202. Elemental death

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Identity & vulnerability

It's hard not to reflect back on the story in The Brothers K of Zosima's brother, when reading what follows,

p39 ...When we relax the clinging to our treasured beliefs and ideas, soften our resistance to the blows of life, stop trying to manage the uncertainty and hold ourselves more lightly, then we become a less solid thing. Less of a fixed identity.

In the months following my heart attack, I realized that the more I allowed my vulnerability to emerge, the less wedded I felt to being somebody. I became less occupied with the full-time job of self-generation. I could feel the exhaustion of propping up my personality... As I accepted the fragility of my life, it opened me. I felt myself a porous thing, more transparent, more permeable.
...

Thanks to our vulnerability, the possibility of knowing our most essential identity is always present. We need not wait for some other time or for perfect conditions or for our death to realize it... 

During my recovery, I felt permeable to everything. The sublime beauty and the horror of the world could enter my consciousness without resistance. I was receptive to it all. I welcomed it. There were no filters between me and any part of myself or the world. I was just Being.
...

p40 The more permeable I became, the more I realized that we humans are just bundles of ever-changing conditions. We ought to hold ourselves more lightly. Taking ourselves too seriously is the cause of much suffering...

My sense of self didn't completely disappear after my heart attack... but my personality was no longer the dominant force it had once been...

Then one day, about six months after the surgery... I felt my sense of self return to my body... My self was reasserting itself with a vengeance. 

p41 "I'm back. Don't worry. I'm in charge again," it said.

Strange as it may sound, I wasn't elated when this happened. It actually felt like a loss. I was afraid that I would slip back into my old habitual ways and lose touch with my newfound sense of my fundamentally limitless nature.
...

When our sense of ourselves shifts toward Being, we move beyond our reactivity to impermanence...

Embracing our own impermanence is a journey, taking us deeper and deeper into contact with the true nature of things. First we accept that things around us change. Then we realize that we, ourselves, are ever changing: our thoughts and feelings, our attitudes and beliefs, even our identities.

p42 The beauty is that our impermanence binds us to every other human being. Empathy arises through an appreciation of our transience and an understanding of our interconnectedness. We are not separate... We are, in fact, deeply connected to everyone and everything.

Zosima would say "Amen" to this.

There's another passage I should record. This is an account of death based on the four traditional elements: earth, water, fire, and air.

p30 Samantha and Jeff had lived in nature... His body was in a very elemental way made up of earth, water, fire, and air. So in dying he was returning to the nature they so loved.

Jeff's body had become very still. This happens as the earth element fades...
...

As the earth element -- form -- dissolves, it gives way to water. The person who is dying may then experience an inability to swallow fluids...
...

Now the water element was dissolving, giving way to fire. When this happens, the body's temperature fluctuates...

As Jeff came closer to death, his hands and feet became cooler, the heat gathered in the center of his body... 
...

The fire element was dissolving, giving way to air. At this final stage of physical death, people frequently exhibit dramatic changes in breathing patterns... sometimes the only thing left in the room is breath. Death is much like birth in that way, with everyone's attention naturally focused on the simplicity of breath.
...

p32 Earth dissolves into water. Water dissolves into fire. Air dissolves into space. Space dissolves into consciousness.

Dying, in many cases, does not happen all of a sudden. It is a gradual process of withdrawing from life in form...

I find that it is often helpful to think about DOG when the subject is supposed to be God. Usually I think of puppies in this context, they are so curious and open to everything and everyone, but as I was thinking about identity and death just now, a man walked past with an elderly, white muzzled dog with a limping gate. For him, a walk is still a biological necessity, but not much of an adventure. But if you need a guide for finding a nice place to nap in the sun, he is ideal. 

But is the old dog really a better guide to life? Is his surrendering of his mature canine identity -- perhaps he was a racer or a bomb sniffer or a guide dog -- something to be envied if you aren't in the same age cohort? Are there even reasons to hope you live that long? (Puppies can appreciate a good snooze in the sun, too.) 

And that account of elemental death (which I radically abbreviated), even before I saw that elderly dog, reminded me of a video I saw recently of the last surviving sniffer dog from the 9/11 WTC site. The old dog limped between lines of first responders into a vets office and came back out in a little coffin. Is there any reason to wish for the full course, elemental death that the dog skipped by being mercifully put-down? Was Ficre, from the last book, robbed of something valuable by dying of a heart attack before he even hit the ground? Can anyone actually imagine someone in that situation looking back at his body on the ground and thinking, "Damn, I so wanted a lingering death in which I could dissolve element by element. And not without pain and discomfort." As always, I'm not asserting the opposite; I'm really asking the question. I want the answer to be no, and even if the answer is Yes, I may still stick with my default approach to life and choose the easier path. I mean why wait for the nasty end to go for maximum experience?

200. The Five Invitations

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No reason

There could be reams of good accounts of "unconsciousness" and I wouldn't know about it, but the final House episode of season two, "no reason," is the only thing I've run into that mirrors my experience. The entire show, except for the first and last scenes, are what House imagines in what we have to assume are a few moments of seeming to be unconscious after getting shot. Sure, it makes me curious to watch the first episode of the next season, but more than that I like that it depicts a timeless dream world. 

I'm going to have to watch it again with the commentary to see what else they have to say about the ideas presented here. 


Not a thing, as it turns out. The writer/director was doing the commentary and talked about everything but this. And here's something interesting, there are several things here suggestive of Inception -- layers of hallucination/dream; a talisman (in this case a bullet instead of a top) that lets you know you are in a dream and not in reality -- yet I can't say that the House episode is derivative since it aired in 2006 and Inception in 2010. Could the TV show have inspired the film? Don't really care.

I was hoping that David Shore would at least have commented that the entire story, including what House's antagonist in the episode (the man who shot him) says is all contrived by House. House could have remembered the case, where he saved the wife, but he has to be imagining the rest of the story. He could be still working out where the case they are working on could lead, but the details are imaginary. 

But, again, it isn't the details of the dream that interest me, though they are interesting and revealing about House's character (something else Shore doesn't go into). It's the manipulation of time. The dream is supposed to continue for days, though his "awake" time in the dream is probably only something over a half hour. But the time House is unconscious dreaming this, is only a couple minutes. And even more to my experience, his "unconsciousness" is experienced as anything but.

Debunking the Madeline

I think the cookie gets too much credit for Proust's adventure in memory. Yesterday into the night we had thunderstorms and the same weather pattern is around today. No lightning as yet, but the air is unusually humid. In past years I've responded to that distinctive rain on hot pavement smell, which has taken me back to the suburban street I grew up on in Louisville. But just now, leaving my gym, the pavement was dry but some quality of the air took me straight to the country club swimming pool I spent so much time at during those same years... and I'm pretty sure it wasn't chlorine.

It makes sense that it would be a quality of air, or the steam off a tea, that would penetrate your olfactory apparatus and trigger smell related memories. Maybe the scent of the madeline, mixed with the tea, played a role, but I suspect it was mostly the tea.

The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseski

A book, by one of the people who established Zen Hospice here during the AIDS epidemic, about death, dying, and living. I've just finished reading the introductory sections, the chapter about the first "invitation" comes next. But he's already done something I'm not that happy about. 

As he is clearing the decks of religious dogma and terminology, he writes the following,

I will use the simple term Being to point at that which is deeper and more expansive than our personalities. At the heart of all spiritual teachings is the understanding that this Being is our most fundamental and benevolent nature. Our normal sense of self, our usual way of experiencing life, is learned. The conditioning that occurs as we grow and develop can obscure our innate goodness.

Being has certain attributes or essential qualities that live as potentials within each of us. These qualities help us to mature, to become more functional and productive. They fill out our humanity and add a richness, beauty, and capacity to our lives. These pure qualities include love, compassion, strength, peace, clarity, contentment, humility, and equanimity, to name a few. Through practices such as contemplation and meditation, we can quiet our minds, hearts, and bodies, and as a result, our ability to sense our experience becomes subtler and more penetrating. In the discovered stillness, we are able to perceive the presence of these innate qualities. They are more than emotional states, though we may feel them at first as emotions. It might be more helpful to think of them as our inner guidance system, which can lead us to a greater sense of well-being.

Perhaps this connection of Being with well-being is behind his choice of the term Being, but surely he must know it is a loaded term in philosophy, dragging ontology and the very nature of "thing-ness" behind it on a rusty choke-chain, like an abused dog with firmly planted feet.

And does Being only consist of Gauri qualities without a single Kali quality in sight? I ask for my friend Michel. If I was running a hospice with a high percentage of dementia patients, I would encourage Gauri qualities too, but how honest is that?

Of course this is also a sort of explanation for the approaching death character changes Dostoevsky describes in The Brothers K. He would have preferred a more Christian expression of this phenomena, I suspect, but he would get the idea.

These aspects of our essential nature are as inseparable from Being as wetness is from water. Said another way, we already have everything we need for this journey. It all exists within us. We don't need to be someone special to access our innate qualities and utilize them in the service of greater freedom and transformation.

So we are uncovering the ontological core of ourselves here. The goal of this book (just as it was with The Brothers K) is to encourage us to, like Zosima, discover and live our true nature even before we face death ourselves. I have to admit this suits me, my character or Being finds all this pleasing, and giving it a Zen context makes it even more attractive. But, again, my friend Michel is chucking bricks this way and Kali -- who you don't want to mess with -- seems to be supporting him much the way Athena supported Odysseus.

In summary, this looks like it will be a much juicier book than the last one.

179. What's wrong with TRTC?

Previous - 178. Big vs Little Me

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Zuckerberg

Our local tech superstars are competing to have hospitals named after them. I haven't yet visited Marc Benioff's UCSF Children's Hospitals in SF and Oakland, but last week I walked around the new Zuckerberg SF General Hospital and it is quite the impressive building. And since SFGH is the main trauma center for this area, this is undoubtedly money well spent. Here are a couple shots of the building,

This is a sculpture near the entrance with the new building on the right and one of the (grand) original wings on the left.

This time the new is on the left and the old on the right. The brickwork is intended to tie the buildings together visually. 

First let me say that I wasn't intending to document the building when I was there, so I just shot what interested me visually. You can find info on the hospital HERE and better views of the building HERE. The brickwork that is the most obvious link to the older buildings is at the very top where it it almost invisible from street level. From the rooftop garden you can see that brickwork, but you can't see the older buildings so there is no context. 

In general, the interior of the hospital looks less like a government institution and more like a corporate building with lots of art and high end materials on view.

Heading off to lunch after touring SFGH, we ran into a curious little structure only a block or two away that is seemingly stuck in time. Again, I didn't capture the structure as a whole, only some details that I loved. I think this was originally a filling station and garage and it is still a garage,

I'm such a sucker for outside lighting fixtures here and...

...also here. But, surprisingly, that isn't what first caught my eye.

I'm not sure what these things did, but I'm guessing either air or water that you could pull down to service a car.

So what's wrong with The Road To Character?

If there really was an obvious lesson to learn from studying these lives, it would have been best to just lay them out there and let the reader make the connections. Obviously, you would present the biographies in a way that you would hope would emphasize the similarities. In The Brothers K, Dostoevsky laid out his characters and plot for the reader to make sense of, and then, just to be safe, followed up with the prosecutors speech at the end of the trial where he made sure his interpretation or intention was not overlooked by the reader. 

Here Brooks starts out talking about the points he plans to make (using a confusing variety of different terms and dichotomies), then presents the stories (with constant references to what he hopes to be showing), and than ends with a treatise on his moral topic that his character studies contradict as often as they support.

Becoming Wise was an awkward re-purposing of interview content for other mediums. This is a sophomoric mashup of "things I read this summer." Of course, for my purposes, this makes for a juicy read. It ranks right up there with the delightfully irritating Ten Philosophical Mistakes by Mortimer J. Adler. 

Still, there is a sense in which Brooks's conclusions aren't wrong. The values he's talking about -- and the benefits one derives from accepting them -- are the same as (and were much more convincingly presented) in the account of the illness and death of Zosima's older brother in The Brothers K. (And reprized at least one more time in the novel.) And this is also the conclusion Victoria Sweet arrived at at the end of God's Hotel, with respect to the patient who required AA to get free of his chemical dependence problems (and so Annie Lamott is also a much better spokesperson for Brooks's position.)

Finally, because this is my blog, I have to add that Brooks's value system is also the equivalent of the Berghof in The Magic Mountain, the place Joachim Ziemssen finally agreed to return to when he had burned through his last shot at living in the flat land. It's a refuge, but it isn't really living. I'm overstating the case, but then, so does Brooks.


This brings to an end my coverage of The Road to Character. And I have nothing else ready to go, so there will be another gap of unknown duration.

Postscript

I almost forgot something. So there's this thing called Nextdoor.com that is a sort of community bulletin board and gossip tool. A week or so ago I was invited to join the one for this neighborhood and signed up. It seems to be equal parts informative and annoying. Yesterday I finally got the first weird and wonderful posting of the type I was hoping for. Here's the quote:

Some guy named Danny McCullough posted on here about needing a hammer to borrow a few weeks ago. I met up with him, and let him borrow my nice, heavy duty hammer. After reaching out a few times to try and retrieve it, I'm putting Danny on blast. 

If Danny the tool thief posts about needing to "borrow" anything else, don't do it. I'm certain that he has no intention of returning items. I also think he probably is a collector of borrowed things.

Here we have moral romanticism turning into moral realism. William Godwin turning into Edmund Burke -- at least that's the way I see it. 

Next - 180. Kite Festival 2017

169. Eisenhower

Previous - 168. Francis Perkins

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Eisenhower

Here's something I missed first time around,
p33 That concept -- conquering your own soul -- was a significant one in the moral ecology in which Eisenhower grew up. It was based on the the idea that deep inside we are dual in our nature. We are fallen, but also splendidly endowed. We have a side to our nature that is sinful -- selfish, deceiving, and self-serving -- but we have another side to our nature that is in God's image, that seeks transcendence and virtue. The essential drama of life is the drama to construct character, which is an engraved set of disciplined habits, a settled disposition to do good. The cultivation of Adam II was seen as a necessary foundation for Adam I to flourish.

Adam2 as essential for Adam1 - Let me start with that bit at the end. This makes much more sense to me than seeing Adam2 as seeking a more profound connection with the meaning of life. The goal here is to create better, more successful bourgeoisie.

God's image - Now back to what first attracted my attention to this passage. What if our nature isn't "dual" at all? What if we haven't "fallen?" What if we are just naturally "sinful" in these terms, and the purpose of religion is to create, out of whole cloth, this other side of our nature that is in "God's image?" Not only do we invent God but we invent a nature for ourselves that is not really natural in any meaningful sense of the word.

I can't think of any argument against this kind of moral indoctrination... up to the point where the indoctrination starts to include hate and intolerance. Ida Eisenhower, as she is presented here, is actually the perfect exemplar for this interpretation of religion, down to her own tolerance and refusal to wear a silly bonnet.

p36 He goes on to talk about the importance of and cures for various sins in a community like Abilene, Kansas. He starts with anger (Dwight's problem) and lust. This pairing makes me think of Dmitri Karamazov. Dostoevsky would agree with Brooks about sin. And we can see in Dmitri a life at the mercy of his uncontrollable tendency to sin -- his Karamazov nature. And then there's lovely young Lise, the poster child for sin run wild. Dostoevsky does a poor job of making Russian Orthodox Christianity seem like the cure for sin in the Russian people. It almost looks like sin thrives in that context. 

...adultery, bribery, and betrayal are more like treason than like crime; they damage the social order... 

And speaking of the social and economic order, neither of these authors really addresses the correlation between behavior and the economic realities people exist in. In Russia this included the master and serf dynamic but also the status of women, not to mention the rising middle class influence Dostoevsky hated so much.

And then we get a picture of Dwight in the military that makes it sound like all this upbringing did him little if any good. Still struggling with his anger. Not particularly happy in his own skin. Certainly not a person I would want to be.


Moderation
p69 I actually stopped reading this section yesterday to resume fresh today, because I wasn't getting what Brooks meant by moderation. In political terms he's talking about something very similar to Edmund Burke's position, where the danger of going to extremes is so... extreme that you have to seek a middle course that isn't too radical or too reactionary. Conservative in the true (my) sense of the term.

But, interestingly, he's going beyond this macro level to a micro level of the personal commonwealth, as it were. A radical personality like Dmitri can't achieve anything because he is swept away by his passions. But a person who completely locks down his passions can't achieve anything either. You need a middle position where the passions are harnessed. That's if you want to achieve anything significant. 

I have to credit Brooks here as I hadn't thought of moderation in these terms before. On the other hand, it may have been the Gay Pride festivities over the weekend that brought to my attention that much of what Brooks has said about character "building" and "pruning" would apply to closeted homosexuals not letting their true character show. If you re-read this chapter substituting "gay feelings" for "sin" you get a playbook for gay conversion therapy.

And having said what I did above about moderation and Burke, it should come as no surprise that I agree with Eisenhower's moderation vs JFK's optimism in their respective speeches in January 1961. Kennedy's inauguration speech did what such a speech is supposed to do, inspire the electorate toward the creation of a better nation and world. Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex, the scientific-technological elite, and warned, "avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow." Look who was playing Casandra?

And look how easy it is to see Faust in this. What Eisenhower warned against (and Dostoevsky, too) was the middle class, Faustian striving with its ever ignored or downplayed unintended consequences/side effects/collateral damage. And isn't JFK a perfect Faust? Ambitious, striving for both exuberant life and great achievements. Willing to make unscrupulous compromises for power (like staying in Vietnam.)

Next - 170. Dorothy Day

165. George Eliot, revisted

Previous - 164. The Road to Character

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The Road to Character

For the second time in recent books, there's a chapter on George Eliot, who I've still never read. I keep forgetting that she translated Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity -- which I'm having trouble getting my hands on. Brooks is focusing in this chapter on love, and this time its romantic love.

I'm just over half through the book and I'm already thinking I'm going to be very critical of his "Adam I and Adam II" thesis by the end, but I'm surprisingly impressed by his dissection, to borrow Tisdale's term, of romantic love. The joyful self-indulgence of pleasing the beloved is wonderfully described. And I can't help applying what he writes to Swann in love, where it fits perfectly. But when it comes to Marcel in love (with Albert/Albertine) Brooks's view falls short. And that kind of "lacerating" love is even more evident in The Brothers Karamazov, with that whole soap opera around Dmitri. 

Brooks argues that, "...love open[s] up the facility for spiritual awareness. It is an altered state of consciousness..." similar to the mystical, religious love experienced by Zosima and anyone approaching death in The Brothers K. But this ignores the appeal suffering has for so many people, and not just in Russian novels. But the desire to feel deeply, regardless of the cost, is probably shared by both romantics and religious people, so Brooks is not entirely wrong.

p177 Eliot and Lewes run off to Europe together. Okay, what's curious here is that this sounds so much like Anna and Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Here Eliot is representing romantic love and all I can imagine is Dorothy Day screaming, "NO! Not Anna."

p183  Many of her characters... begin their adulthood with an ardent moral ambition. They want to achieve some great good, like a Saint Teresa, but they don't know what it is or what their vocation might be... Their attention is fixed on some pure ideal, some distant horizon. Eliot was a Victorian; she believed in moral improvement. But she used her novels to critique such lofty and otherworldly moral goals... 

But Dorothy Day again...

I wonder if Brooks separated the chapters on Day and Eliot because he didn't want us to compare them or because he realized the reader would do all the work of comparing them in any case. If Day had written a novel about Eliot I have no doubt her character would have ended up under a train, just as Tolstoy dealt with Anna -- her brother, Oblonsky, was allowed to live because he had a wife to suffer in his place, I suppose.

I'm glad Brooks doesn't let us forget about Eliot's problem with depression, which never subsided even in her happy marriage. She sought solace in married love (such a strange notion) where Day threw herself into a "lacerating" faith. Eliot's "marriage" was a stunning success while Day's mirror image situation (her actual husband living with another woman) was a painful flop. Praise Jesus!

And I love that Eliot was translating Feuerbach while they were contemplating their break with propriety. Again, you couldn't make this shit up.
 

Random

Just now I was walking down the posh stretch of Grant street and noticed a gentleman enjoying Care in the Community. To be specific, he was engaging, through speech and gestures, with one of the manikins in a shop window. The Valentino shop, no less. As I approached I thought I would see a clerk inside -- perhaps in a shop like this they are called "brand representatives" -- but, no. It was just a manikin that had drawn the guys attention.


I shouldn't be so quick to cast aspersions. Really to doubt someone's ability to interact successfully with the world. This week I've been conducting some financial maneuvers which, in a more gentile age, would have been conducted in a business-like office with me saying, "I wish to to this." And my distinguished agent saying, "Certainly. That transfer will be made by the end of the business day. Is there anything else?" But, of course we, or anyway I, don't live in such a gentile world. Instead I was on the phone with customer service representatives, and most of the time was spent with such agents walking me through online screens where you can quickly and easily perform mistakes that take days to set right. 

On Tuesday I wanted to connect my brokerage IRA account with my bank. Instead, we transferred the funds to another account that was already linked to my bank. Focused on this task, and not having given the whole transaction a great deal of thought, I clicked through the options for withholding taxes on this distribution. By Wednesday I had realized my mistake and called in again to see if this could be edited/revised. No. All they could suggest was transferring the funds back where they started and then doing it all over.

This seemed stupid to me so I called the IRS to see about doing the withholding separately. There's probably a way to do this, but the process of finding it and then doing it was going to be worse than the brokerage do-over approach. So on Thursday I did that. Today, Friday, the funds had registered back in their original home account so I did the transfer again -- unassisted -- and now I'm finally in position to make the brokerage to bank transfer.

And that was just one transaction. I was closing out a second account at another fund which was not linked to my bank at all. Before I quite realized what the women on the phone was doing she processed the transaction with the funds to be mailed to me in the form of a check. The check arrived safely with yesterdays post, and I quickly walked it down to my neighborhood ATM and deposited it. No problem. But from the time I hung up with the customer service person and the time it arrived in the mail I worried about this large check sailing through the postal system. It was even larger than the mortgage deposit check I had, nervously, transported across town to the title company when I bought my condo. At these times I imagine myself with a sign on my back saying "Carrying thousands of dollars. Think of all the drugs you could buy if you robbed this clown."

Postscript

This morning the brokerage house contacted me about needing me to sign a form about the 60-day rollover (when I had to transfer the funds back into their original account so I could do the withholding properly.) I printed out the form, filled it out, scanned it, and was in the process of attaching it to a message when their software told me it might contain a virus so they were not accepting it. Just put it in the mail with a good old traditional stamp.

Next - 166. Montaigne

154. The Sutra...

Previous - 153. Violation

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Still Violating

"On Being Text"

When you pick up a collection of essays you can't really expect anything in particular, but I have to say that this is not what I was expecting from Tisdale -- not that I'm complaining at all. This essay begins talking about the academic penchant for bundling writer's together into anthologies for educational purposes. Tisdale starts by seeing it as a not unappreciated new source of income, but then goes on (after noticing that one editor has botched her biography) to actually read the collections. She also reprises her ad hoc education -- dropping out of high school and weaving through several universities, where she took no "literature" classes -- before finally getting a degree.

p234 ...the moment the students finish reading, they must start to dissect. I'm afraid that what the students of these books are really learning is what college students learn about so many subjects: how to take things apart, but not how to put them together.
...

p236 ...Literary analysis begins by presuming that writing can be understood by understanding its parts. The process is, in fact, called dissection, a term usually applied to dead things.
...

...Reading my own critics has taught me a little bit about my work and rather a lot about certain critics.
...

p240 How would I change college literature classes?... Read, read, read, and then try to explain how it feels. Read a book because someone you like tells you it's a good book. Listen to other readers when they react. Read some more. I believe that one reason I learned to write is that no one ever really tried to teach me, or... no one ever tried to tell me what a writer was supposed to be like...

p241 [From her note at the end of the essay] ...Anthologies give us a window into everything wrong with how we teach writing -- and reading -- and how one is actually read. It's not pretty.

I did take literature and history and philosophy classes, but I still agree with her. A good university philosophy department is the place to go to have your interest in philosophy deflated. And Thomas Mann, another autodidact, would agree with her as well. Academia (you would think) would be a magical place where people really cared about these topics, that few people in general care about, but instead it is where interest goes to die.

There's a great deal more here that I could have quoted, it's interesting to see an author respond to what is said about her writing by "professional" critics. What does please me is who Tisdale finds herself grouped with in these anthologies, Thurber and White and the other writers she mentions here. That would be nice.


"Twitchy"

What a great essay title. I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with Tisdale's categorization as a memorist... even though I think she's the one who suggested it. Her subject is life and she starts with herself, as we all do. Since we keep coming back to subjectivity, how nothing can really be known objectively, what isn't memoir to some extent? 

This essay is about, or at least starts with, a trip to the dentist to have her spectacularly bad teeth worked on. This requires a great deal of nitrous oxide which seems to be Tisdale's drug of choice. 

My teeth are as good as Tisdale's are bad, and yet a moment of wild abandon with a nutty biscotti at a delightful garden party last Sunday left me without the sole -- massive -- filling in my mouth. In fear the tooth would collapse if I forgot and put pressure on it, I rushed to the dentist the next day and had it refilled. Over $400 for those of you keeping score at home.

So I just this week spent time in a dentist's chair-of-discomfort. I wasn't offered nitrous. My iPod is on it's last legs so that's not an option. So I just had to lie back and be thankful this only happens about once a decade.

I was given nitrous once when three wisdom teeth were to be extracted without any other general anesthesia. I don't recall it doing anything. (And I don't recommend having your wisdom teeth pulled like that.) But what Tisdale's nitrous experience does remind me of is the intravenous anesthesia I got when they extracted the rogue wisdom tooth that somehow traveled sideways into the next tooth, leaving the cavity my massive filling is a reminder of. I was conscious but unconcerned with what was happening in my mouth. My thought processes didn't seem (to me) to be affected -- compared, for example, to drinking a bottle of wine -- and there was no hang-over or aftereffect when the procedure was over. I was told I was going to get a Valium IV, and I think I took a Valium before, but at the last minute there was a change of plan which I never quite understood, so I don't really know what they gave me, except that it wasn't what my friends had gotten that knocked them out, left them groggy, and finally resulted in vomiting later on. 

Tisdale goes on to explain her phobia in terms of scary childhood dental work from her (step)grandfather. But what she is averse to is what I dislike as well, the smell and sounds, the surprising pressures, and, for me, the discomfort of simply holding my jaw wide open for so long (that was the worst part of the three wisdom tooth extraction.) If I had access to Valium, and knew I was getting my work done ahead of time, I would have dosed myself up the same way Tisdale uses nitrous. By the time I need to get this filling replaced, I will have forgotten all this again.

She describes an annoying friend who goes to the dentist eager to learn if his flossing has paid off. I'm so much worse than this. Not only do I floss but I use these special little brushes between my teeth. My goal in life is to have the hygienist say, "There's nothing here for me to do" and run off sobbing. And I'm getting closer and closer each year. And yet I react to hearing the words "root canal" about the same way she does. 


"The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies"

Finally! This was my introduction to Sallie Tisdale and it is so unlike everything else I've read by her. For one thing it's as much about Buddhism as it is about flies. It's the only place where she really gets philosophical. And it's like a concise version of Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when it comes to the amorality of nature.

What I noticed this reading is something that Dostoevsky would have loved. Near the end she writes at length about the role flies and their progeny play in decomposing bodies. Then, talking about the Buddha, she writes this, 

p311 ...What lucky flies smelled the flowery scent of the Buddha's death, and came -- flowing through the air like a river in the sky, a river of flies? What lucky maggots were born in his body, in the moist heat of the afternoon while the disciples still mourned? The maggots and blowflies are the words of the old Buddhas, singing of the vast texture of things, a lullaby of birth and death. They came and turned him into juice and soil, the Buddha flowing gloriously like cream into the ground.

I'm thinking about the shocking (to the monks) decomposition of Father Zossima shortly after his death. Of course, I'm not sure this works with what Dostoevsky intended this to mean. But it would seem that Zossima would have enjoyed the interpretation. 
 

Ugly

Yesterday I was looking at some photos taken looking down from the top of Salesforce Tower. This got me thinking about when architects decided that the tops and bottoms of skyscrapers didn't matter? (Or, if we think of the architects as thinking like toddlers, that we can't see the tops, at least.) 

In one shot, there was a great view of the Shell Building and several other handsome structures from the École des Beaux-Arts period of architect education. These structures still appear as perfect sculptural constructions, as neatly designed at the top as where they meet the sidewalk. By contrast, many of the glass, curtain-wall monoliths from the 1960 and 1970s (and beyond) have unsightly mechanical tumors on their flat roofs while their bases seem completely arbitrary. If it weren't for the larger height of the street level floors, you would think that the entire tower was simply extruded out of the ground like a plant shoot with an undifferentiated stem. The few postmodernist structures here do a bit better at the top, but recently they seem to have gone back to pretending no one can see up there. I'll give César Pelli credit for giving Salesforce Tower a better top, but then it's intended to be a focus and focal point for the whole city.

The Shell Building is the petite tower in the left foreground between two flat-topped towers. There are more, old buildings from the early 20th century above and to the left between Shell and the dark mass of the BofA Tower. The other standout tower is the Russ Building. Sadly, the building that houses my gym is just out of the frame to the left of the Russ. The round tower middle right, is Phillip Johnson's 101 California. The dark, part flatiron, part round little tower just this side of 101 California has residential on top, but I don't know it's name. The former First Interstate Bank building is dead center, partly in front of the TransAmerica. The First Interstate building includes a hotel on top and was built in the middle of the block with connection to the streets on three sides, but with the other, older, buildings in that block left in place. It's my favorite large scale development in the city because it integrated itself so subtlety into the neighborhood.

Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building does have a blunt and unsightly top but no tumors sticking up above. The way it meets the ground is a classic example of being too playful with steel and the weightless effect it can give. Like Wright and the Guggenheim, it would appear that van der Rohe also had no sense for urban life.

About the same can be said for SOM's Lever House, especially at the top. The base is better if only because it fills it's site. It's still more a celebration of steel and glass then it is something that belongs in a city.

It would seem that architects started with those examples and then simplified and made the buildings cheaper. Even the BofA tower here, which I think is an unusually handsome tall building, has protruding mechanicals rising from the top and a Seagramesque retreat from the street. I suspect one of the reasons the TransAmerica Pyramid has become so famous is that it is almost Postmodern in the way it avoids both the top and base problems, at least visually. The base is still a sterile zone in an otherwise vibrant neighborhood. I give it a pass as an instance of architectural sculpture, rather like the Burj Khalifa.

Painting a wall

I've been thinking about re-painting a wall in my living room for about six months and it's finally warm enough to have my windows open for a couple days. This evening I moved everything out of the way -- not a simple task in such a small apartment. It went about 90% the way I anticipated, which is surprisingly good. I had forgotten that I had velcroed my mirror to the wall, which makes that part of the job much easier than I was anticipating. On the other hand, I underestimated how much space my over-a-hundred-year-old desk and bookcase would take when I pulled it out. So I didn't move it as far as I planned. (I had already moved a chair out of the way to make room for the desk, and moving it back is impossible, so the chair clogs up my kitchen unnecessarily. Still, all in all it went well.

Tomorrow I will prep and prime. Tuesday I will paint and then move everything back. I've already added on a side project of putting something lighter in color at the back of the old shelves which I use as a display space. That should make my featured artifacts more visible. Maybe. We'll see.

Next - 155. Last of Tisdale

131. Walt Whitman

Previous - 130. Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Link to Table of Contents

Sunday in SF

My favorite kind of Sunday, I got something done (laundry) then went out for brunch at the Pork Store -- the Vegan Delight was even better than usual, more garlic. Then I strolled down Haight to Amoeba and actually found two of the things I was looking for (a DVD and a CD). Now I'm back downtown at my (most) usual Peet's. 

A fairly dressed-up man with a camera with a massive lens seems to be soliciting portraits on the sidewalk outside my window. You'd think that would be like carrying coals to Newcastle, but he seems to be doing some trade. It's a great business model, when you think about it. He takes a shot and then, I'm guessing, downloads the file to their phone. Your only cost is your capital investment in the equipment and the battery charge. You don't have to create prints, and the transaction is complete in a minute or two.


My Buffy online community is having a competition called Writing Idol, where people submit bits of competitive fiction. I've never played before, but the board has been too quiet lately so I thought I would participate in the interest of keeping the forum going.

The first theme is "telescoping;" which turns out to have many meanings to play with. I started out by reading what the OED had to say (smart move!) Thinking about what was in the OED I came up with a first paragraph that included a bunch of different meanings and that gave birth to the plot. Fine. But that was all I'd planned so I was delighted when the final paragraph wrote itself, as it were, without much thought and was itself a form of "telescoping" I hadn't anticipated. 

Why are the "Mozart" moments so much more satisfying than the "Salieri" moments?

Walt Whitman - from Proust Was a Neuroscientist

p1 For Walt Whitman, the Civil War was about the body. The crime of the confederacy, Whitman believed, was treating blacks as nothing but flesh, selling them and buying them like pieces of meat. Whitman's revelation, which he had for the first time at a New Orleans slave auction, was that body and mind are inseparable. To whip a man's body was to whip a man's soul.

This is Whitman's central poetic idea. We do not have a body, we are a body. Although our feelings feel immaterial, they actually begin in the flesh...

Whitman's fusion of body and soul was a revolutionary idea, as radical in concept as his free-verse form. At the time, scientists believed that our feelings came from the brain and that the body was just a lump of inert matter. But Whitman believed that our mind depended upon the flesh. He was determined to write poems about our "form complete."
...

p2 Neuroscience now knows that Whitman's poetry spoke the truth: emotions are generated by the body. Ephemeral as they seem, our feelings are actually rooted in the movements of our muscles and the palpitations of our insides. Furthermore, these material feelings are an essential element of our thinking process. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio notes, "The mind is embodied . . . not just embrained."
...

p3 The story of the brain's separation from the body begins with Rene Descartes... [who] divided being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science, and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clock-like," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism [mind-body dualism], Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs. [You could tie the Church's disapproval of pleasure in "this" life to this schism, except that the Church's attitude preceded Descartes.]
...

p5 ...Whitman believed that his existence could be "comprehended at no time by its parts, at all times by its unity." This is the moral of Whitman's poetic sprawl: the human being is an irreducible whole. Body and soul are emulsified into each other...

Emerson
Whitman's faith in the transcendental body was strongly influenced by the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson... A lapsed Unitarian preacher, Emerson was more interested in the mystery of his own mind than in the preachings of some aloof God. He disliked organized religion because it relegated the spiritual to a place in the sky instead of seeing the spirit among "the common, low and familiar."

Without Emerson's mysticism, it is hard to imagine Whitman's poetry. "I was simmering, simmering, simmering," Whitman once said, "and Emerson brought me to a boil." 
...

The Anatomy of Emotion
p15 Whitman's faith in the flesh... had a profound impact on the thought of his time. His free-verse odes, which so erotically fused the body and the soul, actually precipitated a parallel discovery within psychology. An avid Whitman enthusiast, William James was the first scientist to realize that Whitman's poetry was literally true: the body was the source of feelings. The flesh was not a part of what we felt, it was what we felt. As Whitman had prophetically chanted, "Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul."
...

p16 ...William James inherited the philosophical tradition of Emerson. Pragmatism, the uniquely American philosophy James invented, was in part a systematization of Emerson's skeptical mysticism. Like Emerson and Whitman, James always enjoyed puncturing the pretensions of nineteenth-century science. He thought that people should stop thinking of scientific theories as mirrors of nature, what he called "the copy version of truth." Instead, they should see its facts as tools, which "help us get into a satisfactory relation with experience." [?] The truth of an idea, James wrote, is the use of an idea, its "cash-value." [Now that does sound uniquely American.] Thus, according to pragmatists, a practical poet could be just as truthful as an accurate experiment. All that mattered was the "concrete difference" an idea produced in our actual lives. [Is it just me or is this language as puzzling as the German Idealism it was inspired by?]

p17 [About the physics-inspired psychology of the day] James also wasn't very good at this new type of psychology. "It is a sort of work which appeals to patient and exact mind," he wrote in his masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology, and James realized that his mind was neither patient nor particularly exact. He loved questions more than answers, the uncertainty of faith more than the conviction of reason... James was drawn to the phenomena that this mental reductionism ignored. What parts of the mind cannot be measured?

Searching for the immeasurable led James directly to the question of feeling. Our subjective emotions, he said, were the "unscientific half of existence." ...
...

p18 ...When James introspected, he realized that Whitman's poetry revealed an essential truth: our feelings emerge from the interactions of the brain and the body, not from any single place in either one. This psychological theory, first described in the 1884 article "What Is an Emotion?" is Whitman, pure and simple. Like Whitman, James concluded that if consciousness was severed from the body, "there would be nothing left behind, no 'mind-stuff' out of which the emotion can be constituted." ...

...James believed that our emotions emerged from the constant interaction of the body and the brain. Just as fear cannot be abstracted from its carnal manifestation, it also cannot be separated from the mind, which endows the body'd flesh with meaning. [This would mean that animals that are so motivated by fear must also share in "mind," I would think] As a result, science cannot define feelings without also taking consciousness -- what the feeling is about -- into account. "Let not this view be called materialistic," James warns his reader. "Our emotions must always be inwardly what they are, whatever be the physiological ground of their apparition. If they are deep, pure, spiritual facts they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensation theory, They carry their own inner measure of worth with them."

The Body Electric
p19 Modern neuroscience is now discovering the anatomy underlying Whitman's poetry... 

p20 One of Damasio's most surprising discoveries is that the feelings generated by the body are an essential element of rational thought. [We've been over this before. He describes the gambling experiment.] 
...

p21 ...What Damasio found was that after drawing only ten cards, the hand of the experimental subject got "nervous" whenever it reached for one of the negative decks. While the brain had yet to completely understand the game (and wouldn't for another forty cards), the subject's hand "knew" what deck to draw from. Furthermore, as the hand grew increasingly electric, the subject started drawing more and more frequently from the advantageous decks. The unconscious feelings generated by the body preceded the conscious decision. The hand led the mind.
...

p22 ... The moral of Whitman's verse was that the body wasn't merely a body. Just as leaves of grass grow out of dirt, feelings grow out of the flesh...
...

Feelings from flesh? Soul from body? Body from soul? our existence makes no sense. We live inside a contradiction. Whitman exposes this truth, and then, in the very next sentence, accepts it. His only answer is that there is no answer. "I and this mystery, here we stand," Whitman once said, and that pretty much says it all. 

..."Now I see it is true, what I guess'd at," Whitman wrote in "Song of Myself." What he guessed at, of course, is that the soul is made of flesh.
...

p24 [After a bleak description of the decayed state of his body at the time of his death] What could Whitman have been thinking as he felt his flesh -- his trusted muse -- slowly abandon him? He began his last Leaves of Grass [the "Death-Bed" edition] with a new epigraph, written in death's shadow:

     Come, said my soul,
     Such verses for my Body let us write, (for we are one).

...We are the poem, his poem says, that emerges from the unity of the body and the mind. That fragile unity -- this brief parenthesis of being -- is all we have. Celebrate it.

And here I'm reminded of the mystical bliss that Dostoevsky writes about as his The Brothers Karamazov characters near death. (Though not the Karamazovs themselves.) If we grant that Dostoevsky wasn't just making this up -- and I think I've run into other instances of the same thing, but I can't recall where just now (Anne Lamott) -- is it so unlikely that a soul in conversation, as it were, with a diseased body would find a new song to sing?

Next - 132. George Eliot