353. Swann's Way - Overture

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Swann’s Way

by Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
Random House - 1924-25

Overture

Since I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this, I’m not entirely sure now if my deep interest in dreams and dreaming is something I have in common with Proust or if I caught this from him. My dreams are so much more interesting than my waking life that it really doesn’t bear thinking about. Hardly a night goes by when I don’t awaken, in the night or in the morning or even better after having fallen back asleep in the morning, and am astounded by the beauty and complexity, and sometimes just the strangeness, of my dreams. And here is something in particular that I know very well.

P5 “...for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilization, and out of a half-visualized succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.”

I sleep in a very dark room and so often I will awaken with no idea where I am. That I was just the instant before “someplace” quite different doesn’t reduce the confusion. Usually there is some light from the streetlight outside that penetrates my closed shutters. And if it is morning, there is a hint of light from several directions. But it takes a moment for me to orient myself, not just in my room but in time and place. 

I do wonder how this works for a blind person. If it is early or late there might be sounds to tell me something, but between 1 and 3 am it is nearly silent here. Without the visual clue of light I would not know where to even look for a light or a door. Or for my glasses.

But memory does reassemble your identity over time. 

San Francisco April 8, 2020
We are now in the fifth week of Sheltering in Place or practicing Social Distancing. Today I went out and walked up and down a relatively level stretch of Pine street for thirty blocks. I didn’t interact with anyone so I didn’t wear my face mask. Probably tomorrow I will need to go to the post office so I will wear my mask for that excursion. The streets are mostly deserted and many of the stores are boarded up. It’s rather more dull than the post-apocalyptic fantasies we’ve seen in films. I have been busy this whole time with homeowners association business so I have been anything but bored. I am hoping to have more time on my hands later this week, but that’s what I thought last week as well.

What I miss are things that would not have meant much to Proust, social distancing in his cork lined room. I miss settling in at a cafe with my iced tea to work or read. I have not had a drop of iced tea, or alcohol, since this started. I miss seeing the usual faces at the cafes I frequent. I worry about the workers and the businesses.

On the other hand, I’m amazed at what the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been able to achieve in a matter of months. The Paris Agreement was a half measure that I never believed everyone would live up to, but this virus is taking care of business. I never thought we would willingly do what was necessary, but I did think it would be a global recession or depression that could make a difference, this is even more effective in that it is immobilizing even the wealthy. The cruise and tourism industry is not going to recover quickly from this. Which means the carbon reduction should last for some time. Will it be enough to make a difference? Is it already too late? I don’t know. 

Even when I can return to the cafes, my seasonal work at public events is going to be slow to return. And San Francisco will be hit hard economically. We are known for tech but its tourism that pays the bills.

But as far as the pandemic goes, we are doing remarkably well. Today we counted only our tenth death. So far (knock on wood) we’re getting only a death every few days. Though that could change quickly as there are already cases in the huge, city run nursing home and several cases in the homeless shelters. I don’t see how those two communities can avoid being consumed by the pandemic.

But the city as a whole went to sheltering in place early and it seems to be working. Also, I think a lot of people left town. I know four people in my building and another two or three across the alley went home to their families. Students and even some workers can work remotely from anywhere. I would love to know by how much the population of the city has dropped. 

I’m assembling lists of places I want to go (mostly foods I want to eat) as soon as things return to normal. But how many of my favorite places will survive? In many ways, this, especially if it goes on longer than two months, is going to be as bad as the 1906 Earthquake and Fire. It could take the better part of a decade for business to return to normal. All the more so if this is the start of the Trump Depression, which is quite possible.


Another day has passed with very little change. Yesterday 799 people died of COVID-19 just in NYC and there are now more cases in New York state than in any country besides the USA. No one seems to have handled the pandemic worse than New York. Our death count is still at 10. I realize that counting the weeks is confusing so I’m going to switch to a day count, starting with the day I and the City independently decided to embrace Social Distancing. This is then Day 23. So 23 days since I’ve been able to walk into a cafe, order some tea, and sit down to work. And I’m still refining my Social Distancing routine. I wear my N95 mask when I’m going to interact with someone at a market or bank or post office. And as of today, I’m wearing a cloth mask even when I go out for exercise. The latest word is that the six foot safety zone idea may not be good enough. So with a cloth mask I am preventing any viruses I may have -- there’s no way to know for sure if you have it -- from contaminating someone else as I huff and puff up my hill while giving me a similar degree of protection from anything in the air around me. Not perfect protection, but something.

When you think about it, and look at what’s happened around NYC and even in Singapore of late, it would seem to be a lost cause, yet the case count for San Francisco has gone from increasing around 70% every three days to the most recent count of 25%. That is a greatly flattened curve.


I’ve finished reading about young Marcel’s sad victory over his mother leading to a reading of parts of, but not all of, a novel by George Sand. In some ways I wish Proust had spent more time writing about his -- Marcel’s -- family than about the Guermantes. Though he does capture them and maybe more would not be better. And it’s really his grandmother that we see clearest. I’ve known women like her, and they can be exasperating, but she is also a lovely and good person.

Yesterday I paused at page 34, just before we come to the “petite madeleines.” It had been a long day of HOA related nonsense, check writing and taking the checks and other items to the post office for special service. I’m not going to read much now, but I want to keep moving forward. While I may regret saying this, I think I’m caught up for the moment so tomorrow I should have more time.

The last day has not been a good day for San Francisco during the pandemic. It was our first day with more than one death, in fact three deaths, and the number of cases went up 10%. That last isn’t a surprise as they are now doing more testing in the places where the destitute dwell and the results are about what you’d expect. People living in SROs or tents or in shelters are not going to be able to Social Distance even if they wanted to, and many have no real idea of what’s happening. And unless Meals on Wheels start delivering opiates and meth, they are not going to keep to themselves in any case.

Finally saw some death statistics comparing now with previous year. THIS is for NYC and it extends back to include 9/11. I hope someone at our local paper will see this so we can get similar statistics for San Francisco.

So here is the famous passage, as leaving it out really isn’t an option.

P34 “...mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory -- this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I was conscious that it was connected with the taste of tea and cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature as theirs. Whence did it come? What did it signify? How could I seize upon and define it?”
...

P35 “...feeling that my mind is growing fatigued without having any success to report, I compel it for a change to enjoy that distraction which I have just denied it, to think of other things, to rest and refresh itself... I place in position before my mind’s eye the still recent taste of that first mouthful, and I feel something start within me, something that leaves its resting-place and attempts to rise something that has been embedded like an anchor at a great depth...”

P36 “And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray... my aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or lime-flower tea... But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

“And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine... immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind if for my parents... and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square... the country roads we took when it was fine... all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village... and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being. Town and garden alike, from my cup of tea.”


I wonder if Temple Grandin has read this and if so what she thought of it. If she can remember everything she’s ever seen, does she respond to smell and taste in the same way when it comes to memory? Presumably she would remember the details of a house where she had spent time as a child, but would smell take her back in a more immediate way?

352. Reading Proust during a Pandemic

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Reading Proust during a Pandemic

Pvii “As early as 1890 (when he [Marcel Proust] was nineteen years old) he had also begun to take notes for an elaborate work which he was already projecting but none of his friends appears to have taken his literary pretension as anything more than the self-deception of a dilettante. He was universally liked because of a charm to which everyone who knew him has testified and because of a determination, carried to fantastic lengths, to do the considerate as well as the socially correct thing. He had not, however, written anything which displayed conspicuous talent and it was not thought likely that he would. Then, in 1905, his mother died and he began cutting himself more and more completely from the world which was to bring him at last to a strange self-imprisonment in the bedroom from which, after the most elaborate preparations, he only occasionally sallied forth in order to seek some bit of information from the head waiter at the Ritz or, as one lady remembers, to ask to see a hat worn some twenty years before.

“From childhood Proust had regarded himself as primarily a spectator. There were many things which he could know only by watching, and this fact doubtless encouraged him to make watching an end in itself. Nevertheless, contemplation became something much more than merely a substitute for the activities he could not indulge. His theory was that the quality of a direct experience always eluded one and that only in recollection could we grasp its real flavor. Now that the death of his mother had severed the only tie which bound him to the life of the world, he retired in order that he might discover and record what his experience had been...”

This is from the Introduction, written by Joseph Wood Krutch to the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of Remembrance of Things Past, or In Search of Lost Time, as it is more commonly called today. 

I don’t know that I’ve ever read this introduction. Usually I don’t read things like this until after I’ve read the book, and in this case by that time I’m a year on and putting down a different volume. So it’s quite possible I never have returned to it. But I think Mr Krutch did a commendable job here. This initial point is one of my favorite things about Proust. And maybe this time through I will remember to note the point in the work, around the time he first meets Saint-Loop I think, when Marcel reflects on how, while we long to share important moments with others, this would actually only detract -- distract us -- from appreciating the moment ourselves. It’s one of my favorite passages and I can never find it when I look.

I’m rereading this at an interesting time, and the paragraphs above remind me that it is in some ways a very appropriate time. Today is the first day of the fourth week we are Sheltering-in-Place due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike Proust, I have not chosen to isolate myself in my little studio, but the result is similar though far from the same. I go out walking every day. I occasionally put on my face mask and walk to one of the nearby markets for supplies or to restaurants for take-away food. I can’t wait to spend time in cafes and restaurants again. But for the moment I am forced into social distancing and this could be a perfect time to read Proust.

Pviii “...The first rule for reading him is... complete submission to an author who will certainly take you where you ought to go and who will give you, not only vivid descriptions, subtle analyses, precise portraits and full participation in a strange new sensibility, but also compose all these things into a vast symphonic structure which is probably the most amazing thing of its kind in literature...”

Yes, the connection with music is something that must be mentioned. There follows a sort of preview of what the work is about, precisely the thing I don’t want to read before, and don’t much care to read after, but this next part is interesting,

Px “...No one could possibly be more detached than he and no one could have less faith in anything. Indeed the story of the novel might with some justice be said to be the story of his disillusion with the only thing in which he made even an effort to believe -- namely, that tradition of noblesse oblige which the members of the aristocracy ought to follow but which, so obviously, they do not...” 

So this does go well with Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End. Last reading I went back and forth between these two authors and I think I probably will again.

“...Proust’s greatest invention was the invention of a form, of a method by means of which events could be arranged in a pattern having a formal beauty and a formal meaning capable of replacing the beauty and the meaning lost to those who, like himself, had no moral or religious faith capable of giving them any other kind.”

That reminds me of Adrian in Doctor Faustus.

“Externally the method is one in which the normal chronological order of narrative is often subordinated to a quasi-musical arrangement of material by means of which similar or antithetical persons, situations and moods are rhythmically balanced against one another so as to create a pattern which does not depend upon the order of time but the sense of recurrence. At the same time every presentation of material is dominated by the author’s obsession with Time and the need of the artist to escape it’s tyranny. The past must be recovered; but that is not all. It must be made permanent, and it can become that only when grasped by the imagination in such a way that every moment implies the past and the future because its true significance lies in its being part of a pattern extending from the past into the future. Living experience cannot be fully significant because it is isolated and transitory; it becomes significant only when it is contemplated in connection with those parts of the pattern which Time separates but which really belong together...”

“Proust himself spoke of the various themes whose full significance would not be clear until, in the later volumes, they had begun to combine. This remark of his suggests the analogy with music...”

Thanks to having read Doctor Faustus since I last read Proust, I see a bit of a problem with this, as Adrian points out, the secret of most music is to begin by imperfectly suggesting the theme, but holding off until near the end, the full development of that theme. Marcel’s desperate need for his mother may be the first hint of that theme here, but it is quickly followed by ‘Swann In Love’ which is the full development, later echoed -- but less interestingly in my opinion -- by Marcel’s passions for Gilbert and the others. But this is a quibble. Our Mr Krutch really hits the nail on the head on the next page,

Pxi“...the escape from Time is alluded to on page four where it is immediately followed by the incident of the magic lantern, which, as the first work of art introduced, serves to suggest the technique by which Time is to be transcended. One result of this arrangement is to make the novel in another respect like a piece of music, for of it may be said, more truly even than of most great novels, that the second reading is more rewarding than the first. To know what is coming does not detract from the pleasure -- is indeed necessary to the full enjoyment of it -- since each incident is, like a musical theme, only enriched by a knowledge of the variations to follow.”

And this is why it is so hard to get people to read Proust. I always tell people if you plan on reading it, plan on reading it twice because it is at its best when revisited. And how appropriate to Proust’s purpose is that.

“In the pages of the novel the commonplace fact that faces grow old and characters change becomes... something to be analysed with a fascinated terror. But this change in faces is only trivially important in comparison with that change which takes place in character. Hence it came at last to seem to him that it was folly to speak of Albertine, or Charlus, of himself even, as though any one of them were an entity maintaining its identity while time flowed past; and he realized that if his novel was to attain the full significance which he wished, it must manage somehow, not only to attain timelessness itself, but also to suggest the triumph of Time over the persons and the experiences which the novel alone could rescue.”

Now this I’m not sure I agree with. Do any characters really change over the course of the books? Their status in society changes. I think of them as staying largely the same as their positions change. Marcel’s artistic tastes do change in the course of his education, but he seems to be the same in his relationship with Albertine as he was with Odette or Gilberte or his mother.

Pxiii “Events become, even as he recounts them, already a part of legend and thus life is magically transmuted into art. He himself, as well as M. Swann and M. de Charlus, are no longer mere human beings but analogous to the figures painted upon the slides of the little magic lantern which had fascinated him so long ago... The suffering and the wickedness of his own characters have now ceased to have any significance except as parts of a formal design...”

Mr. Krutch contrasts Proust with Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser -- reminding us that the copyright for this edition is 1934.

“...it must be admitted that... the spiritual world of Proust has elements of charm lacking in most contemporary novels because of the fact that the sensibility everywhere exhibited is of an extraordinary sort. He was disillusioned enough with many things -- with morals, for example -- and he had neither any code nor any standards besides those which his taste supplied. [Is this a reference to homosexuality?] Yet in the midst of what might seem to be anarchy there were still capabilities and faiths which he retained... On the other hand, he never, like so many moderns, found himself in a universe limited and debased by the impossibility of escape from psychology, anthropology and Freudianism. The world was still absorbingly, still amazingly, interesting. Women -- most women -- were to him magical and mysterious...”

Pxiv “Most of the novelists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries felt constrained to take life seriously in a sense that Proust does not, since, and with a clear conscience, he permits himself to live the charmed life of a dilettante, not troubling himself much about the fate of civilization, acting as though there were nothing more important than the careful discrimination between shades of feeling, and devoting himself with the selfishness of the contemplative saint to the achievement of his own private salvation...”

And yet this reminds me of Montaigne and also, dare I say it, of Hans Castorp. This is precisely what Settembrini was always finding fault with. Also, isn’t 1934 rather early to be characterizing the novelists of the century?

“...Charlus, Saint-Loop, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Francoise and Madame Verdurin have definitely taken their places in the not very long list of characters who are more real than reality. Something -- both in the particular sense defined by Proust and in the more general sense in which the phrase is applicable to all great literature -- has been rescued from Time. It is not often that that can be said”

Curious that he leaves Swann off that list. I would add several other family members plus the wonderful M. Legrandin. I don’t imagine Proust and Jane Austen are often compared, but Legrandin ranks right up there with her finest minor characters. Forever captured in a single scene. 


I do believe I am ready to start reading.

351. The Stone Angel

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The Stone Angel

by Margaret Laurence

The University of Chicago Press 1964

P5 “Now I am rampant with memory... To carp like this -- it’s my only enjoyment, that and the cigarettes, a habit I acquired only ten years ago, out of boredom. Marvin thinks it disgraceful of me to smoke, at my age, ninety. To him there is something distressing in the sight of Hagar Shipley, who by some mischance happens to be his mother, with a little white burning tube held saucily between arthritic fingers...” Kind of see Marvin’s side here. Though of course this was written in the ‘60s, today it would be even worse or at least mean something else.

P104 Hagar: “Do you--” I hesitate. “Do you ever get used to such a place?” [while visiting the old folk’s home.]

Mrs. Steiner: She laughs then, a short bitter laugh I recognize and comprehend at once.
“Do you get used to life?” she says. “Can you answer me that? It all comes as a surprise. You get your first period, and you’re amazed -- I can have babies now -- such a thing! When the children come, you think -- Is it mine? Did it come out of me? Who could believe it? When you can’t have them any more, what a shock -- It’s finished -- so soon?”

I peer at her, thinking how peculiar that she knows so much.

“You’re right. I never got used to a blessed thing.”

P111 line 2 “when let I’m out” I’m let out. There were also a number of instances of missing close quotation marks.

What an amazing narrator, and we never leave her point of view. The most revealing passages are when she’s drinking with the insurance man in the fish place and when the preacher sings for her. Otherwise she seems entirely shut off even to herself. And she so reminds me of Gladys Trede even down to her use of “black as the ace of spades.” Again, we don’t see any kind of a perennial philosophy shift as she nears death. It does seem that she finally realizes, at least to some extent, how she has always misjudged Marvin. Though if she suddenly recovered, I doubt she would change a lick.

As awful as she is, she does usually adjust to the curves thrown at her to some extent. From her marriage to the women she shares space with in the hospital. Everyone except Doris. And it’s really hard to tell how unfair she’s being to Doris since we only have her perception of her.

I like what Robertson Davies writes, “...The effect of such skilled use of language is to lead the reader toward the self-recognition that Hagar misses.”

350. Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

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Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

by Kathleen RooneySt Martin’s Press 2017

Oh, this is going to be fun. A city book. And at an interesting time, the end of 1984. When I was last in Britain, when Foucault died. Sadly, I didn’t know NYC at all in this decade. Visited once in the early ‘70s and once in the early ‘90s. Still love the place for what it is and what it was and for the very idea of it. 

P32 Something of a bait and switch here (couldn’t resist). I’m all set for a stroll around the south end of Manhattan and now we’re off into the past. Not that NYC of the Depression isn’t interesting. From here into the ‘40s may be the Golden Age. Though of course people of the past would disagree since everything is always going to hell in a hand-basket from the perspective of most people. 

P39 Okay. Going back and forth is good. “I sometimes have a vague intimation that people were better read and smarter once upon a time.” Isn’t it more likely that unread and stupider people are just more visible now? I’m not saying that all college graduates are well educated, but surely there are more well educated people now than in the past. 

The point she makes about TVs in bars curtailing conversation is probably true, but now the smartphone effect is even more extreme. Of course I’ve also had conversations with people about what was on the TV.

P57 Lily Boxfish is basically the Jo Marsh that Louisa May Alcott wanted. Though I get the impression she turns into the Jo Marsh the publishing world insisted on. I wonder what this says? 

I have to say it is good for me to keep reading fiction from the perspective of people in their 80s. It makes me take advantage of the physical advantages someone in their late ‘60s still have. Seize the day before your body gives out on you. I assume this is also why my friend in her early 70s is off to SouthEast Asia -- if not now, when?

P87 The transition of her favorite restaurant. This hits close to home, though my equivalent this year would make her laugh. Or possibly snort laugh. The little pizzeria I’ve frequented the longest, over twenty-five years, just went through an ownership change. The previous owner, who I would always chat with, is gone now and I can’t order what I always used to order for some reason. But I can’t really complain. The previous owner, who worked the day shift, would often close in the afternoon if she got bored. And while the slice I get now isn’t as good as the one I used to get, it’s good enough and saves me six dollars. This being SF, the previous owner was also ethnically of the Han people and lived in my neighborhood. I would rather not list all my regular cafes that have closed in the past year. And I hate to think what will happen when the Trump Recession finally kicks in.

But the city is always changing and this can be inconvenient as you get older. I lost my regular primary doctor five years ago. Today I’m sending a signed document to a new lawyer referred by my HOA’s lawyer who has decided to retire.

P99 Did a signature in my copy of this book fall out? We jumped from Lily being a good Jo March to her divorce without a word about how this change happened. I assume we will jump back at some point. 

The more I think about this choice the more puzzling it is. Why jump so far into the future with no explanation? If she really doesn’t fill in the gap that would be even more interesting.

As I was reading this, one of my favorite Sid n Susie covers played here in the Bank Cafe. I was delighted, but now I want to hear more. If I were home and this was coming from my iPod I would be all but assured to hear another of their songs after having heard one. Sadly, this isn’t true here. What “they” bring to these covers is, in most cases, Susanna’s distinctive voice. I so wish they would keep going for a few more decades of popular music.

P134 We finally get her meeting her husband. About what you would expect. 

P187 Really love what she writes about suburban versus urban living. Especially the walking. If you aren’t walking around three miles a day you aren’t living in a city.

P200 Just a few pages ago we had St Vincent’s hospital, where Dylan Thomas died, and now we have our Lily possibly having her default mode network calmed so her brain will wake up, only with electro shock instead of psychedelics. Our books keep connecting with each other.

P228 “As I wondered what might cause a person to sustain such apparent enthusiasm -- an endocrine condition? Cocaine? -- Mindy waved over an assistant...”

I have no more notes on the remainder of the book. It stayed interesting, but nothing of note. I do like what a walker and lover of cities she was. But I do wonder how much her walking was based on the real person? I imagine the New Year’s Eve walk was mostly a literary way to connect a bunch of places and experiences, but was the real woman really this much of a walker in her mid-80’s? I know someone like this, but even she wouldn’t go so far afield alone at night.


What I haven’t mentioned is the criticism/observations on the development of advertising from the ‘20s through the ‘80s. And it’s just as well the real person didn’t live to see this decade. At least the big department stores were still pretty healthy at this point -- over thirty years in the past now. 

349. Portland trip 2019

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Portland trip

10:00pm My train hit a truck before reaching Emeryville. I am now in AMTRAK station purgatory. Going to be a long night.

Now 4:28am and the train is still in Salinas. The only good news is that we should be able to see the landscape north of Mt Shasta in the daylight. 

Twelve hours behind schedule! Now on the train in Sacramento and just called my motel to let them know I will be arriving at 4am instead of 4pm. I am tired. And I was too late to get breakfast. So now I’m waiting to get lunch (complementary) after the sleeping car people are served. My bet is that they will be out of veggie dishes and I will cry. Also thinking about finding out where they bury the guy who was driving the truck and go down and piss on his grave. (I was wrong. There was no veggie option so I had to buy something revolting in the cafe car.)

Finally had a good dining car experience for dinner. And the pasta was okay, too. We talked about RVs Tiny Houses and downsizing. Also HOAs. I am a surprisingly good dining car conversation facilitator. Who knew? 

Also was able to do most of my regular pre-bed routine in the train bathroom, so I’m more comfortable tonight.

Ran into a very pretty young woman waiting for the bus at Salesforce Tower, I was able to assure her that she was in the right place. Ran into a similarly attractive guy during our 12 hour wait for the train. He was working on his MacBook and talking to someone on his phone for most of the night, but also noticed my book and chatted me up about it. He was a little annoying but also very accomplished. Couldn’t really tell if he was gay, or bi or what. Later in the endless night he chatted up the pretty girl who responded eagerly. Court and spark, came to mind. Not sure how far that went but they were together getting on the train and she was clearly interested in him. Which I can understand based on my visceral reaction to attractive women. I was thinking better him than me, and then I recalled Nora. So REALLY better him than me since I don’t think women really want their marriages undermined. What’s that quote? I was young once and catnip to women in questionable relationships. No, I don’t think that’s quite it.

I think that interesting looking place up the river from Portland is Oregon City. Check on that. (Yes.)

Walking down the aisle just now holding my (heavy) back pack in front of me, I realized it works as a motion damper, just like the weights at the top of a skyscraper. I think it has to be a free weight you are holding in front of you. Wearing it or being a fat-fuck won’t cut it.

Were any Japanese POWs used as farm labor during WW2? Can’t find any info. Most everything is about the Japanese Americans or German and Italian POWs.

All hell breaks loose on the Coast Starlight. Apparently a passenger has gone nuts and we are waiting for the police to come. 

Finally out of lockdown. I’m back in the lounge car, but we can’t go downstairs.

I maybe should suggest Blinvy read HTCYM for the bits about treating depression. Couldn’t hurt. I guess?

The lower level of the lounge car is still off limits as we seem to be taking the problem to the police rather than have them come to us. This means they’ve manned the little station on the top, which I haven’t seen done since my first trip on the Zephyr. It’s kind of nice, unfortunately I just ate all the things in the dining car so I’m not in a position to order anything.


Upon reviewing this I see I actually wrote nothing about Portland. My visit was curtailed and there were only a couple new places I visited. Subtracting twelve hours from a forty-eight hour visit does have an effect. The fast food place way out on Hawthorn (Next Level) was good and I may give the one here a try some time if I'm ever in that neighborhood. The Petunia Bakery Cafe was also a great addition to my usual options near Powell's City of Books. 

Perhaps the best change was that I finally paid attention to how you are supposed to use the transit day passes and actually "tapped in" this time. Though I still don't understand the point of this when you have a day pass. It let's them know how often you ride transit but since you don't have to tap out, it doesn't reveal where you go.

There is now a Capital One Cafe right on Pioneer Square. And it is open on Saturday! I was able to use the WiFi there on Saturday before I caught the train home. The space is nothing to write home about, but it has the same basic features as ours. Including a Peet's. Pioneer Square is where I transfer to catch the train to Goose Hollow, so I'm there a lot. Fehrenbacher Hof is still my go-to place for breakfast. Such a great little place to hang out. Even better than the May Day in Minneapolis in some ways.

348. How to Change Your Mind

Link to Table of Contents

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

Penguin Press 2018

P41-42 I am not always on the same page as the Dalai Lama, but he’s right here. Given a pantheistic metaphysic there’s nothing problematic about any of this. Having an experience like the one Bob Jesse describes is like leaving the theater to take a pee during a movie. (I really try not to do this and I also try to avoid making-of information for films I really like.)

P46 “Bob Jesse spent the early 1990s excavating the knowledge about psychedelics that had been lost when formal research was halted and informal research went underground. In this, he was a little like those Renaissance scholars who rediscovered the lost world of classical thought in a handful of manuscripts squirreled away in monasteries...” I really like this comparison. I also like that this was happening around SF at the same time I was at the peak of my coding career. So much is going on at the same time around here.

P55-56 Henri Bergson, I shouldn’t be surprised. HOWEVER, again, this is a metaphysical assumption. It is also possible that these experiences are MERELY creations of our minds/brains. That they are one of the possible states for our minds. Just as near-death experiences are simply that, and not a view to the other side, that we are capable of achieving “spiritual” states either with or without chemical assistance doesn’t necessarily mean that a reality outside the human mind is being revealed. In a way, these spiritual states are no different than dreams. Dreams do suggest a connection to a deeper reality (and a creative dreamer) but they do not prove that reality. P75 especially deals with this. After thinking about this some more, I really do think that people underestimate the significance of dreams and that these mystical experiences really add nothing new to what dreams already show in a less dramatic way. 

Also, consider the convincing stories our minds make up to explain something like Korsakoff syndrome. That we find the stories subjectively convincing doesn’t mean they are true.

Also, while Pollan is suggesting that the “magic” molecules cause mystical states of mind, isn’t it more reasonable to say that these molecules, along with near death experiences and other things, cause the mind/brain to generate these states of mind? If these “states” are simply something our brains do when stressed in particular ways, it’s harder to see how this is a window into something that exists beyond us. So I’m still at 50/50 odds.

I would think the Good Friday people, and others, would have trouble with Church dogma after their spiritual experiences. I wonder if this is ever mentioned.(No.)

P128 The questions about how psychoactive molecules developed with fungus is not really any different than how Capsaicin developed with peppers. Well, I guess it is different to the extent that capsaicin keeps animals away, but its effect on humans is encouraging. So did peppers plan this or was it just a happy accident. And if the latter, why wouldn’t it be the same thing with psilocin? Isn’t it more likely that psilocin is simply a failed toxin, something that was supposed to kill the person who consumed it but instead had an unanticipated effect on their brains/minds? Are all the similar but deadly LBMs just failed attempts at psilocin?

P161 This is interesting. That psychedelics turn off our normal filter so that we can see what we normally can’t. That we perhaps gave up the ability to see all this so that we could better handle life in the world. Ohhh... that suggests that this could be what is actually meant by Adam’s Fall. This is what we lost when we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Psychedelics return us to the Garden. Now I’m thinking this is a song lyric from the ‘60s. (Joni Michell’s “Woodstock”:

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden)

And what if psychedelics reveal to us the reality experienced by the rest of nature? All but “Fallen” man? Could this be a possible explanation of The Fermi paradox? Could being isolated from nature be amazingly rare? Also, could this be why Autism and genius seem to be related? 

I knew this book would be more thought provoking than the last one.

Bergson and “The Perennial Philosophy” again.

P194 “Huxley and Hubbard and Osmond shared Leary’s sense of historical mission, but they had a very different idea of how best to fulfill it. The three were inclined to a more supply-side kind of spiritualism -- first you must turn on the elite, and then let the new consciousness filter down to the masses, who might not be ready to absorb such shattering experience all at once... But Leary and Ginsberg, both firmly in the American grain, were determined to democratize the visionary experience, make transcendence available to everyone now...” This is like Erasmus vs Luther and Calvin. Though Luther vs Calvin is probably even better. 

P214 Psychedelics as a Dionysian force undermining the Appolonian order.

First LSD trip: What’s with the eyeshades? Is this so you aren’t distracted by the patterns? Are people really blindfolded? I’m not sure if that would be easier or not? You would certainly be missing a lot.

P292 “Curiously, LSD has an even stronger affinity with the 5-HT2A receptor -- is ‘stickier’ -- than serotonin itself, making this an instance where the simulacrum is more convincing, chemically, than the original. This has led some scientists to speculate that the human body must produce some other, more bespoke chemical for the express purpose of activating the 5-HT2a receptor -- perhaps an endogenous psychedelic that is released under certain circumstances, perhaps when dreaming.” Or maybe humans have lost the ability to produce this chemical and that is why we are disconnected from the Logos.

P305 Individuation and the DMN.

P310 This is back to “the tree with the lights in it” from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. Unfiltered experience.

P314 Not sure how autism works with this theory.

P317-319 This may be the best part of the book so far. How psychedelics increase entropy in the brain. I’d argue alcohol can do that as well, as in my insight into Patton and Petersburg.

P320-321 “The idea that increasing the amount of entropy in the human brain might be good for us is surely counterintuitive... entropy suggests the gradual deterioration of a hard-won order, the disintegration of a system over time. Certainly getting older feels like an entropic process -- a gradual running down and disordering of the mind and body. But maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. Robin Carhart-Harris’s paper got me wondering if, at least for the mind, aging is really a process of declining entropy, the fading over time of what we should regard as a positive attribute of mental life.

“Certainly by middle age, the sway of habitual thinking over the operation of the mind is nearly absolute...
...

“Reading Robin’s paper helped me better understand what I was looking for when I decided to explore psychedelics: to give my own snow globe a vigorous shaking, see if I could renovate my everyday mental life by introducing a greater measure of entropy, and uncertainty, into it...”

This, I think, is related to why time seems to pass quicker when you are older. Too much order reduces friction so you just slide by with nothing to really hold on to.

P322 “In both physics and information theory; [I hope he comes back to this... (no)] entropy is often associated with expansion -- as in the expansion of a gas when it is heated or freed from the constraints of a container. As a gas’s molecules diffuse in space , it becomes harder to predict the location of any given one; the uncertainty of the system thus increases...

“... Judson Brewer, the neuroscientist who studies meditation, has found that a felt sense of expansion in consciousness correlates with a drop in activity in one particular node of the default mode network -- the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), which is associated with self-referential processing...”

So the DMN has a PCC.

P324-25 Again I’m noticing exceptions with regard to the autistic. Autistic children are famous for their spotlight focus. For example when observing grains of sand. Not sure what to make of this.

Going back a bit, the increased entropy and additional neural links of the brain on psychedelics may also explain why synesthetes tend to be more creative than normals.

P326 I love Gopnik’s experiment where 4 year olds score better than adults. Because they think outside the box.

P327 “‘Their thinking is less constrained by experience, so they will try even the most unlikely possibilities’; that is, they’ll conduct lots of high-temperature searches, testing the most far-out hypotheses. ‘Children are better learners than adults in many cases when the solutions are non obvious’ or, as she puts it, ‘further out in the space of possibilities,’ a realm where they are more at home than we are...”
...

“‘Each generation of children confronts a new environment,’ she explained, ‘and their brains are particularly good at learning and thriving in that environment. Think of the children of immigrants, or four-year-olds confronted with an iPhone. Children don’t invent these new tools, they don’t create the new environment, but in every generation they build the kind of brain that can best thrive in it. Childhood is the species’ way of injecting noise into the system of cultural evolution.’ ‘Noise,’ of course, is in this context another word for entropy.”

So much to add to this. First there’s that story of children creating new languages. This ties in with that as well, as they are open to breaking all the rules that they don’t understand to get something that works.

Then there’s the negative consequence of people living longer and being more removed from the cultural context they grew up in. Or the adult immigrants who never adjust to their new home. Perhaps we may need for all the older people to step aside and let the kids find a way out of the mess we are currently in. Because in my experience, even the people doing psychedelics are not really doing anything helpful. Of course this was also the notion behind “don’t trust anyone over 30,” and my Burkian conservatism doesn’t much care for that. 

What would be the psychedelic equivalent of Maxwell’s Demon? I really have no idea, I may be too old. Of course the Demon would be reducing entropy so it would be like a stroke that wiped out all but a few neural paths. Though really an extreme form of OCD like Joey Ramone.

Damn it, he didn’t return to information theory entropy. So... if increased entropy in a message meant that it was more open to interpretation, then Goethe’s Faust and strange movies where the director is trying to confuse you would be the equivalent of psychedelics. Rather than meaning being hardwired, the receiver would be able to free associate and derive whatever meaning they pleased. Again, Faust. Goethe would love this.

P334 They protest too much about the unscientific quality of psychedelic research on mental health issues since there is no objective scientific basis for any of these conditions. You can’t confirm a diagnosis of depression or addiction with a blood or other test. They are subjective conditions. So “applied mysticism” is a rather apt means of treating them.

P347 “...Here we bump into one of the richer paradoxes of the psilocybin trials... its effectiveness seems to depend on a mystical experience that leaves people convinced there is more to this world than science can explain. Science is being used to validate an experience that would appear to undermine the scientific perspective...” 

I don’t think that is particularly true. Or no more so than many quantum experiments that demonstrate results that violate common-sense. Also, having a mystical experience doesn’t necessarily prove a mystical reality. 

P356-7 Now this is weird. Patrick’s death is the first actual death I’ve run into that sounds like the ones Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers K. And his slipping away while she was out of the room is so true.

P382 To me that the depression effect is not as long lasting makes perfect sense. People facing death are otherwise “balanced” but dealing with a particular problem. People with depression -- and chemical dependencies -- probably have long standing issues that contribute to the depression. It’s not surprising that they would need more than one experience. That their highly ordered entropic state needs to be repeatedly disturbed.

The sign of a good writer, this next is exactly what I was thinking, “Yet the fact that psychedelics have produced such a signal across a range of indications can be interpreted in a more positive light. When a single remedy is prescribed for a great many illnesses... it could mean that those illnesses are more alike than we’re accustomed to think. If a therapy contains an implicit theory of the disorder it purports to remedy, what might the fact that psychedelic therapy seems to address so many indications have to tell us about what those disorders might have in common? And about mental illness in general?”

This is all the more true as Western Medicine has no idea what mental illness is, how to identify it, or how to treat it. This, in particular the bit about the DMN, actually offers science a chance to spot a mental health problem and even test to see if it has been fixed. This is offering science as much as it offers the patients.

P389 Describing the spiritual aspect of the psychedelic experience, “...The predictive brain is getting so many error signals that it is forced to develop extravagant new interpretations of an experience that transcends its capacity for understanding. 


“Whether the most magnificent of these stories represents a regression to magical thinking, as Freud believed, or access to transpersonal realms such as the ‘Mind at Large,’ as Huxley believed, is itself a matter of interpretation. Who can say for certain?...”

347. The Rainbow Comes and Goes

Link to Table of Contents

The Rainbow Comes and Goes

by Anderson Cooper & Gloria Vanderbilt
Harper 2016


This is not one of those books that resonates on a personal level. Nothing about Gloria’s childhood reminds me of my own... except perhaps being put in the position of deciding who you want to stay with as parent. And fortunately I was a few important years older and had the sense to not give a straight answer.

Also, I have to say that the lives of the wealthy (and the gentry) aren’t encouraging when it comes to thinking about Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI.) It’s true that the options for women at this time were unfairly limited, but it’s not like men come out looking much better. Or that’s my impression. Though is P.G. Wodehouse really the best model for economic ideas? Perhaps not. Though if GMI could be expected to produce something on the order of "The Crime Wave at Blandings" on any kind of a regular basis I guess I would have to vote for it.

P108-109 AND we’re back to free will vs determinism. How surprising that Gloria and I are on the same page here. I would not have guessed that.

Actually, re-reading the passage again, I see that we don't actually agree at all, or not completely. She says, "...but I do believe in a mysterious force secretly in charge of our destiny, enabling us to make life bearable and keep moving even when times are tough. The end will turn out as it was always meant to be. Yes, from the beginning, we have nothing to do but wait.

"Our choices are preset from the beginning. Whatever direction a person's life goes in was destined. It was meant to happen in precisely that way, although we do not as yet know why."

I noticed the determinism and somehow managed to ignore the phrases in bold that argue for a guiding force. As philosophy I find this less than compelling, but it is interesting in showing how someone like this thinks -- that her successes are destined so all she has to do is get to work. 

P160 “But I really got the power to leave Stokowski only when I met Frank Sinatra.” Now it sounds like she’s just making shit up. Though this is still so consistent with her lack of self-esteem. I was glad that she finally cut off her mother, even if that was mostly Stokowski.

It is interesting -- not to say appalling -- the way such a damaged young woman seems to have been like catnip to so many men. Her first husband might as well have been a pimp, but the famous men that followed were in their own way just as bad. I would love to have been able to ask her what she thought of Lydia in P&P -- she mentions reading this during her first marriage. Gloria is like a cross between Lydia Bennett and The Bolter. First you think less of the men who woo her and then you start to pity them.


P246 It strikes me now, reading this about how children always blame themselves for their parent’s divorces and deaths and other failures, that I never was subject to this. I didn’t understand what was wrong with my parents, but I never thought it had anything to do with me. And this isn’t to say I was oblivious or unaffected -- I’m surprised I didn’t have ulcers or other serious complications. I just wanted them to stop, or else for me to get away from them. Which seems very like me, and not entirely a good thing.

And that's really all I have to say about this book. It was interesting enough, but gave me surprisingly little to think about. I do wish I could have asked Gloria about Lydia and The Bolter.