The Burden of Consciousness

Some Thoughts on God, and Poison Ivy

2009-06-20T16:21:00.001-04:00

I hate mowing grass. In fact when it comes to all things grass-mowing, the only thing that I hate worse than mowing grass is to have a patch of grass that has not been mowed. I hate this because it creates the appearance that the owner of this given patch of grass is so lazy as to be practically non-existent from the point of view of his fellow grass-mowers, who it must be said also hate mowing their grass so much, that they cannot resist squeezing a little pleasure out of it by feeling superior to anyone who dares shrug in the face of agronomical convention and just “let it grow baby.” And, thus, “cuticus ergo sum, (I mow, therefore I am), with apologies to Mr. Descartes.

About the only thing that makes mowing the grass bearable for the 150 minutes or so that I spend each Saturday doing it, is that things tend to occur to me out there that give me pause for thought afterwards. Today for instance, I had a few thoughts about the existence of God, or lack thereof, as illustrated by a poison ivy plant.

It has been wet here for so long that I caught myself staring longingly at a picture of Death Valley last week. Everything in the plant kingdom is very much loving this, and manifesting this happy fact by growing twice as tall, twice as fast. And this includes the poison ivy. In fact, I have had at least one patch of poison ivy lesions on my body every day since late April. And I am not the only one. There was more scratching going on in my last staff meeting than take place in a whole month of games at your average Major League ball park. I think that one of the Department Directors actually engaged in a cup adjustment during his Power Point moment. So when I saw that little three-leaved devil poking its head through a clump of moss today, I began to consider what the existence of such a plant suggests about the existence of a supreme being.

According to monotheistic belief systems, God loves us the most of all the things he created. After all, he even let us name the damn things, and how many of you would let just anyone name your children for you? So that would seem to imply that everything else in the universe would occupy a subordinate position to we homo sapiens, and essentially be placed here for either our delight or our use. And, it must be said that this seems to hold for most things; I guess thanks are in order for the iPod, the sun, the Fender Stratocaster, the fact that you can get a grape to ferment so delightfully, and of course, hardcore pornography. Even George W. Bush was not without usefulness in that he helped expose the religious right as the nutcases they are and also damaged the political future of his smarter and therefore more dangerous brother, Jeb. But, consider the poison ivy plant.

This shiny little dermatological WMD cannot be eaten, woven into cloth, smoked, or used for ornamental purposes. It appears to exist solely to make us miserable and grease the pockets of the companies that produce prednisone and Caladryl. I once knew a guy who burned some of the stuff by mistake, got a little too close to the smoke and, voila, internal lesions! I have heard that you can get it in your EYES for crying out loud! It resists eradication efforts like a Kansas School Board resists science in the classroom. It grows stealthily, among the plants that you actually want to be there, and is so unassuming and humble that you don’t even notice you have been hit with the misery bomb until the scratching starts. Why would a god who loves us above all else invent something like this, and not even give us the courtesy of a warning to steer clear of it? I mean, at least he warned the first couple of us to avoid the fruit of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” right? (Of course, this brings up the question as to why he would not want us to acquire knowledge of good and evil, if he wanted us to pursue the one and avoid the other, but that is a question for another mowing session) And isn’t the arrangement supposed to be that we get hit with nasty maladies after consciously doing something that is enjoyable but sinful? I mean, I get the whole gonorrhea thing. Maybe the logic of it would be apparent to me if only wicked people, like Democrats, the ACLU, Richard Dawkins, and the members of the National Science Foundation were susceptible. I guess that one thing that bugs me is that this seems to violate our contract with the almighty, and nobody appears to know how to reopen negotiations. I mean, Falwell is dead, you know.

One consideration that comes to me is that God may place some importance on the poison ivy plant. Maybe not as much importance as say, a human stem cell, but some modicum of tenderness in the old omnipotent one’s heart. I could accept this I suppose, were it not for the fact that he NEVER EVEN MENTIONS POISON IVY IN HIS ONLY PUBLISHED WORK! Now, in the Bible he sets aside some blood-soaked plot development to express his love for pigs and shellfish (i.e. don’t eat em), sets Sinai up for sanctification by setting part of it on fire before he literally throws the book at Moses, even speaks up for the rights of the sperm cell by severely regulating its use, and so on. Of course he devotes a lot of celestial hard-drive space to his hatreds, e.g. the Hittites, the Babylonians, Baal, Ra, uppity women, menstruating women, the anti-slavery movement, any heterosexual act with someone who actually appeals to you, including…..well, “you,” and, in a major disagreement with Jerry Seinfeld, he definitely thinks there IS something wrong with the whole gay thing. But, not a single word about the poison ivy plant.

Would it have been too much to ask for a little blurb among all the hate-speech and the begots, in maybe, Exodus say, as a warning to look out for this little green bastard? How hard would it have been to have thrown in something like:

“And lo did the Israelites travel with their asses into the land of Balthar Gilgamesh, and there did they retire in the evening for juleps and toddies and to have knowledge of the slave-girls of the Hittites, that God in his mercy didst provide, and when they awakened in their hunger the Lord of Hosts didst command them to go forth and gather the bounty of the land about them that they might eat. But, alas, did the Lord thy God not say unto them to take not the three-leaved plant of shiny countenance, for it is beloved in His holy sight? And lo, the wicked among them who aspired to botanical knowledge didst cast off the Lord’s admonition and didst proceed to take the three-leaved plant of shiny countenance and did eat of it, and make of it a nice tea, like unto the shrooms of wisdom, and also did lie upon its leaves in their slumber, and behold, their sufferings were great.”

Now, is that really too much to ask? How much human misery could have been avoided with just that much of an effort. I mean, he would have had to put way more time into figuring out the stripe patterns on the Zebra or the intake manifold on a ’72 Camaro. And its not like Western Christendom would have failed to notice the reference, after all he granted his book near exclusive rights to the information/entertainment market for more than 5000 years before allowing You Tube, CNN, or existentialist literature to gain mind-space. Not much else to do on a Saturday night in the 12th century, and that’s if you had a candle.

And so, when considering the poison ivy plant I am left to assume that I am either right in my atheism, or that God is just as inconsiderate as those who stand chatting in the aisles of my neighborhood Target Store as if they were in the designated site of the International Idiot Convention. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to see if we have any more Caladryl.

Ralph and Ozz-man

2008-09-28T10:02:00.005-04:00

I saw the Ozzy t-shirt as I rounded the corner onto the long-term ward early that Monday morning. I was still in the vague mental fog common to the barely post-dawn hours, but I recognized the leering visage of Ozzy Osbourne on a well-faded, formerly black concert tee from across the dayroom. The person wearing it, whom I will call Ralph, was not usually seen out of bed before 8am, so there was that novel element to the scene as well. He was standing there by the full length windows, staring obliquely out at the mist of the breaking August morning.

"Hey Ralph," I called softly, not wanting to disturb the other patients who were not yet awake. "Nice shirt dude."

Now Ralph is not known as much of a conversationalist, so I was mildly surprised when he responded with a monotone, "Yeah, thanks Phaedrus." I was going to continue on through the dayroom to the next ward when he asked, "You like Ozzy?" The emphasis was on the 'You," as in "What is such an obvious nimrod doing asking about the Ozz-man?"

Now, I should admit at this point that metal music is no longer at the top of my playlist these days, but at one point I could hold my own in any discussion of the merits of Mercyful Fate relative to Accept or Motorhead, and I had a roommate in college who subscribed to Kerrang magazine. I was also willing to play in any band that was popular enough to keep my bar tabs paid, and in the mid-80's, this meant lots of exhausting nights thrashing out the kick-drum machine gun of Iron Maiden and Metallica covers. I had the hair, the emaciation, the spandex and black leather, in short, the full catastrophe. I could understand however, Ralph's mild disbelief that the figure I cut today, which my wife defines as "premature old-man preptile" is merely the latest iteration of a former head-banger.

The other thing that it is important for the reader to understand is that I had never developed much of a relationship with Ralph. I was actually surprised to hear him call me by name. He is not one of the usual group of patients who greet me enthusiastically when I make my rounds, eager to talk about whatever they may have on their minds at any given time. Ralph is generally quiet, muttering under his breath in response to the voices he hears in his head when he talks at all. He can also become quite violent, in a Martin Scorcese movie fashion, which is to say "extreme and without fanfare." His schizophrenic symptoms are never fully controlled by his medications, so he is tortured by insulting voices most of the time. He recognizes that other people do not hear them, and seems to struggle to avoid acting on them, although he is not always successful. Several years ago he attacked one of his nurses and she required hospitalization for her injuries. He sometimes attempts to "protect" himself by "replacing" his skin, in a kind of personal ritual. He is solitary and typically irritable. I had attempted to engage Ralph in conversation more than 50 times over the years, without much success. The most I ever got was a grunted out "yeah," or "uh-uh" to any comment or question. This was the first time he had ever initiated any exchange with me. I recognized a rare opportunity.

"Oh yeah, Ralph, I do like Ozzy. The Sabbath stuff, and especially the 'Blizzard of Ozz' album with Randy Rhoads. What about you?"

"Yeah, I like that too, and 'Bark at the Moon' kinda too."

I could see the light of connection, as he made full eye contact with me for the first time ever. Moments like this are precious, as one halting, disease-altered, bundle of consciousness reaches out to make itself understood to another. I sat down in a blue plastic chair and gestured with my head for him to join me, subtly, so that if he did not want to he could act as if he had not picked up on it. I wanted to be careful not to issue a directive that he would have to refuse if he was not comfortable with it, injecting a point of conflict between us. He came over and sat down, with a chair between us.

He asked me if I had ever seen Ozzy, like a child might ask if you had ever met their favorite quarterback or movie star. I told him that yes I had, twice. We talked about what the shows were like, and I tried to remember and describe things with as much sensory information as possible; what the arena looked like, the smells, the cigarette lighters held aloft, the thud of the bass that you feel in your chest, the screaming lead arpeggios of Rhoads' black Jackson guitar, and Ozzy himself, stalking the stage like Yeats' "rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born." I gave it my best. Ralph seemed to like it, looking into my eyes without a trace of the menace that he can sometimes convey. It was one man in his 40's talking to another whose life had been sadly made smaller by schizophrenia and poverty of opportunity.

In ten minutes it was over. He had reached the limit of what he could focus on, and his tolerance for close human contact. I noticed him beginning to look away distractedly, uncomfortably, and I made my exit. He did not return my farewell, just returned to looking out of the window. But he and I had made a discovery together that morning, we had found a pathway along which our two minds could meet up again in the future. I was thrilled.

What I did not tell Ralph that morning was what happened the morning after that first Ozzy show, in October of my 20th year. I stumbled my way through a "Learning Theory" exam, sleep-deprived and hung over and wanting to be elsewhere. When the Professor handed mine back to me, with a large "D" on it, he asked me to come to his office after class. "Mr. Phaedrus, this is not acceptable work for someone with your abilities. How can you explain your chronic underachieving?" I told him that I had been to a concert the night before, and that I was sorry about the test, blah blah blah. I just wanted to get out of there and go to bed. He let me go with a parting shot; "Phaedrus, you are wasting your life on stupid things like Ozzy Osbourne concerts, if your aim is really to help people with mental illnesses. Please think about that."

My professor was largely correct of course. I have had to work harder than most of my professional peers in order to rise though the ranks, playing catch-up really. I have foregone some of the things that they see as the fruits of their labor now, because I was borrowing against mine in my youth. But, the professor was not completely right. There is potential value in all life experiences. Sometimes an experience from a mis-spent youth is the crack in the door of another's dark consciousness.

5 Thoughts Before Breakfast

2008-02-10T11:59:00.000-05:00

1. Why is it that the press continues to refer to Barack Obama and other such individuals as black? He is bi-racial, with a black father and white mother who raised him largely on her own, in Kansas no less. I cannot decide whether this tendency is based on patri-centric notions of lineage, vestiges of Jim Crow thinking in which a given amount of black "blood" consigns one to that category, or what? If Derek Jeter's mother were black would he be referred to as white just because his father was caucasian? I think that what disturbs me the most about this and related topics is how increasingly meaningless it is to categorize people according to external characteristics in a world in which such distinctions are getting much blurrier. I see it as an unfair limitation. I see it as a reluctance to move steadily in the direction of MLK's "content of our character" focus.

2. My graduate school advisor saw psychotherapy as a "potentially corrective emotional experience." I tend to see elections in the same way. After 12 years of Reagan-Bush, Bill Clinton provided a correction in those areas in which Republican sensibilities had pushed out too far. After 8 years of Clinton, GWB promised to restore the luster of propriety to a White House that needed adult supervision. After 8 years of W., the country seems to feel that we need to return competence to the Executive Branch. Each change provides the potential corrective experience for the excesses of the previous period. And so, this year we will have either a Maverick Republican, a forward focussed Camelot II, or a return to the wonkish ruthlessness and partisanism of Clinton Redux. I lean towards the Dems this year whenever I think about the Supreme Court, but do I really want to hear Hillary's "nails on a chalkboard" speechifying for the next 8 years? I might want to vote for Hugo Chavez after surviving that.

3. The Wall Street Journal sported a story this week on how Mormons have been "dismayed" at seeing how they are perceived by great swaths of the public during the Romney run for President. I have to wonder what they must have been thinking if they are have been taken aback? The evangelicals hate them just like any other group who does not toe their theocratically xenophobic line. The seculars can't believe that any modern person could believe that the earth was punted across the universe from Kolob's celestial zip code after the fall of Adam (or Michael the Arch-Angel for those really in the know.) Even country-club Repubs are put off by what they perceive to be an over-emphasis on the role of religion in the lives of LDS. On the Democratic side, it will be a long time before the racial insults are forgotten, and feminists have as much to focus their ire on in LDS history and doctrine as they do the more mainstream religious right groups, maybe even more. Now, I don't condone supporting or opposing a candidate just because of their religion, but it is a legitimate factor in evaluating a candidacy. The fact is, however, that Americans are far more prepared for a minority or female President than they are a Mormon one. I don't see why LDS would've been thinking otherwise.

4. Is it just me, or is anything that makes James Dobson, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter unhappy likely to be a damned good thing?

5. Is there anyone else out there who feels that the "tragedy" at the heart of the Britny Spears' debacle is that the world is so obsessed with it. I work in a hospital full of individuals who face more daunting mental health challenges than she ever will, with far fewer resources to draw on for hope and support. I don't see anyone on You-Tube crying for them. And they have not spent their time polluting the airwaves and the minds of impressionable young girls with execrable music and crippling messages about what they must be to gain appreciation in this world. At least Amy Winehouse has talent. I don't wish continued misfortune on Spears, in fact I hope she gets it together for the sake of the people in her life that actually care about her as a person, but I do wish people would grow up and realize that she is not that important in the great scheme of things. Harsh? Maybe... but as my friend Mary Lisa puts it, "I'm just sayin."

Journal Excerpt, Jan 27, 08

2008-01-27T13:36:00.000-05:00

1/ 27/08
Sunday: How do you evaluate the power of hope? I watch the Obama/Clinton(s) conflict and find myself wondering at the seductive power of believing that differences can be bridged, that external distinctions can be subordinated to the salience of internal similarities, that hope can overcome cynicism, that the country is prepared to accept the proposition that getting half of something in actuality is superior to getting all of something in fantasy. And that the real half is actually far more than the whole fantasy once it is held in the hand, the head, the eye, and yes, the heart.

The “horse-racing” story line that the media feeds us plays to the familiar zero sum game aspect of sporting events, and this is a disservice. This technique is part of the dumbing down, the over-simplifying of the culture and the events that shape it. The compressed primaries this year add to this sporting motif, because we do not have long to wait for the outcome to be determined. Rather than a process we have the four quarters of a football game, rather than a journey in which rich details are revealed and then pondered in good time before their import and meaning is clarified, we have the breathlessness of the quick chase with instantaneous punditry pronouncements of what we should now think about things. "THE story tonight is.........."

As for me, I want to believe. I want to believe that a bi-racial forty-something can play the role of an American Gandhi, a Lincoln. That the “better angels of our nature” are still capable of rising up against the poverty of self-interest. But history lies back and slyly says, “Listen my idealistic friend. Have I not shown you that all things are born of conflict, that mankind is always hearkening to the appeals to its baser instincts and that idealism is the mincing vampire that feeds on the blood of common sense until it is ultimately dragged smoking into the daylight? And it is always dragged out in the end, its comical demise standing as a lesson against believing in anything noble again. Be practical, yield to the machine.”

No one likes to be wrong, but it is even worse to be made the fool. To believe in, or maybe even to suspend disbelief in, Obama's claims to value unity of purpose over individual power and glory, requires the guts to attach visceral importance to that which has the potential to tear at those viscera if proven false. The Obama candidacy now aspires to the high ground on which defeat is rendered not by having shown fidelity in falling short, but only by revealing itself to have been an infidel to that higher ground all along. It is an extraordinary thing to see someone attempt this in times such as these. I watch the diverse faces at Obama rallies and see something different there, and I hear it in the comments from even the jaded journalists in attendance. There is a type of wonder, a questioning of what they have seen and heard. It is that unusual.

I sense that a broad swath of America is out there today, after South Carolina, after Iowa, wrestling with their cynicism and what is left of their idealism. The media would call this a head vs. heart moment. I disagree, because it is ever the heart, the emotions, that win out over the intellect, always. We choose wisely because of the feelings derived from having done so. This election may be more about that aspect of our own heart to which we choose to show ultimate fidelity.

"Nighty Night"

2008-01-20T13:58:00.000-05:00

"Daylight says that life is knowable, night tells the truth, says we know not what lies hidden, neither in the darkness out there nor the darkness within. Day is pragmatic acceptance, night is infinite longing" (Allen Wheelis)

All of my life I have been a creature of the dark. Freed of the requirements imposed by others to conform to their quotidian schedules, I gravitate towards the nocturnal. My hours of sleep and wakefulness gradually shift to minimize the amount of time I spend in sunlight. My favorite hours now are those before dawn arrives , when, driving to the gym before work, or sitting alone in my study before the house awakens, I am alone with my own thoughts and those of people I select; an author downloaded to my iPod, NPR, an old CD discovered beneath the seat. What makes them passable company is that they are in my control, or rather, I determine the conditions under which we will share time, their thoughts and my own. That means that these thoughts become my own, so that even Proust's ideas belong to me now, twisted and rearranged by the particulars of my version of consciousness.

Sometimes it is the silence that thrills. I think back to a time in which I was in a boat on a lake at dusk. All sound, even the lapping of small waves had vanished and the remaining silence, the total lack of sound, made me feel as if my ears had been plugged. My head felt stuffed with silence. After the startle subsided I felt peacefully enveloped in nothingness, only awareness remained. I wondered if death would be like this. As night descended the sensation was complete. That was more than 20 years ago, and I have not found that sensation since. Close perhaps, but never the same, never complete, always imperfect. The imperfections are my own. I probe them relentlessly like the broken tooth that your tongue cannot resist exploring, no matter how sharp the remaining edges.

The inner world is all we have. We know what lies without only through the sensations that lie within. The whole world takes place within our sack of skin. This is most apparent when these sensations fade, in the silence of deepest night. In the lull between bombardments of sight and sound, of taste, smell and sense of movement, awareness does not dim. In fact, it becomes more acute, more pointed, naked and raw. In solitude we are freed from the duty of making ourselves understood by the consciousness of others, and absolved of the obligation to decode what takes place within their skin, representing their inner world imperfectly, and pitifully so, within our own. I grow tired of confronting the impossibility of ever knowing or being known.

Finally, alone in the dark we confront ourselves, the fears and longings, regrets, the incompleteness that eternally nags at us, seduces us to lie to ourselves. Because the world lies within, it does not disappear when we turn out the light, close the book, kiss the cheek, fluff the pillow, close the eyes. Consciousness is a solitary prison whose bars are apparent only in the absence of light.

We are all creatures of darkness. we cannot be otherwise.

New Year's Thoughts Elicited by a Supercilious Feline

2008-01-01T11:34:00.000-05:00

My cat Jefferson does not give a damn that this is the first day of the 2009th year after the supposed death of Christ. He sits on his throne across my study and absently grooms himself before lying back on his side with abundant self-satisfaction. If you are a cat lover, and especially if you are familiar with the "Maine Coon" breed, you will readily bring to mind the look of feline disdain for all that lies outside of Jefferson's furry skin that graces his bewhiskered mug in moments such as these. He seems to know without even thinking about it that he requires no redemption for past shortcomings, no point of cognitive demarkation between this and that, and no sense of hope to sustain him through the inevitable trials the coming days are certain to bring. Which is to say that he has not made, nor will he make, any "New Year's Resolution."

These annual exercises are limited to those creatures cursed with the Burden of Consciousness. They are borne of three factors as far as I can see; 1. Consciousness of past offenses for which redemption is needed, 2. A convenient point from which to start on the road to this redemption, and 3. The sense that this time, despite ample evidence to the contrary, we will be able to sustain our corrective measures for far longer than our previous record of 13 days. Hence, redemption, demarcation, and hope.

Redemption, rather the need for redemption, may be a vestige from some distant evolutionary epoch, but it is also drilled into our little craniums from day one. We are indeed nasty little creatures at heart, full of sinful desires and disgusting personal characteristics, which, in the best case we are encouraged to indulge only in privacy. This is why bedrooms and bathrooms are equipped with doors, stalls, curtains, and bedclothes. Of course, religion takes this to absurd extremes, but one must create a sense of abundant need for the products one hopes to sell. You have to hand it to them, our shamans and clergymen, the success in marketing an imaginary product to satisfy a self-sustaining need is a brilliant achievement.

Humans are map-makers. The world may indeed be "small," but it will not fit into ones head without some slicing and dicing. The Zen philosopher Alan Watts often spoke of the cognitive nets with which we overlay the world, which do not alter any of the underlying "oneness," but do allow for dividing things into discrete and more easily digestible chunks. The western mind is particularly adept at this. I think of accounts of the confusion of Native Americans as they failed to find the lines on the actual earth that were depicted in the maps of the wasichus. They did not symbolize the earth in this fashion, but then again, they did not conceive of the size of the planet and thus may not have felt the need to model it to such an extent. They did share our need to divide time itself into digestible bits, poetically so, thus the "Moon of the Popping Trees" of the Lakota. By creating divisions in time itself, we are better able to locate ourselves within it. We do this individually with wedding anniversaries and birthdays, as well as broader swaths of time such as our college days or the 16 months we spent in Germany. There is a "that was then-this is now" effect that we find quite useful. Collective recognitions of these seams in the fabric of time are particularly useful. They allow for common recognition of when "then" actually became "now." Very helpful in casual conversations and history class lectures alike.

When we bring our sense of accumulated guiltiness together with the need for a place to start the redemptive process, ideally one that comes with the imprimatur of the rest of the world like a "New Year," we require only one further ingredient. It may be the most powerful of all. Where would we be without hope for a pleasant future? When humans part with the sense that pleasures will be sustained and pains will be temporary, we tend to want to end the whole thing. Thus, even despite any amount of contrary evidence, we will hold to the happy expectation of future success in endeavors of the most daunting sort. Say, like avoiding potato chips for an entire year, or learning to really love your mother-in-law.

So, I want to wish everyone out there a happy arbitrarily determined point of temporal demarcation, full of redemptive success and sustained expectations for continued pleasures and prompt pain-relief.

p.s. I just read the immediately preceding paragraph to Jefferson. I could almost swear that I saw his lip curl in a sneer.

All is All

2007-12-03T11:50:00.000-05:00

After the caffeine finally begins to have the desired effect on my bloodstream and then my state of consciousness I do a sort of "fade in" to one of those awe inspiring, yet commonplace sights. It is just after 6am, and the world is coming into being before my eyes. The sky begins to differentiate itself from the horizon with a faint purplish glow, a purple that grows ever closer to turqoise with the slowness of time itself and marked in the far eastern corner with a streak of magenta. The mountains to my south are still in silhouette at this hour, and seem to grow even blacker as they stand in growing contrast to the play of light behind the dark early winter clouds. The clouds seem to rush northward, as if to belatedly join their brethren in the winter storm that will commence in New England later today. Mt. Rogers and White Top, the two highest points in Virginia are evident, once taller than the Himalaya before the inexorable erosion of eons. In mid-day, they will reassume their roles as focal points, but beneath this shifting sky they seem to shrug with acceptance of their inferiority. The scene is all the more salient for its fleetingness. In fifteen minutes it is over, and the world resumes its quotidian rhythms without a backward glance. But it will linger in my synapses for a longer time.

It is at time such as these that religion makes the most sense to me. Although I know that the redness in a morning sky is due to the scattering of other color wavelengths in favor of those long lazy reds sliding in obliquely through our dusty atmosphere, it seems so much more than that. It is difficult to believe that the notion of beauty itself does not exist outside of my own head, because this scene and "beauty" seem inextricably bound together, as if beauty were present in the same way that the shape of the mountains and the backlit colors above them are present. The belief that this "beauty" is another physical element of it all leads in the direction of seeing it as some sort of gift. And if there is a gift, there must be a giver. And to this giver, thanks must be rendered in word and deed. After all, who would bestow such a stupendous gift on one who is not loved with equal intensity, and what did we ever do to merit that? What "could" anyone do to merit that? Yes, this is truly a religious moment, except for the fact that it is not.

The same visual spectacular that I witnessed this morning, or one very much like it, was also witnessed by several murderers, a few rapists, some extortionists, child abusers, and if Osama had been carpooling with me, at least one master terrorist. Those clouds happened to be moving over a gorgeous and ancient mountain range when I saw them, but they were probably flying above a reeking modern indistrialized tenement with a dead homeless alcoholic yet to be found beneath his boxes within the next couple of hours, on their way to merge with a storm that will claim a few lives before weakening into disorganization, and right before the holidays to boot. Those massive forest covered mountains house several hundred coyotes, a few of which that will rip apart a household pet before the day is out, only to have a few of their own pups shot as "vermin" in the spring by a frustrated sheep rancher. The broken hearted child who finds what was left of his poor beloved cat will shoot a beautiful cardinal with his Red Ryder on his way back to the house, just to make himself feel better, leaving the bird's drab mate to chip-chip-chip forlornly in the bare maple outside the picture window. And then, the boy will take his allowance, every cent of it, to buy his mother that necklace that he knows she wants for Christmas, imagining her beautiful face when she opens it this December 25th, reminding him of the fact that he is such a "good" son.

And none of it will "mean" anything. All is all, wrapped up in an infinite series of causes and effects, and the human mind is but a silent commentator on it.

And for this reason, the fact that my whole heart seems to expand with pure joy and speechless awe when I see what I saw this morning, that I accept it as an intentionless gift, and that it means absolutely nothing, I am extremely grateful. To no one in particular.

Passing Thought on Left Ears, Right Brains, and that new i Phone

2007-11-25T12:55:00.001-05:00

I have noticed that most people, even when not doing something particularly crucial with their right hands, hold their cell-phones to their left ear.I do it myself, even though I am very right-hand dominant. I have entertained any number of reasons for this, as admittedly the people whom I have occasion to observe are generally occupied with their dominant right hands, say like piloting their three-ton, five-doored, mid-east enslavement death machines at freeway speed. But I think there is more to it than this, and it relates to the hemispheric division of labor in our brains.

As most people know, our brains are divided into right and left halves, or "hemispheres." Evolution has shaped these externally identical bits of gray matter to handle diferent tasks however. The right hemisphere is associated with imaginative, artistic abilities, the capacity to image three dimensional figures in space, to perform upper level motoral functions (think surgery here), to work with abstract numerical concepts , and to perceive and derive meaning from non-linguistic sources of information. The left hemisphere is devoted to linguistic actions, carrying on that running dialogue in our heads (if you are asking yourself, "what dialogue in my head?"- THATS the one I mean), logical, calculating, and introspective to a fault. But not particularly given to extracting subtle, yet powerful meanings from non-linguistic nuances. As most people also know, our brains are "cross-wired" so that the right side of the brain is more closely wired to the left side of the body more or less, and vice versa.

What many people tend to underestimate though, is the amount of information we take in during social interchange through non-verbal channels. As much as 80% of the information we extract in a face-to-face conversation comes through channels other than the actual language used by the other participant. Tone of voice, facial expression, physical posture, spatial bodily arrangement etc; the sum of these inputs is far more important to us in determining the meaning of another person than what they actually say, which is confined to the words they use. Think about our ability to determine when a speaker is being sarcastic. The meaning of the words they use are contradicted by other non-linguistic cues, so that when they say "Oh that is just sooooooo special," we immediately know that they actually mean, "That is, like, so NOT special." And these inputs tend to rely on right brain processing moreso than the left. (I think comedians who rely on irony, like Jerry Seinfeld, have particularly acute left brain processing.)

In a telephone conversation we lose all of the visual inputs we rely upon for deriving meaning in a face-to-face conversation. We are then forced to fill in the informational gaps by placing even more importance on things such as voice pitch and inflection, as well as the ability to create a mental image of the speaker as we hear them, using these subtle sources of information to decode the full meaning of our telephonic exchanges. This processing takes place largely in the right hemisphere, which is more closely associated with sensory inputs from the left ear. And so this is the biggest reason why I think most of us hold our cell-phones to our left ear.

Just a thought. (Feel free to use your right brain to imagine the "no-big-deal" shrug of my shoulders as I write that last line.)

In Praise of the Short and Fat

2007-11-23T10:21:00.000-05:00

I was told once by a wiser man than I that the crown jewel of middle age is the climax of awareness that you are who you are, and there is simply nothing to be done about it. He said this with the wry laughter of any bitterweet truth, and I have been fortunate enough to live long enough to appreciate both the truth and its bittersweetness. In the spirit of his remark, I must admit to myself that I am not one of those people who can think deeply about anything unless I have ample time to do it and space within which to employ the time. I have spent the last several months in the manic whitewater of electronically fueled multi-tasking purgatory, and during that time I have not had a single set of thoughts worth writing down, much less writing about. One of the things that I have learned, probably not for the first time, is that a clear, synthesizing thought linking together things which were not obviously connected, is a very pleasurable experience for me.

In his new book "Five Minds for the Future", Howard Gardner, Harvard Neuropsychologist and principle expounder of the concept of multiple intelligences, lists the "synthesizing" mind as one of the five (along with the creative, disciplined, respectful, and ethical) mindsets required for successful navigation of just the kind of world with which I have been struggling. And I know I have ample company here.

There is a story from this part of the country that has a learned, early 19th century man having his dinner at a wayside inn in the early evening of a blustery November day. In comes another traveller, wet and cold from the road who sits at the man's table, warms himself by a crackling fire nearby, and converses with him on a great many topics until the lamps begin to gutter in the early morning. The conversation is engaging to the extent that the man doers not notice that the tall, thin, traveller never introduces himself. The two discuss agriculture and the man is certain that his companion must be a scientist or a successful gentleman farmer. As the talk turns to books and writing the man is equally certain that his companion must be a professor of literature at a prestigious university, yet when a comment is made upon the soundness of the old Inn, the companion provides a discourse on the esoterica of architecture that belies the expertise of a master builder and structural engineer. Just before the two part company for the night the mysterious man speculates on the nature and philosophy of government and education with such erudition that there remains no doubt but that he must be a great political philosopher and statesman. When the traveller awakes the following morning he enquires about the fascinating gentleman with whom he conversed the previous night. The inn-keeper answers, "Why didn't you know, that was Thomas Jefferson." While jefferson was physically on the lean side, he was intellectually porcine.

As strange as it seems to us now, it has not been that long ago since a learned person, like a Thomas Jefferson, could possess cutting edge knowledge of almost every higher human intellectual pursuit. This is no longer even dimly conceivable, as information now piles up at a rate such that real expertise is confined to thinner and thinner, yet taller and taller, slices of all there is to know. The "Renaissance man" is a quaint notion today. I recognize the necessity of this, we are working with neural hardware that remains mired in "pre-history version 1.0" after all. But I also find this phenomenon to be threatening because it removes much of the overlap between what you and I know, and this decreases commonalities between us. The worlds that we actually live in are powerfully formed by our thoughts about them, and if those thoughts are disparate enough, walled-off from one another by the necessity of our limited biological bandwidth, then we will not actually share the same world any longer. Not in the larger sense of the word, "world" anyway. We need to encourage "short and fat minds," those possessing of some true knowledge of a great number of intellectual domains, as much as we demand the tall and skinny minds of the true expert in any one domain.

We do not see the world as "it" is, we see it as "we" are. I had dinner with a molecular biologist once, who was truly on the cutting edge of his field. This was so to such an extent, that he seemed to be aware of almost nothing else. He had no grasp of politics, sports, movies, history, or literature. There was little basis for discussion between us, and we parted as strangers, despite having sat side-by-side for 90 minutes or so. His knowledge, his "world," was so "tall and skinny" that he could not even converse about it with anyone outside of it.

Of course, part of the problem was that I had almost nothing in my "neural hard drive" on molecular biology, and so I was unable to create any analogy from where he was to where I was. I did not have the requisite intellectual girth to so much as brush against his intellectually ectomorphic frame. Without this analogue, there is no basis for eventual synthesis. And the taller and skinnier our knowledge becomes, the less opportunity for analogizing what you know to what I know, and vice versa. Thus, Gardner's empahisis on the "synthesizing" mind is apt in the sense that it is greatly in need, but it is also increasingly rare. And this is a self-sustaining cycle.

We badly need these specialists with their tall, skinny, walled-off funds of avant garde information, but we also need the generalists, the synthesizers, the intellectually shorter and fatter, to help bridge gaps between the tall and skinny experts out there. I am concerned that our educational systems are catering increasingly to the tall and skinny, math and science crowd, at the expense of the short and fat curriculum that includes art and history along with the periodic table. Thomas Friedmann, champion of global competitiveness and author of "The World is Flat," was once asked on what he would place the most emphasis were he a father of a young child today, concerned about his offspring's ability to be successful in a flat and hyper-competitive world. I expected him to extoll the benefit of math and science education, but instead he answered that the most important thing is to "learn how to learn." I like this answer because he did not stress vertically oriented learning at the expense of the horizontal, "some about a lot," type of learning. I think Friedmann gets it right here, and I worry about the education our kids are actually getting. With a failure to stress things such as physical activity, in favor of deeper and narrower information overload, our schools are cramming emaciated knowledge into the brains of increasingly obese little bodies. This is not the framework on which the Western intellectual tradition was established. Our Greek forebears would be very concerned, those cultivators of overall excellence, or "arrete."

I am not by any stretch in the intellectual avant garde, be it the tall and skinny or short and fat genres, but what proclivities I do have are definitely of the stocky variety. And thus, for me, a synthesizing thought which allows me to extract from my business training a concept which analogizes effectively to my work with a therapy client or a psychology student fills me with pleasure. If that means that my colleagues at the conference table are forced to roll their eyes every time I presage a problem solving idea with an obscure historical reference, e.g. "Well, as Churchill once said to FDR while standing naked in the west wing..." then so be it.

After all, in my middle age I have to accept that I am who and what I am, and there is nothing much to be done about it. What I can do is make a greater effort to extract myself from the multi-tasking whitewater long enough to have a synthesizing thought now and again, and to write it down.

Pain, Beauty, and Loss; or Greek Tragedy on Skinny Tires

2007-09-03T13:13:00.000-04:00

Things which are both painful and beautiful never lose the power to draw us back after an absence from our lives. If it is the pain that leads us away. or conspires to keep us there, it is the beauty that always seems to lead us back, even if only in memory. I feel this way about certain people from my past. One of those people introduced me to cycling, and I have come to conflate the two, a complicated, yet close former friend and the beautiful and most painful of sports.

Early in my career I wound up working for a true madman. I mean this as a compliment, I tend to like madmen, and madwomen. George was a 5 feet-ten-inch, 185 pound dynamo, a force of nature who, like Nigel Tufnel's amplifier in "This is Spinal Tap," had dials that "went to 11," as opposed to the rest of the world's "10." George, in toto, was the smartest, funniest, most charmingly miscreantic and sensitively tactless person I ever met. HE could get more things done in one day than most could in a week, and he seemed in constant motion. He knew how to do everything, he could analyze a patient and a spreadsheet with equal alacrity, and build a house or a Little League team in his "spare-time." He is still the person with whom I would most like to be adrift on an Arctic ice-flow, assuming that I would want to survive the experience. But, he was also a man of voracious and sometimes self-destructive appetites. I could, and possibly should, write a book about George someday, because that is the amount of space it would take to conjure him, and because I have this thing about Greek tragedy.

George had a thing about cycling. He had posters in his office of guys in way-too-tight wool and spandex riding skinny little machines on huge snow-covered mountains and through huge fields of sunflowers. He had a whole vocabulary to describe what I still considered to be the most amusingly mundane of activies. Had I not learned to drive a car as a sort of graduation from riding a bike? My responses to George's entreaties to "come on over and go for a ride," began as respectful demurrals, (he WAS my boss after all) to denigration of his "sport" as hopelessly inferior to the ennobling passion of running marathons. He laughed at this, and challenged me to demonstrate the superior conditioning of the young marathoner by riding a mere 20 miles with a "fat old man." My honor thusly challenged, as well as the posterized running heroes that adorned my own garage walls, I finally agreed to brush aside George's persistent niggling by hitting the road with him on my ancient Trek.

George met me at my house on his screaming yellow "Olmo," a brand of Italian racing bikes that was unknown to me then, but would later become a more powerfully lusted after item than Farrah Fawcett was to the 12 year old version of your humble narrator. We geared up and headed out. As George clicked his ridiculous looking shoes into some tiny little pedals, I noticed how his legs looked different in his cycling kit, not only were they massive in quad and soleus, they were also....hairless. With the therapist's learned ability to look upon personally peculiar proclivity with interested bemusement, I fell into line behind George's Olmo and those pistoning, waxed(?), appendages.

I was on the backside of my competitive running career at that time, having racked up more knee injuries than miles of late, but I was still damned if I was going to let a fat old man (he was all of 42 at the time) cause me more pain than I could cause him. The problem was that I was actually feeling quite a bit of pain fairly early into the ride! Each rolling hill brought screams of an increasingly histrionic nature from my skinny, and hairy, quads, and my lungs were burning with an intensity higher than that which even the Florida sun would have demanded. There is a type of panic that sets in when a person cannot obtain enough oxygen, and while I was experienced with some level of aerobic indebtedness from my running, it had never been like this. I was being simply and methodically reduced to the bug-eyed, death-masked, suffering two-wheeled bastard that I had become, and 20 miles had never stretched out to such prodigious lengths before in my still young life. In a phrase that would become part of my lexicon after that day, I was truly "stuck to the road."

In a couple of months I would realize just how easy George had taken it on me that Saturday, but I did not think so when I had to ask my girlfriend to assist me up the stairs to the house after finally dismounting. George thanked me for the ride and departed with nary a taunt. I think he had felt the hook set firmly in my hammered flesh, and figured that I was to become his new cycling convert. All I could say to my girlfriend that night before my twitching legs finally permitted sleep was, "I have either discovered my new sport, or I have taken the last bicycle ride of my life. I'll know tomorrow."

The next day I began to scour the want-ads. I figured that part of my humiliation lay in my steed, as opposed to my corporeal limitations. I needed a real racing bike, and a week later I brought home my somewhat used Peugot. It was white and purple, but it had the requisite European pedigree and made my old Trek seem tank-like in wieght. I began to read everything I could get my hands on about the sport, learned what words like "peleton," (group of racers) and "tifosi," (the knowledgable Italian cycling fans) and "maillot jaune," (the leader's yellow jersey in the Tour de France, cycling's Super Bowl) actually meant. I learned scientific concepts such as "rolling resistance" and "rake and trail," and I spent money lavishly on spandex shorts and pro-style jerseys, clip-less pedals, and a light and aerodynamic helmet. I spent $400 big ones on new wheels, $150 on a titanium railed saddle (don't EVER call it a "seat), and $50 a piece on tires so skinny they looked like knife edges, and rode like them too. I watched videos of the great races, from the Tour de France to Paris-Roubaix to the Giro d'Italia. I learned about,"the Heron," the "Badger," and the "Cannibal," the Ruth, Dimaggio, and Mantle of cycling. I learned that the French refer to cyclists as the "convicts of the road," because their suffering at the hands of those miles of pavement is so severe. I was to learn about this in the only way one can learn it.

But most of all I rode that Peugot. I rode 20 miles one day, 25 the next, then 30, and finally I rode my first 50 miler. I was abolutely smitten, obsessed, laugh-out-loud in love with cycling. True to the nature of the sport, I rode without regard to the weather. I rode in the rain, in the heat, when I visited family up north I rode in the sleet and, on one occasion, in an ice storm. If I was not in the office I was either on the bike, talking to George about riding, or reading about cycling's history, training methods, and the science behind it all. How to explain this?

There is the thrill of going fast on a machine made just for that purpose, powered entirely by your own effort. There is the meditation within the metronomic piston rhythm of the pedalling cadence, the cicada-like whir of the chain, the hissing of those skinny tires, the sailing ebullience of a tail-wind, and the shimmering black and gray ribbon of a forsaken county road in the hot afternoon of a nation of Interstates. There is the solitary wildcat who snarls in surprise as you swoop quietly around a corner in the Florida scrublands, the hawk that screeches down on a hapless rabbit in a newly plowed roadside field as you pass at 25 mph with a hiss and a glance, there is the orange tropical sun setting behind row upon row of orange trees on the shores of a lake of water warmer than your bathtub. In time there came the cameraderie of other people who had experienced these things, who spoke this language, and who could calculate the $200 importance of the 6 gram weight-savings of your new carbon seat-post. But, most of all there was the knowledge that you could ride over hills that forced multiple downshifts in your car's manual transmission with out pegging your heartrate monitor, that you could reach almost 40 mph in your sprint after 50 miles, that your perinium (look it up) no longer ached after long days in the saddle, and that you were one of the few idiots who could, or were willing to, spend 30 hours a week paying the price required to make those claims. Most of all there was the suffering. One rider described a bike race as "four hours of extreme discomfort, punctuated by 45 minutes of extreme agony." Like the self-mortifying saints, those who ride the obligatory 200-300 weekly miles of the serious cyclist come to point of intimate familiarity with the redemptive power of suffering. In short, the love and passion are equal to the price paid, and there isn't aything suprising about that to a psychotherapist.

I shaved my legs for the first time the night before my first race, which I won. In short order I broke a wrist and a clavicle in a particularly bad crash. I stayed at George's house for the first few recuperative days, and, in a curiously intimate gesture, the man even put my socks on me when I could not use my arm at first. As soon as I could put my hands back on the bars, I was out there again. I got into a fight when a man in a Jaguar eased into me when I was crossing an intersection, and I sprayed the sticky contents of an electrolyte drink all over his hood. I rode on George's team, and eventually became one of its leaders, meaning that the others would ride in my support to try and win races. I met my future wife on a ride, and our first date was when she asked if she could "sit on" (ride in my slipstream) on one of my training rides. I entered races of 100 miles, then 120, some of which I won, and others in which I was inexplicably "stuck to the road" all over again. I bought my first Italian bike, a red Simoncini, and then upgraded that to a $4000, 16 pound titanium road rocket. Things went on this way for about 7 years. I trained like the monk that I had become, again, after thinking that my competitive life had ended under the orthopedic scalpel.

My last race was the Florida State Championship. The night before the race I had stayed up way too late watching the O.J. Simpson Bronco-chase on TV. I told my wife the next morning that I had "a bad feeling" about this one. I had never had this feeling before, and I tried to blow it off as "nerves." Hell, that is what it was, right? The course was flat and fairly straight, which meant that almost all 200 riders were still in the peloton with a little over half a mile to go. In the peloton you are riding with your front tire about two or three inches from the rear tire of the rider in front of you. Someone else is that far from your back tire, and so on. There are also riders packed around you, with brake levers nudging your hips at times, amd all of this at 30 mph. All it takes is one twitch, one touch of the brake, one concentration lapse.

The last thing that I remember was a slight swerve in front of me, and then the whole world was screeching, flying, tumbling, skidding, rolling, scraping, and then, finally, stopping. Then there is the silence for one shocked and prolonged second, and then the groaning. At least 25 of us had gone down in a tangle of spandex, plastic, asphalt, and metal. Lying on the ground, stunned, I looked over to see another rider's cheek gaping open from a chain-ring laceration, another seemed to be unconscious, some were struggling to untangle themselves from the pile of bikes and bodies. As I finally got to my feet I bagan checking myself; my clavicles seemed OK, lots of roadrash but no head injury, I could stand so my legs must not be broken, I think I am pretty much intact, except maybe this pain in my left wrist. I hold it up. It looks as if someone has taken my hand off, and then reattached it to my wrist three inches too far to the left. A race official runs up to me, looks at my wrist, winces and yells for the paramedics. "It's gonna be OK dude," he says, we'll get you in the ambulance."

"Just get my bike for me man, it's a Merlin, brand new," I heard myself saying. I saw him untangling it from the pile. The saddle was torn almost completely off the seat-post. I got into the ambulance beside the facial laceration guy. "How's it look?" he aksed. "Very punk-rock."

I had surgery on my wrist, and was back on the bike after the external pins were removed. But I was not the same. I could no longer ride in the peloton, I was too twitchy, too reactive. I started riding alone more and more. I stopped racing. It was over.

It was soon over for George too. His penchant for making the wrong comments to the wrong gender at work eventually did him in. It hurt, because he was my friend, but he was also wrong. Looking back, it is amazing to me that he got away with it for as long as he did. In a year or so, I moved to the mountains of Virginia where I now live and work. He visited me here once, and we rode mountain bikes. Not the same, by a long shot. I became much more career-focused, and my work weeks stretched to 50, and then 60 hours per week. My wife and I divorced. Within a couple of years we both remarried. Neither of our new spouses were cyclists. George and I had a falling out, and never really made it up. Things which can be overcome in close proximity, are often made permanent by distance and separation. I went back to running as my main form of exercise. But, that was not the same either. Life became less beautiful.

In 2006 I was convinced by one of my new colleagues that I should go ride bikes with him in the mountains. No, not mountain bikes, road bikes. He had seen the race posters in my office, and had heard that I used to be a competitive cyclist. My old Merlin still hung in the garage, woefully out of date. No replacement components were avaliable anymore, a complete rebuild was required. Very expensive. I thought for a long time; I was too busy, it was too expensive, and I had more "adult" things to do now, too much responsibility. And, I remembered how painful cycling is, especially difficult for those who have yet to be hardened by miles in the saddle. Perhaps I had become irreparably soft?

But, as I looked at my still-scarred wrist and my skinny, hairy legs, and my arms which were no longer sporting the deep farmer-tan of a "convict of the road," I remembered something else too. I remembered that cycling is beautiful, for a hundred different reasons, and that I had lost way too much over the years. I called the local bike shop.

I have not written much this summer, as is so painfully obvious. In the midst of a reaorganization at work, I have seen the weeks stretch to 65 and then 70 hours. I love my job, and I am passionate about building high-performing organizations. But, although this work is challenging and rewarding, it is not beautiful. I cannot ride my new Cannondale as much as I would like. Some weeks I do not ride at all, and I am certainly not going to strike fear into the hearts of any of the local hotshots. But I can still dish out the pain to most people I encounter on these mountain roads, even if it hurts me as much as it does them. I now think of a hard ride as an expression of who I am at my core, a manifestation of what I have learned and become in 44 years. I am often "stuck to the road," and I have also crashed once, though nothing broken this time. If you come through this way you might even see me out there on my silver steed, rocking her back and forth as I crest yet another climb, dripping sweat and looking for home. But, what may look to all the world as a pained grimace, is actually the slight smile of one who has been here before, and remembers the joy of winning and the pain of losing, and the Greek tragedy of a singular man who introduced me to a great love, and who was my friend.

Hallway Magistrates

2007-07-15T08:49:00.000-04:00

Hallways and corridors can be great catalysts for flash bits of insight. Tending to be the type of person who can sit at a desk for only so long, I like to get around a bit, over the campus at the hospital where I now ply my trade, and the clinics and classrooms of my past life. You hear bits and snatches of several conversations as you move about in this fashion, generally of the passing, "did you hear about.....?" type. You get a feel for what people are paying attention to in the news, what types of activities people engage in outside the workplace, and, most commonly, what aspects of the private lives of others have been loaded onto the gossip train. I am tempted here to sidetrack myself onto a description of the many daily injuries idle gossip creates, and how I have come to loathe it, but maybe another time for that. For now, I want to draw attention to the common ingredient in almost all of these interchanges between the "Hallway Magistrates."

It will be the rare bit of corridor reparte that does not contain, or is not fully comprised of "rendering judgement." Whether it is the status of Hillary Clinton as a presidential candidate, the pleasantness or lack thereof in today's forecast for thunderstorms, the benefits of having chosen the Honda Accord instead of the new Camry, the wisdom (or lack thereof) of the Judge that sent Paris Hilton back to jail, or, most commonly rendered in a more hushed tone, the "skankiness" of the nurse on B Unit who left her husband for her estate attorney. For a long time after I had begun to pay attention to this phenomenon, I focused on the concept of "schadenfreude," the German term for taking pleasure in another's misfortune. It is a complex and fascinating part of human psychology that we use to prop up our own precarious self-worth, or our concept of a "just universe" with these types of cognitions, but we rarely recognize the underpinnings of the pleasure and reassurance that results from them. But, there is something even more basic at work here as well, and these bits of hallway commentary began to help me see it in my own life. I was also a "Hallway Magistrate." I spent an enormous amount of cognitive time sorting things out into categories that are simple subsets of "Good/Pleasurable" and "Bad/Unpleasurable." And, I bet you do as well.

When I first came to this awareness, I started to think of all of the people with whom I came into routine contact in a day. As I recalled their names and faces, (some were only faces, in fact), I found that I had categorized each and every one of them according to some "likability quotient" or LQ, that I carried around with me inside my head. There were a whole set of feelings that corresponded to the LQ, with pleasurable feelings accompanying the "liked" and not so pleasurable ones accompanying the "disliked." This realization was like the tiny snowball at the top of the steep hill, and the more the idea rolled downhill, the bigger I watched it become. The LQ applied to any number of other things besides people, like the weather, song on the radio, passing smell, office artwork, various routine tasks, etc etc. In fact, I was spending an enormous amount of time everyday, categorizing an enormous number of incoming sensations into this "Good/Bad" dichotomy. Further, in most circumstances the process did not aid me in any discernible way, (I still had to face the traffic jam no matter which category I put it in), and still further, I was not even consciously aware of the most of these sortings. My emotions were being yanked about in this fashion, taking up precious mental RAM, and I was receiving little benefit from the whole thing!

One day I was discussing a clinical issue with a colleague, and he made reference to a client's equanimity in the face of significant personal tragedy. "Of course, you know that she is a Buddhist, so there you go," he said. "Why do I go there?" I replied, "I don't get the meaning." He went on to explain the importance of acceptance in Buddhist thought, which stems from the recognition that human misery is caused by attachment to things which are impermanent, and thus inevitably lost over time. By practicing detachment, and letting go of the illusion that anything is ever permanent, we can focus on the here and now without having to judge what it implies for the future, be that pleasure or pain.

"Eureka!," this was the bit of common sense that I had been missing! OF COURSE everything is impermanent, Heraclitus had taught us that almost 6000 years ago! But, by attaching to something in the present moment, and clinging to it as it is, we set ourselves up for future unhapiness. The new car will rust, the baby will grow up, the vigor of youth will dissipate, the photographs will fade along with the memory. "Acceptance" of this impermanence was key to allowing oursleves to experience things as they are, without freighting them with categories and resenting those we had asssigned to the "Bad" group. I was reminded os something Alan Watts had once said, that we tend to take a stick of a certain length, label one end "Good" and the other "Bad," and then spend our life trying to break off the "Bad," producing only a shorter version of the same stick. His illustration began to make more sense to me.

In one form of Buddhist meditation, thoughts are allowed to flow though the mind unimpeded by any judgement about whether they are good, bad, pleasant, unpleasant, desireable, etc. This serves as practice for life in general, in which "acceptance" implies the uselessness of categorization. Things either are, or not, as they "are" or "are not." I am enamored of this approach to life. I began to practice this myself, in an embarrassingly inept fashion, but hey, I am not judging that either, right? What I have learned in the ensuing years is that I still cling to the illusion of permanence in many respects; I lament the dings in my car, fret over my increasing 5K run times, bitch about having to get stronger reading glasses. But one area in which I notice the biggest difference is with people. The vast majority of people with whom I now come in contact are not assigned to any category. They are in a "take em as they are" state that allows me to be more accepting of things that used to rile, and I have to tell you, that feels pretty good. I am less threatened by what they may think of me, less moved by harsh and unfair judgments of my efforts, more open to the inevitable comings and goings of those I have grown fond of, and more tolerant in general. Attaching less importance to what other people think of me, it is now pretty hard to hurt my feelings, and that leads to a greater sense of security overall, which means that I am better enabled to respond to people with an "effectiveness focus", rather than in any affect-laden, "short-term gain-long-term pain" fashion. Note that I am NOT saying that I do these things to any particular extent, only that I do them more than I used to. I would be the laughing stock of any Zen Monastery, that much is assured. But, my only basis of comparison is with myself, your mileage will vary.

In a recent discussion with a colleague, one of the "Chief Hallway Magistrates" of our hospital, I remarked that solving a particular personel issue would be easier if we avoided getting into moral judgements about the staff member's life outside of work. "I am not interested in how he is making his way in his personal life, only his professional one," I said. Being aware of the "Hallway Magistrates' Guild" findings that I am a "quiet atheist," my colleague retorted with some sarcasm,"Well, that is pretty Christian of you."

"Nope, that is pretty Buddhist of me, actually," I said with a smile.

Phaedrus, Seneca, and the Deuce; On the Road.

2007-07-01T06:47:00.000-04:00

"If Shakespeare is right about "the" question's concerning itself with being or not being, then "the" follow-up question, should one choose to "be," is HOW to be." (Phaedrus' Journal, June 29, 2007)

The Roman orator, Seneca, once exhorted his contemporaries thusly; "As long as you live, never stop learning how to live." My initial, and long-lasting, take on his words was that the "how" is confined to the moral sense. Now, I am not so sure. I am now persuaded that his meaning may have been expansive to the whole of what appears to us as discretionary in our lives, the every decision that we seem to make. I ponder on this as I ride my new Harley Deuce back from Atlanta.

I watch a red-tailed hawk leap into the air and take wing out of the wide grassy median of I-75, and wonder what he may have, if anything in those talons. Hawks do not venture into freeway medians for no reason, and usually those reasons are small and fur-covered. I cannot tell as I move past at a steady 70 mph, and the hawk seems disinclined to answer the question for any of the passing horde of motorists on a holiday weekend. The hawk lives and dies according to the design of nature, without apparent thought to his "hawkness" and what he "should or should not" be doing with it. This is the reason that animals are so revered in eastern philosophical systems, they appear to be "just doing" in the same manner in which humans are exhorted to "just sit" in meditation, or "just be" in general. What is implied is that our penchant for "thinking" about everything that we do is actually a barrier to the "experiencing" of our lives.

On the saddle of the Deuce I am also thinking, but in a different way. Let's face it, riding a motorcycle at freeway speeds in near bumper-to-bumper traffic is a dangerous thing to be doing. And, because I am acutely aware of this, I am acutely "aware" in general. I have to be, because a lapse in attention to the here and now could easily result in my departure from both. My eyes seem to be wider than usual, and my consciousness more attuned. I am listening, inside the percussive roar of "Screaming Eagle" pipes and the passing hiss of SUVs and eighteen-wheelers, for any sound that is different from that which is expected. Psychologists refer to this neurological function as "pattern-matching," in that as long as experience matches with the sub-consciously expected pattern, it will remain sub-conscious and allow me to think about other things inside the conscious compartment of my mind. But, now on the Deuce, it "feels" to me that this process is more subject to conscious awareness than ordinarily, and I am wondering if this is part of the exhiliaration of the experience.

I am tactily aware of the changes in air temperature and wind pressure, kinesthetically aware of balance and lean through a turn, and olfactorally aware of the many smells along the highway in North Georgia, from the paper mill near Dalton to the fetid swamps near Acworth. It is all sensation, all perception, all experience. I am "in the scene," as Pirsig once put it, as opposed to viewing the scene through the automotive glass of my usual windshield. I am choosing not to download the frames i this particular website. And, for these reasons, it occurs to me that riding a motorcycle is a meditation. Sister Mary Lisa wrote me recently that she had seen some Harley riders who appreared to be "following their bliss." Experienced meditators have described their experience to me similarly. I feel the connection, I am finding the stillness in moving. At other times in my life it seems that I might be stationary while the rest of the world moves by, but not now. There is the sense of acting, rather than being acted upon, and I like that.

When the rain hits in Tennessee, I am looking for a place to pull off for awhile, and find a Starbucks that fills the bill. Raindrops feel like needles when you are on a bike. Owing to my not having my full-face helmet, I was getting the sense of what a full-face tattooing would be like. No thanks! When the shower passes, I get underway again as the caffeine flushes the dullness out of my system. The wind is cool now, that blast furnace effect is gone, and I ride on into the evening hours. The traffic is thnner now, the cities are behind me and barns and pasture land move past, and the occassional silo, shining dully silver against a slowly setting sun.

The reduced threat level of fewer fellow travellers allows me to return to Seneca for the time being. "How" to live? Some would say, in agreement with Victor Frankl, that our focus should be on "why" to live, and the "how" will naturally follow. But, this seems overly restrictive. I have known too many people who pursued the same "whys" in diverse "hows," with similar senses of success and failure resulting. I see this as emblematic of the uniqueness in each of us, which all good therapists know, and the best honor. The longer I sat in the consulting room chair, listening to the hundreds of stories of pain, loss, triumph, despair, love, hate, harmony, and conflict, the less judgmental I felt. A fundamental lesson that I learned is that everyone is the star of their own inner movie, and no one wakes up in the morning and decides to be a complete schmuck that day. We all struggle to feel justified in living our lives as we live them, in the moment at least. It is after the fact that the guilt of having betrayed our parents, our friends, our spouses, our potential ,so often sets in.

I think that old Seneca would agree that riding this Deuce is not a smart thing to be doing, it is not a productive way to be spending this time, the purchase price did not represent the absolute best use of funds, and I am nonetheless loving every f-ing minute of it. The moon is coming up and the air is cool on my sunburned arms and I feel like a lean and dangerous middle-aged mofo, kind of like that red-tailed Georgia hawk, laughing at myself from that part of me that observes the rest of me. I don't have a damn thing in my talons, but I loved the thrill of the swoop and the dive. Six and a half hours later, when I wheel into the driveway, my backside feels like, well, you get the picture. Seneca and I have had quite a day, and night. Can't wait to get back on the road tomorrow, you know, to uh.... finish our disussion.

Being Good is Feeling Good?

2007-06-02T09:30:00.000-04:00

You cannot have been an out-of-the-closet atheist for any time at all before you will receive this challenge from a theist: "Well, if there is no God, I guess you can simply do whatever you wish then." The challenge is based on the remarkably ignorant supposition that morality has no meaning apart from "what God wants you to do," and it is easy to parry this particular thrust. But, lying beneath the question is a more interesting topic; where does the "moral sense" that human beings seem to posess actually come from, and how does it operate?

Questions as to the nature of "goodness" and how it is manifest in human thought and behavior certainly predate Christianity, and have captured the minds of many brilliant thinkers throughout recorded history. Plato seems to positively obsess on the subject, and his writings are arguably some of the best one can consult, and that is only a start. But, it seems, for most of this country, that the question of "what is the good" in human conduct, or ethics, has been subsumed under that vast heading, "religion." I think this is most unfortunate, in the same fashion that Genesis is unfortunate. Both are barriers to an actual understanding of what "we" are, and how we came to be "that."

I have touched before, albeit tongue-in-cheek (see Grub Worm post), on the nature of moral dilemmas and how they are viewed by different ethical systems of thought. Ethics is one of the more interesting areas of philosophy, in that it is inherently practical. One's view of what it means to be ethical informs one's conduct of life far more directly than, say, metaphysics does. I concluded the Grubworm piece with the rather flippant suggestion that morality is what causes us to "feel good" about an action. One of the primary challenges to this "self-interest" centered view concerns altruism, or a behavior that advantages others at the expense of apparent self-interest. The woman who dives into the icy water to save someone elses child would seem to be sacrificing her evolutionary interests to support another's. Various explanations for altruism have been proposed, but I have continued to harbor the suspicion that these acts were not as self-sacrificing as they might appear.

As an atheist, I obviously reject the notion that the "conscience" is supernatually derived. What Freud referred to as the functioning of the "superego" appears to be learned, but at a suprisingly young age. We seem to be "wired" for the moral sense, and it is not difficult to connect this to evolutionary underpinnings. To do so here would go beyond my present purpose. I have expected for some time that neurological findings would increasingly impinge on what most see as religion's domain when it comes to "righteous" conduct. A recent article in the Washington Post, therefore, caught my attention.

In 2006, researchers at the National Institute of Health, discovered that moral, altruistic actions, activate the same pleasure centers in the brain that are associated with appetitive behaviors such as food and sex. These, and other similar findings reported by researchers elsewhere, suggest that the brain is hard-wired for moral action in the same way it is wired for procreation. We engage in sex because it is pleasurable, not generally because we wish to create new life. These new findings cast moral behavior in the same light, i.e. we tend towards ethical behaviors because we find it pleasurable to do so, not because God wants us to undergo self-denial today for infinite reward later. Not quite so unselfish, huh?

Further, these results help to explain the apparent empathic and altruistic behaviors observed in many other species, such as rats, who will stop eating when a neighboring rat receives electric shock as a result. Natural Selection appears to use the moral sense as a tool for ensuring a species continued evolutionary viability. These "judgements" have been shown to be more emotionally driven, as opposed to resulting from complex intellectual activity. This makes sense if morality evolved over extended periods of time, because the emotions emerged earlier in our biological history than did higher-order thought. Humans all over the world appear to assess moral dilemmas in the same fashion, lending additional support to the view that this is a neurologically-based phenomenon.

Reducing these types of complex experiences to brain functioning is threatening for some theologians, because God is not a necessary ingredient in the mixture. Others will take refuge in the quasi-deistic view that evolution is a tool in the hands of the creator. In my view, this is another of the thousands of steps away from a worldview based on the supernatural.

An even more interesting segue created by these findings concerns the age-old question, as Augustine phrased it, "On the Freedom of the Will." But, that is for another day.

Bibliophilia, a Case Study:

2007-05-24T12:56:00.000-04:00

"Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it is too dark to read." (Groucho Marx)

All of my life I have indulged in a love affair with books. I find that it is not merely the written word, but the feel of the binding material, the texture of the pages themselves and the nature of their adorning characters and illustrations, the rigidity of an unbroken spine, the smell of an older book particularly. I love holding a 200 year old novel or biography in my hands, wondering who has owned it and what they thought about as they read it. I find these sensations to be invariably pleasant.

Perhaps it was growing up in a rural community, in an age before video games and the internet that led to my bibliophilia, but, whatever the causes involved, I am grateful. As long as I have a book, I am never without possibilities, never without hope that something special is about to happen. My life has been free of the boredom of which so many complain, and I owe this to the happy co-occurrence of an indefatigable curiosity and the abundance of written materials available in our society. Can there be a more reliable harbinger of societal corruption than the censorship of art and literature?

I have come to value and rely upon the fire hose of information that is the internet, for good and ill. If the variety of information is bewildering and the nature of some of it troubling, I like the bewilderment, and I like the trouble. That said, I do not find the experience of reading the screen the equal of turning the page. When I discovered that I printed almost everything longer than a page or so, I realized that the act of reading, for me at least, is so much more than taking in information symbolically represented by the characters of a language. I cannot fall in love with my LCD, but I will fight you for my first edition of "For Whom The Bell Tolls." I feel little affinity for my PDA, but I am more than a little fond of all six volumes of Malone's "Jefferson."

Like most "book people," my offices at work and home are generously cluttered with full, sometimes sagging, shelves. The square footage of a home is instantly converted to estimates of book storage space as I scan a real estate listing. When I watch an interview with a respected figure, I try to make out the titles on the shelves behind the talking head. If I could know what was on those shelves, would I not then know the content of the heart? It was not for nothing that Freud concealed his book titles, along with his art, from the view of his patients, for to have seen that collection, would have revealed far too much of the consciousness, and unconsciousness, of the "collector."

Such is the case in my own life and the spaces within which so much of it has taken place. I can trace the progression of my thought and experience through the arrangements of titles; the Freudian years, the cognitive swing, the christian apologetics, the Eastern mysticism, the angry existentialists, the beautiful Greeks and noble Romans. Let the Catholics have their saints, I will direct my reverence towards Maugham, Orwell, Plato, and Fitzgerald. I will love Patricia Cornwell and Peter Straub, and Christopher Hitchens as well as Emerson and Thoreau and I will still laugh out loud at Mark Twain. Hand me a Hemingway and I will welcome an old friend. Talk to me about Tolstoy and Turgenev and Dostoyevsky and let me merely listen, and I will be happy.

I live in a world now when each moment is filled with the possibility that I am about to be disturbed by a pager, a cell-phone, a knock, or that little chime that warns of yet another e-mail. I was not made for this kind of world. The vast majority of these electronic interruptions will result in the jarring displacement of what I wanted to think about, by what someone else wants me to be thinking about. I have accepted this as part and parcel of the modern professional world, and my little role within it,but I will not lie about my dislike of it.

Perhaps it is, in part, the pleasant fact that a book will never intrude, never demand, that it will silently wait until you are ready for it, that I find reassuring. As the child of strong-willed parents, and a survivor of that pleasant-voiced and peculiarly Mormon thought control, I tend to bristle at all the subtle demands our modern devices make of us. My fantasies typically involve remote mountain-top cabins, solitude, fireplaces, coffee cups, and the soft sounds of the summer wind. And maybe a Philip Roth this time.

I will be away and out of range for the next week or so. You can be sure that I will have a couple more titles for the shelves when I return.

First Installment of; "Things I Wish I had Written"

2007-05-19T09:52:00.000-04:00

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters."

Norman Maclean; "A River Runs Through It." 1976

By His Affronts, We Knew Him

2007-05-17T05:07:00.000-04:00

Is Jerry Falwell the man that Larry Flynt says he was, or can his life be better measured by the many outrageous statements that he made, and the policies for which he so stridently, some would say shrilly, advocated? Put another way; to what extent should we measure a person's life by their private characteristics, when that person so vigorously pursued a public life? I think that it is fair to say that Rev. Falwell, left to his own devices, would have used his personal view of the Almighty to narrow the freedoms that Americans know today. He would, and did, argue, as his followers do even now, that there are more important principles than freedom, namely Godliness, and that Americans have used their freedoms for unworthy, and perhaps collectively dangerous purposes. His God leaps from the pages of the Old Testament, with the attendant proclivities for great murderous rages, in which even those whom Falwell himself would likely think worthy of a more merciful treatment from the divine, are immolated or worse. This view of the "divine will" would indeed cause concern for ones personal welfare given the "sins" of the others around one, because Falwell's God apparently lacks the skill or inclination to be a competent marksman, opting for the "scatter gun" approach of the mafioso. As a result, the Reverend took a particular interest in the private lives of others, and this almost always ends badly for the cause of liberty.

Let those who knew him personally, reflect on his memory in a personal fashion. While we can note with some amusement, that the remarks made of Falwell by a tasteless pornographer are more graceful than anything we can remember Falwell himself uttering, let's not linger too long on such curiosities. Let the rest of us take a brief pause to reflect on his impact on our nation, and then get back to work, with purpose, to prevent his followers from finishing what he set out to accomplish.

I am inclined to believe that he truly did feel that tolerance for homosexuals and a woman's right to choose, at the very least, contributed to God's decision to let his rival's children kill 3000 of us by flying our own airplanes into our buildings. I am inclined to accept his word when he said that the anti-Christ was, of necessity, a Jewish man. I believe that his University, which, as if designed for comparative purposes happens to be ensconced in the same general area as the great University that Jefferson created, truly believes that the T-Rex bones in its "museum" are, in fact, only 3000 years old, and therefore, cohabited the planet with human beings. I also accept that tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans, find at least one of these things to be an outrageous affront.

And so,nobody should be surprised that by his affronts we knew him. His personal relations with those in his physical orbit, including Mr. Flynt, have no bearing upon the effects he had, through his public statements and private political dealings, on those not in that orbit. His effect on my life was to frighten me into a greater awareness of the sometimes surprising fragility of personal freedoms I took for granted. My naivety at that time included the false confidence that such freedoms were a part of the unidirectional nature of America's progress towards greater recognition of the full thrust of Jefferson's vision in the Declaration. When, as a teenager in 1980, I worked on the Reagan campaign, I was unaware of the extent to which the "Moral Majority" wished to roll back the clock. Over the ensuing years, this became all too obvious, to the degree that even Barry Goldwater lamented the growing power of the religious right, and the manner in which this power was brought to bear. The fiscally conservative and socially libertarian side of the Republican party, to which I lent my efforts for some years, was gradually, yet forcefully muscled aside by the theocratic elements of the far right. Eventually, many such as myself had to admit that the "party of Lincoln" had been co-opted by the John Birch Society, of which many of Falwell's and Pat Robertson's early supporters had passed through. And so, we left and still today drift about in the reasoned no-man's-land between the poles of left and right.

Fear is the primary motivator for those on the side of Christian nationalism, and those who oppose it. Thus, the actions of one side always serve to strengthen the resolve and efforts of those on the other in a self-stoking cycle of conflict. Falwell himself, had long ago given way to a younger, somewhat quieter, but even more politically savvy, group of leaders. His death will not diminish their resolve. Those who so vitriolically celebrate his death on forums such as "on-Faith," are deluding themselves if they think that this marks any kind of turning of the culture war tide. Their expressed gleefulness, liberally laced with the hatred they simultaneously decry in the man himself, will now filter into the sermons heard across the evangelical world this Sunday. It will galvanize, rather than demoralize. It will appear on every "lesson-plan" across the Christian home-schooled segment of our nation, exposing the coming generation to the face of their "godless" (see Ann Coulter) opposition.

I urge restraint on the part of the secularists out there. Let our collective reaction to his demise be temperate, reasoned, dignified. Let us aspire to be bigger than Jerry Falwell, not merely his ideological doppelgangers. As Gandhi famously exhorted; let us "become the change we seek in the world." There is much work to be done, and opposition will continue to be fierce from those who think the nation is imperiled by its promise of pluralistic freedom. Imperiled by a deity who is more vengeful, intolerant, and tyrannical than the man who was his public face in the genesis of his political incursion, and who has a penchant for bloodthirstiness to boot.

Jerry Falwell is dead, but Alito, Thomas, and Scalia still ride the bench of the Roberts Court. As long as GWB is in office, we are only an untimely accident away from another such justice further shifting the court to the right, and almost certainly seeing abortion rights join Liberty University's T-Rex in extinction. Intelligent Design is still alive and seeking to infiltrate the science curriculum of a public school near you. The "faith-based initiative" is continuing to funnel your tax dollars to Christian groups who can legally refuse to hire homosexuals and non-Christians. Leslie Unruh still wants to deny your daughters a medication that will lessen their chances of contracting cervical cancer, on grounds that doing so will lessen the penalty for fornication. Patrick Henry University is still turning out graduates skilled in the cleverness of converting religious dicta into secular legislative language, and they are taking a disproportionate share of jobs on Capitol Hill. Falwell's own Liberty U. won the national debate championship. Now what causes do you suppose their rhetorical flourishes will be aiding in the near future?

And, of course,those 3000 year-old bones, adorned with their laughably bogus description, still lie in Liberty's museum. Let's not spend any more temporal or moral capital gloating over the bones of Jerry Falwell.

On Descartes, Running, and the Silence of Two Cats

2007-05-13T07:29:00.000-04:00

I don't like Rene Descartes. Although I recognize his status as the "father of modern philosophy," and I recognize his brilliance, I find that he is the philosopher of ego, of the segregation of the fullness of self. Descartes would have us believe that a human being is fundamentally separated from the rest of the natural world by virtue of our ability to reason. Going still further, he also divided us from oursleves, in that he took the old Catholic notion of the sinful corporeality of the body and gave it the sheen of intellectual rigor. In so doing, he firmly implanted the belief in mind/body duality that has had such a negative effect down through the years.

I am thinking these things while I run through the late spring streets of the town in which I now live. An early morning shower has relented for the moment, leaving an almost summery haze of trapped humidity beneath low hanging skies. I run by the silent Saturday office buildings and near empty lots, accompanied by the sounds of birdsong and the metallo-plastic slap of skateboards from a nearby park. My thoughts keep time with the soft rhythm of my footfalls, and I think about the many thousands of miles that have passed beneath my feet in the span of my near 30 years of running. I have written the larger portions of every speech, paper, essay and article for which my pen has been responsible in this very manner, which is to say, to the rhythm of my falling feet over miles of concrete and asphalt. (and I have the surgical scars on my knees to prove it). I think that it was Emerson who wrote: "Never trust an idea arrived at sitting down." He and his New England compatriot, H.D. Thoreau, were great believers in the mystical connection between the physical exertion of covering ground on foot, and covering ground in our ideas. I am a contumacious kinsman of these giants, or at least I feel like it when I am out covering the ground of my own ideas to the metronomic cadence of my running shoes.

Descartes would not hold with this connection, for he saw our reasoning ability as fully separate from our physical self. He compared the body to the hydraulically operated moving statues in the french gardens he frequented; mechanistic, and devoid even of feeling were it not for our rational capacity. The aim of this rational capacity was to acheive "certainty," or a belief that could not be doubted. Note that there is no requirement for this belief to be "truthful." For Descartes, the goal is cocksureness, as opposed to accuracy. In his famous statement, "Cogito, ergo sum," (I think, therefore I am), he establishes his existence in the world upon the basis of his own thought. Since, in his view, other animals lacked this capacity for rational thought, they were also without real sensation, including the capacity to feel pain. Descartes was known to vivisect dogs and cats without anesthesia, attributing their agonized squeals and yelps to the internal workings of the "machine." For this alone he should be condemned. I think of his smug expression in almost every portrait I have seen.

I turn the corner and follow my regular route past the small shops on Main Street, the jewelers and antique merchants loitering in their doorways nod absently in my direction as I pass by. They are lost in their own thoughts I suppose, which are entirely outside of my capacity to comprehend. Are they also conscious beings, possessed of the same rational abilities that I recognize in myself? I can only be certain of what occurs in my own mind says Descartes, and must doubt the existence of everything outside of it. Outside of my self-perception, my own mind is perceived by God alone, who endowed humans with this mind, and the soul as well, which resides in my pineal gland. The mind and soul operate according to the characteristics with which God endowed them. They are not subject to physical law, and cannot be studied with the material methods of science. The body, on the other hand, is purely mundane and operates according to physical laws which lie within the domain of scientific inquiry. Other animals have neither mind nor soul. In humans, the resulting split, labelled the "mind-body dualism," is behind many of the ills that plague us today.

I feel the twinge begin in my left knee now. This usually occurs at about the four mile mark, and I am expecting its arrival. It first appeared in the last marathon that I ever ran, which was 19 years ago now. When I saw the orthopedist, he very cooly and clinically examined my knee, asked a few question about duration and severity of the pain that had now become intense every time that I ran. He did some manipulations with his cool, antisepsized fingers, watched me wince without changing his expression, and rendered his verdict; "This is just another case of ilio-tibial band syndrome." I felt reassured for a minute to find that this condition was "named," and therefore "understood." I took momentary heart at his use of the word "just." This is a minimizing word, is it not? I asumed that there was a "treatment" which would put me back on the road. At this time, running was a huge part of my life, governing almost every discretionary judgement that I made each day; what and when to eat, when to sleep, how to spend my meager stipend, etc. I was running about 100 miles per week, spending upwards of 20 hours on the roads. So I asked the physician when I would be able to run again without this pain? "Never, "he replied in an off-hand fashion as he left the room, "This is a chronic condition that will probably be with you for the rest of your life. You will just have to find another form of exercise." This time his use of the word "just" minimized ME, I thought.

I was stunned, and mutely sat there for a minute before realizing that I had been dismissed from the inner sanctum of his exam room. There was no treatment available, other than surgery, which was also no guarantee and could even worsen things. Over the next few weeks I became increasingly depressed. I tried to run, only to be forced to turn back and trudge slowly home when the pain became too intense. It felt as if a metal file was being slowly sawed across the outer portion of my knee joint, and the only thing that could lessen the effect was to stop doing what I most loved to do. My life had changed.

I now realize that Descartes was in that exam room, embodied in the orthopedist's mindset. I was "just another knee," to him, and therefore cleanly, clinically, separated from any emotional reaction that I might have to the news that he gave me. My emotionally pained questions were just "noise from the machine," within the same category as those poor butchered dogs on Descartes vivisection table. This is the mindset that blights so much of the practice of medicine in our time, the anatomical factory technician approach to the "healing" profession. And it can be traced right back to Descartes having divided the mind and body at the dawn of modern philosophy.

I went on with my struggle to run competitively for a few years, having the surgery done on both of my stricken knees with only slight efficacy. I took up competitive cycling, and a few triathlons, but I never ran with the power and clear-mindedness I once had. I was always waiting for the pain to return, that tell-tale twinge as sure as any ringing doorbell. I run a few miles at a time now; five miles one day, rest, 4 miles the following day, rest, then maybe 6 or 7 if I feel good. But, I still love it enough to keep doing it, long after I am no longer competitive. I enjoy it now for the things that occur to me while I am doing it, the little insights and ideas that rise from my consciousness as the ground moves beneath me. Sometimes I arrive back home not being able to recall the actual "run" at all, only the thoughts. On these occassions I realize that there has been no separation between the act of running and the person "doing" the act of running. It gives a whole new layer of meaning to the phrase "I AM running." The person has merged with the act, and experienced the "unification" of what is not divided to begin with.

Descartes may have been cocksure, but he was wrong. Our minds and bodies are unified holistically, such that it is actually nonsensical to refer to them separately. Medicine is beginning to recognize this fact, and alter its practice in some ways. I prefer the term "body-mind," as inseperable as Enstein's space-time. I encourage people suffering from emotional ailments to get out and exercise the body-mind, make some ground pass beneath their feet or wheels, and experience the many sensations, physically and mentally, that will arise from doing so. Those who take this advice, often report back their positive results with wonderment. This wonderment far outstrips Descartes certainty, in my mind at least.

I have arrived back at the house, drenched in the sweat I have earned and feeling emotionally cleaned out. My cats, Thomas and Jefferson, stop their tussling long enough to gaze up at me silently. What is conveyed in their silence I cannot know. It is a deeper silence than the "space between speech" of which we humans are more familiar, but this is not to say that it is an emptiness. There is something present in their absence of speech of which no certainty will ever be permitted. Their inscrutible expression defies any cocksure conclusion as to from what it arises. It is simply an expression of their "catness," as surely as my reflection on it is an expression of my human-ness. Who is to say if one of those is superior to the other. Rationality be damned. "Fuck you Rene," I say softly to myself as I head for the shower.

Encouraging the Elephant; On Fundies and Gay Marriage

2007-05-06T16:35:00.000-04:00

Some of you may know that I am a frequent poster on the Newsweek/Washington Post discussion blog, "On Faith." It started out as a curiosity, and has become an opportunity to get my own thoughts worked out, discuss important (to me anyway) issues with others from around the world, and to make wonderful cyber-friends like Sister Mary Lisa, Mayan Elephant, Henry and Betty James, and Huff. One of the issues that tends to, shall we say, pique my interest, is anti-homosexual doctrines and practices within fundamentalist groups. I include Mormons in this category, for a variety of reasons. The following is a piece that I wrote to several LDS participants on Susan Jacoby's thread earlier today;

In medievel Christendom, left-handedness was associated with "evil." In fact, the word 'sinister' derives from this unfortunate association, which was perpetuated by religious authorities. This mindset was so deeply ingrained, that children showing a natural inclination towards left-handedness were subjected to all manner of abusive "corrective" measures, designed to force them to use their right hand by denying the use of the left. We look at this belief and practice as silly, and barbaric, today. But, let us understand that both the belief and the practice stemmed from humans "understanding" of God's intentions as derived from his written, Biblical, word.

I wonder if church authorities, being confronted by those who decried this belief and practice, would have retorted: "We afford the sinister the same as the non-sinister; the right to use their right hand dominantly."

Those who claim, with a literary straight face it would seem, that "gays are afforded the same rights as heteros, to marry someone of the opposite sex," merely mimic the medievel mindset towards lefties. Heteros are afforded the right to marry someone to whom they are natually attracted in a sexual sense. Homosexuals are not. No amount of sophistry can conceal this central fact.

Homosexuals, in an attempt to find solace in the fundamentalist community, frequently do marry a member of the opposite sex. Many then have children. And a great number of them then see those families ripped apart when the homosexual member is no longer able to deny their true nature. This is wrong, dreadfully wrong. Having treated several of these family members through the years, I can speak to the pain this produces.

In defending this fundamentalist stance towards homosexuals, many apologists attempt to claim that, because God "prescribes" this form of discrimination, it is, somehow, no longer discriminatory. Words have meanings however, and injustice is injustice no matter the source thereof. And, this is not even to mention the fact that these claims come from those who are certain they have a monopoly on God's intentions in the first place. Can you really be so sure?

Thousands of years ago, a set of human beings codified the moral conceptions and superstitions of their time and place, and attributed them to a deity whom they then claimed demanded adherence to these "laws" from all. Having projected and embodied their own consciousness into "heaven," these men then bestowed upon themselves the authority to exact earthly retributions for insults to this "divine" will. Much suffering was born of this circularly "reasoned", and self-serving contrivance. But, we get used to that which we experience consistently. The adult elephant remains tethered to his pitifully tiny cord because it was introduced in his infancy.

Thankfully, morals evolve like everything else. The moral structures of these desert tribesmen have become progressively less tenable over the centuries. We no longer stone adultresses in the west, we no longer practice slavery, we no longer force the "sinister" to use their right hands. We have thrown off these particular yokes, but there is more work to do. The challenge to the religious fundamentalist is how to remain comfortably within the corner his Biblical inerrantism/literalism has painted him into. Time moves in but one direction, however, and it is not possible to prevent its flow, nor reverse it.

Some of you claim that I am "grinding an axe." This is something one says to impugn another's motive, or the fashion in which they act according to such. If I am grinding an axe, it is a pitifully tiny version of the mighty axes of a Ghandi, a Martin Luther King, a Thomas Jefferson, and the LDS' own Emmeline Wells. I am contented to be in that arena, albeit in the cheapest of seats. I will be happy to continue to work to throw off the yokes of those primitive desert power brokers, for those who continue to chafe under them.

To those who would say, "But the Mormon church is a private entity, and should be able to decide for itself what rules it will enforce for its members," I say "Right you are. If it ended at the borders of the faith." But, it does not. The LDS church spends millions of dollars to combat gay marriage, and any meaningful version of civil unions, in every state that takes up the issue. In so doing, it seeks to exert its influence over the lives of "everyone," LDS or not.

I do not claim that it should not be permitted to do so, as this is a form of protected speech. (I do urge our elected representatives to investigate whether this is a violation of the church's tax-exempt status requirements, but that is another issue.) But, having done so, the church enters the political process, and becomes fair game for its political opponents. It cannot sit back and try to maintain a low and falsely-pious profile, while it has politically partisan mud on its hands.

Our continuing moral evolution will settle this issue eventually. One by one, the yokes placed upon modern humans by ancient sensibilities will be removed. There are a lot of little Emmeline Wells' out there, a lot of tiny Jeffersons.

I, myself, am heterosexual. My children are too young to know what this debate is all about. One of them may turn out to be lesbian, who knows? But, I feel a responsibility to fight for them now, just in case, and for other children who will one day discover they are homosexual, and suffer the slings and arrows of a society steeped in the ingrained hate of that which is "different," as well as the "morality" of a long dead age.

There are a great many of us who will continue to urge that adult elephant to break that rotting old cord.

On Grub Worms, Consciousness, and Morality

2007-04-30T20:30:00.000-04:00

I had meant to post again on Hemingway last weekend, but as events will, they intervened. Instead of the cold morning run, the hot coffee and a good book, I was cutting grass, planting flowers, spreading mulch. Spring had sprung I supposed. Two weeks ago we had snow, but last weekend I planted azaleas. Mindless work right? It usually is for me I admit, but that day I had a rendezvous with a grub worm, who became my teacher for the afternoon. You know the Buddhist saying that "when a student is ready, the teacher will come?" Note that the form of the teacher goes unaddressed. Thus, I am sticking with my grub worm thesis for the purpose of this post.

It was in digging the final hole for the final transplanted azalea that I saw him. He was fat, shiny, sticky-looking and brown. There is no doubt that, as a bird, my dessicated genes would never see the light of the next generation because I find the resident mockingbirds' tastiest morsels more than a little unappealing. Including the grub worm.

I continued to dig, the shovel dislodging a bit more stony soil with each thrust, and the grub worm, well, it did what grub worms do when they perceive threat, which is to say that it simply curled into a ball and endeavored to ride it out. The odds were awfully good that the worm would be bisected at any second. The hole was not that big, and dodging each shovel thrust produced declining odds of remaining whole. I was tired, my back was aching by this time. I just wanted to finish what I was doing and take a shower, relax with a good red zinfandel or something. But, I stopped digging and just stared at the worm.

I would assume that an entomologist would tell you definitively that grub worms are not conscious. I have not studied them myself, but I feel safe in saying that. They lack the neural hardware to have awareness at the level of humans, certainly. For all I knew, the worm would not even feel pain had I cut into it with the shovel, it's not as if I go around looking things like this up, but still. And yet, I found that I did not want to do this, this wormicidal act. I suppose that I am a reflexive anthropomorphiser, but I found myself wondering if the worm was fighting for its life in the only way it "knew how." I live in the middle of deer country, and I am surrounded by deer hunters. I have been most of my life. I have heard story after story from "triumphant" hunters about the lengths to which deer go to simply try to survive. I will spare you the truly gory details, as they always make me sad and episodically homicidal against anything in blaze orange. But, that is another story for another time, and for now, what about this grub worm?

Was he trying to survive? Did he (note the tell-tale assignment of gender, another sign of the anthropomorphizer) feel pain? He must have perceived that he was in some degree of jeopardy, because he had quickly assumed the requisite defensive position. I was tired.Did I mention my back was hurting? I wanted to finish. I wanted to drink some good wine. The worm was slimy, wriggling, twisting upon himself in the depths of his former home. If I pulled him out, where would I even put him? Could I not just dig around him carefully?

The Christian and the Muslim believe that we should behave morally because God wants us to do so, and this will also best enable us to avoid the fires of hell. Most of them will also tell you that without the concept of God, morality has no ultimate basis, no final cause. They will tell you that there is no morality outside of the way god wishes us to behave. And thus to them, sans god=sans morality. Not killing is one of Yahweh's Big 10, (although it is OK to kill non-humans, infidels, abortionists, gays, adultresses, disrespectful children, Democrats, etc.) God might take the causing of needless suffering as some insult to his creation, might take an interest in seeing the insulting party suffer. The Christian and Muslim have much riding on such decisions. Forever is a long time, and there are those dark-eyed virgins to think of.

The Buddhist will tell you that we should not kill because all life is sacred, given that every creature is on the wheel of rebirth, and racking up karmic debt by killing the hapless creature could lead to you actually being the grub worm in the next go round. So, there is some self-interest there as well.

But, what does the atheist believe? On what should atheists base a moral code? When you factor out the life after death variable, by what equation can atheist morality be figured? Without the reward, why not do whatever you like? I do not have a good answer for this, if "good" is defined as that which appeals to my sense of logical beauty. It does seem clear that humans come hard-wired by nature with a moral sense, which was necessary for our collective survival in the primordial environment. After all, we do not come equipped with natural weaponry like claws and fangs, only these big old brains and the concept of strength in numbers. (Not to mention the Burden of Consciousness) If you live amongst numbers of others, it is a good thing to be able to coexist peacefully, more or less. And thus, the moral sense. Perhaps it is the teleological feel of this that prevents me from being ultimately satisfied with it, although it is far more acceptable than the "god the law giver" hypothesis.

At the moment that I began to consider what the great philosphers would have had to say on my dilemma, and the grub worm's moment of truth, events did what they will do, they intervened . Just as I was considering Kant's categorical imperative as applied to invertebrates, Mama Mockingbird began to swoop by my head. My philosophizing had brought the grub worm to his existential crisis; the azalea sat drying in the sun, Mama Mockingbird's circles tightened and dipped by my head, my back ached, and the worm.......turned.

Hastily I took the shovel and filled the hole in, covering the worm with his dirty safety blanket. Mama cursed me with a haughty twitter, circled again and was gone. Far away, a dog howled (all right, I made that part up). My back reminded me of how stupid this whole thing was, and as I thought I was hearing the azalea's roots begin to sizzle, I began to dig another hole.

In the end, I did what I think morality is all about, on a personal level anyway. I did what made me feel better.

Virginia Tech and the Second "Question I Will Never Forget"

2007-04-25T18:52:00.000-04:00

She came up to me near the beginning of the class, and asked if I would be willing to speak with her in the hallway. When we found a vacant area, free of most of the traffic of tardy students taking the steps two at a time, I could see that she was smiling not to cry. After 18 years in this field, I know this look well. A lovely girl, long black hair, brown eyes, red around the rims from grief and lack of sleep. She told me that she had lost two professors and nine friends in the shootings. I had to pause for a second to take that in. I tried not to let the horror I felt at this moment reach my expression, but I can still not completely wrap my mind around those numbers. This young lady standing there on the bottom step of a now empty stairwell had just lost 11 people from her life within 4 hours time, eight days ago, in the deadliest mass murder in our nation's history.

We went on to discuss her experiences over the past week, her memories of the events of that day, how she had come to know about her friends and professors, how she had been eating, sleeping, all the things we are trained to do in these situations. She told me about her now dead friends, how much she revered these particular teachers. She was actually doing well, considering. I told her that, asked her where her strength came from, and she discussed her family and boyfriend with me for a few minutes.

She had just found out earlier on the day of the killings that she had been accepted at a prestigious east coast school, with a full scholarship, to pursue a graduate degree in bilogical sciences. She had gone from one of the highest moments of her life, to the very worst moments she is ever likely to see, within hours. There is no basis within my personal experience that would allow me to connect with the full extent of hers, so I just listened to her as she continued to talk. I tried to impart information from time to time, that I hoped would be helpful for her in the ensuing days and weeks. I always feel inadequate in these situations, but I am distrustful of those who say they don't have that inadequate feeling. I have been on-scene at hostage situations, robberies, murders in the work-place, unexpected deaths, serious assaults. But nothing to compare to Virginia Tech, not even close.

Then she asked me the second "question that I will always remember."

For context, I should tell you that the first such question came from a middle aged man I was interviewing after a serious suicide attempt. I asked him what had happened in his life that led to his wanting to end it. It is a standard question, and usually culminates in the person describing where their discomfort is coming from. It is intended to be a "door-opening question. This man looked at me, took a deep breath, and said quietly; "The question is not why I want to kill myself. The question you really want answered is why YOU do NOT want to kill yourself?"

I cannot tell you how many times I have tried to answer that question in my head, watching as my consciousness wrestles with the existential dilemma, from this novel angle. Hamlet has more meaning for me now, I can tell you that. "To be, or not to be?" Indeed.

And the second such question came at the bottom of that weathered stairwell, steps cupped from millions of footfalls, reeking of solvent and the scents of hundreds of candles burning on makeshift shrines throughout the building. The young lady looked at me as if she was forming the thought for the first time as she spoke, and asked haltingly, "When will I be able to regain the illusion that I am safe?"

Note the word "illusion." She did not ask when she would "feel" safe again, or when she would actually "be" safe again. She asked about when she would be able to reconstruct the illusion (technically this is a "delusion" by the way) of her personal safety? She had just spoken of that which most will never consciously conceive, even if they recognize the truth of it; that our "safety" is only one potential outcome of a near endless matrix of the most capricious forces, become "causes.". None of which are subject to our complete control. All of which are entirely natural and in which no diety could ever participate, much less mitigate, no matter how many offerings are placed upon the altar.

I had not expected to hear this profundity from one so young. But, she was, now, young in the chronological sense only. Her consciousness had aged.

I talked with her about "the look." You see "the look" in the news images of the faces of people who have just seen the hurricane-ravaged ruins of what was their home a few hours before. You see it in the Emergency Department on the faces of now childless parents. You saw it everywhere on 9-11. It is the look of one who has had the veil of permanency lifted, one who has seen the truth of Camille Paglia's words; "Nature shrugs, and man breaks." It is the look of recognition of how truly powerless a human being actually is, and how immune the natural world is to our status. It is the face that lies behind the "delusion" of our deeply felt "specialness." It is the recognition of the ephemeralness of life itself.

Over time, even after having been "enlightened" through these traumas, we tend to rebuild some of this delusion, and I do not find that unhealthy. Without these helpful fictions, we might never leave the house. As days go by and we are not killed on the highway, we begin to buy into the notion that we have control of whether we will arrive at our ultimate destination. We do not take meaningful note of the weaving 18-wheeler, the speeding muscle car with the barely post-pubertal pilot, the cell-clutching debutantes, each of whom may be about to change our life in a nano-second. As the years progress and our children grow strong and healthy, we buy back into the notion that it is they who will bury us, and not the other way around. We allow ourselves the assumption that if we exercise and eat right, we will not clutch our chests in a final gesture sometime in our fifth decade. In short, we begin to reconstruct the delusion, and if our good fortune holds, we make a passable job of it. I told this young lady this, and she seemed to receive the information gratefully. But, we both knew that she had learned something about life that would never be "un-learned." That the burden of consciousness had shifted for her in a way that has made her different, and that would shape her future for every one of her future days.

She asked me for a hug in parting, and walked out the front door into the afternoon sunlight. An hour or so later I walked past the makeshift memorials for the last time. Driving home, I thought about delusions and lasting questions. I drove more slowly than ususal. The extra time seemed precious.

(Note: I have significantly altered certain facts about the personal characteristics of the persons who asked me each of the questions of which I write. I do this to protect their privacy, and have only altered items immaterial to the point I seek to make. I wish to assure the readers that the questions themselves, and all other elements of this narrative, are entirely accurate.)

Another Reason Why I am No Longer a Republican:

2007-04-22T09:06:00.000-04:00

I came across this next piece on Richard Dawkins' website. If you have not been there, I highly recommend a visit. Dawkins is referred to as one of the "Three Musketeers" of atheism, and, while I find this kind of sloganeering a pander to intellectual cliff-noting, I do respect Dawkins, Harris, and Dennett for what they write. This article is a response to one from Dinesh D'Souza, one of the darlings of the right-wing thinksters out there. A natural segue from my last post, I suggest you give it a look to see Dinesh get his comeuppance. Note how he attempts to shift the onus of the "problem of evil."

http://richarddawkins.net/article,904,Dinesh-DSouza-says-I-dont-exist-an-atheist-at-Virginia-Tech,Mapantsula-Daily-Kos

The Other Problem of "Evil"

2007-04-17T19:15:00.000-04:00

First things first; I am a native Virginian. I returned to these beautiful mountains after a twenty year absence, and I am proud to be a citizen of the Old Dominion, home of Jefferson, Washington and Madison. Especially when she bleeds. I am not a Virginia Tech alumnus, but we are all "Hokies" today, in the same manner in which we were all New Yorkers on September 12th, 2001.

_____________________________________________

Usually, when you see a reference to "the problem of evil," it is in a religio-philosophic context. The question generally pertains to how a "perfectly just" deity, who is ominiscient, omnipresent, and ominipotent, can preside over a world where evil exists? This may be a germane question today, especially as so many people pray to a particular deity for comfort, after loved ones were allowed by this same deity to be slaughtered in their youth. I leave that question for another time, as those who are suffering should not be molested in turning for comfort where they will in such times. So, I will concern myself with another "problem of evil."

I believe that there is a natural explanation for every phenomenon. I believe that everything that happens is the result of a series of naturally occurring events. This includes why my car starts in the morning, why the sunrise has a particularly red tint today, why my coffee is a little bitter, why allergies seem to be worse this Spring, why anti-biotics are becoming less effective on evolving bacteria, why a mother feels something stir inside her when she sees her child running to her car after school, and why a twenty-three year old college senior takes a handgun and kills 32 fellow students and faculty members on a cold morning in the foothills of the Blueridge Mountains.

The reasons that a person makes such a series of choices are obscure, particularly in the case of mass murder. Serial killers tend to be vain, proud of their actions. They taunt authorities, return to the scenes of their murders to watch others reactions, collect newspaper and magazine clippings of themselves. They derive erotic stimulation from killing others one-by-one. They do not want to be caught, they want to kill again and again, victim by victim.

Mass murderers are different. They tend to be quiet, reclusive, socially backward, frequently depressed. They seek neither atention nor help. They are, most notably, deeply, furiously angry. Their thoughts are often obsessively violent fantasies of "getting back at" that, or whom they feel so angry towards. Their acts are enormous explosions of violence, seemingly directed towards life itself, that frequently end with their own suicides, by their own hand or "by cop."They feel very wronged, aggrieved, victimized. And, frustratingly for people like me, they do not stick around to be studied, and this is a major reason we know so little about them.

If our primary aim was to prevent future acts of this sort, then yesterday's final shooting victim was the biggest setback. With his suicide, Cho Seung Hui dealt a blow to those who seek to account scientifically for why some people do what he did. And, it is only through the scientific method that the "WHY" question the whole country asks today will be answered. And now the problem;

The following statement, heard often in the aftermath of all such events, conveys how we will remain forever ignorant on this question;

"This happened because there is EVIL in the world!"

I have a one word response to this sentiment: .... "NONSENSE!"

It is quite obvious to anyone who really thinks about it that "Good" and "Evil" are merely human concepts used for psychological reasons. They do not exist outside of human consciousness. They are not nouns, they are adjectives and adverbs. IS the lion the bad guy and the zebra the good guy? Is the hurricane that destroys your house "evil?" When your standoffish cat deigns to let you briefly stroke his head is he being "good?"

Of course not. These are purely descriptive words used to convey a judgment as to whether something is more likely to bring us pleasure or pain. There is no phenomenon in the universe that corresponds to "evil." Evil is as much a part of the natural world as is a unicorn. We can perceive a unicorn in our thoughts, but to claim that it exists outside of our consciousness is likely to generate unwanted attention from the authorities. To persist in believing otherwise is to choose to remain ignorant as to why things actually happen. Ignorance is expensive in this world. It is long past time that we threw these silly "pseudo-explanations" out, because they are actually dead-ends to real understanding.

What happened at Va Tech has to do most directly with the causal contributors to the shooter's actions. It may turn out that, like Charles Whitman (Texas Tower case, 1966), there is a clear neurological link. The tumor near Whitman's hypothalamus was not "evil," it simply "was." Of course, had all of mankind remained satisfied with the "good vs evil" causal theory of everything, we would not even know what a brain tumor is, or the effects they can have on emotion, cognition, and behavior. We may never have a good grasp of the causal chain of events that culminated in yesterday's murders. But, whatever series of naturally occurring phenomena led up to this event, rest assured that they "are" naturally (as opposed to supernaturally) derived.

No matter what the theologians will tell you. Or the politicians.

Yesterday, a friend of one of my colleagues was working trauma at Montgomery County Medical Center. A cool and "seen it all" type, she was assisting with a young man who had sustained trauma to the head and eye. At some point in the procedure, his cell phone began to ring. It lit up with the caller ID, saying "Mom."

Some might say that the most important thing that we might do for that "Mom" is to help her feel cared for by a loving God. Perhaps this is the kindest bit of fiction we can offer her, and who would we be to deny her that? But, for the rest of us the best thing that we can do is whatever makes this less likely to recur. And that means avioding fictions like good, evil, god, satan, and the idea of a universe who renders justice. Yesterday in Virginia it should have been clear to anyone that the universe is oblivious. Like the red sunrise and the bitter coffee and the brain tumor in Charles Whitman's head, the universe simply "is." It is up to us to provide the justice.

Thoughts on "Papa" Hemingway, and the Summer of 87:

2007-04-14T07:29:00.000-04:00

One of my favorite writers is Ernest Hemingway. I find him to be the standard berarer for those writers and artists who, having seen the first Great War, emerged with a forever altered consciousness. The death of Victorian sensibilities unleashed a new kind of art, philosophy, and science, peculiar to these kinds of sweeping, "then and now", world events. Artists like Dix, Picasso, and Miro; writers like Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Hemingway, reinvented art and literaure for an age shorn of the pretense of inherent grace and dignity. Grace and dignity must come from the self, and one must admit of the "nothingness" as the initial step. God was obviously dead, man was alone in the universe, and amongst his own species as well.

Victorian nationalism and romantic hero-mythology had resulted in millions of anonymous bodies filling thousands of filthy trenches and the shell-torn expanses of no-mans-land; the air full of the stench of death and poison gas. As the fog of war cleared, what remained behind was a pervasive sense of "nothingness." The modern materiel of war had advanced far beyond military tactics, with predictable results. Europe looked around its dinner tables at the empty chairs of its children, and found that it had all been for naught, a great and vain sacrifice born of the ignorance of romantic mythology. As Gertrude Stein's mechanic once remarked to her; "You are all a lost generation." The name stuck, and the "lost generation" writers and artists of Paris's left bank went on to leave an indelible mark upon the world's sensibilities.

Hemingway is generally regarded as the consummate 'man of action,' his books and stories filled with war and bloodsport. But this is not what has appealed to me through the years. I find that 'Papa' was one of the very best at conveying the BOC in his novels certainly, but also his short stories. I will get to one of the short stories in a subsequent post. For now, one of the novels.

In the Summer of 1987 my girlfriend left me. I was entering grad school and she had finished her B.A. and wanted to pursue her career in another state. I was shattered, for the very first time, by the loss of another human being from my life. I had never felt that particularly hollow type of ache, and had no idea how to carry on in the manner in which my responsibilites demanded. I found myself thinking things like; "That star up there is the same one that she would see if she were also to look up at this particular segment of the sky at this very same moment." That thought provided a brief sense of cosmic proximity at the time. I stood in line at the phone booth to get in a call to her, but the sound of her voice only made it worse. I became ashamed of the way in which I was moping and feeling sorry for myself. I felt weak, needy, not in control of my self. And I hated those sensations! I needed someone to point the way. I needed to get my sense of purpose and dignity back. Enter Papa.

I started with "Islands in the Stream," for reasons I can no longer recall. It is Hem's posthumously published story of "Thomas Hudson," who is a "good painter" and lives on an island in the Gulf Stream. Here are the two opening sentences from that book, which I found so beautiful that I have remembered them for these 20 years:

"The house was built on the highest part of the narrow tongue of land between the harbor and the open sea. It had lasted through three hurricanes and it was built solid as a ship."

I thught then, and still do today, that were I ever to commission a painting, I would simply provide the artist with those two sentences and say "paint that house." Winslow Homer came close, but not close enough. The house is metaphor for Hudson, who was solid enough in himself to weather the hurricanes of his life, despite the precariousness that comes from a clear understanding of our ultimate fragility. To set onself upon the "highest part" of understanding, is to recognize one's ultimate fate more directly and to feel the BOC most acutely. The winds are always more acute at the summit. Hudson endeavored to reside there, and to bear up with "courage," which Hemingway famously defined as "grace under pressure."

After reading the book, I wrote this poem:

I learn,
as Thomas Hudson learned,
that the isolate gives up no pyrrhic wail
nor thrashes limbs about
when the mind is bound,
offering up a ragged soul to those only
geographically worthy of receiving such weak and winded desperation.
No.
I learn,
as Thomas Hudson learned,
that it is only through quiet resolution that
a man is fit company for himself.

The poem is certainly forgettable, but the impression created at that time is not. I went on to read every novel and every short-story that Hemingway wrote during the summer of 1987. That was 20 years ago.

Perhaps I need to revisit Papa. I have 16 Hemingway bios on my book shelf, and I have read each of them cover-to-cover in the ensuing years. They reveal the most complex of men, full of the starkest of contradictions. I do not know if I would have liked Hemingway the man, but I love Papa the artist.

In the end, he snuffed out his consciousness with a shotgun, as the burden became literally unbearable. Was it that he recognized that he was no longer capable of measuring up to the caricature he had allowed himself to become? Some scholars think so, but I remain mystified. I go back and forth on whether this was a refusal to go out on anyone's terms but his own, or the ultimate failure of courage, the most ungraceful of exits. He had once said that "Man owes God a death." He paid up in 1960 in Ketchum Idaho.

Gertrude Stein had once said of Hemingway: "Forgive him everything, he writes like an angel." "Islands in the Stream" was not in the same league as his real master-works, which is why he chose not to publish it in his lifetime. Papa was a keen self-critic. Perhaps the shotgun blast was merely his final edit.

As for me, I tried to bear up with quiet resolution through the rest of that summer. After I finished grad school I moved to my girlfriend's state, to see if there was anything left for us. What I found was that I had changed in that time, and that the change was to a part of me that was integral to our relationship. The Summer Of Hemingway had led to a difference in the manner in which I bore the BOC. In the end, I said goodbye. That was in 1992. I suppose she made the right choice for herself five years before then. It was not the "Summer of Hemingway" for her, but only a change of venue and the start of a career. But it was the fork in the road that sent us off on separate paths forever.

Oh those everyday ironies; a thought about the "I-man"...

2007-04-12T08:53:00.000-04:00

Don Imus said an amazingly stupid thing. He should have, and, in fact did know better. He should experience some discomfort as a result of that. But, is it not more than a little ridiculous that, as a result of Imus's idiotic remarks we are now being lectured to and hectored by the men who brought us "Hymie-town," and "Tawana Brawley?" Is it just me, or does it seem apparent that the Revs Jackson and Sharpton just kind of hang around like vultures waiting for opportunities to pounce on the carcas of any media friendly event that smacks of racism, real or imagined, limited solely to that directed towards blacks?

Racism is repugnant, but it is not any more repugnant when practiced by one race than any other. In a curious synchronicity, the charges against the three Duke lacrosse players, stemming from allegations made by a black female, were dropped by the Attorney General of NC yesterday. In the immediate aftermath of the allegations, the Revs were all over the story, appearing on several different media outlets to denounce the team members' actions, as if the allegations had already been proven. The Black Panthers descended upon Durham as well, to make it clear that they were watching the outcome. Yesterday, not a word from the Revs or the Panthers. I think that, were these folks truly interested in racial harmony, they missed an opportunity to demonstrate this by appearing in public to condemn the actions of the false accuser and the overly zealous prosecutor in Durham. Not a word from the Revs. They have moved on to Imus.

If any good can come out of this, it might be in Imus's comments, and the reactions to them, leading to an examination of the rampant misogyny and racism in the rap "community." Referring to any woman as a "nappy head ho" is deplorable, no matter who does it. Let's see if the Revs follow up their anti-Imus campaign with one directed towards Snoop Dog or Fifty Cent. I wont hold my breath on that. Wouldn't it be great though, if the Rutgers team and coach took up this standard and used their high moral ground to denounce all "nappy head ho-ists" in society. Folks, if its a bad thing to do, and it very definitely is, then don't discriminate in whom you take the fight to.

Possibly, the best aspect of continuing to make progress on racial relations in this country would be the lessening of opportunities for the spotlight grabbing, and cycloptic pressure tactics of these two "Reverends."

The BOC and God in Golf:

2007-04-09T19:28:00.000-04:00

If there is a sport in which the BOC is a bigger player than it is in golf, I would like to know what it is. Any person who has ever stared intently at that little white ball in a paroxysm of terror at the sheer magnitude of one's power to either succeed supremely, or fail absolutely on the most ephemeral edge of possibility, knows the truth of this thesis. There is no hiding in golf. You tend to build your "self" into your game, your impatience, lack of confidence, failure to prepare, recklessness, impulsivity; all of these are partners in every round. They lurk in your mind, along with the memories of every shank, every skull, every worm-burner, every "snap-hook." A round of golf is a confrontation with your secret self, in public.

Bobby Jones once said that all golf is played on the five inch course between a golfer's ears. (or something close to that). Bobby Jones knew a little something about that course. He mastered it well enough to win the only "Grand Slam" in golf history, all four major championships in a single calendar year. He also knew something about creating a golf course, and a great tournament to match. His creations bear the names Augusta National Golf Club, and the Masters, respectively. I saw Augusta National for the first time this year. Were there a heaven, for a golfer at least, it might look a lot like deep green and obscenely azeliaed Augusta. And the great tournament Jones created finished yesterday with a relatively unknown 31 year old from Iowa besting the Bobby Jones of our time, Tiger Woods.

But, this is not a sports column. For this purpose I am not so much interested in Zach Johnson's iron play, as I am the comments he made after winning the Green Jacket. Before he even won, officially at least, the tournament, he was already thanking Jesus Christ for assisting him on the course. He also mentioned the presence of his late Grandfather as well, but it was the Jesus comment that got me thinking about the role of consciousness in golf, and how religion assists in bearing the BOC.

The element of golf that is so terrifying is the alone-ness. The ball rests on the ground, it does not move, etiquette dictates that you have quiet as you take you stance, check your grip, make your waggle. There is no time limit, no outer source of distraction, and absolutely no one to provide you with any assistance. This is alone-ness. You try to visualize your one desired result, while NOT visualizing the infinity of things that can go dreadfully wrong. Everything is contemplation and action, as opposed to instinct and reaction. Contemplation is one of the purer forms of consciousness exploration, thus, golf is the game of consciousness channeling. And few things are as burdensome. The ball is just lying there, it is entirely up to you where it next comes to rest. And there are eyes upon you.

Superstition, at its most basic, results from a a faulty cause-effect analysis; e.g. that stepping on a crack (cause) will actually result in your mother's subsequent ruptured disk (effect). From this spurious conclusion, all manner of behavioral ritual flows; e.g salt sprinkling, crack avoidance, crosses on windshields post black cat crossings, genuflection, you get the picture. These rituals allow one to control anxiety by providing the illusion that one is asserting one's influence over natural phenomena. The problem is that the conclusion of the cause-effect analysis itself is bogus, so any action based on it is equally bogus. The only potential benefit of these rituals is that they make us "feel" better, by helping conceal our powerlessness over potentially threatening natural phenomena, from ourselves. Thus, we may act in ways to make the ritual seem effective; e.g. "See, I prayed for the baby to get over her cold, and she did! Prayer is effective," despite the fact that there is no actual cause-effect relationship there.

When such beliefs and practices are limited in scope and number of adherents, we call them superstitions. When they are complex, widely-shared, and involve a deity, we call them a religion. In both, they are rather desperate efforts to manage the BOC.

And so, is it suprising that golfers tend to be amongst the most superstitious of athletes? Lucky socks, the ragged head covers your dead uncle gave you, the advice you got from that mysterious old pro one time, the way the blades of grass are tossed, the three, and ONLY three practice swings, the only color tee you will use. All of these are merely magic spells to ward off the demons on that five inch course between your ears. When man feels most alone with his fears, he is most likely to create his personal savior to banish them. Twer ever thus. And so, whom does Zach Johnson conjure to serve as the "uber-caddy," but Jesus himself...... oh, and Gramps too.

Obviously, the point here is that all superstitions do pretty much the same things for us. They permit us to avoid the realization that the universe is oblivious to our feelings, desires, and experiences. When the baby gets its first inoculation, the reason Mother cries is NOT because she feels the pain. The only person who feels our pain is ourselves. This is a threatening thought, no? If no one feels our pain as we do, then they are not likely to care as much about helping us to avoid it, shielding us from it, subduing it on our behalf. We are actually alone inside this suit of skin, on the most fearsome of courses, called the world, and it scares the hell out of us. It is this underlying fear that has served the need of every snake oil salesman the world has ever known. Its that same fear, of being denied something we desperately want and experiencing the empty agony in its wake, that makes a person tremble over that last 3 foot putt before a crowd of faceless, unfeeling millions.

So, Jesus is Zach Taylor's candle in the dark window, his fellow dreamer, his all-knowing, all comforting, all embracing companion on the fairways of that five inch golfcourse called consciousness. Zach won the Masters because Jesus wanted him to, more than he did anyone else at least. Pretty powerful comfort there. A powerful shoulder on which to rest the burden of consciousness.

Meanwhile, 10 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq over this Masters weekend. You would think that Jesus would have different priorities as to where to direct his efforts.

Hello from Phaedrus:

2007-04-08T07:34:00.000-04:00

It was one of those warm October days in the mid-South, you probably know the kind of day that I am talking about. Sunlight filtering through the windows, beyond which leaves were turning ever redder, more golden, the air so clear that it seemed as if sound travelled further than usual. Like, say the sound of bat meeting ball and the pop of leather. I was sitting in class listening to the Professor expound upon the nature of consciousness, and how its development over evolutionary time marked the rise of human mastery of the primordial environment. As he droned on and on I could hear the clink of softball bats on the intramural field, I wanted to get out of "this environment," and "naturally select" THAT one. Was this dude going to talk until Winter set in, until the girls up front batted their eyelashes so fast for so long that they actually came...off!? (He was a young professor with, what one of my co-ed friends referred to as, a "sexy intellect") I wondered which particular circle of Dante's hell this situation fit into. I was pulling for the 6th or 7th, as I recall. "Okay Dr. X., so I am aware, and I am aware that I am aware, thus endeth the lesson, n'est pas? Mine is the consciousness of the inveterate smart-ass I am afraid.

How we change over time. My professional career, first as a therapist, a college professor, and then as an administrator in a large psychiatric hospital, has been spent struggling with the effects of consciousness, my own and thousands of others. If I could return to that classroom, knowing what I know now, I would take a decidedly different tack. I would not allow the young professor to confine his intellectually sexy remarks to the evolutionary advantages of consciousness. I would direct him to the underside of this neurological phenomenon, to what I began calling the "burden of consciousness."

This blog will get around a bit. The burden of consciousness is seen in religion, politics, interpersonal relations, economics, history, philosophy, psychology, and the arts. I will, I feel certain, get around to all of these things, and mix them up into my ususal synthesis of elements so diverse that combining them in any fashion may seem perverse. I can't help it, I should have been treated for Attention Deficit Disorder as a child, and now it is too late.

It is, to paraphrase Lincoln, "altogether fitting and proper" that I launch this blog on Easter Sunday. Religion is an area in which it is quite easy to see the burden of consciousness (which I will refer to as the "BOC" from this point forward) at work. I will have much to say about religion in the future. Those who would like a preview of my thoughts in this area can peruse some of my posts on the "On-Faith" blog, sponsored by Newsweek and the Washington Post. You can find me most readily on the threads of Susan Jacoby and Michael Otterson. Much encouragement has been received from participants to that site, and I thank them for that. You know who you are.

A few words on my name: The name "Phaedrus" is fairly common in the b-sphere, sadly. The real Pheadrus was a Greek philosopher, a sophist actually, who came in for some rough treatment from Socrates in the Platonic dialogue that bears his name. Another Phaedrus appears in ancient Rome. But, the name is most familiar today because it is the monicker used by the narrator of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," to describe a "self within a self.". This is one of my favorite books, and I return to it often, though I do not subscribe to the "metaphysics of quality." I am drawn to the character of Pheadrus because he represents a primordial self, banished by electroshock therapy, to lurk in the background of Robert Pirsig's consciousness while another "self" takes over administrative duties. I will not give too much away, some of you may want to read the book if yu have not done so already, but suffice it to say that Phaedrus emerges the "better self."

I took the name when I first went on-line in the 90's, as I thought of cyberspace as like unto another plane of existence even then. Hence, I needed another "self" for this plane, and Phaedrus seemed a natural one. The name seems part of me now, after all this time. Now I see many others using it, some saying ridiculous things while so doing, and I considered calling myself something else on this blog. But, I cannot do it. I am "Phaedrus" to ME, and so I have little choice but to be "one of the Phaedruses" to you.