong (HG, 河上公 of the Western Han dynasty 西漢 206 BCE-8CE) and Wang Bi (WB, 王弼 226-249 CE) of the Three Kingdoms era (三國 220-280 CE) commentaries. In fact, most of the English translations are based on WB’s texts. HG emphasizes cosmology and self-cultivation, while WB focuses on “nonexistence,” which the Buddhists equate to the Buddha’s notion of “emptiness.” The Xiang’er commentary, on the other hand, is an “excavated” text, since it was discovered from the caves of Dunhuang in the early 20th century. Written before 215 CE, it is the earliest religious Daoist interpretation after Laozi was canonized as the Daodejing for recitation. All these commentaries work with different, although not substantially different, texts.

3      同乎無知，其德不離；同乎無欲，是謂素樸。素樸而民性得矣 See Huang Jin-Hsung Xin yi Zhuangzi du ben (Taipei：Sanmin Shuju, 1974), 132-3.

4       See Verse 28: “Pristine naturalness disintegrates to become artifacts.” (pǔ sàn zé wéi qì 樸散則為器).

5       雲行雨施，品物流形。 乾道變化，各正性命，保合太和，乃利貞。首出庶物，萬國咸寧。See Wang Yun-Wu, ed., Nan Huai-jin and Hsu Ch’in-ting, trans. Zhouyi Jinzhu Jinyi (Taipei: Shangwu Yinshuguan, 1976) 12.

6      One of the three legendary sage-kings of ancient China and the founder of the Xia 夏dynasty (tread. 2070-1600 BCE), Yu 禹, purportedly invented a system of canals, dikes, and dams to prevent flooding and promote agriculture. Damming rivers have caused the extinction of millions of species and displaced 80 million of people whose lives depend on running rivers. Annually dams have emitted a million tons of greenhouse gases from the decomposing plants that they have inundated. See Macarean Soler, Monti Aguirre, and Juan Pablo Orrego’s “Keep Our Rivers Flowing Freely,” New York Times, December 30, 2019.

7    See Xu, Linqi, Sishu Wujing Lunyu, (Beijing: Peking University Press, 2013): 知止而后有定，定而后能靜，靜而后能 安，安而后能慮，慮而后能得。物有本末，事有終始，知所先後，則近道矣。

 

This article has been updated.

A Scarecrow Named Snuff

by

 

Hartley was sitting idly looking out of the train window with his notebook open at a clean page waiting for an inspirational thought or a witticism to come into his mind.

So far… nothing.

Everything was rushing past so quickly that he had hardly a moment to take it all in. One second it was there, the next it was gone. A broken windmill. A field of tightly rolled hay-bails in the distance looking like cereal pieces on a hummock of green. Sheep like a scattering of popcorn. The patchwork of Downs, falling and rising.

A sudden interruption of a curtain – an embankment – a bridge – poles – pylons –  a brief view of houses – backyards – allotments.

A short darkness of a tunnel where the steady streaming sound changed to a brief roar. The dull smack of a train passing in the opposite direction – more undulating fields.

A distant sentinel oak in the middle of a ploughed pocket on a picnic blanket of arable browns.  A lonely white caravan in the corner of a field – a toy tractor – a collection of encroaching industrial buildings with container lorries waiting in their docking yards, All rushing past faster than the eye could register.

Hartley concentrated on the surface of the glass. The landscape blurred into a screen of streaming green below a steady dull blue.

Hartley sighed.

He was remembering the sound of the trains in his youth beating a hypnotic message as the wheels rolled along the rails …where will we go …where will we go …what’ll we do …what’ll we do.

He remembered the sights and sounds …sights and sounds, waiting for the whistle to blow …nearly there!

Everything seemed dissonant now that Hartley was older. Modern trains had an uninspiring sound between a hum and a drawn-out drone. How dreadfully dull – no beat, no cadence, no reassuring subliminal message to be changed to anything he wanted so long as it conformed to the Diddley-dum, Diddley-dum rhythm of the heavy wheels over the piano keys of heavy sleepers.

No more single First Class/Second Class carriages (were there ever any Third Class carriages?) with a narrow door on either end. Long padded seats that smelled of pipe tobacco and cigar smoke; where opposite passengers’ knees almost touched and everybody had to keep his elbows tucked to his sides; five in a line, a couple standing in the tight space holding straps; everybody swaying like sleepy sardines. Overhead, a rack of cases, bags and parcels sagging in sturdy netting.

Carriages now were long sanitised tubes with open booths; a table to share; wide sliding doors that open by the press of a button and only when everything was safe. No more lowering the window with two hands and reaching outside to open the door to step onto the platform.

Hartley sighed.

Progress without the romance thought Hartley. Comfort without the senses.

It was better now, he had to admit. He missed the sense of adventure he felt steam trains conjured. He was younger then, everything at that age was a prelude to an adventure.

So why didn’t Hartley feel like he was setting out on a new exciting experience, Resident Chaplain at his old school? He supposed he was excited …somewhat.

It would be a change …no more having to mix with The Great Unwashed …just kids – well-behaved kids, he reminded himself. A bit of teaching would be expected of him, the obligatory Confirmation classes, garbled Morning Prayers, a weekly sermon (watered down, of course), about Bible …oops! Sacred stories. Comfortable full-board-and-lodging, his own spacious study, a well-stocked library on the premises, a modern reading room, no bills, sit-down-dinners around the Horseshoe Table with The Master and honoured guests. A wine cellar to die for. A staff common-room to enjoy stimulating conversations with his colleagues and a personal ‘Toby’ (can’t call them servant, OK?), Games of rugby and cricket to watch – thankfully his Alma Mater had maintained sufficient standards – so no soccer, as yet.

So why, he wondered as he watched a scarecrow pass his big-screen window, wasn’t he bouncing for joy as his house-mate, Rev. Thomas had when Hartley showed him the letter from the Master, on behalf of the Board of Governors, asking him to step into the breach while the tenured Chaplain was in Thailand?

Before he could consider the answer, the scarecrow in the field had not only grabbed his attention but had taken hold of his imagination. That was something to get excited about.

‘Did you see that?’ asked Hartley, following the scarecrow with his finger. It was gone before the boy opposite could answer.

The boy’s mother looked up from her book. Hartley knew that she hadn’t been looking. For an older man, a priest (perhaps, especially for that reason), to attempt to engage a young boy in conversation about something that was no longer there would not be considered a wise move. Who knew? He could be attacked! His parents (Hartley was certain they were) would probably do nothing about it.

‘Did you see that scarecrow in the field? …fine-looking fellah.’

Hartley would’ve left it there but the boy appeared to welcome the distraction. Surprisingly, Hartley noted, he wasn’t playing on a mobile telephone. He too had been looking out of the window. ‘Did you see it?’ repeated Hartley.

‘He’s a very observant boy,’ said the mother, ‘aren’t you, my darling?’

‘Yes,’ mumbled the boy and sank back into his seat, looking as if the momentary spark of enthusiasm had been tamped down; almost snuffed out.

‘In The Great Plague,’ began Hartley, hoping to rekindle some sort of spirit in the boy, ‘there was a dearth of children. It was left to the adults to guard their crops. Some stood on wooden lookouts. Historians believe that was the origin of scarecrows.’

Hartley could see the boy was struggling with the word, dearth.

 ‘There weren’t many children around at the time, you see?’

‘…because of The Great Plague…’

‘That’s right.’

‘He’s a very bright boy, aren’t you, my darling,’ added his mother with a kiss on his cheek, leaving a smudge of lipstick.

‘…because they were all dearthed,’ added the boy, wiping away the lipstick with small slaps.

‘Oh, very bright!’ chortled his step-father, for which he received a dirty look from his wife, a tight shake of her head, her lips pinched. He gave the newspaper a flick as if to repel an angry horsefly.

His own remark amused him. He’d remember to tell the landlord of The Pelham Arms that one. The children of The Great Plague all dearthed, so they invented scarecrows to stop the rooks and crows from stealing the seeds from the dearth! It would be good for a laugh; not against the boy but against the mother. Poor lad! Hope he knows how to make friends now that she won’t be there to frighten them off with her affectations.

‘Never ask a scarecrow the way to the pub,’ volunteered the step-father. ‘He points in both directions at the same time!’ He crowed quietly to himself. Hartley too chuckled and reached for his notebook.

‘Sometimes, they used an animal skull or a rotting pumpkin,’ started Hartley, gearing up to tell one of his stories. ‘They’d place them in fields in the Spring and burn them after the Autumn harvest in celebration …then scatter the ashes over the field.’

The boy joined in, ‘Sort of …bring them luck and say thank you for the next season?’

‘Exactly so! They called them, Hodmedods or Hay-Men …my favourite name for them is …Tattie-Bogles.’

The boy was laughing now; bouncing in his seat. He nudged his mother. ‘Tattie-Bogles!’ he repeated, ‘Tattie-Bogles!’

‘Sit still, dear,’ snorted his mother, ‘You’re disturbing everyone.’

Tattie-Bogles thought the step-father. He’d remember that too.

‘Scarecrows became a symbol of Death and Resurrection…’

Seeing the boy glance at his dog-collar and perhaps wondering if he was in for a sermon, Hartley added, ‘They were also used as a dire warning by Vlad The Impaler …you’ve heard of Vlad The Impaler, right? …the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s novel, ‘Dracula’ …not a nice guy! …but a very scary warning to his enemies!’

The boy’s mother looked up from her book. Hartley couldn’t help noticing the title and author; ‘The Bitch’ by Jackie Collins. He hurriedly moved on.

‘Did you know?’ whispered Hartley, about to pass on a juicy piece of conspiracy. ‘There’s an artist called, ‘Pumpkinrot’. He makes hauntingly beautiful scarecrows which he secretly places in fields and hedgerows. He likes to hide in the bushes and record people’s reactions to post on YouTube. Nobody knows who Pumpkinrot is. He’s like that chap, Banksy. Have you ever heard of Banksy? Of course, you have! Of course, you have!

‘But did you know that one day a man from the Hollywood Prop Shop saw one of his creations and bought it. Pumpkinrot told the film Director, ‘You never see two scarecrows together. They are always doing some important solitary job.”

‘Are you making all this up?’ asked the boy.

‘I am most certainly not! Why would I do such a thing? I’ll have you know that Pumpkinrot’s scarecrows appear in a film called, ‘Mr Jones’. I’m told it’s a very scary movie about two kids who go exploring in a field but then everything starts to go horribly wrong …you wouldn’t catch me watching that sort of thing, no, Sir!

‘However, there are some nice scarecrows who say all manner of clever and witty things…’

‘Oh, no! Not The Wizard Of Oz! I’m fifteen! I’m going to a new school. The Wizard Of Oz is a chick flick!’

‘You like The Wizard Of Oz, Richard. Don’t you!’

Turning to Hartley, the mother announced, ‘He likes The Wizard Of Oz. His favourite character is the Scarecrow. We’re taking him to his first day at a famous boarding school …one of the best, where he’ll be educated by the finest teachers money can buy and he’ll make friends of his own age – friends for life. I’ll kindly thank you not to fill his brains with stories of Dracula, Vlad The Inhaler and worthless artists …Pumpkinrot or Tattie Bogles!’

Richard sank into his seat once again snuffed by his mother. Hartley wondered if the boy was happy to get away from home. The step-father sighed, recrossed his legs and pulled in his elbows, a tortoise retreating into its shell.

Hartley decided that he’d have the final word.

‘I hardly think that the history and symbolism of Scarecrows is filling up someone’s brain with stuff and nonsense. After all, there’s plenty of room inside a boy’s brain for all manner of things. As for teachers …as L Frank Baum wrote. ‘Some people without brains do a lot of thinking’!’

Richard looked across at Hartley, then at his mother and rolled his eyes.

After a full five minutes of silence, Richard piped up, having given the matter considerable thought. ‘If they’ll allow me to make a scarecrow at my new school, I shall call him, ‘Snuff’.’

Hartley thought about that.

‘Snuff?’ he considered. Was the boy referring to the modern usage of a staged murder or the dampening of an idea?

So many potentially exciting moments in life were dulled and proved disappointing in reality that he approached change with excessive caution. He supposed it answered his reserve about his own future, The boy had yet to learn this lesson. Perhaps, the boy’s journey would not call at that station. If he was lucky.

‘A fine name for a scarecrow. I shall make a note of it in my notebook …SNUFF! There!

‘As the scarecrow said in The Wizard Of Oz, ‘You know you’ve had a good day when you didn’t have to unleash the flying monkeys.’  Good luck at your new school, my boy.’

Hartley had no way of knowing that they’d shortly meet again. Each would play a part in the other’s destiny.

Negative Capability

by

In a letter to his brothers in 1817, John Keats shared his admiration of “negative capability,” the capacity for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason,” a concept inspired by  Shakespeare, whom Keats admired above all other writers. Where lesser artists backed away from phenomena that upset their reductive understanding of the world, Shakespeare wandered into the mystery and came away with complex psychological portraits that expanded our understanding of what it means to be human.

Underlying this negative capability was a healthy skepticism about the likelihood of always knowing the truth with certainty.  Since a degree of skepticism is implicit in Pragmatism, the most distinctively American school of philosophy, it’s no coincidence that John Dewey, one of its founders, echoed Keats in arguing that true philosophy “accepts life in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to intensify its own qualities.”  Dewey thought that the provisional quality of this knowledge, combined with the overarching desire to make things work, should dispose us to compromise in the political realm, and to revisit earlier decisions with an open mind.

Unfortunately, the humility necessary for self-correction–even for concessions to reality—has been lacking in our political debate lately, and the one most lacking is the most powerful man in the world.  Donald Trump seldom concerns himself with “reaching after facts” because his opinions are based on impulse and self-interest rather than careful deliberation.  He arrives at belief without appealing to reason, and he does so with such passionate intensity that he threatens to drown the innocent ceremonies of democracy.  Unless they sink him first.

Trump is so certain he’s right that he sees no need to consider multiple points of view, and his narcissism is so strong that ethical reasoning might be impossible for him.  Immanuel Kant argued that moral agents must act out of “good will”: they must fulfill a duty and not merely pursue inclination.  The ability to follow principle presupposes a broad perspective: “it indicates a man of enlarged thought if he disregards the subjective, private conditions of his own judgment, by which so many others are confined, and reflects upon it from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by placing himself at the standpoint of others).”  Once we put ourselves into other people’s shoes, we can follow the first categorical imperative, Kant’s moral directive to “act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become the universal law.”  It’s not hard to detect the kinship between this directive and the “Golden Rule,” wherein Jesus summarized the law of the prophets and echoed or anticipated a key tenet of almost every ethical system worth its salt before him or since.  Nor is it difficult to see that the enlarged thought necessary for this approach will not come easily to a president whose favorite form of communication is a Tweet.  If Trump considers “doing unto others,” he’s probably contemplating revenge or imagining a new sexual conquest—his blank, pitiless gaze indicating that ethical considerations are suspended now that he has been loosed upon the world.

One would think that Trump’s obsession with wealth and rejection of Christian ethics in their most basic form, combined with his utter lack of humility, would alienate followers of a prophet who championed the meek.  But evangelicals, often the loudest in proclaiming themselves Christians, ended up embracing the least Christian man imaginable in the last presidential election, 81% of them voting for Trump.  And it turns out that his arrogance was actually a selling point, while the restraint of opponents who stopped short of definitive pronouncements was deemed a weakness.

Intellectual humility was once a sign of wisdom.  It is “just this little thing” for which Socrates gives himself credit in Plato’s Apology: “What I do not know, I do not think I know, either.”  Kant recognized his own limitations and insisted on a “critical spirit,” a willingness to examine his assumptions, as he and other philosophers explored the boundaries of knowledge.  Montaigne was similarly dubious about what he could know with certainty.  As Sarah Bakewell notes in How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, he made a series of medals featuring the word “epokhe,” meaning “I suspend judgment,” along with an emblem of scales “designed to remind himself both to maintain balance, and to weigh things up rather than merely accepting them.” And he seemed to follow this reminder, filling his writings with qualifying phrases to “soften and moderate the rashness of [his] propositions.”

So there’s Socrates, Kant, Montaigne—and then there’s Trump, who in recent months, has declared himself “the chosen one,” trumpeted his “great and unmatched wisdom,” and spoken on all matters with an intolerance of dissent reminiscent of the medieval church.  Back then, thinkers who hoped to square scientific findings or Greek philosophy with Catholic teachings tried to shield themselves with the notion of a “double truth,” the view that a theory might be empirically true yet theologically false.  Boethius, for example, called one of Aristotle’s theories “true, but heretical,” and he was condemned for the concession to reality.  Our founding fathers took a different route.  Inspired by the Enlightenment, they separated church and state because they rightly viewed the concept of a “heretical truth” as an absurd threat to thoughtful debate in a democratic republic.

Now that we have a president with a cult following, however, the notion of “double truth” has made a comeback among his minions, who had to ignore a series of disconcerting facts in order to support him in the first place.  Evidence of his corruption mounted so quickly in the first months of his presidency that supporters became troubled by the dissonance, so they were grateful when his handlers presented “alternative truths,” and they soon felt certain of his infallibility again.  Brimming with a quasi-religious fervor, Trumpists feeding on faux news reject the very style of thinking that makes “educated elites” suspicious of extreme pronouncements. While some Christians have redefined “critical spirit” as a destructive disposition toward finding fault in others and rightly warned against it, those in Trump’s camp appear to have rejected the old kind—the kind that would require them to question themselves.  In so doing, they have demonstrated a new brand of negative capability that bears no resemblance to the old.

Trump supporters don’t linger in uncertainty to develop a deeper understanding; they refuse to think.  They don’t reach irritably for facts and reason; they become irritable when facts and reason are offered to them.  They don’t suspend judgment as they face complex issues, nor do they change their opinions in the face of damning testimony by Trump’s appointees, guilty pleas by those who have lied on his behalf, or taped confessions of wrongdoing by the man himself. Instead, they leap blindly toward the blustering, incoherent certainty the man offers, and many will be surprised to find that the chosen one has left them no place to land—no job, no education, no health insurance, no savings, no home. 

And Trump won’t care.  About that, they can be certain.

 

Essay reprinted courtesy of Counterpunch.

The Existential Nature of Millennial Anxiety

by

He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. — Jean-Paul Sartre, L’âge de raison (The Age of Reason, 1945)

After having an especially anxious month, I started buying a plethora of books and reading voraciously in an attempt to assuage my mental funk. After a few duds, I landed on Sarah Bakewell’s Existentialist Café, partly due to my current obsession with Paris. Judging from the cover alone, I expected a relatively light read, detailing the idiosyncratic personal histories of some of the greatest European philosophers of the 20th century. What I did not expect was to be confronted with some home truths about my generation and the way we are shaping culture.

At its core, existentialism is both a cultural movement and philosophy that emphasizes personal freedom. Spearheaded in the mid-twentieth century by thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the theory places responsibility totally in the hands of the individual, giving each and every one of us agency over the decisions we make throughout our lives–“existence precedes essence.” The pressure is enough to give anyone heart palpitations, especially those just entering the adult world.

It will come as no surprise to anyone that anxiety among teens and twenty-somethings is on the rise. It is practically impossible to go a single day without reading an article or a news bulletin detailing the latest crises in the mental health of young people, driven by a culture of achievement and a world that threatens individual safety.

Blame for this phenomenon is usually cast onto social media.  As almost every aspect of our lives are now being tracked, recorded and turned into data, this argument has some merit. Apps such as Instagram can incite undue stress as a consequence of their compelling comparative nature. “… [S]elf esteem–and worldview–becomes connected to… posts.” Indeed, overexposure frequently leads to hermit-like retreats into duvets and Netflix, shutting out the world.

Yet to accuse social media alone of causing this generational trend is too reductive. Simply pointing the finger neglects to take into account the role played by the individual and their own existentialist freedom in inciting anxiety.

As our society becomes more and more interconnected, ironically, people are being more and more introspective. Rarely does a week go by where I don’t have a conversation with a friend, consoling them as they tell me how stuck they are feeling, how anxious they feel about the fact that their life is not moving forward fast enough. I often catch myself in the same pernicious thought loop. I will be agonizing over the fact that I haven’t achieved anything in the past week or the fact that I am not doing something during every waking moment of everyday. 

Social media is a vehicle for these thoughts, but ultimately it the abundance of freedom that is the driver of the subsequent malaise. No one forces an individual to endlessly scroll, to stay up for hours just to stare at a florescent screen. We choose to do so, irrespective of the fact that we risk coming across a picture or tweet that will elicit deep-seated feelings of envious desire, thoughts of, “Why not me?”

“It is sometimes suggested,” says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “That existentialism… is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position.” It’s no wonder that the term “existential crisis” has entered popular culture as a punchline, a flippant way for individuals to explain why they have been in a funny mood all day. However, the generational misunderstanding of the tenets of existentialism are at play in 21st-century anxiety experienced by my generation.

What the term really highlights is the inability of people to put the phone down and just take a breath without explaining what they are doing and why. Even those individuals who do manage to remove themselves from the digital social sphere have to occupy themselves with something else to justify their absence. 

The anxiety charging this dynamic is beginning to define our culture. Everything has to have a greater meaning beyond its mere existence. Everyone seems desperate to label themselves and define their actions by something more than simply what they are. Our understanding of “freedom” is inadvertently constraining us, overwhelming us with choice. Bringing wave after wave of exasperation and stress, we are constantly worried about making the wrong decision, fatalistic about the repercussions our decisions will have on the rest of our lives.

When I share my thoughts with those of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations, I find that they rarely had these concerns at my age – or were at least able to compartmentalize them. Life for them was a set of milestones, predetermined by their background and education. They were not blindsided everyday with images of the dramatically romantic lives lived by their “peers”: video and stills screaming, “This is what you should be doing/wearing/eating/watching.” They had a clearly defined structure–the here and now–less influenced by externalities.

My generation seems to have done the exact opposite, blaming ourselves for every perceived failure, every apparent lack, when the idea of freedom is the recognition that you are the sum of your choices and that you can start fresh with a new perspective.

If we fail to recognize and reawaken the tenets of existentialism, we are setting ourselves up to fail in dramatic style. If we ever hope to re-orientate ourselves, we must take control of our freedom. Choice can be a burden, but it is a fundamentally positive one. No one gets to choose the world, but everyone gets choose how they fit into it. Such a task, whatever way you look at it, cannot be undertaken behind a screen.

Temple of Poetry

by

Poetry Park, Lithuania

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Albert Einstein

My son-in-law once told me he didn’t see the purpose in poetry.  He said it didn’t serve any useful function, as far as he could see.  This article is, in part, an answer to his questioning about the reason for poetry.

As Yeats said, “Out of arguments with others comes rhetoric; out of arguments with ourselves comes poetry.”

(The following two paragraphs are from a 2018 interview in Sisyphus Lit Mag “Living with Low Vision.”—Ed.) 

It is important to back up and think about where we are. If you think about what we have done as a species, when you know how we interpret what is outside of our “bony domes,” it is amazing. It is amazing that we have created mathematics to study the world, astronomy to see it, art to emulate the experience. As a species, we have reached out and touched the world in remarkable ways, figured out how to manipulate and use it, for better or worse. But, in the meantime, we have left behind something important. We have been inventing this world we live in: invented languages to describe it, invented telescopes to see it, invented vehicles to circumnavigate it, invented religions to give us comfort, and invented politics and governments to give us a sense of control, and yes, invented weapons of mass destruction. We forgot to understand what it means that we made it all up. Meaning is human-made. It is not built into reality, but a part of our human world. We engage in atrocities and war because we forget that all understanding is human invention. And these inventions can lead us into a true hallucination that has dangerous and disastrous implications. Or maybe we can wake up and realize who we are, who we have been, and where we are going. The beauty that remains to us lies in our art, our music, and our ability to create as part of the ecosystem on this magical planet we call Earth.

How much of daily life is caught up in following beliefs that are false and may not even be our own? Our collective truths are determined by politics, our ethnic tribal alliances or misinterpretations of what was told to us in our childhood. Personally, I have received some relief through the practice of mindful communication. Mindfulness makes a huge difference in relocating oneself and the world. From a mindfulness perspective, your historical story is a fabrication, is made up, is unreliable as a guide to future ways of being in the world.  You understand compassion because you are able to let go of attachments to your story, your Narrative Self, and realize your filters are flawed. You must come to grips with the reality you are living in, rather than the reality you want it to be. This was a profound revelation for me, that my “story” is a construct of my brain and subject to modification as information becomes available.

As Jane Hirshfield so aptly states, for me, “poetry practices in language what meditation practices in silence.” Sometimes I think we have forgotten how to look within in order to find what’s real, what’s not, an overlay of a dysfunctional time in our culture.

In spite of William Carlos Williams saying that “people die miserably every day for the lack of [it],” there really is no purpose to poetry.  It’s not about purpose.  It’s about a world of waking up in which one comes to an understanding that the world is not as straightforward as one might think.  Historically, the English word poet comes from the Greek word, poiesis, for “making.” The poet is considered a maker or a creator: a creator of emotional realities. Several scholars enjoy the notion that the ideograph for poetry in Chinese (shī 诗) is comprised of the characters for “temple (sì 寺)” and “word (yán 言).” While sinologists are likely to dispute the accuracy of these etymological interpretations, I like the concept of poetry as a Temple of Words in which the poet is the High Creator.  One might put these two concepts together and conclude that poetry is about making real an emotional reality that can be shared, and a congregation where one comes to a temple of words to share with people who are willing to stop what they are accomplishing and listen for what is.

Temple of Literature, Hanoi

“Poetry is serious business,” as Rainer Maria Rilke says, and the reason we need such serious business is because we, in our current and contemporary life, are divided among ourselves because we are divided within ourselves. We are desperately in need of returning to an inner self that takes life seriously and allows us to regain the lyric of our private life.

I recently read an anthology of poetry titled Hearth. “A hearth is many things:” says the foreword, “a place for solitude, a source of identity…a history of ourselves and our homes….It is, in short, the perfect metaphor for what we seek in these complex and contradictory times—set in flux by environmental emergencies and economic violence, by the refugee crisis and large-scale migration, and by social disintegration and the dislocating effects of technology.”

Mark Treddinick’s essay in Hearth is an inspiring wordplay. “Hearth contains ‘earth’ and ‘heart’ and ‘hear’ and ‘art’… to return to health is etymologically related to ‘whole’…Self is a hearth you make and keep making, like a fire…Selving is the work of re-membering all that you are.”

Poetry becomes necessary when one experiences “the shattering of self … the loss of life’s lyric.  A self and a world evacuated of all meaning for a time,” as happens in periods of depression or crisis: divorce, loss or death of a loved one, an existential challenge to a person’s understanding of themselves.  Treddinnick’s essay relates his coping mechanism for personal crisis.

But our species is facing the existential crisis of climate change looming on the horizon. We have elected a Mad King engaged in disinformation and gaslighting—“facts” and “truth” are subjective and our information systems are vilified. Water and food and medicine are sometimes safe and sometimes not. We are imbalanced and tribalized. We are living in and through the Information Age with concepts like big data and technological pleasures and yet none of it brings us back into the world. It leaves us “un-hearth-ed,” afraid of the rivers that won’t stay in their banks and the fires that refuse to be controlled and the angers that refuse to be less dangerous.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune…

—William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much with Us”

“…survival happens in two ways in the making of a poem,” Gregory Orr opines, “first we shift the experiences a ‘bearable distance’ from us into the world of language; second, the poet has ‘made and shaped’ her experience into a form, has brought order to disorder, rather than ‘passively’ enduring it… they emerge from crises: falling passionately in love, or losing love, or situations of grief and confusion. I wouldn’t say they’re always written while the crisis is happening—but for dramatic purposes they tend to locate themselves in that crisis moment, and that’s when we, as readers, most need poems, during our crises. We need poets when we’re deliriously happy, and the delirium threatens our stability, when we’re crazy with love. We need them when we’re crazed with grief and despair—then they’re a momentary stay against our confusion, a momentary clarification. Then they have the power to re-stabilize us.” 

Galway Kinnell held that it was the job of poets to bear witness. “To me,” he said, “poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.”

Mesmerizing scenes at Scenic Hudson’s Poet’s Walk Park in Red Hook, NY in the Hudson Walk. The park was frequented by famous twentieth century poets and authors for inspiration.

A poet is a seeker, a seer, a witness. For me, poetry is closer to the sense of smell than it is to the art of discourse. It is more a way of feeling with someone than talking to someone; a way of reclaiming a shared inner sense of the world.

 “So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do,” counsels Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet. “You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

 “It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, – is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.” 

 

Phalen Poetry Park, St. Paul MN

Poetry brings the world back into the living, reconciles the dissonances in our disparate understandings that have grown up in the Holocene/Anthropocene era. There is a “perpetual slow-burning emergency to the unhoused self,” says Treddinick. “Art – letting rhythm and metaphor rock me back to the world beyond my head – can become a hearth you can dwell by, a tent and fireplace under stars, while you wait your homelessness out.”

Poetry is the plea to come back to the heart-h, to eschew politics, religion, profit-and-loss, to leave behind the dystopic world and xenophobic philosophies. Poetry has nothing to do with beliefs, but it does have something to do with meaning though the music and magic of words. Poetry is a call to return to nature, meaning our nature:

…Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

—Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

For me, there is also something about this act of sharing that is, in part, a process of self- discovery.  It is a locating of a “self that sees,” a witness. In my own poems there is an inner “self,” a muse, that rises up from the pool of my subconscious mind, from my leaf-mold memory, that allows me to find the exact right sound or word I need to make the poem work.  And this discovery of a “self that sees” is a joy that fills and sustains me and remains one of the major reasons I write poetry.  It’s also one of the ways I am able to discover my inner self, my guiding self, my historical self.  I lose track of who I am when I get too far away from poetry.

…The seasons proceed,
and we reach inside each other,
begin living in a new kind
of weather.
 
You live now only in my most inward life,
spread out, like pieces of shell at the shore.

—Charles Entrekin, “To Remember You”

“I believe in the spiritual,” says Orr, “but being a lyric poet trumps both philosophy and religion for me as a source of meaning. Being a lyric poet is like being given your own giant scroll. You unroll it and discover that it’s blank, but it has the potential to be a star chart. As a poet, you put the stars on it yourself. Each time you write a poem you’re making a meaning, placing a point of light on this blank chart, dotting it over time with your own meanings, your own stars. You’re making an image of a night sky on the scroll…Stars in the night sky have a kind of wonder and beauty, but they’re a systemless system. You feel awe and wonder at them, but they don’t all hold together. Religion, philosophy—those seem to me to be systems that try to become internally coherent, arrange themselves into one huge constellation, but what I love about lyric poetry is that, like the stars, it’s just an array. It’s an open system that’s mysteriously radiant with significance.”

And Orr considers a metaphor about all of the creation of humankind, from our cave paintings to our Instagram broadsides, part of the collective human creative process, a sort of existential anthology of our species. “The Book I am imagining is a gigantic anthology filled with every poem and song ever written. All poems and songs feed into it. The Book is an ultimate jukebox, an iPod as big as the moon from which each person can download that playlist that will help them live. We go to it not for entertainment (as the jukebox or iPod metaphor might imply) but to find the words we need to sustain us.” 

Poetry is a kind of non-dual universal sharing of a reality that can be transmitted via words, the paradox between the silence of our introspections translated into language. Lyric is our nature, our instinct. A tick’s existence relies on heat—it lives in hibernation until a dog walks by that it recognizes as a source of sustenance. The dog, in turn, relies on its sense of smell to engage with the world. The dog’s master, Homo sapiens, rely on internal contemplation and articulation in language to express complex desires. 

Rilke says in “Letters to a Young Poet,” that to be a poet means committing yourself entirely to an enterprise that requires you to find inside yourself the reason for writing the poem in the poem that emerges.  It is an act of self-exploration, a revelation of a reality that is emotionally honest and authentic.  “Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time,” says W.S. Merwin (1927-2019). It takes courage to reveal oneself on the page, but more than that, it takes vision and a commitment to honestly seeing what’s there, whether or not you recognize what you have discovered. 

“I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Templo de Poesia, Portugal

 

Mark Treddinick’s essay in this book inspired this article (click image for hyperlink).

 

 

 

Where the Wild Things Were: The Paving of Abbey’s Road

by

Life is already too short to waste on speed.”

Edward Abbey

Naturalist, environmentalist, philosopher, and polemicist Edward Abbey (1927-1989), author of many essays, letters and books, loved the desert landscape primeval and revered all of god’s creatures that inhabit it, save one, human beings (oh, and their beef cattle). Like Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain in his later years,

Abbey was a genuine rebel who simply did not believe in the modern industrial way of life. He wrote against the grain, always choosing the path of the greatest resistance. Beginning in the 1950s, he depicted the Southwest not as a virgin utopia peopled by rugged individualists, but as a region under siege because of government and corporate greed, its people at risk of being cut off from the primary wellspring of their spiritual strength – the wild places. ~Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist, James Bishop, Jr., 1995

The only state Abbey pledged allegiance to was the state of nature. His activism and tirades against the despoliation of the American West by timber and energy interests and their political and bureaucratic enablers invigorated conservationists as surely as Thoreau, John Muir, and Rachel Carson did. Were he still gracing this orb now at 92, he would surely be weeping for all the wild places that are under siege in one way or another and at how even more cut off from them most of us have become. And surely he would shed tears at all the technological shields vacationers bear when they visit the outdoors that eviscerate direct experience by keeping nature at bay.

 

Communing with nature: Camping Out in the Adirondacks, 1874. Wood engraving by Winslow Homer
Communing with nature: Camping Out in the Adirondacks, 1874. Wood engraving by Winslow Homer

Harper’s Magazine published this bucolic scene of camping in New York’s Adirondack Mountains captured by up-and-coming artist Winslow Homer in 1874. It’s one of many illustrations he turned out in competition with Currier & Ives in the mid-to-late 19th century for magazines and newspapers, most depicting Americans comporting themselves out-of-doors in cities, towns, villages, and hinterlands, in an age unmarred by automobiles, aircraft, telephones, and digitalia.

But even by then, the accelerating pace of progress had decimated the vast Adirondack region in its voracious demand for lumber, paper, and charcoal. In the 1880s, after much environmentalist agitation and corporate opposition, New York’s legislature designated much of the area as a forest preserve. Ten years hence, after the preserve’s stewards were exposed as corrupt, the state constitution was amended to protect the 6.3M-acre region (almost the size of Vermont) “forever.” The amendment was all of two sentences, but it did the trick:

The lands of the state, now owned or hereafter acquired, constituting the forest preserve as now fixed by law, shall be forever kept as wild forest lands. They shall not be leased, sold or exchanged, or be taken by any corporation, public or private, nor shall the timber thereon be sold, removed or destroyed.”

And so, were you to visit the location in Homer’s illustration, it might still look pretty much the same as when he depicted it, except, perhaps, for the campers and the campsite. Hardy hikers and boaters still improvise shelters like the branch-and-bark lean-to these dudes put together some 150 years ago, but camping and its attendant gear and expectations has changed radically since, and with it the very notion of what it means to confront and commune with nature.

While a healthy number of extreme outdoorists still pride themselves on packing as little gear as possible to escape from civilization, most Americans prefer to bring as many comforts of home as possible (including phones, satellite TV, and internet) when they park their overburdened vehicles and bodies at campsites. It’s yet another depressing symptom of how utterly cocooned we have become in our technological shells. Even atop Mt. Everest, it’s quite impossible to get away from it all.

Campers still arrive at destinations travelling light by canoe and by kayak, but most check in on four or more wheels, in cars, trucks, SUVs, and RVs, guided by satellite instead of by lodestone, sun, and stars. A dog, as Homer’s dudes seem to have brought along, might accompany the crew. If their vehicle can’t accommodate sleepers, instead of pitching a tent they might unfold a trailer. Out will come hampers of food and drink, cold chests, gas grill, pots and utensils, folding furniture, and perhaps a cabana or beach umbrella. Bicycles, mopeds, or watercraft may adorn the roof or rear of their vehicle for off-road or waterborne adventures. Mobility-obsessed campers and day-trippers turn it up a notch with powerboats, all-terrain vehicles, or snowmobiles that spook wildlife and enhance the wonders of nature with exhaust fumes and high-decibel noise. They will continue to impair their hearing and atrophy their muscles so long as gasoline is still plentiful and flora and fauna remain to be flattened. And speaking of snowmobiles, Edward Abbey had this to say:

The purpose of snowmobile recreation is not to get anywhere, see anybody or understand anything but to generate noise, poison the air, crush vegetation, destroy wildlife, waste energy, promote entropy and accelerate the unfoldings of the second law of thermodynamics…Everyone knows that.” From Hayduke Lives!, Boston: Little, Brown, 1990, pp. 128-129.

All that semi-off-the-grid technology distracts us from experiencing the outdoors when it’s not cluttering our homes and garages. But it doesn’t have to; instead of burdening themselves with a ton of gear to experience the outdoors, vacationers of sufficient means can book into a luxurious outdoorsy retreat offering all-inclusive close-to-nature posh. It’s called glamping (glamor camping, “where stunning nature meets modern luxury” according to glamping.com, whose motto is “Travel…evolved”). You should be itching to, they say, “experience the untamed and completely unique parts of the world—without having to sacrifice creature comforts. … You can wake up in a yurt on a mountaintop. Reside in the forest canopy in a treehouse. Take in the panoramic views in an eco-lodge. And that’s just to name a few.” Let them further explain in aspirational words and pictures what you’ve missed if you’ve never glamped:

Experiential travel, they call it, as if only high-priced retreats qualify as a holiday experience. Jetting to an upscale tent city to be treated like an ersatz potentate while pretending to be roughing it is truly camp. Glamping—and car camping too—fulfill bourgeois fantasies of being served by locals while living better than them. More than the journey or the destination, it’s about pampering ourselves. By making us feel safe, comfy, and special, all this evolved travel mediates our outdoor encounters. From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with Styrofoam, dwelling in our portable playpens and paradisiacal playhouses distances us from nature by circumscribing our experiential horizon around the familiar objects at hand and focusing on our own enjoyment. Are we having fun yet?

* * *

After we have made the planet one vast brownfield, you’ll be able to trudge through clear-cut forests, scale mountains of mine tailings, or paddle along dead dammed rivers in VR goggles that display the glories of wilderness in 3D as it once was or might be once we’re no longer around to trash it.

But why wait to inconvenience yourself and waste gasoline to experience nature virtually, second-hand, when you can do it indoors? Soon, if not already, some clever innovator will open an indoor hiking range with programmable treadmills, where you don headgear and dial up a trail in a virtual mountain, desert, tundra, jungle or arctic landscape with surround sound. But until then, you can take virtual hikes on YouTube, such as this one and others from Tall Sky (boots optional). If you’re the competitive type, “forward motion video technology” (aka a GoPro cam movie) lets you experience running in a road race at home from start to finish (treadmill optional but recommended). And, if killing large animals is your thing, you can hunt big game from the comfort of your lounge chair (camouflage optional). With technology, the possibilities for physically isolating ourselves from nature and one another are endless, and there are more than enough clever entrepreneurs and marketers out there to keep it happening.

Earth First! Tomahawk and Monkey Wrench Logo

And happen it will unless we turn away from the mediated life to regard and protect nature. You might not be the sort to join the radical Earth First! movement (motto: “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth”), pour sand into the crankcase of an earthmover, chain yourself to old-growth tree trunks, or drive spikes into trees slated to be clear-cut, but consider supporting them and coalitions of indigenous people who are on the front lines of resistance to the abuse of public lands, fracking, pipelines, big dams, and other profit-making environmental assaults.

The Adirondacks were saved by a handful of citizen activists who persuaded politicians and the public of dire downstream consequences should nothing be done to end their plunder and despoliation. Environmental challenges from corporate greed and compromised stewardship are much more daunting today, but if not now, when?

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.” ~Edward Abbey

                                                                                  * * *

Inspired by re-reading Edward Abbey’s radical and raunchy 1975 fictional epistle against ecocide, The Monkey-Wrench Gang. See Robert Macfarlane’s retrospective review in The Guardian for more about the lasting influence of his environmentalist credo.

Here’s the full Edward Abbey quote that speaks of speed:

“There are some good things to be said about walking. Not many, but some. Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who’s always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details. The utopian technologists foresee a future for us in which distance is annihilated and anyone can transport himself anywhere, instantly. Big deal, Buckminster. To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.” ~ Walking, from The Journey Home, p. 205

Waiting Behind Empty Space

by

I am actually a flesh and blood human being, standing here before you. I know you are busy. But you are fulfilling orders for people who are not here and, by the looks of things, won’t be anytime soon. This is what I would like to say to the nice, young barista, calling out “mobile order for…” to the void as I stand by my lonesome in my almost empty local Starbucks.

I keep quiet because I know she’s not responsible for implementing the mobile order policy of the global corporation that employs her in Astoria, Queens. As a barista she’s too far from the center of decision-making to be blamed for much of anything beyond the taste of my drink, and even then, she doesn’t choose the ingredients that go into making it. I also, perhaps unfairly, judge by her youth that anything I say about the injustice of prioritizing online customers over flesh and blood ones will make me look like a cranky, middle-aged Luddite.

I get it though. I understand why a multibillion-dollar global corporation would tap into a new technological advancement and the zeitgeist it creates. The dictum of corporate masters is to create new revenue streams. It makes a certain sense for decision makers at Starbucks to further monetize the need for self-caffeinating in our go-go world by allowing customers to order their favorite coffee and breakfast snacks from apps. This way at least harried commuters avoid waiting in line to place and pay for their orders. Commuters running late, who might have forgone a recharge to get them through the morning, can now order from their smartphones. Those orders represent income that otherwise the company wouldn’t capture.

Nevertheless, the workings of mobile orders perfectly captures our depersonalized, technology mediated moment. Customers in the flesh have to stand in line, even when there isn’t a line, as disembodied customers have their orders fulfilled. 

I imagine baristas take the orders as they come through regardless of whether these were made online or in person. The selling point of a mobile order, however, is that it will be fulfilled before the customer appears in the flesh. And as this in-person customer finds himself more often in virtual cues behind a series of mobile orders, he can’t help think that even the miniscule community building activity of being surrounded by other customers is going the way of the neighborly chat, the telephone conversation, and the home visit.

Forget, can we all get along? The saying and its goal might be too ‘90s. Getting along might be an impossibility in our social-media fueled polarization. But can we all at least stand with each other? You know? Not in any social responsibility sense, but… to get our coffee.

 

Transformation: Anaïs Nin

by

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger [than] reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I cannot transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.” Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (February 21, 1903 – January 14, 1977) 

 

I’d carefully planned every word I’d say to Anaïs Nin when I first met her.  The occasion was the Women’s Celebration at U.C. Berkeley in December 1971—a solo, landmark event for emerging writers. I went to see and photograph the writer who most captured my attention when I’d left my husband and lived alone for the first time in my life, the icon who’d questioned, “How wrong is it for a woman to expect the man to build the world she wants, rather than to create it herself?” 

Anaïs floated across the stage in her floor-length red velvet winter gown. She was petite, smaller than I’d imagined, and perfectly formed.  Her hands were delicate and en pointe, like the supple dancer she was trained to be, her voice so soft you had to lean in to hear. She spoke graciously, with great care. She reflected before she spoke. She appeared to me French, European. I sprang into action, camera clicking. I took pictures of her as she read, as she spoke, every word elegant and beautiful to my ears. I wondered if any of the two rolls would print well, because I decided to use no flash (at F8 for 1/30th of a second), so as not to disturb her grace. I liked that I didn’t believe in flashbulbs.  Like Anaïs, I never wanted to intrude.

One could never imagine her getting angry at anyone. Someone asked if she ever got angry and she responded, “Oh, yes. And then I wait. It goes away.”

I watched her as she introduced the other speakers, her welcoming presence offering them dignity and respect. She smiled with thoughtfulness and wisdom, never shot from the hip, and always praised the best of what others brought to her on stage. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,” she advised. I moved to the edge of the stage several times for close-ups. 

When the day-long event was over, I waited nervously in queue behind 100 other women also eager to speak to her.  After an hour I thought, “Will she leave suddenly, before we can even meet?”  I was ready. I practiced in my head: “Anaïs, my name is Donna and I’ve read all of your books.” 

But as I reached the author and she smiled up at me, no words came from my mouth.  I could not speak when my turn came, not even a whisper. Sensing my anxiety and excitement, Anaïs smiled politely and tried to put me at ease. I remember shaking. She stroked my arm and gently shook my large hand with her softer, smaller one. She’d taken my breath away.  She signed my program, in friendship, and I nodded my thanks, believing her, crying the entire time. 

She said I must write to her.

After hours in the darkroom, the photographs came out after all.  Months later, I chose the best one– a soft focus portrait of her head and neck, her face responsive, all eyes and attentiveness–as she spoke to admirers that previous December. I created an eight-by-ten print with a matte finish on my most expensive Portriga Rapid double-weight paper and mailed it to Anaïs.  I included a letter, praising her for her ability to write words that relate to all young women’s struggles to discover themselves.  I shared that I was now in psychoanalysis (just like she had been thirty years ago), trying to become who I was meant to be, instead of somebody my family wanted me to be or the person my former husband had ravaged.

Anaïs wrote back immediately, thanked me for the portrait, and asked if I had others.  She needed photographs to give her audiences. Could I show her the rest?   

After another twenty-four hours in the darkroom, I had five or six more images. I wanted them to be perfect. I still remember sending that package at the Cow Hollow post office on a cold, foggy San Francisco morning before work. I held onto the brown envelope for a minute before dropping it into the mail slot, flipping the handle a few times as if my life were hanging in the balance. Then I waited. 

Anaïs’ second letter was full of thanks and—surprise!—a payment, a personal check!  She also sent new books, inscribed to Donna, master of light and shadows.  I dissolved.  I danced. I flew around my apartment, singing, spinning out onto my balcony and telling all the cars lined up to go down Lombard (the crookedest street), “I’m an artist!”

Thus began a correspondence and a job or, rather, a mentorship. Anaïs influenced me in all aspects of my deepest self. I began living in the moment, thoughtfully, not recklessly. I found an Edwardian cottage and decorated it for my taste alone. I took a painting class, another in ballet. Photography and pottery became hobbies.  Anaïs used my very first photograph of her on the book jacket of her seventh diary. She asked for many more for stories in the New York Times.

Anaïs invited me to join her writing groups in Los Angeles.  I wanted to go, but my psychoanalyst advised against interrupting my therapy.  He similarly advised against going to London to study with Anna Freud, when I was accepted at her institute. I complied with his treatment plan, but later wondered about his self-interest.  I think he feared I’d become a radical feminist. I became a radical feminist. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” as Anaïs said.

I enjoyed success at work, was promoted to higher positions. Anaïs had taught we could love many different men, even on the same day, and I dated and explored my sexuality openly. After all, she had husbands on two coasts.  It seemed ironic to me when men later criticized Anaïs for the same behaviors they practiced all their lives. I found that this lifestyle had its limits, yet sexual freedom was most exciting for a short time.  I came to trust reliable people, work choices, commitments. This was tough in the Seventies when some were enlightened and others were not as thoughtful. Or clear or honest about themselves. Or sober, even.

Our partnership lasted six years, until Anaïs’ death in 1977. At her memorial in Los Angeles, thousands of women spoke about her personal influence on their lives, as the new John Williams quartet played on stage. She wrote to us personally. She encouraged us to consider ourselves as equals. I’ve saved her letters, tied with a purple ribbon, in a small safe.  “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”

I continued to work with her second husband Rupert Pole until his death in 2006 and still hear from her publishers occasionally today. Time has passed. In recent years I see a resurgence of interest in Anaïs’ diaries and surreal prose. Whether she remains recognized by the literary world is not as important to me as the effect she had on the women of my generation. She sparked my writing, photography, and clear belief in myself.

Photography classes with Lynette Lehmann and Ruth Bernhard changed my portraits of people. Images became freer, up closer, unabashedly intimate. I began having two- and one-woman shows and joined two art galleries in the subsequent years. Over the last fifteen years of publishing my poetry, I always use my own photographs on my book covers. 

People often regard them as watercolors.

Anaïs Nin’s voice was not the edgy language we are told to use today. Hers was the passionate voice of the free spirit, the authentic voice of a liberated heart.  I remember waving to her when I happened to be on the seventh floor of a New York City apartment building and she happened to be walking to brunch in the alley below, her publisher beside her.  She wore a long black cape that swayed behind her. It was as if she flew, near the ground.

 

Ode to Lucretius

by

This is an ode to a poet who created a work that has influenced thinkers over the millennia, guiding societies and ideologies. Titus Lucretius Carus inspired Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo da Vinci, and many others with his last surviving work, the didactic Epicurean poem On the Nature of Things. Despite the many attempts to suppress the work as heretical , it is still being read today: Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) tracks Lucretius’s influence from his inspiration for creation to the poem’s sociopolitical influence from inception to present. “Lucretius presents the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena.” Lucretius’s philosophy is also said to have inspired C.J. Thomsen to create research categories of artifacts, widely known as the Three Age System: Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. The communication of ethical and societal theory has survived over 2000 years and its ripple effect on civilizations is enormous: widespread and compelling.

Ode to Lucretius (99-55 BCE)             

I have been listening to one of the old masters,
a Roman poet
singing the truths of Epicurus, who tells us
about the way of all things.

Everything comes into existence,
everything goes out of existence:
rocks, trees, seas, mountains, people.
All things are made of atoms.
There is no such thing as eternity.
There is no such thing as certainty.
There are no deities who gave you life.
There is no sacrifice to make.
There is no fate you cannot break.
Death has no claim on you;
banish the fear of the hereafter.
Do not fear the dark of mind.
Tear the mask of fear aside.
The mind is man-made.
Do not give away your freedom.
Let go all the old religious stories.
Set them free.
They do not belong to you.
These are but dreams and scams.

Friendship, service, and civility
light the passageways to a good life.
Discover the world as it is.
Enjoy the morning light;
balance and stability thrive
in a harmonious life.

He is well
who sees himself
at peace in the present.
When you embrace what is,
the tranquility of self is kept alive,
wherein all delight resides.

 

The 7% Rule

by

A discussion with Charles Entrekin about nonverbal communication, consciousness, and the sense of self. 

“Multicultural differences in body language, facial expression, use of space, and especially gestures, are enormous and enormously open to misinterpretation.” Susan M. Heathfield

As someone who became visually challenged later in life, what is your experience with how that changed communication for you? Studies imply that a large part of communication is based on visual cues. Do you find any anecdotal truth in that? How?

I think that a great deal of information for conversation comes from facial expression and body language. I have noticed that when I can’t see people’s expressions, I can’t read their intent. When people talk with their hands, they are delivering to you information about their message, when they are smiling with their eyes, they are providing information for understanding. Body language is obscured, isolated out of the conversation, when you can’t see it. Without that, you are left with tone of voice and the distraction of other sounds in the room that also take up your attention. Dr. Albert Mehrabian (Silent Messages: Implicit Communication of Emotions and Attitudes), conducted several studies in the 1960s on nonverbal communication. His resultant data has been contested for decades—7% of any message is conveyed through words, 38% through certain vocal elements, and 55% through nonverbal elements (facial expressions, gestures, posture, etc.)—but the upshot of his and subsequent research is that the majority of communication is non-verbal.

This strikes me, also, as one of the more interesting problems with email and texting, that you don’t have any of this visual information and so it becomes considerably more important that context be provided. Yet email and text are designed for quick communication and don’t lend themselves to the development of context and dependent language to explain what the message is.

In addition, the mind fills in data that is not readily available via perception. We think we know and recognize our world and we base our reactions on pre-conceived knowledge. The Invisible Gorilla observational experiment is an example that, as a species, we miss a lot. Our perceptions change communication and discourse in vital ways.

I was struck by this selective attention experiment in which students were given the task of doing mathematical computations aloud while tossing a beanbag (so they had to be totally concentrated on what they were doing). During the exercise, a man dressed in a gorilla suit walked through their midst. When they were shown the footage later, they were flabbergasted because most of the participants didn’t see the gorilla. Did you? It shows you that, when people are distracted, their observational ability suffers.

Confusion as a result of misinterpretation can lead to hurt feelings, missed appointments and misunderstandings, but there are more serious implications about what we see, what we don’t see, and what we know and don’t know much of the time.

This brings me to the notion that psychology traditionally recognizes that each unique individual is, in fact, a combination of selves: a Perceptual Self, a Narrative Self, and a Social Self.

In a recent Sam Harris podcast Anil Seth believes it is important to elucidate the Perceptual Self by subcategory: the Bodily Self, the Perspectival Self, and the Volitional Self.  Seth postulates that the primary job of the brain is to regulate homeostasis in the body. The sensory receptors of the “Bodily Self” receive stimuli from both internal interoception and external experiential inference. Predictive perception regulates the internal state, as well as introceptive inference (the experience of having a body).

The Perspectival Self is the experience of perceiving the world from a first-person point of view.

The Volitional Self is the cognitive process of intention, of agency, of urges. It is one of the primary psychological functions that inspires the individual to be the cause of a particular course of action.

The second and third aspects of selfhood affect me most, in my opinion. The Narrative Self (also referred to as the Autobiographical Self or the Historical Self) is built from a rich set of autobiographical memories over a course of time. This is the part of self-recognition where the “I” comes in—the ego of an organism. As I lose my eyesight—or when I was diagnosed with cancer or Parkinson’s—my fundamental perception of “myself” had to adjust, adapt, evolve. The Narrative Self therefore animates my Social Self.

The Social Self is refracted through the perceptions of others, through a unique social milieu.

“Now, think about this for a minute,” says Anil Seth in his TedTalk. “If hallucination is a kind of uncontrolled perception, then perception right here and right now is also a kind of hallucination, but a controlled hallucination in which the brain’s predictions are being reined in by sensory information from the world. In fact, we’re all hallucinating all the time, including right now. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.”

Objective reality is also influenced by tribal affiliation. Human beings tend to rely less on intuition and rely on perceptions of others to confirm what we see and hear and feel. Viewing the Social Self—through the perceptions of others—is the locus of creating confirmation bias. 

The distinction between the Social Self and the Narrative Self is important here. My social interactions are diminished by my lack of vision because of loss of perceptual and experiential information. I am thrown back to a reliance on the Historical or Narrative Self, which is also under duress because I no longer have a Social Self with confidence, which affects my Narrative Self, the story I tell myself about who I am. I begin to doubt who I am, who I am becoming. My Narrative Self begins to be defined by an unreliable experience and perception.

As an example of this phenomena, Anil Seth demonstrates the rubber hand illusion.

“A person’s real hand is hidden from view, and that fake rubber hand is placed in front of them. Then both hands are simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush while the person stares at the fake hand. Now, for most people, after a while, this leads to the very uncanny sensation that the fake hand is in fact part of their body. And the idea is that the congruence between seeing touch and feeling touch on an object that looks like a hand and is roughly where a hand should be, is enough evidence for the brain to make its best guess that the fake hand is in fact part of the body.

So you can measure all kinds of clever things. You can measure skin conductance and startle responses, but there’s no need. It’s clear [the guy in blue] has assimilated the fake hand. This means that even experiences of what our body is is a kind of best guessing –a kind of controlled hallucination by the brain. Just as if it was his own arm, the brain is supplying the information to say what is real and what is not real.”

I have a personal anecdote to further represent this issue. I suffer from Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which means that I experience visual hallucinations that are based on my eyes not providing me with enough information. I have a blog post about the phenomenon here. I don’t see clearly what is actually there, so the brain supplies an alternative view.

“Consider that each human eye normally receives data at a rate of about 8.75 megabits per second,” says Allen Bellows, “a bandwidth which is significantly greater than most high-speed Internet connections. The visual cortex is the most massive system in the human brain, and it is packed with pathways which manipulate the rush of visual data before handing it over to the conscious mind. When disease begins to kink this firehose of information, a legion of neurons is left standing idle.”

 For example, when we were driving to an appointment in San Francisco and were surrounded by trees, what I saw were tall apartment buildings from the Lower East Side in NYC. Or when we were crossing the Bay Bridge, I saw meadows and landscapes stretching off into the distance. What was happening here? My brain did not have enough visual stimuli from my Perceptual Self, so it created a new image.

For me, I have learned to make friends with what I see, so that I am not upset with it. It is sometimes funny or amusing. What I am seeing is my brain providing the information to make sense of what I am seeing. My consciousness of the world outside is limited by visual perception, what I can see or what I can’t see. Consequently, I also make up some of the lack of visual perception with auditory or tactile substitution.

How does this relate to communication? My Social Self is altered and my Narrative Self is unsure. When I enter into conversation with friends and family, I often hear their words but have to guess at what they are meaning because I cannot read their gestures—their upturned smile or downturned frown—and I have to go with sound alone and a blurred image of a face that I know really well to guess what is going on. I engage in a lot of guesswork.

Consequently, my Social Self has become quieter and more humble in its interpretation of what is going on around me. In many ways, this has made me be a friendlier, warmer, more open person, more willing to admit mistakes, more willing to forgive, and more willing to be open to new experiences.

In an increasingly digital world, how does verbal acuity define identity in society? How much of the persona, defined in the virtual world, informs our perceptual selves?

A persona is a mask, a version of how we want the world to see us.  We don and remove our mask at will. The more time we spend wearing the mask, the more it becomes a defining part of the self.  However, the digital identity is more removed and more dangerous because it is anonymous. The avatar is not animated by the rich memories over the course of time. Thus, the resultant information—the Narrative and Social Perspective—becomes warped in the vacuum of impersonal relations and has the potential to have weak connections to or be devoid of the empathetic and moral compass to inform social choices and decision-making, no matter how articulate the digital source.

There are very few occasions where one is held accountable for an online digital identity. Without the experience of interpersonal relationships, it becomes too easy to offer empirical evidence (Fake News!) not backed up by factual information. As Thomas Metzinger elucidates in his essay “Intellectual Honesty”:

“The collective self-image of the species Homo Sapiens will increasingly be one of a being caught in evolved mechanisms of self-deception to the point of becoming a victim of its own actions. It will be an image of a class of naturally evolved cognitive systems that, because of their own cognitive structure, are unable to react adequately to certain challenges—even when they are able to intellectually grasp the expected consequences, and even when, in addition, they consciously experience this very fact about themselves clearly and distinctly […] Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself. It is closely related to old-fashioned values such as propriety, integrity and sincerity, to a certain form of ‘inner decency.’ Perhaps one could say that it is a very conservative way of being truly subversive.”

Our ethical conflicts are created by the unknown variables between interpersonal communication, confirmation bias, defined personal narrative, and social mores.  As my grandmother used to say, “Be careful who you hang out with because they define who you are and who you become.” I want the people I associate with to practice honest interaction, with themselves and the outside world. I aspire to that but, even like a virtuoso violinist, the experience of living in the world necessitates that you have to practice all the time.

Personally, I have received some relief through the practice of mindful communication. Mindfulness makes a huge difference in relocating oneself and the world. From a mindfulness perspective, your historical story is a fabrication, is made up, is unreliable as a guide to future ways of being in the world.  You understand compassion because you are able to let go of attachments to your story, your Narrative Self, and realize your filters are flawed. You must come to grips with the reality you are living in, rather than the reality you want it to be. This was a profound revelation for me, that my “story” is a construct of my brain and subject to modification as information becomes available. By contrast, digital identities are static.

Part of the concept of “letting go of the self” is inspired by my philosophical study of Buddhism. The Buddhist understanding of “no-self” is a comforting concept for me in the light of the other perceived selves that are no longer undamaged by my lack of eyesight.

In light of digital advancement, how could your unique experiences inform understanding of effective communication? How can young people benefit from your experiences to sustain reliable discourse and be effective in management and teams? How do think communication can evolve in a positive way in the global marketplace?

I think that my situation has made me more aware of sensory stimulus and more observational in general. How warm is the room? How cool? Is there air-conditioning? Breeze? Is there background noise or other external stimuli? I have become more proficient in evaluating the ambient atmosphere as a barometer of conversation, like other stimuli I used to discount or ignore.  When the ambient atmosphere increases, context of information is lessened.

“Imagine being a brain. You’re locked inside a bony skull, trying to figure what’s out there in the world. There’s no lights inside the skull. There’s no sound either. All you’ve got to go on is streams of electrical impulses which are only indirectly related to things in the world, whatever they may be. So perception — figuring out what’s there — has to be a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines these sensory signals with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is to form its best guess of what caused those signals. The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.” Anil Seth.

To illustrate the point, Dr. Seth creates a sound experiment in which the neurologist plays a recording of a distorted, unintelligible, alien sound. When Seth plays a recording of his own voice, suddenly the voice on the original recording is clear because the brain accepts Seth’s translation. In the same manner, if I come across an object that I don’t see clearly, I will reach out to touch it. When I touch the object, my brain supplies the information necessary to “recognize” it—a book, my phone, or an I-pad.

Recognizing (from studying Charles Bonnet Syndrome) that my brain is augmenting the visual stimuli with tactile information to “see” an object, I have learned to practice avoiding confirmation bias (the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one’s existing beliefs or theories) and base new ideas or projects on empirical data and independent sources of information.

Future technology should and will likely focus on facilitating a communication atmosphere. As we become more global-centric, visual communication technology will be increasingly important because physical cues are a barometer of interpersonal communication. Even on today’s news, audiences listen to the dialogue but also react to visual stimuli—a panelist rolling their eyes or desperately trying to signal an interruption to contest a point. Holograms and other communication technology currently in its infancy will be vital. Face to face communication across global pathways with access to virtual drawers of shared information is the technological path forward.

It is important to back up a bit and think about where we are. If you think about what we have done as a species, when you know how we interpret what is outside of our “bony domes,” it is amazing. It is amazing that we have created mathematics to study the world, astronomy to see it, art to emulate the experience. As a species, we have reached out and touched the world in remarkable ways, figured out how to manipulate and use it, for better or worse. But, in the meantime, we have left behind something important. We have been inventing this world we live in: invented languages to describe it, invented telescopes to see it, invented vehicles to circumnavigate it, invented religions to give us comfort, and invented politics and governments to give us a sense of control, and yes, invented weapons of mass destruction. We forgot to understand what it means that we made it all up. Meaning is human-made. It is not built into reality, but a part of our human world. We engage in atrocities and war because we forget that all understanding is human invention. And these inventions can lead us into a true hallucination that has dangerous and disastrous implications. Or maybe we can wake up and realize who we are, who we have been, and where we are going. The beauty that remains to us lies in our art, our music, and our ability to create as part of the ecosystem on this magical planet we call Earth.

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Albert Einstein

 

 

 

Happiness Doesn’t Come in Bottles

by

Neuroscientists learn that joy comes through dancing, not drugs.

Photo by Bruce Cook, 1989.

This posthumous reprint of Dr. Walter J. Freeman III’s (1927-2016) op-ed was originally requested by Peter Sylwan, Science Editor for Svenske Dagbladet, Stockholm, Sweden 24 May 1996 (in Swedish). Reprinted (in English) in the Journal of Consciousness Studies 4: 67-71. Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at University of California, Berkeley, “Walter Jackson Freeman III [was] a neuroscientist and philosopher known for his pioneering work on how the brain generates our perception of the world…” (Robert Sanders, Berkeley News, 2016). We chose to reprint it here in Sisyphus more than 20 years later because the science is still relevant, the first sentence still rings true.–Ed.

 

Too little has been written about the biology of joy. Most of the articles in the medical literature about brains and emotions are devoted to explaining how we feel fear, anger, anxiety and despair. This is understandable, because we don’t go to doctors when we are feeling optimistic, happy, and joyful. Most of what we know about the chemistry of our emotions has been learned from the disorders and the treatments of people who are sad and depressed.

But we can’t just accept this and say, “Why bother?”, because too many of us are seeking to find joy by taking chemicals. We need to ask, “What happens inside our brains when we experience happiness? Is there a way to stimulate pleasure in our brains, and what really happens when we do that?”

Electrical stimulation

We have known for 40 years what happens in rats, ever since a neurobiologist named Jim Olds learned how to put electrodes deep into their brains, connect the wires to an electric current generator, and give the animals a switch with which to stimulate their own brains. In some locations in the brain, if a rat accidentally presses the switch, the rat jumps away and stays as far distant from the switch as it can get. We call those locations “pain centers”.

At other places, after discovering the effects of the electric current, the rats press repeatedly for hours. They seem to be addicted to self-stimulation. We call these locations “pleasure centers”. But does it make the rats happy? We don’t know, because we can’t know what they are feeling. We can only know what they do.

Some neurosurgeons have placed electrodes into the brains of human subjects, who were suffering epilepsy. The surgeons were trying to locate the places in their brains, in which a tumor or a scar might be triggering the epileptic fits, so that the damage could be surgically repaired. They stimulated the brains with electric current in order to try to control the epileptic seizures.

For some locations, patients reported feeling profoundly depressed, as though they were about to die. One of them said, “Doc, don’t ever do that again!” In different places they reported feeling pleasure, sometimes sexual, but mostly rather bland. Some other patients, who were afflicted with chronic pain, reported that they got temporary relief from their suffering. They were given the opportunity to go home with a battery and a switch, so that they could treat their pain by stimulating themselves and adjusting their own dosage of electric current.

But no one wanted to keep the wires, and no one got addicted. Some doctors feared that a black market might grow, with addicts going to third world countries to get fixed with wires and stimulators. That didn’t happen, because whatever the pleasure was, it didn’t last, and it wasn’t happiness.

Chemical stimulation

But a lot of people do get addicted to chemicals – alcohol, cocaine, amphetamine, heroin, and nicotine. Why do they do that, and why aren’t they happy? It is because brains have a variety of chemical systems that regulate their electrical activities in waking and sleeping. The addictive drugs artificially stimulate those systems, but the feelings are not those of joy.

For example, a chemical called ‘dopamine’ is broadly spread through the brain by specialized nerve cells, when a person achieves some kind of reward, such as by satisfying hunger and thirst, winning a game, or passing an examination. Dopamine is often called a “reward hormone”. Its chemical actions are produced also by closely related compounds such as amphetamine and cocaine. They give feelings of buoyant optimism, energy, power, and knowledge.

It is not surprising that people who have no other avenues to success, living in poverty and hopelessness, will spend their food money on some transient chemical bliss. But that isn’t happiness, and even people who are bloated on academic or business success, and who feel elation, aren’t liable to confuse that feeling with happiness.

Other chemicals called ‘endorphins’ act in the brain as natural pain relievers. Their action is imitated by heroin and morphine, and also by alcohol. Again, it is small wonder that people who suffer from the emotional pains of regret, shame, guilt and despair might find relief from their demons in forgetfulness. But that isn’t happiness.

Yet another chemical called ‘serotonin’ is important in bringing mental relaxation as an important condition for getting to sleep. We don’t really know yet what sleep is for, but we know that we can’t survive without it. The relief from agitation and anxiety that is mediated by serotonin leads also to recovery from some forms of depression. That is why the chemical fluoxetine (Prozac) has become so popular. It doesn’t act like serotonin, but it prolongs the action of what little serotonin the brain is producing, if it is in short supply. But return to tranquility from anxiety and depression is not the same thing as happiness.

So, is there a chemical for joy? Scientists are beginning to understand that this is a wrong-headed question. There is no such chemical, and even to ask the question is to expose a deep ignorance about how brains–and people–actually work.

Lonely brains

There is more to brain function than chemistry or electricity. Some pioneer neuroscientists have used the new theory of nonlinear dynamics to build mathematical models of brain function. These far-out dynamicists have come to some remarkable new insights, which at first may seem outrageous, but which are turning out to be much more in tune with human intuition about brains and human nature than anyone had expected.

One conclusion is that brains don’t take in information from the environment and store it like a camera or a tape recorder, for later retrieval. There is no fixed bank of memories in brains, such as we hold in libraries and computer chips. We have been misdirected by the makers of computers and the visionary Canadian neurosurgeon, Wilder Penfield, to search for the hypothetical “memory banks” in the temporal lobes of humans. Human remembering is notoriously fallible.

A stimulus that excites the sensory receptors, so that they send a message to the brain, triggers a reaction in the brain, by which the brain constructs a pattern of neural activity. The sensory activity that triggered the construction is then washed away, leaving only the construct. That pattern does not “represent” the stimulus. It constitutes the meaning of the stimulus for the person receiving it. The meaning is different for every person, because it depends on the past experience of the person.

Such a stimulus is only successful in triggering the construction, if it already has some relevance to the person, most particularly if it is being sought by the person through paying attention, or if the person has had some previous experience with that class of stimuli.

Each successful stimulus also evokes a learning experience so that the person is changed by each stimulus and new experience accumulates. As the existentialist philosophers from Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Sartre have concluded, each of us constructs our self by our own actions, and we know our self as it is revealed to us in our actions. The self is in dynamic readiness to act and bring into play its entire experience at each moment. That is not the way a library or set of look-up tables works. It is far more flexible and rapid, though at the cost of reduced accuracy.

The implication of this dynamical model is that the meaning of a stimulus is different for everyone who receives it because the sum of experience for each of us is unique. Because the sensory activity is washed away and only the construction is saved, the only knowledge that each of us has is what we have constructed within our own brains. We cannot know the world by direct experience of it.

Why not? It is because the world is infinitely complex, and an individual brain can only know the little that it can handle through its own body. It turns out that this view is well known to philosophers. It is called solipsism. Many philosophers have been afraid that it is true, but they couldn’t prove it or disprove it. Now neurodynamicists have proven experimentally that it is true. Cognitive scientists have also proven that it is true, but in a negative way. Every attempt they have made to make a robot or a computer using a fixed memory store that could handle problems in the real world has failed miserably.

One reason that philosophers have been afraid is that solipsism seemed to make it very difficult to account for shared knowledge. If everything each of us knows is made inside our brains, how can we know the same things? The answer is simple. We share almost the same things. Almost. That happens only if we go to the same school, or grow up in the same neighborhood, and acquire the same language and the same culture.

Another reason for fear is that each brain is isolated from all others. No one can truly feel what another person is feeling, though we can empathize through shared experience. This separation has a good side in that each of us has the inalienable right to privacy. The bad side is loneliness. And here, paradoxically, is where joy begins to enter.

Dancing is a way to happiness

Where we humans find joy is in surmounting this solipsistic barrier between us and sharing our feelings and comforts. We cannot ever really cross it, but, a bit like neighbors chatting over a fence, we can be together. However, there is more to this communion than mere talking. There is trust, which underlies true friendships and partnerships. What is the chemistry of trust?

Answers are found when we look back on our mammalian ancestors. Raising a helpless infant to childhood requires intensive parental care, which comes with bonding between the parents and the infant. Now, how does a carefree child, when it has grown up, become a parent? This change in role requires a catastrophic change in beliefs, attitudes and values to make new parents. We humans would say that they fall in love, first with each other, and then with their offspring.

Scientists have learned that, when animals mate and give birth, specialized chemicals are released into their brains that enable their behavior to change. Maternal and paternal patterns of nursing and caring appear. The most important is a chemical called ‘oxytocin’. It doesn’t cause joy. On the contrary, it may cause anxiety, because it melts down the patterns of connections among neurons that hold experience, so that new experience can form. We become aware of this meltdown most dramatically as a frightening loss of identity and self-control, when we fall in love for the first time.

Bonding comes not with the meltdown, but with the shared activity afterward, in which people learn about each other through cooperation. Knowing another person doesn’t come with foreplay and orgasm. It comes in cooperative activities during and afterward. Trust emerges not just with sex, but also with vigorous shared activity in sports and combat, through which people bond into teams by learning to trust each other.

So oxytocin is not a happiness chemical, but a brain tool for building trust. Perhaps a million years ago our ancestors learned how to use this mammalian mechanism to promote social bonding beyond sexual union, in order to form groups and tribes. They did it, and still do it, with dancing, rhythmic clapping and chanting, singing and making music together all day and night, into exhaustion and collapse. When they awaken, they are reborn.

Nietzsche realized this. Emil Durkheim and other anthropologists have shown how people engage in Dionysian orgies and religious ceremonies, as the most effective way in which to create group identities. The joy they experience comes in dancing and singing with each other, thereby forming the bonds of trust. Trust comes when we are able to predict what other people will do, and we achieve that by repeated cooperative actions.

Aristotle wrote: “Happiness is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.” That is rather abstract. We can see virtue as a set of shared goals for the good of ourselves and our children. Joy comes with activities that we share with people we have learned to trust, and that enable us to share meaning across the solipsistic barrier that separates each of us from all others.

So happiness is not made by a chemical. That would be the same as treating a violin sonata as nothing but rubbing horse hair on strings of cat gut in order to make a wooden box resonate. Violin makers have to know their materials to make one, and physicians have to know about the brain chemicals in order to treat patients, when the chemistry of brains has gone wrong, but they can’t give us a pill to make us happy. We create our own joys, and we feel happiest in learning to trust each other.

#

Special Thanks:

Department of Molecular & Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-3200

Fear in a Handful Of

by

To me, this is just a nice little piece about people never changing their roles, even as they dream of doing so, because they think they aren’t capable or because they are afraid.

A solitary particle of dust sat on a lonely street corner in the shadow of a building one early afternoon and wept. It looked from one end of the street to the other and could see nothing and no one and its sobs bounced off the walls of the empty banks and dry saloons.

“What’s up, buddy?” said a voice from above. The lonely particle of dust looked up and saw a small dust mote floating on the warmer air in a shaft of sunlight.

“I can’t stand it anymore!” cried Particle to Mote. “I have dreams of being more than just this. If I could find away to cover a fine plate in a fancy cupboard or film over a stained glass window in a church, I would be happy.”

Mote landed softly a few inches from the solitary particle and said, “Really? Just a covering for a dish? I have bigger dreams than that! Imagine! I might one day be the grit that makes the keystone stick. Watches and clocks would pass all time with me on their face! Our legions could blot out the sun! Even if I only fill a pothole in a busy road . . . all that potential — right? Along comes the wheel of a cart and boom! I’m all aloft again and on to the next thing.”

A rapid thudding vibrated through the still air and boardwalk, causing Particle and Mote to shift slightly and look for the sound. At the far end of the street, flying towards their corner, a horse and rider thundered along the dirt road. The rider wore dusty grey clothes and a big black hat with a ring of coins set around the hatband. His horse was a quick brown and white steed. Behind them in hot pursuit were a half dozen more riders, whose approach was like the pounding of a thousand mallets on a thousand stakes. All those horses were blindingly white in the sunlight and, on the chests of the riders, sharp brass stars flashed as they bounced and jostled at gallop.

As Particle and Mote watched, the fleeing rider twisted in his saddle, ripping a large revolver from its holster in a fluid, practiced movement. He fired three shots at his pursuers. One of the lawmen grabbed at his stomach and slid from his saddle mid-stride, slamming into the road to lie crumpled in the dirt near the corner. Immediately shots were returned, and the dust heard ricochet-whine echoes between the building facades. Particle and Mote were knocked backward by the buffeting wind of the passing horses still in pursuit of the fleeing rider, and as the final horse rounded the corner, a chunk of road thrown from the hooves flew high into the air and skipped along the dusty boardwalk to rest near Particle and Mote.

“Whew!” exclaimed Mote. “Do you see what I mean?! Look at that! I can’t wait to fill a pothole or maybe to line the ruts of wheel tracks! What a life!”

The chunk of road dirt grunted. “Don’t get too worked up about road life, little dude. What’re your names?” Particle stayed very still and realized he didn’t have one.

Mote said, “What’s it to you?”

The dirt chuckled. “Don’t matter,” it said. “I’m Clod.”

Particle couldn’t speak, so Mote did.

“Clod, what do you dream about being?”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” the dirt clod cracked and shifted a little. “Tell you the truth, I dreamed about being enough for a landfill. Imagine being enough to extend the land in any direction. To make water get outta your way, to make a difference! Yeah. I heard y’all talking. Earlier. Before the excitement.”

“Yeah!” Mote shouted. “That was something!”

“Whoa, there. Why, I been waiting in that road for nearly ten years and that’s the first piece of action I’ve seen ever. And lookit. S’all gone and over in a few seconds.”

At that moment, they heard a coughing and gurgling from down on the road. A blood- coated hand scraped upwards from the gutter. Blood dripped from the fingertips. And as the marshal struggled to drag himself away from his death, his grasping fingers left five streaks of blood in a zigzag pattern that terminated at the edge of the boardwalk. Clod, Particle, and the Mote counted the seconds afterwards by watching the movement of the building’s shadow as it drifted away from the sun. When the shadow had crept over all of them and crouched over the dead man too, Particle spoke.

“That’s what I hate,” it said. “The world goes and goes. I wish something would happen.”

Intellectual Honesty

by

 “Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself.” T.M.

I recently encountered Thomas Metzinger’s work in a podcast debate between the German philosopher and author Sam Harris (Waking Up) and became interested in his ideas.  In finding out more about Metzinger, I ran across the essay excerpted below, which seems to be critical for understanding the nature of the current debates in the U.S. and world politics, e.g. the nature of truth, honesty, and spirituality; the debate raging around climate change and whether the human species will be able to grasp the nature of the problem soon enough to mitigate global catastrophe. Metzinger offers us some perspicacious insights and intellectual tools as a foundation for the problems and coming to grips with what the future holds, which, to my way of thinking, can help anyone who is interested in pursuing these matters (everyone should be pursuing these matters).—Ed.

Preliminary Remarks

We are currently undergoing the beginnings of a historical period of transition that will have a deep impact on our image of ourselves, and on many different levels at the same time. This accelerating development presents us with a profound challenge. A question of central importance is whether a “secularized spirituality” is possible (or even conceivable). Could a modern and spiritual self-conception do justice to this historical change in our image of ourselves and the desire (not just important to professional philosophers) for intellectual honesty at the same time?

In the external world, climate change poses a new and historically unique threat to humanity as a whole. As I write these words, this objective danger is barely perceptible. But today we already know for certain that even in a best-case scenario, it will last for several centuries. Conceived of as an intellectual challenge for humankind, the increasing threat arising from self-induced global warming clearly seems to exceed the present cognitive and emotional abilities of our species. This is the first truly global crisis, experienced by all human beings at the same time in a single media-space, and as we watch it unfold, it will also gradually change our image of ourselves, the conception humankind has of itself as a whole. I predict that during the next decades, we will increasingly experience ourselves as failing beings. We will experience ourselves as beings who collectively and stubbornly act against better knowledge, who even under great time-pressure are unable, for psychological reasons, to act jointly and efficiently and to put the necessary formation of political will into effect. The collective self-image of the species Homo sapiens will increasingly be one of a being caught in evolved mechanisms of self-deception to the point of becoming a victim of its own actions. It will be an image of a class of naturally evolved cognitive systems that, because of their own cognitive structure, are unable to react adequately to certain challenges—even when they are able to intellectually grasp the expected consequences, and even when, in addition, they consciously experience this very fact about themselves clearly and distinctly […]

Intellectual Honesty

Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself. It is closely related to old-fashioned values such as propriety, integrity and sincerity, to a certain form of “inner decency”. Perhaps one could say that it is a very conservative way of being truly subversive. But intellectual honesty might at the same time also be exactly what representatives of organized religions and theologians of any type simply cannot have, even if they would like to make claims to the contrary. Intellectual honesty means not pretending to know or even to be able to know the unknowable while still having an unconditional will to truth and knowledge, even where self-knowledge is involved and even where self-knowledge is not accompanied by pleasant feelings or is not in accordance with the received doctrine.

Some philosophers conceptualize intellectual honesty as a virtue, as an “intellectual virtue” concerning one’s own thoughts and inner actions, as an ethical stance towards one’s thoughts and beliefs. Again, this involves moral integrity. It means that, as often as possible, one’s actions should be in accordance with the values one has adopted as one’s own—and it concerns the question of what one should believe in the first place. Adopting a belief as one’s own is itself an inner action, and one that it is possible from which to refrain. The spontaneous appearance of a belief is one thing, the active endorsement of this belief by holding on to it another. Aside from emotional self-regulation (the ability to purposefully influence one’s emotional state) and the ability to control the focus of attention, inner self-regulation also exists with respect to what one believes. Interestingly, infants only gradually learn to control their emotional states and the focus of their attention. But the kind of critical self-regulation involved in adopting beliefs as one’s own is something that even many adults are not proficient in and never fully master. Is it possible to enhance one’s autonomy, one’s inner freedom, by practicing and improving this particular type of self-control? This is exactly what is involved in intellectual honesty. And it is interesting to note that meditation aims to increase this very same kind of mental autonomy – namely, by cultivating a specific and effortless form of inner awareness. Meditation cultivates the mental conditions of possibility for rationality. It involves the inner ability to refrain from acting, the gentle but yet precise optimization of impulse control and the gradual development of an awareness of the automatic identification mechanisms on the level of conscious thought. Thinking is not about pleasant feelings. It is  about the best-possible agreement between knowledge and opinion; and it is about having only evidence-based beliefs and about cognition not serving emotional needs. Have you noticed how the last two points suggest that all of this also involves abstinence, a special form of mental asceticism? And it reveals first points of contact to the spiritual stance. The central insight, however, is that the sincere pursuit of intellectual integrity is an important special case of the pursuit of moral integrity. More about this soon.

Whoever wants to become whole—a person of integrity—by gradually resolving all conflict between their actions and values must pursue this principle with their inner actions as well. This requirement is especially true for their “epistemic actions,” their action for the sake of knowledge. We act “epistemically” whenever we strive for insight, for knowledge or true belief, for sincerity and also for authentic self-knowledge. As all meditators know, there is more than one form of inner knowledge, and inner epistemic action cannot simply be reduced to the intellect or to thought. This seems to be a first bridge between spiritual practice and the ideal of reasonable, rational thought: both involve an ethics of inner action for the sake of knowledge. Moreover, in both cases the goal is a systematic enhancement of mental autonomy. It is interesting to note that spiritual practice is much deeper, more refined and better developed in Asia than in the West. Occidental cultures, in the spirit of the enlightenment, increasingly developed and focused on the ideal of intellectual honesty. Let us look at four stages in the Western history of ideas in order to see this inner connection more clearly.

John Locke

For the British philosopher John Locke, the desire for knowledge itself was a religious duty towards God: “He that believes, without having any reason for believing, may be in love with his own fancies; but neither seeks truth as he ought, nor pays the obedience due to his maker, who would have him use those discerning faculties he has given him, to keep him out of mistake and error…” If God really is a person, and one with such distinctly human properties as “intentions”, then he cannot want us to simply believe in his existence. He must want us to try to know of his existence. This nicely illustrates the philosophical idea that at the very beginning, intellectual honesty and striving for knowledge themselves still are religious duties towards God. On the other hand, for Locke, this also always involved acknowledging clear awareness of the limits of our knowledge—trying to go beyond these limits (for instance by trying to answer questions about the immortality of the soul) goes beyond our God-given intellectual powers. At the very beginning, philosophical honesty involves modesty. This is what Immanuel Kant would have said about honesty in general: The strict duty of honest comportment is “reason translated into social practice,” because it first creates the preconditions for mutual trust between the members of a society and thereby forms the basis of public order. I think the same could be true for the inner stage, for the protagonists of my inner life (that, as we all know, often resembles a civil war and sometimes even a completely uncivilized natural state, a war of each against all). How could this barbarism in my own consciousness be ended in a peaceful manner? What exactly is required to attain mental civility, an “inner state of civilization”? Maybe we could say that it involves “commitment towards oneself”—the foundation of an inner order for one’s own mind. In 1793, in “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” Immanuel Kant put this point in a completely different, but particularly beautiful manner. What is needed, he says, is the sincere intention of being honest towards oneself. The “sincerity” or “pureness” of the desire for honesty towards oneself is, I think, the central point. This point also provides the second bridge to spirituality: Now, at the very latest, you should begin to sense that a strict and altogether old-fashioned form of rationalism could have a lot to do with spirituality.

Immanuel Kant

Kant even tells us that this form of intellectual honesty is the innermost core of morality in general. It is, as it were, the essence of the desire for ethical integrity. Here is how one put this in 1793: it is “the idea of the moral good in its absolute purity.”  In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), he put this point concisely and clearly: “. . . man’s duty to himself regarded merely as a moral being . . . is . . . truthfulness.” At this point, Kant can also explain what intellectual dishonesty is, namely a kind of “inner lie.” For Kant, dishonesty is simply a lack of conscientiousness. Lacking conscientiousness in the ethical sense of inner action is nothing other than a form of unconsciousness, a lack of awareness—a further, interesting connection not only to the spiritual stance, but also to the history of the concept of “consciousness” in the occidental tradition.

 For Friedrich Nietzsche, intellectual honesty is the “conscience behind the conscience.” In 1883, he wrote in Zarathustra: “Where my honesty ceases I am blind and also want to be blind. But where I want to know, I also want to be honest, namely venomous, rigorous, vigorous, cruel and inexorable.” Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to really write about intellectual honesty, about “conscientiousness of the mind” as an ethics of cognitive action more narrowly conceived. It is interesting to note that, once more, this involves a certain form of asceticism, of letting go. For Nietzsche, intellectual honesty is the “culmination and ‘last virtue’” of the Greco-Christian history of ideas, because it leads to the self-annihilation of the religious-moral interpretation of the will to truth. What exactly does this mean? In its highest form, the desire for truthfulness allows one to admit to oneself that there is no empirical evidence of God’s existence whatsoever, and that in more than four thousand years of the history of philosophy, no convincing argument for the existence of God has emerged. It allows us to relinquish our search for emotional security and pleasant feelings, which has been hard-wired into our minds and bodies in the course of evolution, and admit that we are radically mortal beings with a tendency towards systematic forms of self-deception. Truthfulness towards ourselves allows us to discover the delusional and systematic denial of finitude, as expressed in our own conscious self-model. More about this point soon.

Friedrich Nietzche

The philosophical debate in Anglo-Saxon culture has been considerably more profound, and analytically more clear and substantial. Let us look at the fourth example form the history of the concept of “intellectual honesty.” Today, the technical debate is conducted under the title of “The Ethics of Belief”—and this already reveals one of its most important aspects: When is it permissive, from an ethical and moral perspective, to believe in something specific, or to adopt a certain belief “as one’s own”? The British philosopher and mathematician William Kingdon Clifford was one of the first thinkers to ask this question, and subsequently became the founding father of this discussion, which is central to the distinction between religion and spirituality. His two main principles are:

  • It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
  • At any time, at any place, and for every person it is wrong to ignore or carelessly reject the relevant evidence for one’s own beliefs.

In academic philosophy, this position is simply called “evidentialism.” This means only believing things for which one actually has arguments and evidence. The philosophical counterpart is something we are all familiar with, namely dogmatism and fideism. Dogmatism is the thesis that “It is legitimate to hold on to a belief simply because one already has it.” In philosophy, fideism is the thesis that it is also completely legitimate to hold on to a belief when there are no good reasons or evidence in its favor, and even when faced with convincing counterarguments. Fideism is the standpoint of pure faith. For a fideist, it is legitimate to hold on to beliefs that not only lack any positive arguments or evidence in their favor, but even in the face of strong counterarguments and strong empirical evidence to the contrary. The interesting point now is that fideism can be described as the refusal to take any ethical stance on one’s inner actions whatsoever. It involves a lack of inner decency. And this is the classical standpoint of organized religion as opposed to spirituality. If one were to interpret these two epistemological positions from a purely psychological perspective, one could say that fideism involves deliberate self-deception, systematic wishful thinking or even paranoia; whereas the psychological goal of the ethics of belief consists in a certain form of mental health. I call this form of mental health “intellectual integrity.”

William Kingdon Clifford

If you let yourself go and allow yourself to simply hold on to a certain belief in the complete absence of any positive theoretical or practical evidence, then you have already given up on the whole idea of an ethics for inner action. In doing so, you reject the project of intellectual honesty, and on the level of your own mind, you refuse not only rationality, but also morality. This not only changes your own opinions and beliefs, but causes you, the person as a whole, to lose your integrity. And this is what I meant at the beginning, when I said that intellectual honesty is what theologians and representatives of organized religions of any type simply cannot have. This sentence might have sounded like cheap polemics or deliberate provocation just for the sake of it. But it is really about a simple, clear, and objective point, namely the “principle of self-respect”—about how not to lose one’s dignity and mental autonomy. Importantly, this statement not only concerns traditional churches, but also a large part of the so-called “alternative spiritual culture.” Many of the movements that developed in recent decades in Europe and the United States have long lost their progressive impulse. Today, they merely stabilize or conserve the status quo and are characterized by an infantile complacency and crude forms of intellectual dishonesty. Anyone who is seriously interested in our question concerning the possibility of a secularized spirituality has to take all the relevant empirical data and all possible counterarguments into account. In 1877, the philosopher William Clifford claimed the following about anyone who is unwilling to do so by “purposely avoiding the reading of books and the company of men who call in question or discuss” their presuppositions: “The life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”

 

For the full annotated essay, “Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty,” following the link below:

http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophieengl/files/2013/07/Metzinger_SIR_2017_English.pdf