VISIONARY THINKING

Title shot: a film essay

Grant Slater (grant-slater.com) and I share an alma mater, Northwestern University.  More accurately he shares Ivan Doig’s alma mater, since he is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism, as was Doig.  I was in what was then called the “School of Speech,” now called “Communication Studies” and quite different than it was.

Slater calls himself a “moving image maker” and that’s exactly right.  Behind his photography is always a story that is moving, not because it is video, but because it is so deeply emotional, down in the gut where we used to try to reach as actors.  So this blog post will “quote” a lot by giving you links.  It will be what we used to try to define as a “vook,” meaning a book that moved across media to include image, interview, music, and thought.  Some are meant to be marketing persuasion, which is somewhat stigmatized, so I’ll start there.  Here’s a nice piece for VISA.

https://vimeo.com/144914189  You see how appealing it is?  

Here’s the second Slater vid I saw — I only found him this morning — and this one is marketing FEAR.  It’s about Trump, but more than that.  The title is SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS.  The epigram is “Tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy […] the greatest and most savage slavery out of the extreme of freedom.” From Plato’s The Republic.”  

https://vimeo.com/175888789?from=outro-embed  

I’m reluctant to post the link because I’m AFRAID some people are going to love this and repeat it a lot.  They will not see it as an advertisement meant to make it easier to drive us into obedience to tyrants, but rather as an advertisement for BECOMING a tyrant, even if only in drinking establishments among “friends.”  Or at home with women and children one can tyrannize.  Maybe it’s safer to provide this link now that Trump has proven what a lying fantasist he is.  But this is almost Leni Resinthenthal, famous as Hitler’s cinematographer who made Olympic Competitors into soaring supermen.

My other fear is that good people will be so afraid of these images that they will try to suppress them so they don’t have to think about them.  We’ve got to have the guts to really look.

Now here’s the link to Slater’s antidote, which is how I came to his work today because Aeon.com picked it up for the day’s set of essays.  I skip a lot of the print essays, but I always watch the short vids.  They never disappoint.  This one is relevant to prairie life, far to the north, where Bob and I once went moose hunting and where my father’s family pioneered for a while.

https://aeon.co/videos/bring-back-the-mammoth-to-fight-global-warming-its-not-as-crazy-as-it-sounds?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9c4d3e603e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_03_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-9c4d3e603e-68600437

It’s about global warming, the thawing of the permafrost, in this case in Siberia, but the same phenomenon is happening here in Canadian territory.  The scientist who wants to bring back the woolly mammoth is a visionary.  We are more likely to send out elephants in sweaters, but at Harvard they’re working on reverse engineering elephant genes.  Since there are mammoth carcasses that were flash-frozen with browsed buttercups still in their mouths, the genes of mammoths are at hand.  But this man and his son are not waiting — they’re putting the original beasts: wild horses, musk oxen, caribou, back on the land.  Since these beasts are being crowded out of their habitat in North America, it’s only a transportation problem.  So far no grizzlies, but if we’re sending them to zoos, this might be an excellent alternative.

At a long ago conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (https:asle.org) in Banff, there was a woman called “Barney” whose proper name has escaped my aging brain.  The premise of her talk was that sustainable prairie requires a balance between something like an elephant to knock down trees and something bovine to graze back brush.  The men in the permafrost project are imitating the elephant by smashing trees back mechanically, which is why they want mammoths back.  

They say that when the cities have been bombed to radioactive rubble by the Tyrants, since the glamour and power of humans have been conveniently gathered into targets, what will be left will be grass.  They say that the land around the Hanford Reactor in Washington State is radioactive but that the small animals — the squirrels and foxes — have adapted much better than they did to human doings.  Same in Russia and Japan where radioactivity accidents cleared out the people.

Now I’m going to shut up with the print chatter so there is time left for you to explore Slater’s work.  This long sequence he calls “longtelegram.   http://longtelegram.com

You can also find his work at https://vimeo.com/grantslater

ARE THESE THE WINDS OF CHANGE?

I never expected things to go this way.  I’m scared.  I’m always wary but usually of things like a bad winter or even a rise in sea level due to a warming north pole — two things that are evidently connected.  I say “evidently” because that’s what the evidence tells us.  But that’s not really what is disturbing my sleep now.

It’s Trump.

I agree with Ken Olbermann www.gq.com/story/watch-the-closer-keith-olbermann  He is evidence-based and sums it up accurately.  Even the local Flat Earth Society, even the people who keep their tin hats handy in case the aliens kill another cow, are feeling uncertain now.  They thought that, once elected, Trump would drop his disguise and become rational.  

NOT.

The most thoughtful people in town (women) defended Trump, mostly because they despised Hilary and her pant suits (they wear jeans).  Now they’re trying not to think, binging on housework and holding family close, using medicinal chocolate.  I don’t bring up the subject.

We have met the enemy and he looks like a kewpie doll and has the mentality of Clem Kadiddlehopper.  I have two thoughts:  one is gratitude for my neighbor who almost secretly shoveled out my snowed-in driveway — never asking for gratitude but going ahead as the people here have always done to help each other.  The other is that Trump has got to be the dorsal fin of the shark to have gotten to this position of President Elect.  There must be a lot more holding him up than some kind of neurotic compulsion of the population.  

I don’t think the choice ever was change versus the status quo.  Change was murdered in its cradle by the global Status Quo Board of Directors.  And something is fiddling with my internet connection.

This time of year people make lists of blogs in Montana.  They are always political, always from the high-pop mountain cities, and often written by people under forty who didn't grow up here.  When I first came back in 1999 I was writing under the radar because everyone thought of me as an historical extension of Bob Scriver.  Then I got his biography written.  (Which was ignored because as one veteran told me, books are only bought by distributors if a salesman comes and tells them what is important, and anyway this book was published in Canada and I only wanted people to read it because I’m a bitter old woman.)  At least I’ve never worn a pantsuit. Amazon shows the covers of my other published books.

Then came blogging.  Wheeee!  Amazon links to my main blog.  But I’m still under the radar.  Rather glad of it, actually.  Because I write scary.  I’m not bitter: I’m reckless.  And I’m reckless because there is less and less to lose by speaking out, joining “The Resistance.”  I wish Olbermann weren’t sponsored by a men’s magazine focused on style.  It’s too easy to brush him off.  (He wears pantsuits but at least they're not three-piece.)

But I should stop defining people by their choices of identification.  For instance, one of the most intelligent and connected-to-reality publications on the Internet is called VICE and came to my attention because of an exposé of “law and order” on the rez at its worst.  The report was accurate and a reporter came here to see, instead of depending on second hand stuff.  But it also prints material that matches its title.

The wind is rising, as was forecast, and the work of my neighbor in shoveling my driveway out is being erased by larger forces, the global east-flow jet stream among them.  So do I go see if I have mail, bundled up in my down rancher coat, or shall I just hunker down and wait until tomorrow?  At the moment I vote for hunkering.

But when it comes to Trump, I think that’s the wrong choice.

This is less than my self-imposed quota of a thousand words, but I need to go dig around to see if I can find some chocolate, since I won’t be making it to the store until tomorrow.

PARADIGM SHIFTS KNOCK YOU ON YOUR BUTT

My eyes are troubling me and there is a lot of work to do on my environment, so I’m going to post excerpts from a conversation I’ve been having with an entirely honorable and lovable UU minister who used to be a colleague. Without any warning or immediate cause, he was sacked. I don’t think you’ll recognize him but I’ll change any details that might be identifiers. Of course, if he wants to uncloak, that’s fine with me, but the impact on the next congregation (which is already lined up) has to be considered.

I’ve been thinking and writing about these kinds of events for years but have found no minister who would talk to me about it. You’ll remember that I simply walked out on Saskatoon — not without notice and following procedure, but taking my remaining pledge with me, which enraged them.

I see two or three pivot points WORLD WIDE, but played out through the UU world.

1. Everyone is terrified. Bad things (overpopulation, drought, natural disasters, minority riots, etc.) have been predicted to begin about now and they are. Actually, it’s not that different, but our feeling is that the world is ending.

2. There is no “theological” message that really takes hold. The Principles are old and over-familiar. (Go to UUA.org to find them. You won’t be dazzled.) The UU world is not participating in the fabulous inspiring re-framing or paradigm shift that is developing: the Long Now, Deep History, Big History, the Evolution of the Brain, the two hundred kinds of hominins, and a few other ways of organizing the overwhelming new ideas out there.

I call it Mystical Science because it so clearly tells us we are participants in something vast and unknowable, but felt. FELT. Here and there people are organizing groups that are essentially congregations, but they are NOT UUA. Not even identified as religious. Some say humanism, but it’s not about humans. It’s not about salvation, not even saving the planet. It’s about PARTICIPATION. You’re a speck, but a connected speck. This is butterfly-winging: teeny changes can transform everything.

The people who are running the UUA are after self-preservation, compensation for being put down as black or female, and Trumpism, imagining they are CEO’s with a strange notion of that as an entitlement. They have conflated religion with politics. To be UU in the USA is to be a Democrat.

Neubauer Collegium

I think my friend was not fired — they set him free. (That’s more usually called re-framing than paradigm shift.) I myself am penniless, getting old so that pieces keep fall off, but I am FREE. And writing daily. I have not severed my connection with the UUA because I need the credential and I want to know about what’s happening. Same with Meadville, which is no longer Meadville at all. I’ve been following the Neubauer (neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu); which now occupies the building, and is not afraid of thinking big thoughts. The legal Meadville is a rented space in the Loop.

This colleague I’m speaking to is very much in the traditional, nearly genealogical, past of the UUA when it was in the neighborhood of Boston and Emerson was a renegade. That was before the California UU’s cooked up the Aquarian revolution while steaming in a hot tub.

Let’s look at it this way. You are the Al Gore of the UUMA spectrum. Your whole stance is history, honor, heritage, and continuity. It fits with your temperament, your education, and even your portrait. But the present congregations of the UUA in many ways are turning away from the UUA that I knew and joined in 1975. I assume you remember those times, too.

25 Beacon Street, Boston

No one ever imagined that the UU’s would leave 25 Beacon Street. No one ever imagined that the BACA-BAWA scuffle in the Eighties would finally come back almost subversively and capture the big churches and the presidency of the UUA without ever being congregational ministers. No one imagined that the UUA would become synonymous with the Democratic party. How can they turn away from the New England Emerson and Channing mode?

But they did. Now they look to the South and I have no idea who their heroes are or even if there ARE any. They want to win, they want to be rich and secure, and if that means rigging the US Supreme Court, let us not have qualms. But their enthusiasm for levelling and anarchism gets smashed by advertising that pitches everything “better” that will prove status. As someone remarked, “We’re fine with minorities so long as they dress well and have good manners.” You know, “nice” gays who love fine music.

Here’s another interpretation: in the last few decades many people are working more and longer hours than ever before. The women and retired people who used to shoulder almost all the volunteer services are now in jobs or are in demand in a host of NGO’s responding to the greatly increased need in our times because governments are pulling back. So we hire people and call them “professional.” In a peculiar reversal, the minister is considered a “servant.”

Here in Valier, which is highly traditional, many (I think I could say most) women are in comparatively low-pay jobs but make enough to hire someone to clean their houses, which those cleaner women do for even lower-pay. A few years ago a radio station wanting to promote how wonderful they were, said they wanted to organize Thanksgiving and would provide the turkeys, if the women would cook the meal and provide the salad, veggies, etc. side dishes. There was uproar. “Just when,” said the women, “Did you think we had time or inclination to cook the way our mothers did?” The radio people looked for grannies, but they were taking on the kid care or were dead of diabetes.

I'm saying that when society changes, particularly the economics, the churches must also change but are often unaware of the larger culture because they are a self-selected group.

In Valier we have no immigrant class willing to work for pennies out of desperation. The Indians have gotten uppity and earned college degrees. The children are so indulged and praised that every mosquito bite throws them into rebellion. Work? Who, us?

Another element I feel keenly because of my Diabetes 2 is the huge role that communal “feeds” still play in church life. I’m solitary by choice but would be anyhow out of necessity because so many community events are pie sales, cake walks, barbecues, pancake breakfasts and so on. My non-attendance can be interpreted as snobbery. Nowadays, between allergies and food risks, these events still barely work in small rural towns but are close to impossible in cities. BUT the other urban food dynamic is towards eating out or cooking gourmet with good friends. Expensive, exclusive, requiring skill. Not church building activities.

Economic forces are bringing to the front such big questions about money. Maybe churches ought to have economic study groups instead of theological study groups. Both are highly politicized and feel dangerous.

I left, but I’m not you and I’m from a different part of the UU spectrum: prairie humanism. Co-ops, grain elevators as cathedrals and red Indians. Life on a mystical horizon that requires constant vigilance. And Carhartts. (Tough work clothes.) We are already at ground level. Some lean Right.

If the UUA is going to continue to claim to be pluralistic (I’m not sure they are or want to be right now) the denomination may just shrivel, due to hypocrisy, and die. Like Meadville, they are already a bit of a low-attendance/residence operation, in a world that operates through a web of tight relationships. If they go on, they will need an umbrella concept. Tillich’s genius was always looking for the umbrella: being vs nonbeing are united by the Ground of Being.

So how can an historian find an umbrella or through-line that will include these minister-hating savages, these wanna-be CEO’s, and extend history out into the future when the terms of existence will surely change again? I couldn’t do it if I wanted to, but you probably could.

That’s the extent of my advice so far. Except that even congregations evolve, which means change but also getting a better fit with the larger world.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE UNITARIAN CONGREGATION OF SASKATOON

The Meeting Hall I knew.

Actually, I suppose I’m writing to a congregation that no longer exists except in my head, so I may be a little “off” because of not knowing the newer members.  After all, this is several ministers and several buildings since I was there in 1986.

So . . .Saskatoon, Saskatchewan — a euphonious town.  It’s been almost thirty years since I cut my hair and walked off.  So many memories, both good and bad.  And a lot of funny ones.

A college-aged Communist (he said he was Stalinist — hard core) took a liking to me and offered a bit of local geography.  He took me to walk on “Bare-assed Beach,” an expanse of sand next to a body of water that was every bit as good as an ocean beach.  It also offered grass high enough to give people a little privacy for sun-bathing, a sort of Scandinavian thing to do, escaping darkness while it’s possible.  We visited off season, so no shedding clothes.  

Someone told me a story about being there with her two little boys.  She was watching them while she read a book, but somehow they got too far out into the water without her noticing and were in trouble.  Just as she was registering the danger, a totally naked woman burst out of the grass at a dead run, easily passed her, soon had a boy in each hand and pulled them back to their mom.  Then she disappeared into the grass and was never seen again.

So Saskatoon was like that for me: full of narrow escapes, vast spaces, and surprises.  I don’t know who was more surprised, myself or the congregation.  But they were suspicious and I was unsuspecting to the point of naiveté.  I had thought they’d be “aboriginal-friendly” and that was one of the reasons I went there.

First of all, let me make it abundantly clear that I’m neither breaking off ties with the Unitarian Universalist movement (nor CUC) nor fishing around to return.  I am not interested in speaking gigs, nor even publishing with Beacon or whatever.  I don’t want to be a force for good in any denomination, but I don’t mind being a memory-keeper.  It’s not that I’ve left the principles but that they aren’t enough.  It’s not that I think congregations are bad — in fact, they are all that can gather endorsement in a democracy, because it takes numbers to impress governments.  But there are far too many people who will not unite their voices and who wish to use congregations as their own political stepping stones.  Everywhere.

I was astounded that the liberal people were funded by the government.  “Don’t you know it means they control you?”  They answered -- with moral indignation — "They wouldn’t DARE to try to control us!"  Ha.

The morning I quit.

So . . .Saskatoon, Saskatchewan — a euphonious town.  It’s been almost thirty years since I got up on Sunday morning, cut my hair to just below the earlobes and walked off.  But that was a tipping point and it wasn’t all about Sask.  I had been married to Bob Scriver throughout the Sixties on the Blackfeet reservation which is on the high east slope of the Rockies pushed up against the Canadian border.  My father’s family had lived in Minitonas, Manitoba, (another of those names) for years and Bob’s reputation was on both sides of the border.  We once tried to work with a foundry just outside Regina.  I thought this was enough to compensate for the stigma of being American.

During my second year Bob had a bad stroke.  I wasn’t notified, but I had one of those mysterious intuitions.  I arranged for a pulpit replacement and went back to Browning where Bob’s fourth wife was drunk on her ass, the hired men had gone blank and withdrawn into the shadows, and a teenaged clerk was running everything, begging for help.  I stayed a week and restored order.  When I came back, I discovered I had committed the equivalent of running off with a former lover.  I suppose I had.  But it was an American thing to do.  (Maybe French.)  I was asked to swear never, never to choose Bob over Saskatoon again.  Never to even make contact with him again.  Ha.

Myself and Bob Scriver

That’s a nice cover story, easy on my old tattered ego.  But there are layers of stories.  Somehow I got onto the board of the Friendship Centre, which is a euphemism for helping aboriginals.  The board was supposed to raise money, but no chance of that with this congregation.  Their identity was firmly attached to being academic and British Empire in a sea of Others.  So I’d go over to the Friendship Centre kitchen and peel potatoes while I gossiped.  

Those were the days when the cops routinely took “old drunks” and troublemakers way out of town and dumped them into the sub-zero snow (Fahrenheit, not Celsius) without jackets or shoes.  Their bodies were considered “accidents.”  Then one tough sunnavabitch made it back to town. 

This was also about the time that a new street drug hit town — I think it was meth or crack.  I talked to a friendly cop about it.  He said they didn’t know what it was or where it was coming from, but it made the customary drinking parties into a hell of violence with no coherent witnesses. Once I was given a premium for filling up my gas tank: a slender screwdriver with a shaft long enough to reach a heart.  I said to the gas jockey,  “This is not a tool — it’s a weapon.”  He quickly went inside.

I recognized the fear and the distortions and defensiveness that comes of mysterious change.  There was still a large part of the demographics that were survivors of Stalin’s famine, transplanted to fill up the prairies.  No one listened to the local television: they all subscribed to the North Dakota cable, which was not reassuring.  More dangerous and more glamorous at the same time.

In my blogger beret.

You folks know the saying “publish or prairies.”  It doesn’t apply down in the States, but up there the idea was that the academic world, if it were in the prairie province universities, was either purgatory or limbo.  The idea was to get to Eden — Vancouver.  Or if you wanted power, you could head east to Ottawa.  I never heard anyone yearning for Quebec, which is where Bob’s parents grew up.  I guess it was French.

What were the sources of good and courage?  What was the consensus?  What the resources?  How do the people of the congregation continue to grow and join hearts and have babies?  (Ivan Gidluck’s baby born while I was there must be about ready for college.  I remember that baby and mother were incandescent the next day after the birth.)  

When we had one of those endless soul-searching sessions to try to frame up a mission, everyone headed in a different direction.  Finally Ann Coxworth suggested,  “We receive the gifts of the universe gratefully and try to return them.”  Or something like that.  I just declared it the winner, the consensus, and drew a line under it.  The end.  Made everyone mad, but I still like it.

I remember so vividly staying the first night in Saskatoon at Ann Coxworth’s where there were tanks of turtles and a whole greenhouse alcove, which I’ve yearned for ever since, and in the garden a fish pond with chicken wire over it to keep out the cranes and raccoons.  Maybe you’ve seen those posters of a crane trying to swallow a frog that has a stranglehold on the crane’s neck so that it CAN’T swallow.  That’s what congregations can do: grip the esophagus of injustice.

One of the most transcendent moments for me was by accident coming to a field of courting cranes, with their graceful strangeness and haunting bugling.  I wonder how it would be for a Saskatoon minister to use the metaphor of the ultra-lite pilot leading a long line of cranes across the territory so as to take them to the nesting ground.  I suppose to some it will look as though the pilot is on a power trip, but to others the pilot will seem vulnerable, even if only to the possibility running out of gas.

Still, when I hear "Fanfare for the Common Man," I stop whatever I'm doing and listen through to the end with my hand on my heart.  (It was the congregation's prelude.)

SEEING IT THROUGH

MARTHA GRAHAM: 

A DANCE ADDRESSING THE TROJAN WAR

Some new information is just clutter or comes from a dubious source anyway, but when serious and careful science turns up a lot of facts that eventually lead to a new understanding of the world, everything can demand a reconfiguring, and that can lead to a revolution in the way of doing things, often one overdue. Every small habit a person has developed over the years can be challenged. The way we eat, dress, and treat each other are now in the middle of several slow revolutions.

The most fascinating problem to me is the necessary reconciliation between psychotherapies based on introspection and cultural definitions (What IS violence? WHY are people depressed?) and the fMRI and tissue studies of the brain, not just defined as a blob-in-a-skull, but as an information system throughout the body and through empathy between people. Freud’s insights have been confirmed, enlarged, and knocked clear off the couch. Now we have a whole new set of questions.

I woke up this morning trying to think through the difference between being conflicted and being bipolar. This is because of reading about anxiety according to the work of Joe LeDoux, whose book “Anxious” is an explication — not a cure for anxiety so much as a map of how molecules interacting create cells that record danger so that the body can react, then using various internal sequences and processes to create an emotional state that our culture calls “anxious.” The message is not that we’re taking the wrong pill or ought to be doing Tai Chi, but that fear and anxiety are complex, not necessarily related, and part of being a human still more unconscious mammal elements than any lately defined DSM intellectual constructs, mostly based on the lives of a specific class of entitled people sitting as a committee.

DSM-5 Panel: Gambling Disorder

Bipolar is one of those sort of literary diagnoses like paranoia and narcissism. I mean, they are plot elements for novels: fancy names for an array of emotional states that are unpleasant but that the culture likes to sling around as shorthand and that — once named — they see everywhere. Bipolar is supposed to be moods alternating through time for some biological reason. For a while you’re really “up” and even a bit over the top (mania) and then for a while you go “down” and become depressed to the point of paralysis.

Conflicted is more old-fashioned, with two internal forces (either thought or emotion) that are present at the same time, grappling. The alternation is only because circumstances will favor one side or the other at any given moment, but not because the other side is gone. The constant conflict may irreconcilable, lifelong. Half of it may be ecstatic or erotic, while the other half is torment, unendurable. This can be produced by the state of the body (tortured) or may create a state of the body (impossible longing). Consider the child abused by a parent, a kind of Xian archetype that ends in crucifixion.

Clues have been sought through split-brain studies which discover that two sides of the organ have assigned kinds of awareness. Or through dissociation, which is a reaction of the mind/body when under extreme duress, like abuse or sexual violation that challenge the identity. The conscious mind can organize a sub-category. This leads to the idea that an identity is not one permanent “object” but rather a constantly rebuilt and fluid body of understanding. We’ve known that people can have multiple personalities and that authors or actors can “inhabit” fictional personas. But a conflicted person who claims one side or the other can be disconcerting. They can strongly assert opposites.

Inner conflict, which is always uncomfortable, driving towards resolution, can become unbearable. People may try to act out the conflict or seek situations that will duplicate the problem. Think of “Hurt Locker,” that vivid movie. It’s not just about adrenaline addiction.

The bomb disarmer in his armor. 

“The Hurt Locker.”

One would think that if a person could get close enough to the individual and take one side or the other, whatever seems healthiest or resolvable, that would solve the problem. But it’s a little like disarming a bomb, easily taking the situation enough out of balance for an explosion. Not everyone is brave enough to intervene, or they may be getting involved in an effort to resolve their own inner oppositions. Maybe they’re just wrong.

Another problem is secrecy, esp. when dealing with families. “Conflicted” may be the family dilemma, like those who demand “respect” in a culture that despises poverty or ignorance or divergence from the norm. It becomes an inheritance, but one constantly suppressed, always growing more powerful and more toxic. On the other hand, it can drive achievement. But the very fact of the achievement can cause the conflict to return, like a strong wind rekindling embers.

Life itself, quite apart from any physical or familial or psychological issues, is irreconcilable. We love those who abuse us; we fuck those who infect us; we eat what will destroy our bodies; we die. We die. We die. Sometimes for no good reason and in spite of all the efforts of others. AND we abuse those we love, we infect those we fuck, we destroy our bodies and spend a lot of money doing it. But even if we were the most irreproachable people on the face of the planet, we would still die.

Fritz Perls

The therapist Perls, who had managed to escape from a lot of things, was fond of creating a dialogue by placing two chairs to speak aloud each side of a conflict, the client actually moving from one chair to the other or imagining a representative of the problem in the other chair. Perls did NOT sit in either chair. He did NOT become the controller and resolver. He watched the conflict and sometimes he listened the conflict into at least accommodation.

My interest in Crime Solution Investigation programs is that tiny clues and traces can sometimes bring resolution to some question of justice. This is a good thing for writers to think about. (Therapists are hopeless.) But justice will not keep anyone from dying. A conflicted person is not helped by justice. There is really no cure except to just keep going and to practice mercy when one can.

FEAR v. ANXIETY (referring to LeDoux)

MY THOUGHTS ABOUT “ANXIOUS,” 

a book by Joseph LeDoux  

LeDoux feels that what we call “anxiety” and what we call “fear” are two different phenomena that are managed differently by the amygdala and brain connectome.  

He speaks of the “split brain” research he did with Gazzaniga, in which it was vividly demonstrated that if one side was shown something, it could name and identify it accurately.  If the other side was shown the same thing, they couldn’t name the images but derived a kind of feeling from them and explained it creatively.  Consistently, one side could say what something actually was and the other side would “explain” it by inventing a story.  This has been distorted by some theories, calling it female/male, etc. 

Our culture insists that only humans have consciousness, that consciousness is a matter of words, that consciousness (self-awareness) is “better” and “higher” and is the same as “thinking”, which to them is the management of relationships among words.  The sensorium is assigned “poetry,” which is a language of art, sometimes considered fantasy, invention.

It seems that the difference between anxiety and fear is that anxiety is a felt emotional concept, a state of being, and fear is focused on a legitimate threat to survival and suggests something to be done about it, according to the identity of the individual and the resources of the culture.  The object of fear can be named and addressed, but anxiety is a feeling that lacks a story but drives the person to look for one.  Maybe what psychotherapy does is resolve anxiety by finding a convincing object of the fear and suggest ways to resolve it.  

LeDoux feels that fear and anxiety are addressed by two different connectomes or systems: one that responds to internal felt emotion and one that responds to the sensorium, raw neural information.  Behavior can come out of either or both.

I relate this to “spirituality” which is a felt experience that is hard to name or describe (liminality, transcendence, numinous, sublime) versus “religion” which offers named entities to fear (God, the Devil, atheists, “Commies”) and a narrative in which to embed them.  Thus, I suspect that spirituality relates to the same connectomes as anxiety while religion is about named threats that a theological system can explain.

Today there are so many rational threats that religions should be booming, but the offered naming and abating are not working -- they are only effective for those who live in a world that has passed.  Some “religious” wars are about trying to restore that world.  Even in supposedly peaceful settings, there’s a craving for writing and relationship as a source of surrogate authority. There is also much felt anxiety that is going unnamed in relationships, economics, government.  We’re aware of how much is secret or not what we expected (the internet) and how many of the institutions of reassurance have been dispersed (unions, families, school).

It seems to me that spirituality is a creature of images (sensorium) we can feel, but that religion is verbal, often adversarial, and both narrative and logical but logic that takes introspection as a source rather than the sensorium.  This is at the heart of the “Western” religions.

These ideas generated by LeDoux and team seem to lead somewhere instead of shutting down discussion or new evidence.  Whatever the amygdala has to do with it (which seems hard to pin down), it would be a mistake to assume we already know.  The very long bibliography and discussion of various theories show how hard it is to resist closure.

A FIVE-STAGE ACCOUNT OF 

HOW HUMAN BEINGS DEVELOP

Keep in mind that as each new ability or understanding comes “on-line,” it then loops back to connect with everything previous and that creates new synergies that weren’t possible earlier.

I.

Human beings are self-unfolding, pulling in what they need from around them, and creating their own internal order.  The drive to do this is kindled at conception and guided by the genome, the epigenome, and the womb environment which connects to the mother’s molecular status and reactions.

So the first stage of fear/anxiety is in the mother, whether she is safe and peaceful, or aroused and frightened.  This affects not only the state of the baby -- when the fetus is old enough she will feel its movement and know how much it participates in her emotional state as expressed in the blood according to the secretions of her organs -- but also the development pathways as the baby’s organs are created and calibrated.  Adrenaline, cortisol and so on can influence gender, both whom to desire and gender identity, to say nothing of genital formation.

Once outside the womb, the baby begins develop its sensory systems, not just eyes, ears and so on, but awareness of gravity, nearness, velocity, and some estimate maybe several hundred other things related to what is outside the body/skin.  As soon as something is perceived, it is built into the “map of the world” of the baby.  At this early point the new entity forms an opinion of whether the world is trustworthy, but there are also genetic factors.  If some genes are missing, the baby has no fear.  This anomaly will not last long in an unprotective world.  The original genes were meant to promote survival by wariness.  It is also possible that an epigene might turn off this gene.  There is a named syndrome in females, who are more likely to be protected and even treasured for their fearlessness, NOT the kind that is learned, but rather innate, an innocence.

The development of emotions at this stage is unfocused and unnamed inside the person, but identified and treated differently by the care-giving persons.  Some feelings could lead to abuse, which can cause suppression of emotions with internal consequences.

II.

Once all the senses are in place and the skeletal and muscular body has developed, the adrenals activate puberty, a whole new system of hormones and organs that adds new capacities, but also new reasons for worry.  A changing body can be hard to manage and can evoke predatory attitudes from others.  Increased awareness of other people’s emotions means realizing the state of the marriage on which the family is based, the restrictions and requirements of school, and possibly larger forces like racism, or war.  

By now the impact of the world outside the skin is causing emotions the person is able to name and that the culture will treat according to its way of labeling and managing.  Suppression, soothing, rage, laughter or mocking -- these will teach the person about the world.  The autonomic nervous system, combined with hormonal signals, are felt but perhaps not named nor accurately understood.

III.

By this stage the brain is doing a lot of sorting and filtering.  The person can reflect on what they see, actively reject some things and fasten onto others.  Not until the early twenties are they able to get to the meta level of thought, understanding why things happen, what ought to be done, make introspective inquiries, consider revolution.

This is the most obvious stage, the one we are aware of and act on.  But I begin to realize how many people never step outside their cultural boundaries or even know there is anything out there.  If it intrudes or if they much leave the familiar, they are both anxious and fearful.

IV.

This level is meant to refer to the person’s ability to connect to others.  When there is a threat, to look to see whether the others take it seriously.  As personality dictates, to respond in concert or in defiance.  To assume a responsible role, like a teacher or soldier, and react according to what is one’s duty.  The body of learning from experience is enlarging all the time.  Mirror cells, empathy, bonding, team-building, there’s no way to evade being a social animal.

V.

Cosmic awareness  Transcendence.  Not everyone seems to have this direct experience of “being,” but for those who it can be “the mysterium tremendum and fascinans” that overwhelms with the power of the universe, or the “oceanic feeling” of belonging to everything reassuringly.  Not only is it a felt and emotional concept, trying to define it into a theological system will end it.