"People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them."
-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Because of my own passing interest in death and loss and, by extension, grief, I'd been meaning to read The Year of Magical Thinking for quite some time. I'd avoided it, though. I was afraid of it. I was afraid of being thrown back into grief (an awkward state from which escape seems impossible). But finally the erudite kaaronwarren mentioned it & finally I was in Berkelouw Books in Leichhardt looking for something to read and life seemed good. So I bought it and started reading it today and goddamn, goddamn, thank god Didion's only documenting a year.

What I'm learning, though -- for all the muted optimism of her title (The Year, one year, not a life, not life) -- is that grief, once it gets a hold, leaves a path. Grief alters everything forever. When grief knows you, knows how to find you, it's always there. Grief, the shadow, the warrior virus, the terrorist, the hitman.

Didion writes a story that feels necessary. She writes with a vocab that's recognisable. Hell, I think I myself wrote some of Didion's sentences years ago, and she's now written some of mine.

(I remember a friend of mine, in the midst of grief, one day saying, "I could lie down in the middle of the road and no one would see me.")

Don't read this book, don't read this book. Grief is dangerous. And Didion has left the door open.

A word about the politics of diagnosis-making is in order. Over the years, DSM task forces have had to contend with bids, pro and con, for diagnoses such as masochistic personality disorder, sadistic personality disorder, pathological (racial) bias, and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (a.k.a. PMS). Soon, planners of the next edition, the DSM-V, tentatively scheduled for publication in 2012, will hear appeals to create categories for shopping and food addictions. Internet addiction will surely come up too -- as it did this summer at a meeting of the American Medical Association. Pro-life advocates hope to get the DSM to adopt "post-abortion syndrome" (indicating pathological regret after terminating a pregnancy). Meanwhile, there is a battle over gender identity disorder, with some members of the transsexual community wanting it evicted, while others wanting it to stay in so that insurance companies will pay for sex-reassignment surgery.
-- Sally Satel, a review of Allan V. Horwitz 'The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow Into Depressive Disorder'

Psychology has long had a hang-up about being seen as a 'science'. It's all about statistics and categories, measurable 'this' and quantifiable 'that'. It tends to twist someone up, that need to count and label. It tends to twist up an entire industry when it's enshrined into one definitive book -- psychiatry's Diagnostic & Statistical Manual.

I still love psychology, though. Probably because it's got -- pardon yet another pun -- personality. It craves respect -- but only on the terms psychology itself defines. I remember being taught to test for statistical significance across a group of subjects in a psychology experiment. If you test a hundred people, at least 5 should show the 'effect' in order for it to be considered real. Less than five, not significant.

In discussing this with my lecturer in The Philosophy of Psychology (my favourite subject), my lecturer said, 'If even one person feels the effect, surely that's significant? Isn't it significant for that one person?'

That contrast between the significance of one life, and the life of a group, has always stuck with me.

Which is entirely tangential to the above article on a book that investigates psychiatric categorisation.

In ancient Greek, if you knew how to pronounce a word, you knew how to spell it, and you could sound out almost any word you saw, even if you’d never heard it before. Children learned to read and write Greek in about three years, somewhat faster than modern children learn English, whose alphabet is more ambiguous. The ease democratized literacy; the ability to read and write spread to citizens who didn’t specialize in it.
-- Caleb Cain, Twilight of the Books, The New Yorker, 24 December 2007

I'm not really all that bothered by the idea that reading will one day perhaps be confined to a "reading class," primarily because, as far as literature is concerned, it more or less already is.
-- Daniel Green, The Prestige of Exclusivity, The Reading Experience blog, 26 December 2007

It's interesting to take a second to look at wikipedia. It started with the most populist, inclusionary point of view of all, but over time, people being people, a hierarchy and inner circle has been created. The exclusion is based on effort and skill, not race or income, but it's still exclusionary. And at its best, it makes the site work. When it fails, it limits discussion, reinforces small thinking and enrages the outsiders.
-- Seth Godin, Exclusion, Seth Godin's blog, 25 December 2007

Three tracts on the uses & abuses of exclusivity came through the RSS feed ( last week. )

Research carried out at the University of Granada reveals that housewives are more willing to separate glass from other garbage than students. According to this work, a high awareness of the environment does not necessarily entail the practice of ecologically responsible behavior. Research was carried out from a sample of 525 university students and 154 housewives.
-- _eurekalert

We're a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness. We nurse one another, romance one another, weep for one another. Ever since science taught us how, we willingly tear the very organs from our bodies and give them to one another. And at the same time, we slaughter one another. The past 15 years of human history are the temporal equivalent of those subatomic particles that are created in accelerators and vanish in a trillionth of a second, but in that fleeting instant, we've visited untold horrors on ourselves—in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan, London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania—all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species the planet has produced. That we're also the lowest, cruelest, most blood-drenched species is our shame—and our paradox.
-- Jeffrey Kluger, What Makes Us Moral, TIME

The perfect way to celebrate the pause that happens between the chaos of Xmas and the bittersweetness of New Years: a lunch of leftovers in the cool breeze by a riverbank in the western 'burbs of Sydney, followed by a dinner of crispy skin chicken vietnamese soup in one of the few parts of the city still open (ie. Newtown). Nothing puts you in touch with the ebb & flow of your own humanity than good food & good company after the party's over, eh?

That a damn good dose of festive fatigue!

(On another note, how can there be aNOTHer 'alien vs. predator' movie? Didn't we resolve that one already?)

"Let’s begin by avoiding an obvious mistake. I hasten to add that I am not accusing
Rosenberg of this mistake. Rather, by agreeing with Rosenberg that this is a mistake we
can begin to establish some common ground. Here is the mistake: As a descriptive or
interpretive matter, it would be wrong to claim that most physicalists believe that the only
things that exist are the things that are recognized by fundamental physics.1 The view that
all that exists are strictly physical things—the entities, properties, relations, etc. of
fundamental physics—is a radical one, and it is usually called “eliminative materialism”
or “eliminative physicalism.”2 So as an objection to physicalism, it is no use to point to
familiar objects such as books, trees, and dogs, and observe that they are not entities
recognized by fundamental physics, QED. Physicalists who do not intend to assert
eliminative physicalism will rightly think that such an argument misrepresents their view
rather than refuting it. "
--Thomas W. Polger, 'A Place for Dogs and Trees?', PSYCHE 12 (5), December 2006

Heh. I'm an amateur psychologist, which is to say I have a degree in it but no work experience or proper credentials. If you'd told me at uni that I'd end up reading this stuff for fun, I naturally would've concluded you were in need of professional help (that's often been my conclusion on a lot of things anyhow). But reading these articles now, I'm struck by the delightful prose of the pieces. And by one of the features of psychology: its narrative. There is no way to explain a human without narrative. Even behaviourism has its narrative. Even the most mundane part of a life. Even the most spiritual.

*That's* why I like psychology.

And in its attempts to prove itself a science, psychology undermines everything we think science offers. And yet, it keeps trying. That's the other thing I like. It's perversity. ;)

And that's what I've been doing this fine Sunday morning before commencing the wrapping of Xmas presents & the eating of breakfast. Excelsior.

Both Newitz and Paffenroth suggest that our grossest imaginings are really about self-loathing. The "stain" of slavery, Newitz declares, makes whites maim themselves and presage their extinction with every Robocop and Blacula. Zombies "are us, and we are them," Paffenroth mourns. With these assertions, both authors presume that viewers identify not just with victims but with monsters. As we have been taught to do. We are the gutted and the devourer, the rapist and the pretty-mouthed woman hung by hooks.

In which case, is body modification a means of maiming ourselves and adorning the "stain"? At the farthest extreme are the self-amputators, the self-castrators, those smooth-groined members of the "nullo" movement. But even on the street, on the bus, what passes for standard body-mod might be art that doubles as punishment that we imagine we deserve, the rods and rings through our flesh saying Stab me. Chain me. Hang me.
-- Anneli Rufus, Why Do We Love Being Shocked and Disgusted?, AlterNet

I have lived in the pursuit of a vision, both personal and social. Personal: to care for what is noble, for what is beautiful, for what is gentle; to allow moments of insight to give wisdom at more mundane times. Social: to see in imagination the society that is to be created, where individuals grow freely, and where hate and greed and envy die because there is nothing to nourish them. These things I believe, and the world, for all its horrors, has left me unshaken.
— Bertrand Russell, "Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday"

I like this distinction, below:

"Bertrand Russell would not have wished to be called a saint of any description; but he was a great and good man."
— A.J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, NY: Viking Press, 1972.

(Also from Wikipedia.)

It is the difference between great and good that interests me. Because time & again history seems to prove that great works can be carried out by bad people, and good people can fall short of achieving greatness. (I offer this without any attempt to define 'great' & 'good'. I am going on instinct, & I suspect many people will know, in their guts or their hearts, what I mean.)

Many thanks, azhure:

Introverts are not necessarily shy. Shy people are anxious or frightened or self-excoriating in social settings; introverts generally are not. Introverts are also not misanthropic, though some of us do go along with Sartre as far as to say "Hell is other people at breakfast." Rather, introverts are people who find other people tiring.

In other news, I am now no longer the only person in the world* not to have seen an episode of Firefly, thanks to seanwilliams! :)


-----
* Some people say I lack perspective. I tell those people 'you are the most boring person I have ever met in my WHOLE ENTIRE LIFE!'

From quotez:

"The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering."
-Carl Jung

Not sure I'd stretch it to 'all' mental illness (though, y'know, out of me & Jung, pick the famous psychologist type. So ... ), but I'd pay this one. Avoidance is a mental ouroboros. A green-eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on and ok, now I'm getting a bit carried away.

So let's complement that with:

"If you're going through hell, keep going."
-- Winston Churchill

and:

"The best way out is always through."
-- Robert Frost.

Boy, I just have dozens of these, don't I.

You know, on a tangent, I was talking to a guy once who happened to work in advertising, & we were discussing upcoming movies, & I was saying, 'Oh, the Movie Show reviewed that, & they said...' Anyhow, the second time I said, 'Yeah, the Movie Show guys said...' he sniggered, cut me off & said, 'Have you thought about coming up with an original opinion on anything by yourself?'

I think the next thing I said to him was, 'Good night.'

And let me re-iterate: he worked in advertising. One of those vocations renowned for originality. So his point about my unwillingness to come up with an original opinion on movies as yet unreleased in my city was completely justified. Or, wait, no, I think he was just a complete tosser. Yeah, yeah, that could be it.

As to that self-indulgence thing that's all over everywhere online, love nihilistic_kid's comment today:

I just thought this was an amusing addition to the conversation, since the self-indulgent/non-self-indulgent fight seems to be boiling down to another round of Artists vs. Hacks, again, sans any evidence of what actually motivates people to write. Of course those artists just love their own selves (ooh, smoochie smoochie, mirror man!) and of course the hacks just want to stick to formulae and do well by their readers (it's in the contract!), goes the conversation so far. But the first person I met who actually gets to discuss motivations and meanings with dozens of authors per year pegged two uberhacks as the most self-indulgent of writers straight off.
So nyah nyah on everybody.

I don't actually mean to get into the self-indulgence debate. It's just that I find everyone else's reactions so entertaining. Plus, clearly, tonight I have no original opinions on anything.

What I'm wondering, though, is how to gauge motivation &, once gauged, how to critically assess it? I'm wondering this because it seems to me that motivation is, in fact, important. Because I think it seeps into a work & therefore into a reader. In my mind, now, motivation has become twisted around with intention. 'What is the author's intention' goes the popular highschool English lesson. As a student, I used to want to argue that it didn't matter what the intention was, what mattered was what I took away from the text (I was post modern before I was even post modern. Does that make me pre-post modern?). But now I think intention is understated. Overlooked, even.

What, indeed, *is* the intention of the author, any author? What assurances, what subliminals, what attempts to get into the psyches of readers exist out there? What amount of trust should we give, & what hold in reserve? What imbalances are we contributing to the collective consciousness (thanks, Jung) if such exists? *Can* we contribute to the collective consciousness, or are we just passive recipients? Why did I not bother to check my facts before I started this post?

What numbers of people are wanting to ask me to defend my blithe comment that motivation is important -- given that I have bothered with no evidence whatsoever? ;)

More brain food for those recent discussions:

"If the world was without any natural evil and suffering we wouldn't have the opportunity, or nearly as much opportunity, to show courage, patience and sympathy."
- Richard Swinburne

"When written in Chinese, the word 'crisis' is composed of two characters - one represents danger, and the other represents opportunity."
- Saul David Alinsky

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."
- Sir Winston Churchill

"Do what you can, with what you have, where you are."
- Theodore Roosevelt

And by the way,

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- Aristotle

"However jewel-like the good will may be in its own right, there is a morally significant difference between rescuing someone from a burning building and dropping him from a twelfth-storey window while trying to rescue him."

Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions

Saw Jared Diamond last weekend, in the second-to-last session of the Syd Writers' Festival*. Diamond was talking about his book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. You can find a very similar talk he did back in 2003 over here.

I was fascinated by the talk. I like that Diamond describes himself as a 'cautious optimist'. He's spotted what he feels are the patterns that lead to collapse of societies**, but then he adds (admittedly, almost as a footnote) that the great advantage we have now is access to information, & thus, hopes Diamond, we will use this information to develop wisdom & will consequently avoid such a fate ourselves. Like I said, I like Diamond's cautious optimism. I don't know if I agree with it.

( A few things he said that really interested me )

It's interesting how statements once meant to be inclusive have become exclusive. Like, take for example, B.F. Skinner.

Skinner (1904-1990, or so the web tells me) is considered to be one of the forefathers of that particular school of psychology known as behaviourism. When I was studying psych, behaviourism was like some kind of consolation prize. It was functional, common-sensical, even, but it lacked romance or spiritual excitement. It talked about curing people by making their maladaptive behaviours go away, but it said nothing about the mind or the soul, or about belief and identity, emotion or integrity.

'I fear giant rats are eating at my brain, and they start underneath the smallest fingernail of my left hand,' said the client.
'Count to five and remember this anagram: EAMPT. Continue in this manner until you desist from driving your left fist into the nearest wall,' replied the bahaviourist.
'Can I tell you about my mother?' asked the client.
'Goodness, no. But I can train you out of the *desire* to talk about your mother, if you like,' said the behaviourist.
'Will that be helpful?' asked the client, scratching at her left palm.
'It will *look* helpful, and who is to say that is not help enough?'

By now, you may suspect I'm oversimplifying behaviourism, & you're right. But that's because behaviourism is not at the heart of my point, & I couldn't be bothered checking my facts right now.

My point is that when Skinner was writing (he is most often cited for his papers in the 1970s), the word 'men' was inclusive. It meant 'humans' or 'people' or even 'humankind'. So that when I pasted his comment into my lj last week, though *of course* I was aware of the connotations & denotations of the word 'men' nowdays, still, in my mind, I was reading Skinner as he intended. Men as people. Of the comments I received on & off-list, not one made reference to this reading.

Men, I now note, means *men*. Not people. Men are just _some_ of the people. They are not all.

I quite like this. It makes me happy.

Let me translate, then, Skinner's words into our modern banter.

"The real question is not whether machines think, but whether the writers of Matrix 3 had anything at all going through their heads when they etched together that ridiculous script of theirs, thereby wiping out all the love I had for their first, deadly cool movie & leaving the taint of bile in my throat."

There. Done.

Next up: Conflux2 = love.

And in other 'fun things you, too, can do', today I updated my will.

It was just an overdue thing -- nothing at all to do with all the dying that's featured in discussions lately. I stumbled across the half-completed will under an overdue water bill (which seemed particularly poignant at the time) & thought, oh yeah, this thing, I'll just fill this in right now. It's not like my 'estate' is in any way complex or extensive.

So I completed the new will right then at work & surprised a couple of colleagues into witnessing it for me & I tore the old one in two & I felt pretty good. Like I had outwitted death by leaving behind a few words & some trinkets with a sentimental value only, & some small sliver of paid-off mortgage.

Then I got a little worried about how I'm spending my time, & whether my priorities were really working out for me & I thought, 'you know, I really need to be *living* my life a little more'. Which is just one of those irksome ideas that can either galvanise or immobilise you, depending what you determine to make of it.

And I thought to myself, fuckitt, galvanise.

( And then I reflected on a scene from Six Feet Under that I found particularly moving, & went looking for a transcript online, & here is the bit I mean. )

"Suicides have already betrayed the body."
-- Anne Sexton, Wanting to Die

Today's subject line was prompted by girliejones in our discussions on the suicide of Hunter S. Thompson.

How do you pick a day to die?

Not just die. How do you pick a day to inflict irrevocable violence on yourself? How do you reach a point where that seems the better option? How do you do that to yourself knowing what legacy you are leaving to your family, friends, fans, neighbours?

And in case you haven't read these blog entries yet, I recommend them to you. You might find some answers there: lonewolfe's Suicide is painless... and Lee Battersby's Thompson.

Since there is so much talk going on about this, I felt an urge to clarify myself. I should say upfront that, so far, I have not been touched by suicide. I've known OF people who suicided, I've not known people who HAVE suicided, I have never contemplated it myself. Suicide is ugly. I don't buy into the romantic glory of it despite the extent of my sympathies for its victims.

( And now things get a little gross & if you are feeling sensitive or vulnerable right now, you can avoid this bit )

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

-- Anne Sexton, Wanting to Die

http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?45442B7C000C07050E70

Thankfully, I want most to know 'why build'.



Thief --
how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

-- Anne Sexton, Sylvia's Death