Photo: E. Byrne WILL YOU?
When, at the end, the children wanted
to add glitter to their valentines, I said no.
I said nope, no, no glitter, and then,
when they started to fuss, I found myself
saying something my brother’s football coach
used to bark from the sidelines when one
of his players showed signs of being
human: oh come on now, suck it up.
That’s what I said to my children.
Suck what up? my daughter asked,
and, because she is so young, I told her
I didn’t know and never mind, and she took
that for an answer. My children are so young
when I turn off the radio as the news turns
to counting the dead or naming the act,
they aren’t even suspicious. My children
are so young they cannot imagine a world
like the one they live in. Their God is still
a real God, a whole God, a God made wholly
of actions. And I think they think I work
for that God. And I know they will someday soon
see everything and they will know about
everything and they will no longer take
never mind for an answer. The valentines
would’ve been better with glitter, and my son
hurt himself on an envelope, and then, much
later, when we were eating dinner, my daughter
realized she’d forgotten one of the three
Henrys in her class. How can there be three Henrys
in one class? I said, and she said, Because there are.
And so, before bed we took everything out
again—paper and pens and stamps and scissors—
and she sat at the table with her freshly washed hair
parted smartly down the middle and wrote
WILL YOU BE MINE, HENRY T.? and she did it
so carefully, I could hardly stand to watch.
~ Carrie Fountain
*
My children are so young
when I turn off the radio as the news turns
to counting the dead or naming the act,
they aren’t even suspicious. My children
are so young they cannot imagine a world
like the one they live in.
~ This is an utterly serious and even tragic poem in the guise of a sweet little domestic scene. The children are too young to grasp mass shootings, and the mother sensibly doesn’t push such traumatizing subjects on them. At the same time, because they are so young, they can show brilliant common sense:
How can there be three Henrys
in one class? I said, and she said, Because there are.
But the seriousness starts sooner, quite soon after the “innocent” opening about glitter:
. . . I found myself
saying something my brother’s football coach
used to bark from the sidelines when one
of his players showed signs of being
human: oh come on now, suck it up.
That’s what I said to my children.
Suck what up? my daughter asked,
and, because she is so young, I told her
I didn’t know and never mind, and she took
that for an answer.
How we treat children often depends on the role models we’ve had and how they treated children. Thus, the speaker’s brother had a coach who didn’t tolerate “signs of being human” among his players. We don’t tolerate feelings — they can be trouble. Boys don’t cry, and increasingly girls are supposed to be more like boys and be tough and brave. Never mind the spiel about nurturing and empathy.
There is even theology here: to a young child, god is a kind of Superman in the Sky; He’s real and he does things (presumably good things; he cares; he helps people). Mommy works for this kind god:
Their God is still
a real God, a whole God, a God made wholly
of actions. And I think they think I work
for that God.
(I’m so envious. The talk of hell started early in my religion lessons, so I could never see god as good. But then perhaps I assume too much here: the poem doesn’t explicitly state that the children’s god is all-good.)
And then we’re back to making valentines — and the daughter’s earnestness is such that it’s difficult for the mother to watch. The parent knows that this trust in the world will pass away, this ability to accept anything at face value, without doubt and skepticism. A child's valentine is in a way like the wagging of a dog's tail — it doesn't lie.
Though we are told to be like little children in order to enter heaven, we know we can never be — we’ve known too much evil, especially of the random and undeserved kind, to ever have that kind of faith. And what is even more shattering, we learn not just that bad things happen, and that people, even those we love, can hurt us — we learn that we too can hurt people, even those who love us. Life itself is the Forbidden Fruit.
Now, I am not saying that childhood is wonderful and it’s downhill from there. Absolutely not. The point is that we must reach for the Forbidden Fruit — there is no avoiding it. We must learn about good and evil, and all the shades in between. Churches encourage us to be like little children, but the point is to become truly adult, capable of dealing with complexity and ambiguity.
Our reward is that we learn to find something good even in an apparent misfortune, and to appreciate whatever delights life truly provides. Even though, as Tony Hoagland remarks, “We mainly learn not to be so clever,” we know that it’s more interesting to be clever (without becoming overconfident) and learn as much about reality as we can — then we will never be bored.
*
On a minor note, I guess the speaker thought glitter would be too messy. In the hands of young children, though, anything gets messy, and you live with it — though glitter, as Mary observed, is pretty much forever. And the speaker admits that the valentines would be better with glitter — that symbol of illusion.
CHARLES SIMIC ON POETRY AS OPTIMISM, THE IDEAL READER
~ “Each poem is addressed to an ideal reader. You are reaching out to tell someone something you passionately believe in and there is something religious about it, something sacred. In a sense you want to tell the truth. These are all very big words but I’m tired of crap, of imprecision, of dehumanization. I want to simplify; I want to return to and communicate some basic human content.
All poets are guardians of the language—Pound said something like that. They keep certain channels of communication open. If there were no poets, how would the unconscious be articulated?
I feel poetry is, ultimately, optimistic. Despite the fact that I may write a series of very gloomy, dark poems, the gesture itself is a positive one. One celebrates—even living in despair. In some curious way that gesture is anonymous. There’s a level on which we wish to further ourselves, our own egos—but there are moments in which we feel very lucid, simply disarmed, where that gesture is so much greater than our destiny. You realize the greatness of poetry. We make the gesture then in the name of everyone who has ever lived. It is a selfless act.
The source of faith in the continuing possibilities of poetry comes from that long tradition. To read a poet who, let’s say, wrote 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, and to feel how contemporary he still it well, an astonishing experience. The great gesture, the selfless poetic act, is timeless, a moment outside history. With poetry we are still back in the cave, we still understand very little about the universe, we’re wondering, we’re astonished at the stars, everything is new everything is beautiful, complicated, mysterious.
The poet wishes secretly to be a philosopher—in other words, to understand the universe fully. But poetry differs from traditional philosophy in that it realizes that ideas have to be tested in daily existence, in simple ordinary human experiences. You sit one evening and string together a series of beautiful statements about life and go to bed kind of sublime, moved. Next morning one wakes up and, usually forgetting all that, goes his very grumpy way through simple daily tasks. Later on in the day, one remembers the ideas he had before and somehow . . . there’s some great gap. We don’t know how to incorporate it into our daily existence.
Let’s put it this way: philosophy is an intellectual activity, poetry an activity of the emotions. The ultimate aim of the emotions is to digest ideas. To take a great idea, a great proposition about the universe and feel what it means in relation to life on earth—well, that’s quite another matter.
The problem with philosophy is that it generalizes about everything including feelings, but poetry has no choice. It has to particularize. Actually, its magic comes from that faith in the concrete.
It seems to me that if you cut the man in half, if you throw a part of him out the window, pretty soon that other half is going to rebel and assert itself and you are going to have a lot of problems. But I think poetry is aware of that lace of balance and so it searches for the whole man.” ~
https://lithub.com/charles-simic-and-barry-lopez-on-a-roadtrip-1972/?fbclid=IwAR20mbgKMLGkbjATVUub5c63RU85YVeK75BxV6msscQo3_rliyNR6cHb8-0
Simic makes some wonderful remarks here. I was especially struck by poetry as optimism — since so much poetry is actually melancholy. But melancholy doesn't mean devoid of faith in the human spirit.
If a poem achieves true poetry, that undefinable but felt magic, then by the very fact of being poetry it lifts up our hearts. Sursum corda.
A bit on a tangent: I was struck by the statement that the aim of emotions is to digest ideas. One could as easily argue that the aim of ideas is to digest emotions, to tame them, control them. The two are intertwined in a complex and inseparable way.
PPS. Charon's Cosmology (1977) was the first collection of his that I've read, and it's still my
favorite.
*
“Happiness was never important. The problem is that we don't know what we really want. What makes us happy is not to get what we want. But to dream about it.” ~ Slavoj Žižek
“Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.” ~ Soren Kierkegaard
Van Gogh, Orchard in Bloom with Poplars, 1889; note the reflections*
HORSE USED TO BE HROS
Wasp used to be waps; bird used to be brid and horse used to be hros. Remember this when the next time you hear someone complaining about aks for ask or nucular for nuclear, or even perscription. It's called metathesis, and it's a very common, perfectly natural process.
Thunder used to be "thuner", and empty "emty". You can see the same process happening now with words like hamster, which often gets pronounced with an intruding "p". This is a type of epenthesis.
The "l" in folk, talk and walk used to be pronounced. Now almost everyone uses a "w" instead- we effectively say fowk, tawk and wawk. This process is called velarisation.
What the folk?
In Norwegian, "sk" is pronounced "sh". So early English-speaking adopters of skiing actually went shiing. Once the rest of us started reading about it in magazines we just said it how it looked. Influenced by spelling, some Americans are apparently starting to pronounce the "l" in words like balm and psalm (something which actually reflects a much earlier pronunciation).
(~ this is from The Guardian, but I accidentally lost the link — maybe because I was thinking of shiing in Norway.)
It would be logical to post an image of a hros, but Norway is so gorgeous, even if you don't shii . . .
It was learning other languages, as well as reading Shakespeare and other "old masters," that liberated me from the idea that there is just one correct way. There is the "accepted usage" — but it changes over time. And it's simply fun to know that "horse" used to be "hros" — how Norse that sounds, harking back to Beowulf.
Norway, hoar frost (no hros). Photo: Phoebe NilsenIMMORTALITY PROJECTS
~ “Young gorgeousness: Nothing so seemingly eternal nor so temporary. It's the most in-your-face, mind-splitting experience of the human condition, what psychologist Ernest Becker described as being like "Gods with anuses"
Through language, humans can imagine possessing eternity. But through language, we can also foresee our own deaths. We recognize reluctantly that we're still physical, still subject to entropy. We're in a bind: How do you throw all in knowing you'll be thrown out?
Becker argues that we find "immortality projects" ways to identify with some eternal something, a kind of disassociation from our ephemerality. Religion is a popular immortality project.
I skipped out on religion pretty early. A big one for me was young gorgeousness. I prayed at its altar, convinced of its absolute permanence even while knowing it fades.
Love songs helped. I still love, sing, and play them but I wonder about their effect on the young. It's perilous to send them out in the world besotted by the romantic norm. It's a little like giving booze to a 10-year-old.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
Oriana:
Freud spoke about why men strive for achievement: “for fame and the love of beautiful women.” Fame is of course an immortality project.
Portraits and eventually photographs were also “immortality projects”: the dominant idea of photography as a “passage to immortality” that “meant the medium was predisposed to seriousness over the ephemeral”; and that Victorian and Edwardian culture itself took a dim view of smiling, supported by a survey of smiling in portraits conducted by Nicholas Jeeves at the Public Domain Review that “came to the conclusion that there was a centuries-long history of viewing smiling as something only buffoons did.” (source: Open Culture)
One theory about why Americans smile so much is that immigrants tend to smile more to ingratiate themselves with the native-born. It's a quick way to show friendliness, and sometimes also to cover up not understanding something that was said. Another theory is that the smile started as a sales technique.
*
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.” ~ Adrienne Rich
Tasmania: Mount Rugby. How did I get from Adrienne Rich to Tasmania? Rich reminded me of Dickinson, who was perhaps the only American poet to mention Tasmania in a poem, though Dickinson used an archaic term, Van Damien's Land. If you doubt my explanation, you are correct: I found the image first, and only later found a way to connect it with poetry. Just to demonstrate through an innocent example that language is often used to rationalize and mislead. *
“No nostalgia is felt as keenly as nostalgia for things that never existed.” ~ Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman
But isn’t this the essence of all nostalgia? True, there are degrees to which to idealize and distort certain periods of life, certain places. I'm already nostalgic for the years when I was an active poet — but it’s not such a remote past that I can forget how utterly miserably I was during those years, marked by some severe emotional shocks and a lot of suffering, both emotional and physical (horrible migraines, for one thing).
Warsaw: dear old Palace of Culture *
“My own view is that Jewish humor will continue as long as the reigning note behind Jewish jokes continues to be the belief, everywhere confirmed, that out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing entirely straight can be made, that human nature in all its nuttiness does not change, and that the greatest fool of all — he could be mayor of Chelm, that legendary Jewish town of fools — is he who thinks it can.” ~ Joseph Epstein, Jews and Their Jokes
Chelm: City Hall. Chelm is close to Lublin and the Ukrainian border
Oriana:
This has been said many times before, but not as lucidly as here. (Source: Neuroscience News and Research, a reader’s comment)
John Guzlowski:
I did my PhD dissertation on RD Laing (a Scot psychologist) and contemporary fiction. His central book was called The Divided Self. In it he argues that the self is not one fixed self but a self that consists of what we assume is our self, what others assume is our self, and what we and others may assume is not our self but may be our self. He had some interesting ideas about how self-imagining destroys the deep self and the need to get back to essential experience with a full sense of how we as humans are addicted to self-imagining. The True Self is hard to pin down and always shifting. The bottom line is that we aren't who we say we are and will never be that self. To know the self we need to recognize this tendency to embrace our "false self."
Oriana:
It always fascinated me how various people bring out different aspects of what we call the self for lack of a better term. Thus, a lover may make us feel “like a new self.” I view “self” as a verb — it's a process, emerging and constantly shifting under a gazillion influences. Except for some individuals who deliberately cultivate a false self as sales technique (or for whatever purpose), we just "behave" according to habit, context, who we are with, are we teaching or in class as students etc — and stage of life, degree of stress, and other factors too numerous to be ever analyzed completely. At this point I have zero interest in "personality tests" — never mind what my personality "is" — rather, in what little time remains, what can I still accomplish, how can I contribute.
As for R.D. Laing, I know only summaries of his work. The good part was that he brought respect and compassion to the treatment of schizophrenia. The bad part was that he was one of the fathers of the anti-psychiatry movement, in an era with very little understanding of brain function and dysfunction.
And I’ve found a fascinating article based in part on an interview with his son, Adrian:
R.D. LAING: “HE SOLVED OTHER PEOPLE’S PROBLEMS, BUT NOT HIS OWN”
~ “The question of what it was like to be the child of one of the 20th century's most influential psychotherapists has been playing on Adrian's mind of late. 'It was ironic that my father became well-known as a family psychiatrist,' he says, 'when, in the meantime, he had nothing to do with his own family.’
'From the moment of birth [...],' Laing wrote in 1967, 'the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.’
Laing theorized that insanity could be understood as a reaction to the divided self. Instead of arising as a purely medical disease, schizophrenia was thus the result of wrestling with two identities: the identity defined for us by our families and our authentic identity, as we experience ourselves to be. When the two are fundamentally different, it triggers an internal fracturing of the self.
His theories overturned the prevailing orthodoxy of the day that mental illness was, as the German psychiatrist Karl Jaspers had put it, 'un-understandable'. He became a countercultural guru in the Sixties and Seventies, attracting a large anti-establishment following who admired his anarchic and individualist philosophies. Laing believed that mental illness was a sane response to an insane world and that a psychiatrist had a duty to communicate empathetically with patients. Once, when faced with a naked schizophrenic woman rocking silently to and fro in a padded cell, Laing took off his own clothes and sat next to her, rocking to the same rhythm until she spoke for the first time in months.
As a psychiatrist, both brilliant and unconventional, RD Laing pioneered the humane treatment of the mentally ill. But as a father, clinically depressed and alcoholic, he bequeathed his 10 children and his two wives a more checkered legacy.
This was partly a blighted genetic inheritance - Laing died, as did [his eldest son with his second wife] Adam, of a heart attack while playing tennis at the age of 61 [Adam died after a night of drinking]. He, too, struggled with drink and drugs, experimenting with LSD in his later years after being influenced by the work of the psychedelic drug pioneer Timothy Leary. But mostly, it was the result of an absorption in his work so total that he could be guilty of breath-taking callousness and seeming hypocrisy towards his own children. Adrian, 50, Laing's second eldest son, sees it like this: 'Anyone who has become deliberately well-known, inevitably they've done that at the expense of their family. They've gone their own way. They can't do both.’
According to his friends, colleagues and relatives, Laing was frequently unable to extend the compassion he felt for his patients to his own family. His children were left to grapple with their demons. For all his professional benevolence, Laing was a flawed parent. He, too, was capable of unleashing 'these forces of violence called love’.
Ronald Laing was five when his parents told him Santa Claus did not exist. He never forgave them, claiming in later years that the realization they had been lying to him triggered his first existential crisis. For the rest of his life, his childhood memories were bleak. He told interviewers of an emotionally deprived upbringing in the Govanhill area of Glasgow, with a disciplinarian mother who broke his favorite toys when he became too attached to them.
His background left Laing with an abiding antipathy towards the nuclear family. By the time of his death he had fathered six sons and four daughters with four women over a period of 36 years. 'I think his reputation took some blows in terms of the way he died, leaving behind 10 children and looking like an irresponsible father,' says Adrian, the youngest of five children Laing had with his first wife, Anne. 'There was an enormous backlash then from families who thought he was blaming them for their children's mental illness.’
His own family was the first casualty of Laing's increasing celebrity. The reissuing in 1965 of his most famous work, The Divided Self, led to frequent television and radio appearances. In many ways his existentialist approach - he believed that social 'sanity' was fabricated by mutual consent; that the mentally ill were as fully human as the medics who were classifying them - captured the countercultural zeitgeist of the 1960s. His radical rejection of convention ensured he became the most famous cult psychiatrist in the country.
Charismatic, darkly handsome and possessed of an innate sharpness of mind, he soon embarked on several extra-marital affairs, spending weeks and months away from the family home in northwest London. Anne was left behind, treading water in the wake of his success. The marriage finally came to a juddering halt in 1967, by which time, says Adrian, 'my mother had totally lost it. She found it so humiliating because he was becoming so well-known but he wasn't living with us.'
Laing had already started an affair with Jutta Werner, a German graphic designer who would become his second wife. Despite his burgeoning career, he paid only the legal minimum in child maintenance to his first family. 'He adopted an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality,' says Adrian, who started taking odd jobs aged 13 to contribute to the family income. 'In my mind, he confused liberalism with neglect. My mother was furious about it. She had an unfathomable amount of resentment. Her expression for him was "the square root of nothing”.'
Laing would disappear for months on end, forgetting birthdays before turning up in a blizzard of misdirected anger. In a 1994 biography he wrote of his father, Adrian recounts one of Laing's rare visits to their new home in Glasgow when, having argued with Jutta, he took out his anger by beating his daughter, Karen.
He was an unpredictable, occasionally frenzied, father figure who acted with little regard for the consequences. When, in 1975, his second eldest child, Susan, was diagnosed with terminal monoblastic leukaemia, a row broke out between her parents. Anne felt it would be kinder not to tell Susan the diagnosis. Laing disagreed. In the face of fierce opposition from Anne, Susan's fiancé and her doctors, he insisted on traveling to the hospital to inform her that, in all likelihood, she would not live beyond her 21st birthday.
'That was the worst thing,' says Adrian. 'My mother just went potty. She said he was going to rot in hell for that. Then, after he told Susie, he went back to London and left us to deal with it. My mother was spitting blood.'
Susie died, aged 21, in March 1976. 'My father was riddled with guilt about it. He would have been aware of the statistics that demonstrate there is a higher chance of dying from that particular disease if you are from a broken family.'
A year later, Laing's eldest child, Fiona, had a nervous breakdown and was taken to Gartnavel Mental Hospital, Glasgow. Anxious that she should not be subjected to the brutal electric shock treatment and impersonal medical examinations that Laing so detested, Adrian called on his father for advice.
I was really upset. I asked, "What the fuck are you going to do about it?"' Adrian pauses. A curious smile curls at the corner of his lips. 'At the time we were living in a house called Ruskin Place, and his response was: "Gartnavel or Ruskin Place, what's the fucking difference?" It was a double-bind, you see. Either he had nothing to do with it [Fiona's breakdown] and his theories were shit, or he had everything to do with it and he was shit.’
Later Adrian tells a revealing story about Susan being interviewed in 1974 by a journalist writing a feature on the children of famous people. The piece ended with a memorable quote from her: 'He can solve everybody else's problems but not our own.'
But Laing seemed to mellow with the passing of the years. To his second family with Jutta, and to his two youngest children with different women, he proved a more kindly father. Adrian was gradually reconciled with him over the years, coming to stay with his half-siblings when he studied for his bar exams in London. 'Ronnie was clear, kind, warm-hearted and sagacious,' says Theodor Itten, who knew him in this later period. 'He was very gentle with his family. Once he told me that in his first family he had hit his children because he didn't know any better. I was surprised because I always thought Ronnie had been the Ronnie I knew, very playful and comforting as a father.’
But in his later years, as he became more dependent on alcohol and drugs, his judgment was blunted. When he was drunk Laing could exploit the fault-lines in someone's personality with a vicious cruelty. One of his students, Francis Huxley, once said that Laing's words could act like 'a psychic fist hitting the navel of insincerity'.
'My father was deeply intuitive and could make you feel you were talking rubbish just by looking at you,' says Adrian. 'It was very unnerving. He could pick up every nuance of your gestures and body language. When he was drunk he would rant and rave and it felt quite dangerous. He could be emotionally vicious. If he thought I was talking rubbish, his favorite expressions would be "psychotic" or "offensive", and I would say "Why don't you just say you disagree with me, Dad?" It was just so tiring. He was such a heavy drinker and I watched his second marriage disintegrate. Jutta would plead with him and say, "Where are you going to be in five years?”'
In 1987 Laing was forced to withdraw his name from the General Medical Council's medical register after a patient accused him of drunkenness and physical assault (the complaint was later withdrawn). He began to hold 'rebirthing' sessions and took spiritual pilgrimages to Sri Lanka and India. Much of his later work was erratic, crude in tone and increasingly discredited by mainstream psychiatry. 'The general view of Laing's theories within psychiatry is that they are the product of a wild, utopian, romantic imagination — or interesting as museum artifacts but of no contemporary relevance,' says Daniel Burston, author of The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of RD Laing. 'The view outside psychiatry is more complex.’
Adrian says he has now made his peace with the infamous RD Laing, especially since becoming a parent himself (he has five children). In his biography of his father, Adrian drily notes that his relationship with him 'has improved greatly since his death'. 'I'm very relaxed about him now,' he says. 'I had enough occasions before he died to let him have it. We were friends.’
For all his inconsistencies, there is little doubt that Laing loved his children, in spite of the flawed manner in which he expressed it. In one of his later works, The Facts of Life, Laing wrote: 'Whether life is worth living depends for me on whether there is love in life.’
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/01/mentalhealth.society
Oriana:
Another example of how having a horrible childhood can cause lasting damage. To Laing’s credit, though, he “mellowed” and was a better father to his younger children. Still, what a story: arguably the most famous psychiatrist in the world, a counter-culture era celebrity, turns out to be an alcoholic and an abusive father toward the children of his first marriage.
Jung and Freud were no saints, but this is far beyond that, and I mean far beyond.
So, here we have the a kind of unpleasant paradox of a man who could overflow with empathy toward patients — the patients whom the authoritarian medical staff treated as subhuman — but who couldn’t deal with his demons and unloaded his huge displaced anger on his first family. Loving toward the patients, abusive toward his children. True, he had a cruel, disciplinarian mother, but you’d expect him (of all people) to understand the damage and seek to heal it and counteract it.
I loved another example of his manner with patients, quoted in another source. He was visiting an American psychiatric hospital and interacted with a woman patient who’d been mute for a long time. Laing offered to buy her pizza, and asked what kind of topping she wanted. Ending her mutism, she answered “Pepperoni.”
So, no matter what his flaws as both a father and a theoretician, one has to grant Laing one wonderful thing: he knew the revolutionary power of treating a mental patient as a person.
The idea that schizophrenia is caused by bad parenting has been discredited — though it may be a contributing factor in susceptible individuals. The current theorizing leans toward an interaction between a set of genes and high stress levels and early traumatic events. One gene in particular has been singled out by research — it may cause inappropriate synaptic pruning during adolescence (the brains of schizophrenics show less gray matter, a similarity shared with the brain of Alzheimer’s patients). But the immune system also seems to be involved, and the microbiome (the gut bacteria), and possible pathogens . . . Just the biological part of it is quite complex, before we even consider the interaction with emotional and social factors.
It’s interesting to note that some people assume the theory of bad parenting causing schizophrenia started with Freud. However, Freud believed that schizophrenia probably had a biological origin and refused to analyze schizophrenics. Some of his followers, however, developed “psychoanalytic” theories of schizophrenia.
Still, when we read the biographies of high achievers in any fields, we are struck by the frequency of unhappy childhood and some degree of psychopathology (but also by phenomena such as at least one relative or teacher loving mentoring the child). Various forms of mental illness seem to be more common in the families of highly creative individuals. We are just barely beginning to perceive the broader pictures.
PS.
Brilliant work, a monster at home — this reminds me of the not-so-rare phenomenon in the arts: we love the work but detest the artist. Genius and dedication to creative work don’t automatically lead to this split: Dostoyevski was a devoted husband and father in his second marriage (his first one was remarkably incompatible), and would stay up nights with sick children. Dickens wasn’t a good husband (to put it mildly), but he adored playing with his children.
So Laing was paradoxically able to make a brilliant use of the lack of family love he experienced as a child by showing high empathy for the patients and (I am tempted to say) being the kind of loving parent to them that they perhaps never had. At home, at least until he “mellowed” in his later years, things were very different.
PPS.
Studies found in for recovery from grief (e.g. after 9-11), dogs outperformed human “grief counselors.” There is no mystery here: dogs have empathy and give unconditional affection.
LAING ROMANTICIZED MENTAL ILLNESS
Mary:
I remember Laing in the heyday of his radical fame, and he did force that one basic and essential principle into the arena: the mentally ill are persons, deserving of respect, not subhumans to be warehoused and forgotten. He also took things farther: he romanticized “madness” — valuing it in the way it might be seen in more primitive societies, where the "mad" could be seen as “holy” and in some way connected with a deeper, more authentic reality than that prosaic world of the “sane.”
That leaves out all the suffering. And it doesn't help much with solving the basic problems of day to day living for any of us, mad or sane. Things like cognitive therapy are basically so much more useful. Practical, pragmatic tools for solving problems of thought (like excessive worry or overthinking or self blame) and behavior — giving real room for choice and change.
The whole business of the growth of recognized psychiatric disorders is I think at least partly due to the capitalist mentality of continual growth. More and more diagnoses means more and more patients, more and more customers. In our society everything becomes a growth industry. Physical medical diagnoses are growing as well. Now skimpy eyelashes are a “condition” one “suffers” that can be “relieved” by a prescription medication. In pharmaceuticals as well as in all other products, the drive is proliferation — more and more products, more and more choices — even if they become increasingly ridiculous, interchangeable, only nominally “new and different.” All very exhausting, an endless cascade of meaningless choices.
Oriana:
Yes. Laing had both a great good effect — treating mental patients with dignity — and a terribly bad effect, being one of the founders of the “anti-psychiatry movement.” The mentally ill, even those badly in need of treatment, were suddenly perceived as having something like a shamanic experience that was going to enlighten them. It was society that was insane — the schizophrenics or bipolar people in the depths of either depression or mania were holy sages working their way toward true sanity.
I think Laing was strongly influenced by the drug culture of his era. He took drugs himself, and allegedly had some patients take LSD.
I have known four mentally ill persons sufficiently “up close” to know there is nothing romantic about mental illness — and there is indeed a lot of suffering, both for the patients and the people close to them — parents, spouses, close friends. It’s very draining to deal with someone even partly out of touch with reality. Likewise with the elderly who suffer from dementia — and yes, sure enough, I did come across an article admiring the childlike innocence of Alzheimer’s! Those people are so “in the moment”! Fortunately that’s an exception.
On the other hand, I heard from a friend about a demented patient who managed to convince a visitor that he was illegally incarcerated in a care facility — the visitor got him a lawyer, who got the man out of the place, with resulting chaos, endangerment, much expense, and more suffering of the family.
That’s an instance of the unfortunate legacy of those like Laing who started the anti-psychiatry movement: some patients get released who should be receiving further treatment.
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IS WORRY THE UNDERLYING FACTOR IN POOR MENTAL HEALTH?
~ “Are you weary of "new year, new you" positive thinking exercises? Tired of trying to feel Tiggerish in the cold, dark, midwinter mornings? Why not try this quick experiment to redress the balance. All you have to do is imagine that something great has happened in your life: maybe you've run into an old friend; perhaps you've been promoted at work; or you're about to head off on holiday. Now ask yourself what could go wrong. In what awful ways could it all fall apart? What disastrous chain of events might unfold? Don't think solutions, think problems. Open the worry floodgates and allow yourself to be swept away.
When we worry, we become preoccupied with an aspect of our lives, desperately trying to anticipate what might go wrong and what might happen if it does. Although we might believe worry is constructive, actually all it usually does is lower our mood. And when we start worrying it can be difficult to stop.
The number of officially recognized psychiatric disorders has mushroomed in recent years, and now stands at around three hundred. That giant total has attracted a lot of criticism – and with some justification – but in fact many of these conditions are pretty similar. It is better to think instead of three main groupings of disorders: internalizing (most commonly, depression and anxiety); externalizing (addiction, for instance, or anti-social behavior problems); and psychosis (with its characteristic symptoms often bracketed under the label of schizophrenia). However, even these three broad groupings share many of their causes, which has led some researchers to speculate that underlying and unifying all mental illness may be a single cause: the so-called "p factor of psychopathology”.
At the social level, we know that poverty, isolation, and negative life events all elevate the risk of mental health problems. But when it comes to the psychological p factor, there is increasing evidence that it may be excessive worry. When worry gets out of hand, it now appears, a very wide range of mental health problems can follow in its wake.
This kind of “trans-diagnostic" approach represents a major shift in the way we think about worry. Traditionally, problematic worrying has been demarcated as a specific condition: generalized anxiety disorder. And in that box it has remained. (The exception to this rule is depression, for which persistent worry about the past is a recognized symptom. But it's not called worry: it's called "rumination". "Worry" is defined as anxious thinking about the future.)
Yet real life seems to show a lamentable lack of respect for systems of psychiatric classification. Rather than being a separate disorder, excessive worry has been shown to play a significant role in the development and persistence of paranoid thinking, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol and drug dependence and insomnia. It has also been linked to the incidence of eating disorders.
If persistent worry is potentially so damaging to our mental health, what can be done to combat it? Interestingly, we tend to worry less as we grow older. People aged 65-85, for example, report fewer worries than those aged 16-29. But besides simply waiting for the years to pass, the evidence is strongest for an adapted form of cognitive behavioral therapy. This relatively brief, one-to-one treatment is based on a detailed model showing how problematic worry is caused, maintained and overcome. Patients are helped to notice when they're worrying, to interrupt this habitual thinking style, and then try alternative ways of reacting to life's problems.
CBT also teaches us to confine our worrying to a regular set period of 15 minutes or so each day. When worrying thoughts arise at other times, the trick is to save them for later and let them go. "Expressive writing" can be effective too: you describe your worries in as much detail as you can, focusing on what it feels like, and resisting the temptation to analyze what's causing your thoughts. And don't underestimate the power of distraction: work out when you're most likely to worry and plan a pleasurable, absorbing activity you can do instead.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/jan/09/worry-happy-mental-health
Oriana:
I see “positive thinking” as developing an expectation, often entirely unrealistic — e.g. “A lot of people will come to my poetry reading.” But positive fantasies that are enjoyed strictly as fantasies, without the New Age idea that your thoughts cause events, can be a source of pleasure.
If it were enough to think “I am rich” to become rich, wouldn’t most people catch on and become millionaires? But I guess the worst of this trend is already over. Interestingly, the ineffectiveness of prayer has not had much effect on those who pray. As for the large study that showed those cardiac patients who were prayed for and knew it actually had worse (though not dramatically worse) outcomes than those who weren’t prayed for, true believers will always find some way to discredit such findings.
I had a friend who had never experienced a lasting love relationship and once expressed some sadness over it. Then almost instantly she added, with triumph: “But my love fantasies have always been positive” — and she smiled in that special way she had, in spite of her numerous problems — the happiest, most radiant smile you can imagine.
What I like best about this brief article is the opening experiment: "imagine something great has happened in your life." Somewhat to my surprise, I can think of numerous options! And talk about an instant happy mood!
Indulging in happy fantasies qua fantasies (I emphasize that this has nothing to do with cultivating expectations) can easily be dismissed as escapism. I'm not suggesting that happy fantasies should take the place of productive activities. But they are a quick way to lift one’s mood. A happy brain is a heathy brain, and a healthy brain has implication for overall health.
You can learn how to induce a feeling of bliss — and why not?
But I am more interested in the therapeutic use of external focus. If you concentrate on yourself (we are not talking in terms of deliberately having a happy fantasy), you are likely to start worrying — or you may remember something unpleasant that happened in the past. While it would be unrealistic to strive for a total absence of introspection, there is something to be said for keeping an external focus — on work, on learning a new skill (learning to play a musical instrument is said to be the most effective), on satisfying activities such as gardening or cooking or tending to a pet (depending on the individual).
Socializing has been found to have a lot of health benefits, including a lower risk of dementia. It doesn’t mean you have to join a church or some special club like the Lions. Walking a dog has been shown to result in multiple positive social interactions. But even the much-maligned social media can create a form of socializing that is definitely better than nothing, especially for those who are housebound or live in isolated places.
Now, I don’t know if I would define worry as THE underlying factor in all mental disorders. For myself, I find it more productive to think in terms of internal versus external focus. Intense external focus has been my own miracle. And it doesn’t even have to be work. Recently I happened to make the happy discovery that simply reading my old poems, without any attempt to revise them, is enough to shift my focus. True, just reading print typically has a calming effect on the brain, but reading my own poems from long ago has a greater intensity, which leads to more pleasure. Pleasure therapy! If I were to become a therapist, I’d be a “pleasure therapist” — ah, another fantasy I can indulge in now and then.
Tasmania: Three Capes National Park
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HOW THE CRUSADES HELPED SPAWN THE MODERN JIHAD
~ “There was a real sense of prophetic mission among a lot of people who answered this call for Crusade. You can’t have a normal war for Jerusalem. That seems to me as true today as it would have been in the 11th century. Jerusalem, from the medieval Christian perspective, was both a city on earth and a city of heaven, and these two places were linked. The idea that the Jerusalem on earth was being dominated by an unbelieving, infidel — in their terminology “pagan” — group was unacceptable.
The rhetoric that was associated with the people holding Jerusalem is pretty shocking: Christian men are being circumcised in baptismal fonts, and the blood is being collected! They’re yanking people’s innards out by their belly buttons! This is not normal talk. Hatreds and passions were stirred up. The heart of it, and why it was so successful, was that the call to Jerusalem was felt so strongly.
On why the slaughter stood out, even for medieval times:
Warfare on this scale, with this level of brutality, with the end of cleansing the streets of Jerusalem with the bodies of the people you have killed — that’s not typical of the medieval experience. What I’ve tried to bring to the table is the apocalyptic element of thought: the idea that we are entering into the battle of the Last Days here, we’re moving in prophetic times. …
[F]rom the perspective not just of medieval Christians but even of a lot of the modern evangelical Christians I grew up around, the end of the world is something you look to with hope and excitement — maybe even more so in the Middle Ages, because the end of the world was going to be a military event, and soldiers were going to be involved in it. You’re recruiting people to fight in the grandest epic of all time. That sort of sense of apocalyptic, history-making, epoch-ending excitement is what’s missing from the other [academic] explanations [of the crusades].
What the Crusade introduced into medieval thought was the notion that war was not just a necessary evil, it was a positive good. Not only did it not count against you, it was actually a moral good to massacre the enemy.
And finally, on what the Crusades helped unleash:
[On] the Islamic side, the notion of jihad was dying out [before the Crusade]. Holy war was something that had happened in the past, and there had been this steady state reached in the Middle East. I’m not sure that the Turks saw what they were doing when they were engaging the Byzantines as engaging in jihad. After the First Crusade, within 10 years of it, you get Islamic voices like Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami … saying we need to revive jihad. He says: The Franks [a catch-all name for the Crusading forces] have been waging jihad against us; now we have to get the jihad going back up again.
It also seems to me that the new model of jihad borrowed from what the Crusaders brought. You get the idea of martyrdom — the idea that if you died you would go straight to heaven. You get mythical holy figures appearing in battles that Muslims were fighting against Christians. You get a more poisonous relationship between religion and warfare than existed before.
Mind-boggling: Almost a millennium later, we’re still dealing with the fallout.” ~
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2015/02/11/how-the-first-crusade-was-fought-what-obama-didnt-say-and-how-the-crusades-helped-spawn-modern-day-jihad/?fbclid=IwAR0yShZNuq9FM2tF4CIBDAJ5M79Ly18fr59FN1HDZZ41Sz1UenOATAefWnc#ixzz3RZ2el4Ob
from The Crusader Bible at the Morgan LibraryOriana:
The first crusade also included a preview of the Holocaust: the first massacres of the Jews who lived along the Rhine.
Mary:
The discussion of the Crusades reminds me again that we tend to think in terms of relatively recent times, and ignore the events of deep time — sort of a "oh that's all ancient history" attitude, that leads us to ignore the heritage of that ancient history still very active and powerful today. Oh those backward radical Islamists, still stuck on ancient history, going on about crusaders and medieval wars!!! They should be over it! It's the twenty-first century!! That perspective will never allow us to understand the dynamic operating today, what powers the forces of ISIS, of terrorists and jihadists. In that world the crusades are not over — they are as alive and relevant as yesterday's headlines.
As pointed out, the crusades were seen as an apocalyptic struggle, a religious struggle, a war against the forces of evil, and brutal slaughter, genocide itself, ruthless massacres, were seen by the crusaders as morally imperative, holy acts. Remembering that, it is easier to see these same ideas alive and well and fueling the continuing conflict as it occurs today. Long memories may prolong conflict and destruction through centuries, but short memories give no sense of origin or endings, and leave us baffled, with inadequate and ineffective strategies.
Oriana:
So true. For the Jihadists, the medieval Crusades were only yesterday. Even worse, they see the West as continuing to wage a crusade against them (W. Bush even used the term “crusade” in a very unfortunate way). As long as terrorism and all kinds of atrocities are seen as piety and a ticket to paradise, what are the chances of ending the conflict? Those who seem to know best have pointed out that the military solution is not enough — you have to grapple with the apocalyptic ideology and keep presenting the information that counters the recruiting propaganda.
FOODS THAT ACT AS ANTACID — IT’S NOT ONLY BANANAS
~ “Cucumber helps regulate blood pressure and plays a role in the structure of connective tissue within the body, including the muscles.
Seeded Watermelon, excellent because of its high water content.
Avocados are high in potassium and healthy fat. This creamy fruit contains antioxidants that will do wonders for your skin. Essential antioxidants make avocados a powerful, nutrient-dense food.
Spinach is not only easy to buy and use, but it is also delicious. This incredibly alkaline leafy green is high in vitamins K, A, C, as well as iron, potassium, and magnesium. Spinach is also rich in chlorophyll, a natural blood builder.
Kale is rich in antioxidants and helps the digestive system.
Bananas act as a natural antacid. They also produce mucus, which coats the lining of the stomach. This versatile fruit is rich in potassium, magnesium, and calcium.
Broccoli helps inhibit the growth of cancerous cells, supports the digestive system, and improves detoxification processes in the body.
Celery has extremely high water content and lots of vitamin C, which helps support the immune system, inflammation, and cardiovascular health.
~ adapted from https://facty.com/lifestyle/wellness/10-best-high-alkaline-foods/10/?style=quick
One surprising “natural antacid” is standing rather than sitting or lying down. Standing puts less pressure on the lower esophageal sphincter.
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ending on beauty:
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
esso—so—so—so
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
~ Elizabeth Bishop, last stanza of “Filling Station”
Edward Hopper: Gas Station, 1940
