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Psychology

C. G. Jung in the Wild West

“Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog. Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns.” Psalm 22:20-21

If you want to see The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s newest film now playing on Netflix, without prejudice, hints or spoilers, stop reading right here. Peruse this screamingly funny review of Christmas Movies instead, and come back to the blog once you have been seduced by Campion’s latest.

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Full disclosure, I used to be an avid Jane Campion fan. The director and screen writer, who earned degrees in anthropology and sculpture in addition to one in film studies, has always struck me as the perfect mix of intellectual powerhouse and visual artist who knows how to use space, color, atmospherics in ways that doubled and tripled the impact of her already intense plot lines. The Piano and more recently the 2 part series Top of the Lake count among my favorites, for visual magic as much as feminist approaches to the conflicted states women experience when they try to free themselves from patriarchal violence and restrictions.

I also watched a lot of Westerns. The strange, far away America came to the German TV screens, still black and white in the 1960s, with visions of John Wayne’s law and order and the Cartwright family in Bonanza (I almost choked on my coffee when I read the Wikipedia description that the show was “known for presenting pressing moral dilemmas.” The only dilemma I encountered was when we 12-year-old girls fought over who had first dibs on Little Joe…)

In the 70s I was drawn into Spaghetti Westerns. I used to watch them late at night in a small, smoke-filled movie house in a suburb of Hamburg, together with like-minded students who were exploring socialist politics and enchanted with the Westerns’ subversion of the American genre’s archetypes and the films’ revolutionary messages, particularly in the Zapata movies. These parables using the Mexican Civil War at the turn of the century as a vehicle for left-wing optimism and dreams fit right into the late 60s, early 70s in Europe when we had a lot of hope for change. As did Ennio Morricone’s film music, a constant on the turntable.

Many decades later, I saw Brokeback Mountain in the movie theatre (which I rarely went to, always worried that exposure to a large screen would emotionally overwhelm me – I like my films on a computer screen that helps me modulate my reactions.) And I am not averse to filling sleepless hours with unassuming commercial fare like Longmire. There, I admitted it.

And now comes The Power of the Dog, a Western by Jane Campion. Stellar acting, brilliant camera work, a languid story told in chapters, almost like a dream that slowly, unstoppably, turns into a nightmare. Think psycho-drama against a backdrop of the Rocky Mountains, with every Jungian archetype conceivable and clever symbolism to boot, gloves, ropes, scissors, traps and ominous landscapes included. Then share my surprise when myth-buster Campion, champion of strong, self-determined women, falls right back into depictions that are conventional female stereotypes, while focusing on the complicated, tortured souls of men. The only woman who lets her hair hang down, is one who is dead – miraculously growing golden locks in her coffin, or so it is reported, as if Rapunzel meets Snow White, no further prince needed.) There is an insensitivity to women who are depicted as violated or objectified that felt jarring, going against expectations set by Campion’s previous oeuvre.

The basic story describes the fate of four people. Two adult brothers own a successful ranch in Colorado in the early 1900s. One is a Yale-educated classicist who is the quintessential Western cowboy, toxic masculinity and all. The other is a reserved, politically aspiring businessman, who might soon climb into the ranks of robber barons or state politicians. Their shared bedroom is emptied, when the business man, George (Jesse Plemmons,) decides to marry a widow with a teenage son. Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) is aghast at the change in the household and does everything he can to taunt and torture the newcomers, deemed gold digger and weakling, respectively.

Rose (Kirsten Dunst), who was a perfectly competent restaurant owner and former piano player in a movie pit, shrinks from the limelight she is thrown into when having to host important people. Moreover, she is deeply hurt and frightened by her brother-in-law’s meanness and slowly descends into serious alcohol abuse. Her husband hovers protectively when he’s there, although he seems to vanish increasingly from the scene the more the triangular tensions become apparent. Rose’s son Pete (Kodi Smit-McPhee) also does everything imaginable to protect his mother who lost her first husband, his father, when he committed suicide.

We soon learn that cowboy Phil was shaped by an intense relationship with his mentor, Bronco Henry, with likely homoerotic leanings, or at least unconscious desires. It is hard work for Phil to suppress his longings, particularly when he is surrounded by display of male beauty right out of Thomas Eakins’ or Henry Scott Tuke’s paintings.

Thomas Eakins The Swimming Hole)
Henry Scott Tuke The Sunbathers

The teenager discovers this and makes use of this knowledge when he meticulously and cautiously plans to get rid of the tormentor to ensure his mother’s happiness. Letting himself be taunted as a “faggot” and a “Nancy” by the ranch hands, he stirs something in Phil that leads him to envision a relationship like he had with his mentor, now roles reversed. He wants to toughen up the waif-like youngster, rope him in, projecting onto him the possibility of ending loneliness. We see Phil change in front of our very eyes from bullying macho to vulnerable loner exhausted from repressing his sexual inclinations.

The boy, on the other hand, so seemingly vulnerable, stiff and thin, with a glaring lack of detectable sensuality, turns out to be made of steel, something that his father had always feared. He kills wildlife without hesitation, does autopsies to learn about biology, systematically gets the necessary tools and ingredients to kill with impunity, and eventually claims his target. His overarching desire to help his mother is not matched by any insights into what she wants or fears, just driven by his own interests, including a medical career with access to decisions over life and death.

A key scene where he walks amidst catcalling cowboys to inspect a nest of magpies gives it pretty much away. The symbolism of magpies does not just include extreme intelligence and trickery, it also stands for self-awareness. Magpies are the only non-mammals that pass the mirror test, a way to assess if an animal has self-awareness. Pete knows who he is and what he wants, no conflict between his conscious and unconscious, so prevalent in the rest of them. Dressed always in the black and white of the (NZ) magpies, with a similarly elongated shape that we mistake for a scare crow, he is the master of everyone’s fate.

While we still cringe at his executioner’s demeanor that grants a last cigarette to the condemned, smoked in alternation by Pete and Phil like a post-coital ritual that was never enacted, we soon wonder why he peruses the biblical verse exclaimed by Christ himself during cruxifixction, calling for help from the Almighty. “Deliver me from the power of the dog,” the pull of Satan’s seduction, “save me from the lion’s mouth,” the threat to Rose’s happiness, he’s dealt with all of them like a higher power himself.

The film does not just employ the various tropes of Jungian psychology, the ideas of persona and shadow, of anima and animus, or the concept of contrasexuality that was quite progressive for its time. The idea that masculinity and femininity can be contained in one person, and not correspond to being male or female, is really the focus of the narrative set in a world that abhorred that concept.

C.G. Jung was also steeped in biblical knowledge – his father was clergy, his mother came from a long line of theologians – but saw the bible more as describing psychological processes rather than revealing G-d’s word. So ending the story with a verse that refers to a cry for help at the same time that that help was delivered (as evil act, no less) is really something of a horn of the unicorn, something mysterious, inexplicable, rare.

So is Campion’s wizardry when it come to dropping clues. If the film was a dream, an analyst would have a field day. Maybe the Jungian dream analyst Campion repeatedly visited during the film shoot would agree. The symbolisms sure made my brain work, while my eyes feasted. Now can we please go back and use the director’s considerable skill-set to model for us the empowering of women? Psalm 22 could be of continued usefulness to set the stage:

But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people. Psalm 22:6

Here is an official review.

Here’s the soundtrack. Composed by (Radiohead’s) Johnny Greenwood, with clear echoes of his fascination with Krzysztof Penderecki. Beautiful music.Disquieting too, like so much in that film.

Photographs from the American West, although not Colorado, which I still haven’t seen, nor have I visited New Zealand where the film was shot.

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Stones on the Heart

Once you have crossed Portland’s Burnside Bridge you will encounter a building on the Eastside that has large sheets of paper hanging in its windows. They are printed with a poem by Oregon’s current poet laureate, Anis Mojgani. It is an appeal which addresses us with loving flattery, perceptive about potential burdens we might carry, and enthusiastic in its belief that there are remedies that can help you drop the stones of your heart, as he puts it.

The suggestions made me smile, made me frown, made me feel seen as one of the multitudes who experience themselves these days as “dark and angsty” as he says. (The word angsty, by the way, from the German word Angst (anxiety) was introduced as early as 1849 by English writer George Eliot. But it became popular in the 1940s when translations of Freud’s work promoted it in the context of neurotic fear, guilt and remorse.)

I was in a dark mood indeed, having been accused of neurotic fear, well, not in those words, but in a closely related term, namely being prone to conspiracy theories. Heated voices had been raised over an essay that I tried to summarize and that found nothing but scorn in the ear of my listener. The essay was published by Timothy Snyder, author of an interesting series of essays currently on the web, Thinking Aloud. He teaches history at Yale, and is a tenured fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His work concerns East European history, the Holocaust, the history of the Soviet Union, and the history of Ukraine, and he has been published in the NYT, the L.A.Times, the Guardian, Christian Science Monitor and many more. I dwell on the pedigree so we can agree this is not some random fantasist, dabbling in pseudo-Freudian analysis, or simply a moron (one of the less condescending terms emerging in our “debate.”) Not that learned people cannot be idiots, but I think there is something else going on here. Hear me out.

The essay is titled Killing Parents in Bad Faith. – How historians will remember the pandemic.The main argument offered is that reckless behavior of maskless younger people endangering their older relatives, or reckless refusal of politicians to implement measures that protect the elderly and anyone else against the ravages of the virus is not simply based on stupidity. Instead it is a return to the (falsely applied) maxim of the survival of the fittest with the added benefit that it triggers wealth transfer that is direly needed by a younger generation who has seen the promise of upward mobility ground into the dust by decades of Republican politics. The author goes so far to talk about elder cleansing and generational harvesting, which would be clearly revealed in retrospect by future historians.

An extreme position, not backed up by empirical evidence, yes, I understand the varied reactions ranging from crap to idiocy I have heard when I talked about it with people. So why do I, not the most irrational person on the planet, see reason to keep an eye on the argument with a possibility that it might be true? Why do people who fully acknowledge that Republicans have embraced Social Darwinism, have refused vaccinations on the basis of non-scientific, ideologically driven beliefs, have shown publicly a willingness to sacrifice older generations, can’t go as far as acknowledging that there might be a condoning acceptance of lethal consequences when younger folks expose their elders to the virus,(if intentional parricide is a step too far?)

I wonder if Snyder’s arguments are deeply influenced by his immersion into Holocaust research, and my openness to them affected by being German. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has a whole section devoted to the way Nazism, German people, average citizens like you and I, betrayed people deemed unworthy of life in ways that insured economic benefit to the perpetrators. As early as 1933, laws were established to force the sterilization of all persons who lived with diseases considered hereditary, such as mental illness, learning disabilities, physical deformity, epilepsy, blindness, deafness, and severe alcoholism. These people were colloquially called useless eaters.

Daily cost of feeding a disabled person and a healthy family.

The program escalated but 6 years later with Operation T 4, which instated “mercy death” of non-Jewish German and Austrian citizens by gassing. By the end of the war an estimated 275.000 people living with disabilities had been murdered. These included people who were brought to the authorities by their families for no other reason than being “difficult” spouses or defiant daughters (blamed to have mental illness) or elders who did not want to dish out an early inheritance. The euthanasia program explicitly included incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally distraught, and elderly people.

There has been a lot of psychological research looking at how the elderly are valued over younger lives, with decisions made by participants across the world that IF they have to sacrifice some life, it will be the elderly over the teens. Those sentiments are enhanced during times of crisis. Public discourse during the epidemic (social media content analyzed by scientists) showed an increasing amount of ageism with some proportion alluding to senicide (the killing of or abandoning to death of the elderly.) Real life scenarios certainly happened in several countries across the pandemic where a lack of ventilators forced doctors to do triage with a cut-off of age as low as 65 in some places where you were no longer eligible to have your life saved. Princeton Psychologist Susan Fiske who studies prejudice and ageism finds in her surveys that “younger people want to be sure that the elderly don’t hog a disproportionate amount of time and resources. Older people are expected to step aside.” The only American cultures that have consistently positive views of the elderly are African Americans and Native Americans.

Prejudice against old people is of course a far cry away from stepping up and actually killing the old by active measures. One can look at the moral deprivation of murder at one extreme of the scale. On the other end of the continuum would be the morally justified decisions by doctors to grant survival to those who benefit most of it, the young, when means to ensure survival are limited. Then there is the vast area in-between. There is morally unacceptable action – the decision to expose vulnerable populations to maskless visitors, say or state decrees forbidding mask mandates. Or equally debatable inaction of the authorities to demand protective devices or order vaccinations mandates for people who come in contact with vulnerable populations, or the personal decisions by police, firefighters or nurses not to get vaccinated.

To get back to Snyder’s Covid scenario, yes, it might be .0002 % or whatever tiny proportion of maskless visitors to retirement homes who have consciously nefarious motives. Bad apples, etc. pp. Once a political administration justifies the sacrificing of this or that constituency under the mantle of Social Darwinism, however, personal motives can find political backing, ruthlessness can be uncorked, as history has shown. And we are very few steps away from such an administration in the years to come. Looking at some State governments, we are there already.

Stones on my heart, indeed.

Music more representative of fall than spring, but there’s still hope that spring might be rushing back….

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The Wishing Tree

I wish, I wish, I wish – oh, so many wishes.

Some are tinged with ire.

I wish judges like this didn’t exist, much less be allowed to practice law.

Some of my wishes are colored by regret: I wish we had more information about what our actions actually engender. Case in point: Ordering stuff on-line with the full expectation that we can send it back if it doesn’t work out and it will be restocked.

I actually never ever ordered things on-line pre-pandemic, other than getting bed linens from L.L.Bean or some such. I still rarely do it, but felt horrible when I chanced on information that explained the environmental cost of ordering on line right after sending back pants that were too big. And no, we are not just talking cost of transport, the trucks and trailers and planes and container ships wasting fuel and polluting in order to deal with the return of things that did not fit or did not please.

Here is a detailed description of what all these returns amount to: they are thrown into the garbage. Inspection cost (were items worn or damaged,) repacking and restocking cost are so high for the manufacturers that they simply forgo those options for the returned merchandise valued more than $ 100 billion, last year alone. Some items might be stripped for valuable parts, but a lot of it goes directly into the landfill. That is particularly true for clothing.

Why don’t companies donate the returned items to charity, so at least they get a tax write off? Brand dilution! If paying folks see their brand names displayed by the homeless they will no longer buy that brand…many companies now tell you even to keep the unwanted merchandise and they refund you nonetheless, hoping to save the cost, time, and labor to deal with it and leave it to you to dispose of it, pretending that they are generous. In the meantime, people who are not aware of the damage, order in multiple colors and sizes, keeping only the perfect fit and send the rest back.

I wish I had known, I wish more of us knew these things. But these are unlikely thoughts to be found on the scraps of paper hanging from wishing trees, like the ancient horse chestnut tree on the corner of 7th and NE Morris St. Established by property owner Nicole Helprin in 2013, this tree has seen so many wishes and dreams added over the years. Rumor has it that the occasional paper blown away into the streets represents a wish fulfilled.

Wishing trees have been around for a long time, across diverse cultures, many concerned with issues of love, fertility, safety, and some with peace. People deposit expressed words, or pieces of cloth, or coins, depending on custom.

Wishing tree from Alaçati, Turkey (source on web)
Tanabata Festival wishing tree in Japan (source on web)
Wishing tree spiked with coins in Scotland ( source on web)
Wishing tree hung with Nazar in Anatolia

Why trees? Association with powerful forces (of nature) or home to otherworldly powers that could make wishes come true? In their height closer to the heavens, home to benevolent grantors? Antennas?

For me psychologically more interesting is the fact that people like to externalize what could be a private prayer or wish – the very act of making it public, saying it out loud, seems to have some meaning. Maybe the act of sharing makes you feel less alone, or heard, even if the next reader is not the powerful entity that could fulfill your wish. Maybe the act of voicing it defines a problem that you want to be collectively remembered and then collectively tackled (certainly for the wishes for peace or end of poverty.) Maybe putting it in words clarifies, through the very act of verbalizing, the hierarchy of your own needs and provides access to thoughts about action.

I wish I knew.

If you don’t have handy access to a wishing tree you can easily send your wishes to a project dedicated to putting up wishes, or, as the case may be, filling a well with them. Yoko Ono started an interactive art work in 1996 asking people to write down their wishes, hang them on trees displayed around museums and civic spaces. Over a million of them are preserved and stored in the wishing well, adjacent to a light sculpture called the Imagine Peace Tower in Island, a beam that is lit up at certain times of the year. Here is the link to send your’s in if that would make a difference.

Mine, in the meantime:

Looks like my adventure is cut short….

And here is Roger waters of Pink Floyd fame with Three Wishes.

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Glowing Pumpkins

You get a reprieve, dear reader. In my ongoing quest to figure out how the mind works, I was going to write about new theories of consciousness proposed by neuroscientist Anil Seth. His work is the most recent iteration of figuring out the mind/body problem. He discusses the fact that what we perceive consciously is both informative – that one given experience is different from everything else you ever have or ever will perceive – and integrated, every aspect of perception is tied into a whole in fundamental ways. He also has become known for his claim that our brains in some way hallucinate our conscious reality.

But then I thought,”Nah, it’s Friday, let’s do something less demanding. If they want to read up on it, a good intro can be found here.” Let’s just cite one bit since it relates to some of the motivation behind my montage work, which often attempts to take one perception and create one of the many possible alternatives.

“Each (conscious experience) rules out the occurrence of a very, very large repertoire of alternative possible conscious experiences. It’s the reduction of uncertainty among a repertoire of alternative possibilities.“

I guess art is then the search through the repertoire of alternative possibilities….

On to something more entertaining – with montages that were chosen today as a counterweight to the words below: pumpkins bringing color and light to words describing darkness.

What words do we know about the fading or absence of light? Isn’t that question perfect for a stygian, rainy weekend? Stygian, you know, extremely dark, gloomy, or forbidding? From the river Styx where souls are ferried to the underworld? Well, this English-as-a-second language writer hadn’t heard of it either. (I found all of them in the Merriam Webster dictionary.)

I did know umbra, though, from the Latin word for shadow. Not versed in its many variations, however. Adumbrate (to foreshadow; to suggest; to obscure,) inumbrate (to put in shadow,)sombra (the shady side of a bullfight arena – tickets cost more?)burnt umber (a dark brown color,) umbrage (shade; suspicion; resentment,) and last but not least umbrella (device for protecting from rain.)

Next we have tenebrous which means “shut off from the light,” a synonym of dark or murky. Which leads to feeling  somber, (gloomy, sullen, melancholy, or dejected in appearance or mood.)

There is caliginous (misty, dark,) and its cousins fuliginous (dark, having the color of soot,) and carbonous (“brittle and dark or almost black in color.”)

Maybe we should focus on crepuscule, a fancy word for twilight or gloaming which is a synonym of “twilight” or “dusk.” There’s at least a smidgen of light still there. And gloaming comes from the Old English word “glōm,” which is akin to “glōwan,” meaning “to glow,” which is what my patient pumpkins try to do in their new visual roles. May they bring cheer!

Music: Liszt’s Nuages Gris (Grey clouds) seem the right fit, in original piano score and then a version for guitar which is actually interesting. And when you’re done with everything else, go out and pick some pumpkins! Just don’t wait until it gets dark….

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And what kind of personality are you?

In case you still wondered about joking patterns in this household, with someone downstairs in the study, the other at her place of writing, a.k.a. “the bed,” here is last weekend’s exchange (my part in blue.)

What are we talking about? The Myers Briggs Personality Test, which became a topic of interest with us after discovering some of its history. You might have heard about the test, for all I know you might have taken it during your life time. It is one of the most used personality tests in the world, taken by about 2 million people annually and generating income for the industry to the tune of $20 million a year. Fortune 100 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military all use it.

Before I list what the test claims to measure, let me put it as gently as I can: the test is completely useless. In contrast to what is claimed by the industry that makes money off it, it does not predict how you’ll feel or perform or handle situations or fare in career choices. It does not reliably assess who you are – the results from taking it are inconsistent across time for the majority of people, even if they space session only a month apart. Importantly, it ignores the complexity of human personality by forcing you into categories rather than allowing for measurement along a range or a continuum.

In other words, you are asked to make binary choices along 4 dimensions: are you an introvert or an extrovert, someone who intuits or senses, a perceiver or a judger, do you think or feel. The answers push you into discrete categories, and all have some positive slant (you’re a thinker, an explorer, a dreamer – never a sadist or a narcissist or some such) – one of the reasons people are happy with the test. They also feel that the test must be accurate because after all it spits right back at you what you just reported – hey, they got you right!

These binaries are artificial, of course – none among us is only thinking or feeling, judging all the time or any other of these variables. Psychologists, with rare exceptions, look at personality (and test it accordingly) along a continuum, considering a  five-factor model that measures people’s openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism — factors that do differ widely among people, according to actual data collected and that are predictive for performance.

Here is the simplest example I can come up with to explain the difference between being put in a category vs. on a continuum. Take three people, their height being 4.9, 5.1 and 6.2 ft. respectively. If I artificially set a cut-off at 5.0 and everybody above it is tall and everybody below is short, then 5.1 and 6.2 are grouped together as tall people. Yet you surely agree that 4.9 and 5.1. have much more resemblance to each other than 5.1 and 6.2. If measured on a continuum the appropriate placing relative to each other is maintained. You can find a short, fun podcast on the personality test topic here.

What is fascinating about the Myers Briggs is its history, though, laid out in detail in a book about the mother daughter pair who invented the test in the 1920s. The mom, Katherine Cook Briggs, a homemaker, was an ardent fan of psychologist Carl Jung; her daughter, Isabel Myers Briggs wrote detective novels (with intense racist premises, no less) and was eager to bring her mother’s insights about Jungian psychology (not exactly shared by Jung himself who always warned of putting people into too neatly designed categories and refused to help the mother/daughter pair) into the mainstream and use it as a tool for “personology” as they called it. Neither had scientific training. Their work took off in the mid 1940s and has been mainstream in hiring decisions across the nation ever since. Here is a trailer for an HBO documentary on the politics (and dangers) of personality testing. Not sure I could stomach watching the whole film, given my current desire to avoid any more bad news….

And since you are dying to know: I am (for now – the assessment would likely change 4 weeks from now) a

As the testing site told me: “Few personality types are as creative and charismatic as Campaigners (ENFPs). Known for their idealism and enthusiasm, these personalities excel at dealing with unexpected challenges and brightening the lives of those around them. Yet Campaigners can be tripped up in certain areas of their lives. When it comes to building relationships, choosing a career, or turning their dreams into reality, people with this personality type may need to consciously address their weaknesses and gain new skills – even as they draw on their many strengths.”

Try it out for yourself, for free and for fun, not science. And remember, YOU just told them how you see yourself, so to no-one’s surprise their echoing it back sounds like they’ve hit on something.

Music today is fittingly devoted to the Four Temperaments, (Melancholy : Sanguine : Phlegmatic : Choleric), Hindemith’s score commissioned for a George Balanchine Ballet from 1946. Here is a seductive review of what one can expect to see and hear tonight regarding this piece, if you are lucky enough to have scored tickets to OBT’s season opening. Two more performances on Saturday.

Photographs are the last of the clematis, reminding me with their gracefulness and little tutus of ballerinas.

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Into The Vanishing Point

Van·ish·ing point/noun

1. the point at which receding parallel lines viewed in perspective appear to converge.

2. the point at which something that has been growing smaller or increasingly faint disappears altogether.

– Merriam Webster

Heads up. I’ll be thinking out loud today to formulate why I had such strong, differing reactions to two books I tackled across the last weeks. Hear the brain gears creak….

I picked up Siri Hustvedt‘s Memories of the Future partly because I had adored her previous novel The Blazing World for its wonderfully perceptive and sarcastic skewering of misogyny in the art world. I was also curious how the experiences of the protagonist in the new book, a transplant from rural Minnesota arriving in New York City in 1978, would compare to my own experiences of arrival at the same time and place coming from Germany. A slight nostalgic twinge was soon overshadowed by a growing irritation.

The story moves back and forth between the thoughts and actions of the young protagonists in the late 70s, revealed in diaries recently discovered during a move, and the contemplations of the same person now old and an established author. The reader is invited to share the explorations of selves across time in complicated structure, a piece of auto fiction, given that the protagonist bears the same initials as the author of the novel in hand, S.H., laced with Hustvedt’s usual mediations on what constitutes truth. Eventually the focus on male entitlement emerges, but it is buried in the desperate search for autobiographical as well as fictional selves who are fused to provide meaning for her current existence.

As someone who has spent the bulk of her academic career with research on issues of memory, I am curiously immune to reminiscing. Instead, my days are spent with thoughts about how to make it through the day (on bad days) and how to make a difference (on good days,) anchored in present and future then, rather than the past. Although I understand why reminiscing gives pleasure to people or raises hopes that they might discover unknown patterns, I simply have no interest. Part of that might be the fear that it often veers into navel gazing, defined by Merriam Webster as useless or excessive self-contemplation, for which they helpfully provide tons of synonyms:

egocentricity, egocentrism, egoism, egomania, egotism, narcissism, self-absorption, self-centeredness, self-concern, self-interest, self-involvement, self-preoccupation, self-regard, selfishness, selfness.

Note, these concepts are reserved for excessive contemplation – there is nothing wrong with simple self-reflection if it leads to clarity about purpose or understanding of what needs to be done to shift a burdensome status-quo. To trust memory of younger selves, though, might not be the way to go, given that these are often reconstructions based on our current understanding of world and needs and self. They also are prone to favor psychological interpretations, rather than acknowledge the role that external factors and chance play in one’s development across time. The actual selves across a life time have really disappeared into the vanishing point, no matter how much we long to resurrect them.

Part of my negative reaction to the convoluted focus on self in this novel is likely derived from a different source, though – the sense that the notion of individuality, ones’ role in the world, one’s specific being and accomplishments, feeds into or is exploited by the western ideology of individualism as a higher goal. The notion of being the master of one’s fate has been used – still is, just look at current legislative budget wrangling – to justify a system that favors those who have succeeded, seemingly by their own strength rather than structural factors that empowered them. It is an empty promised designed to maintain a status quo of inequalities.

Which brings me to the other book that has captured my attention, this time with awe. I was alerted to Gayl Jones‘ first novel in 22 years, Palmares, by an exuberant review in the NYT by Imany Perry, (followed by an inane one by Hilton Als in the New Yorker.) The novel is narrated by Almeyda, starting in 1670 when she is an enslaved child in Brazil. The story unfolds like stories of old, linearly through time, laced with magic when suffering becomes unbearable, full of unflinching descriptions of unimaginable brutalities and tales of heroism, cleverness and endurance.

Along the way we get educated about real life history of enclaves that were built by escaped slaves, only to be destroyed again by colonial powers. We learn about a surprising amount of education and knowledge – including the fact how many slaves were multi-lingual, referring to Latin as the language of Horace and Virgil rather than the proselytizing priests – helping the rebelling slaves to build their own communities. We get to know how exposure to scores of traveling explorers, pirates, artists and scientists influenced the growing knowledge of a world beyond the colonial empire. We also are made to understand that Palmares, the free republic, was not an island of the morally intact – human nature in its force to oppress, sanction, or punish driven by inferior motives, rules there as anywhere.

Almeyda bears witness, describes the fates of a people rather than focus on self. We barely know her other than through tangential descriptions with the sole exception of a declaration at the half-point of the novel: Asks what it is she wants she says, “Liberty, safety, solitude.” All withheld by slavery. Even in her unfolding love story there is never a reported communication of her emotions, just the facts of her commitment under the worst of circumstances.

Her name – yes I’m stretching here – struck me as al(l) before me, a soul (alma) that holds collective memory, the sum of all experience, knowledge and feeling, rather than the relentless preoccupation with individual self. It serves the memory of a group that needs the guidance of stories as a repository of its history, given the dispersion into the diaspora through sales and forced relocation, before it disappears into the vanishing point. And rarely has that story been told in more gripping ways than in Palmares.

For those interested in current psychological research on cultural memory, here are two interesting sources:

One talks, among other issues, about how children are taught to remember events with a focus on factors outside of self in different cultures, the other talks about the impact of collective memory compared to individual memory on groups.

Music today by a composer who was born in 1939, the incredible Annea Lockwood. ‘Into The Vanishing Point’ is a piece developed with New York piano and percussion quartet. Its starting point was a text on the collapse of insect populations, and the sound world frequently conjures the clacking of mandibles, the frictions of exoskeletons, the piano a monstrous human imposition upon the brittle percussive sounds. Or, as mentioned before, the likely noise of the gears in my brain….

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Rebels Welcome

The time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is supposed to be one of of taking stock of one’s actions. Contemplation of right and wrong, of divine judgement and human repentance, might guide an annual reset. Not a bad idea given that we could all improve on ourselves, even if I don’t buy into the belief that some higher agency will dish out consequences (the concept of hell is conspicuously absent in Judaism but there is a judging G-d.)

I have my own do’s and don’t’s list, in addition to the usual ones that define a moral person. One of the don’ts is to post poems that I fail to understand, necessitating spending the better part of a day to read up on possible meanings. One of the do’s is to break my own rule when what I learned really fits with the focus of the week, defining good or bad, as well as how what we know shapes our beliefs and subsequently actions.

The cryptic poem can be found at the beginning of William Blake‘s book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, introduced as “The Argument.” (The full version of the short book, without the engravings, can be found here.)

What I knew: Blake was an exceptional artist with a visionary mind. He was a poet, a painter, an engraver, combining his skills to produce works that were multilayered, drawings interacting with the text. I was also aware that he was, in the context of the revolutionary movements of his time (we are talking the late 1700s,) a strong voice for change and breaking up patterns dictated by church and state.

What I learned about this particular poem: it was a parody directed at the religious cult around a philosopher guy named Swedenborg (never heard of him.) It used imagery directly derived from the Old Testament (who knew) and is populated by characters that are interpreted in 100 different ways by Blake scholars (and there are many – how would I choose?) It also tries – that’s where it gets interesting – to break up the dichotomy between angels and devils, the meek, rational, obedient good people, and the energetic, sinful, creative, rebellious bad ones. If you can figure out how that can be inferred from the lyrics you have a clear advantage over me. Something about the meek and the wild switching habitats? Crossing over?

The text goes on with prose, which makes it a little bit clearer:

“Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.

From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason; Evil is the active springing from Energy.

Good is heaven. Evil is hell.“

Blake insists that our existence depends on a combination of forces that move us forward (the marriage of the title.) It might be in the interest of those in power wanting to the retain the status quo, to designate us into “Team Good” and “Team Evil,” but for progress to happen we have to acknowledge that we are “Team Human,” as someone cleverly said. (My main source for what I learned was an issue of Image/Text (3.2) entirely devoted to scholars of the artist.)

Being human is not either/or, all good or all vile. We are complex enough to accommodate impulses from all directions, to heed some more than others, or do so in different contexts or different times. We might be the just (wo)man at times, or the sneaking, snaky villain at others, going from meek to enraged or in reverse. Change, both in the personal and the political realm, depends on it. Change, in the New Year, will depend on embracing all of what makes us human, and not waste energy to isolate bits and pieces at the expense of others. Intellect and sensuality, rationality and emotionality, acquiescence and rebelliousness can and must coexist.

Blake delivered this progressive message in a time of political upheaval both in the Americas and during the aftermath of the French Revolution, and I would never have known, if not for those who teach this stuff. Which brings me to a contemporary essay, also with a focus on the relative merits of acquiescence and rebellion, that outlines the danger of selective telling of history (in this case linked to the celebration of Labour Day.)

Adam Johnson, one of the most incisive young writers around, and Sarah Lazare deplore in The Column how even seemingly “progressive media outlets minimize radical elements of American history and recast liberal reforms as the primary movers of justice and political change.” It’s a short read and worth your time, providing food for thought why the establishment clings to meek(er) agents of change and prefers them to the call for more energetic rebellious action in Blake’s terms.

Let’s read up on our history!

Images today are selective Plates of Blake’s book, from an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, some years ago.

Here is some of Blake’s work set to music by Benjamin Britten.

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This Bunch or That?

It is the season for bunches, bands and batches, swaths and clusters of flowers in the meadows.

Yesterday’s photographic harvest was mostly common tansy, yarrow and goldenrod, all seemingly humming, which on closer inspection was, of course, the music of the bees.

The tightness of the clusters, the masses of plants all bunched together, reminded me of the polar opposite, isolation, and how that term (or state) has become such a focus for explanatory models of people willing to join groups or cults, when otherwise they’d never would have.

What do we know about that? Researchers have shown that people in places with high “social capital”—relationships and networks that connect us and enrich our lives – are more immune to being lured into cult-like groupings than those living in regions with low social capital.

And if you are lonely, belonging to the MAGA crowd has immediate rewards: you have an instant community, can travel with like-minded friends from rally to rally, feel connected through inside jokes and swag, just like following your favorite bands in days long gone. As one recent author, writing in the context of Trumpism preying on an emotional void, put it:

“There’s a reason vulnerable people are drawn to street gangs. There’s a reason Charles Manson preyed upon teenage runaways, and there’s a reason why so many poor Black women died in Jonestown. When you are down-and-out and lonely, you cling to the people who care enough to give you hope.”

Given the situation that we now face, I really want answers to the more immediate question, namely what it takes to get people out of cult-like existences. We cannot easily fix the causal societal ills of anomie and isolation and lack of community, although efforts in that direction have to be strengthened. Even if we did, there are reasons to fear that it would not necessarily make people leave Trumpland, and simply make a U-turn.

A convincing explanation for that sad fact, along with helpful suggestions, can be found here. Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s essay focusses on witness testimony of people who lived under historical authoritarian strong-men. She observes:

“Just as cultivation and conversion leverage strong positive emotions (belonging, inclusion, safety, rapture), so does disengagement evoke strong negative emotions (shame, humiliation, abjection) that many wish to avoid.

Shame and fears of punishment, ridicule, and loss of status can motivate individuals who have been victims of con men to stay silent. They can also lead people who start to realize that they have been misled by authoritarian propaganda to double down on their convictions out of pride. 

Saving face can seem like a psychic necessity as it becomes increasingly difficult to deny the leader’s untruths and destruction, and individuals may feel betrayed as well as humiliated.”

We need to add to that list the fact that psychological losses loom larger for us than potential gains, something called loss aversion (part of the psychological literature since Kahneman and Tversky published their seminal work in 1979.) Even if I start doubting the wisdom of the Elders of Trumpland, I would still loose the community I’ve just found, the sense of belonging that I so yearned for, if I were to leave now. It seems also to be the case that cultures that favor individualism and masculinity, like our’s, tend to display a higher degree of loss aversion. (Ref.)

Ben-Ghiat concludes:

“This is why experts emphasize the importance of avoiding judgmental attitudes when dealing with people disengaging from cults. We should also resist the temptation to present individuals with evidence of the failure, corruption, or nonsensical nature of the cause they embrace. Such evidence will come from sources that are still tainted for them, and likely makes use of  language and reasoning they have been taught to distrust.“

That is, of course, more easily said than done. How can you not try to reason? Never mind assumptions about blood-slurping pedophile rings in the subterranean regions of the White House…. how can you not confront (dis)beliefs with visible, undoubtable facts of close to a million people dead in this country from a disease that could have been conquered with timely and appropriate measures? Do you really have to “empathize” with Covid-deniers, as the National Review suggested?

Some people furiously disagree, sociologist Brooke Harrington among them. Here is a drawn out thread on her argument. She summarizes:

“The “moral failure” of the COVID+ pandemic deniers & anti-vaxxers ranting from ICU beds is to prioritize saving face over saving other peoples’ lives. They could do the latter by telling the truth & exposing the con, saying “COVID is real, get vaccinated.” But they don’t.…. Since they’ve chosen moral failure, & now endanger us all with their face-saving maneuvers, the pragmatic question is: How do we keep them from killing the rest of us?“

As it turns out, she believes (on the basis of sociological science) that only people who are trusted, family and former fellow cult members or current leaders associated with it, are in a position to help change minds, minimize shame and need for face saving for cult members trying to turn around.

Which means, most of us get a pass, right?

Not much going to happen, either.

The flowers didn’t care. They just radiated warmth and color and purloined sound, making me happy, willing to forget about politics and psychology for an uplifting hour.

You should experience the same by listening to this music: Mahler’s 4th which describes heaven through a child’s eye.

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See to it!

“Ach Gottchen,”(Ohhhh, little God) my mother would cry when I’d appear tear-streaked in the door. Not clear if the diminutive name of a power she steadfastly believed to be almighty was meant to appease that power, or if it implied a call for mercy. “Ach Kindchen,” (Ohhhh, little child) my atheist father would sigh with quivering helplessness before turning away. Both tender utterings, pointing to a higher agent or infantilizing, respectively, did, of course, nothing to combat my sense of powerlessness.

I could almost hear their voices saying these words this week when I felt overwhelmed by the climate news, starting with the fires here, the drought, the floods in Germany with scores dead and many more missing, the seemingly futile resistance in the struggles against pipe lines, and so much more. What do you do when climate crisis depression hits, or any other kind of upset over the world’s fate?

Someone mentioned Octavia Butler‘s work as an anti-dote. The African-American author (1947 – 2006) was groundbreaking in many ways, not least that she was the first Back woman to succeed in the male-dominated field of Science Fiction. Recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant and the PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award, among others, she wrote prescient novels about global warming, Black injustice and misogyny before her untimely death from a fall in 2006.

I must confess that I had trouble warming up to her tales, the Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Talents in the early 1990s, trying to juggle small children, teaching undergraduates, doing research, and translating a book. There was something too close for comfort, with its setting in a drought-stricken Los Angeles, CA, the advent of authoritarian rulers, the victimization of non-Whites, and the expressed belief that some sort of religion – Earthseed, which held many a Christian tenet – could be of help to the resistance. I liked my science fiction then in the worlds of Gene Wolf and, as you all know, Ursula LeGuin, worlds that were sufficiently removed (if also true mirrors) that they gave my high anxiety some breathing space.

Butler’s parabels’ current resurgence is driven, however, not just by her prescient description of our country’s developments and challenges. Her protagonist is a young woman who believes in change, believes that G-d is change, and that we can shape and influence pragmatically what is around us, be agents of change ourselves. There is a sense of “outsized resolve,” as an essay in the New Yorker put it, a belief in pragmatic solutions and the will to bring them about that works like an anti-depressant.

The heroine’s resolve echoes that of the author, who grew up in poverty, worked multiple low-level jobs during her decades of writing, and who chose a field, Afrofuturism, that had its own obvious challenges.

Over the decades, as she was writing her most popular novel, “Kindred,” and two highly regarded series—her five-part Patternist books and her Xenogenesis trilogy—Butler was filling personal journals with affirming mantras. “I am a bestselling writer,” one entry, dated 1975, reads. “I write bestselling books.” She closes: “So be it! See to it!” 

A short autobiographical essay that describes her way of looking at and fighting for things, a wonderful, moving read about positive obsession, can be found here.

For those who want a perceptive and humorous miniature version, read this poem by another successful Sci-Fi writer, Patrick O’Leary.

Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. LeGuin, Octavia E. Butler and I are sitting on a bench.

Gene is to my right fiddling around with his cane.

Ursula — or “Ullyses Kingfisher” as I like to call her, is smoking a pipe. (We’ve never met.)

Ms Butler is sitting way down at the end.

I realize that they are dead and this is a dream.

But I seize the moment.

I can now ask them the one question I’ve wondered about for years.

“Gene?”

He raises an unruly eyebrow at me, his handlebar droops, unimpressed.

“When you were alive who did you think was the best writer in the world?”

Gene full-faces me and raises the other eyebrow.

I have never been so insulted in my life.

A waft of cannabis pulls me to my left. “How about you, UK?”

“Don’t call me U U!”

“I did not call you: you you!”

“You did it again!”

“Come on! Who was the best?”

“Who gives a fuck?” She points. “Look at that hawk!”

I look. Perfectly flat slate of water to the horizon. Total Bergman.

When I turn back, Ursula is gone.

I look to my right. Gene left his cane. It makes that face at me.

I turn to Octavia who is sitting like a blue rock in a river.

“Estelle?”

“Me,” she says.

Which brings us back to the beginning. The best way to fight the climate- or other blues is by clinging to, or if need be conjuring up, a sense of agency. By forcing ourselves to be engaged as agents of change in whatever way we do it best, writing blogs included…, or calling politicians, or donating money, or all the other things you people excel in. See to it.

And if that doesn’t work, there is always ice cream.

Photographs are of meadow patterns from this week.

Music (Lemonade by Beyonce) is influenced by Octavia Butler as well, covering her other great topic, the Black female body.

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Citizen Informants

Esther Bejarano z”l, one of the last survivors of Auschwitz’s girl orchestra, died this weekend at age 96. A life-long fighter for remembrance and against authoritarian regimes, she was a controversial figure in Germany to which she returned in the 1960s, critical of Israel’s politics and Zionism, something that (non-Jewish!) Germans would not tolerate as can even be seen in the varied reactions to her death. An active member of the German Communist Party (DKP), she taught many generations, mine included, about fascism and resistance, about the twin evils of silence and forgetting.

The Holocaust survivor taught us that to fight against authoritarian movements you have to be familiar with their play-books. When you see tricks from those books popping up all over the place, you know where to turn your attention. I was reminded of that when I read last week about the new law in Texas that prohibits abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy, when you can detect the fetus’ heartbeat. One of the key clauses in this bill involves reliance on citizen informants, who can sue doctors and clinics if they detected “illegal” abortions, with an award for each successful lawsuit of a minimum of $10.000. All the gory details of this new law, and the implications of its attempts to switch enforcement from state to citizens can be found in this New York Times article.

Photographs are from sights and objects found in public squares in small Texan towns

I want to focus here, though, on the psychology of denunciation in our current political situation. When I think about informants my immediate thoughts turn to either Nazi Germany or the former GDR where 189.000 citizen informers fed the STASI with reports of real or assumed behavior of neighbors. In both cases, the betrayal of Jews, people with anti-Hitler sentiments, or prohibited sexual orientation in the 1930s, and the denunciation of anti-socialist, pro-western ideologies in the post-war GDR, led to extreme punishments, even death sentences. Actions had existential consequences and yet people flocked to tell on their neighbors.

Of course, Germany is not an isolated case. Think Argentinian security structures during the years of dictatorship, or look at the North Korean neighborhood watch system, that every single citizen is required to belong to. A self-policing citizenry helps an authoritarian regime, providing otherwise impossible access to private information and saving resources that would have to go to hired enforcement.

But what are the citizens’ motivations that lead to this collaboration? There is a bunch of scientific literature on the topic, but also literary case studies of individual cases, particularly of women who in this regard switch from the role of victim quite often to the role of perpetrator. Personal interest to settle old scores, jealousy, elimination of competition, attention seeking, trying to vie for favor with the state, fear and, yes, money, all contribute to the eagerness to denunciate. Seen from a different angle, women in particular, who are usually overall less free to act, more oppressed in authoritarian regimes and traditional societal and family structures, can experience agency.

And women will know about other women’s bodies. And no bodily issue is more about religious identity and revenge against a world that has seemingly left White evangelicals behind, than abortion.

Denunciations are nothing new in American history. As early as 1657 we had a New Hampshire law that incentivized locals to become informants on Quaker activities (and penalized anyone housing them) by offering hefty sums of money. In the early 1950s, with the United States in the grip of McCarthyism, the state encouraged a culture of denunciation, where thousands of Americans were accused of communist involvement or sympathies and subsequently publicly shamed, marginalized, persecuted or prohibited to pursue their chosen careers. Never mind that there often was no evidence, no right to respond, no legal protection.

Here and now, though, the extremes of polarization have made enmity personal. People are not just scared of some nebulous commies taking on the US, eager to protect the nation. People are seeing their own personal beliefs and circumstances under attack, their religious beliefs ridiculed, their relative societal status in decline from within. That makes motivation to get back at those around you, perceived to be the enemy, all the more personal, justifying to be vicious. Being active collaborators in this battle for religious. political and cultural dominance also creates an increased sense of in-group cohesion. It’s us against them, and if we can manage, let’s have them rot in jail. Down to the Über driver who transported the woman to the abortion clinic. I predict a deluge. As does the Texan government whose trick book is not coincidentally taking its tricks from regimes that they long to emulate. Hardening polarization, they know, will keep them in power by motivating and accepting extreme measures.

At least Esther Bejarano z”l is spared to have to live through a repeat of history. May her memory be a blessing – and an obligation.

Music depicts her performances in the last years with the Hip Hop Band Microphone Mafia. She was in her nineties. I stand in awe.

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