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.

"MANIC: A Memoir": Review/reflection

“Manic: A Memoir” by Terri Cheney is a wild novelistic trip through dramatic Hollywood events by a woman we envision to be a fabulous blonde, a hapless Marilyn Monroe.  When you go to YouTube and look for video of her, you find a bony red-head with an ear-to-ear mouth that has a little gap in the front top teeth.  Hardly any makeup, a politician’s suit and scarf, and a lawyer’s demeanor.  Privileged, she had a Corvette given her at age sixteen (now a Porsche -- she got the message:  “you are what your drive.”) and graduated from Vassar, where she was an English major, before law school in LA and employment in the entertainment biz.  (Big names mentioned here.  The kind whose cases require battalions of lawyers.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6tVbj5wmgE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvssWgF22wQ&feature=related

Her writing is sensational, but very workshop -- meaning things like socko first lines for each chapter:  “I didn’t tell anyone that I was going to Santa Fe to kill myself.”   It’s skillful.   She works “closely” with her agent and publisher -- that means she’s writing to sell.  And it worked.   “The Dark Side of Innocence” is a childhood version of the biopolar dilemma, her second book.  I’ll look for it.  She and her publisher, William Morrow, are working ALL the publicity venues: social internet, book tours, interviews, vids. conferences, and short pieces about pop subjects.  (Insanity is very popular).  She seems to be a kind of Joan Didion Lite with overtones of Joyce Carol Oates.  (I can hear Tim snorting now.  He hates this thing of explaining one writer by invoking another.  SHE says she’s into Austen and Fitzgerald.  Very trendy.)

It appears that even though her writing implies out-of-control movie-star bad behavior, the kind of excessiveness we as a culture perversely define as privilege and genius, she is in her daily life usually quite circumspect and puts a lot of energy into local groups that work hard to educate and reform the managing of people struggling with manic-depression.  She gets kids with manic-depression to write as therapy  

Her background in law must be helpful and she herself considers it essential preparation for being a writer, though she does not write in a straight narrative line -- each chapter in “Manic” is a stand-alone piece, some of which were written without any relationship to each other at different times.  She points out that this fits with being manic-depressive, a term she prefers to bipolar.  She feels that being politically correct is a way to dodge the real issues.  I agree.

I found it interesting that she was from New England.  When I did my ministerial internship in Hartford, Connecticut, the social worker whose home I stayed in (with twenty cats, which I thought was a good thing) took me out to the local cemetery to show me the graves of young men who, like her son, had struggled with manic-depression and schizophrenia.  But her son persisted against the odds and finally got his mood-swings under control.  (Until then he bought a racy red sportscar every spring and headed over the horizon, obliging his mother to track him down and return the car, which he couldn’t afford.)  Clearly this is a phenomenon that is related to the environment, that is organic as much as emotional, and that can be deadly.

But it’s so dramatic and the manic phase is so productive and enticing that people get pulled into the glamour of it all and pretty soon they are enabling -- maybe even marrying these jet-propelled characters.  The down side comes hard.  That’s when you need a good lawyer.  

But not every irresponsible immature character is manic-depressive, though it makes a good defense, an excuse really. Of course it is hoped that the organic functional origins of this burn-high/burn-low brain will be found soon.  It seems not to have anything to do with intelligence per se, though it interferes with judgment.  This author was forced into therapy (not a prob in LA) and then into a spa-type hospital.  Finally electroconvulsive shock treatment that after eight sessions threw her into suicide again and that turned out to be have been supervised by a doc arrested for very bad behavior.  She lost a lot of memory.

We might not even read this stuff if it weren’t so entwined with class, education, achievement, sexiness, fine clothes and all the other cultural markers of success that have persisted since Victorian England.  (They don’t call it “Victoria’s Secret” for nothing.)  Going manic at Esalen, “mixed state” at Big Sur -- soooo exciting.  Although no one I know except therapists from Saskatoon ever goes to Esalen anymore.  There are some good thoughts in here, though the book is FAR from being either an medical account of the problem or a checklist of what to do about it.  One is this “mixed-state” business: it turns out that "bipolar" is not just a euphemism but also a distortion of a range of states along a continuum. 

Another interesting and cultural point is that the author’s first line of defense was being “beautiful.”  Everything is beautiful at the ballet, right?  Maintain that facade of lovely manners, perfect grooming, and elegant house -- in a society that judges by appearance, “faultlessness” and “perfection,” and what she describes as an obsession with high-end flowers -- and few will challenge what’s under it.  But we all know about the wormy corruption at the heart of fame and fortune.  The crowd loves it.

If I were this woman’s psychoanalyst I would go straight for her parents, to whom she dedicates the book.  Her mother instructs her that a lady never scratches an itch and her father sets her up for electroshock conditioning to treat what is the most out-of-control bulimia I have ever heard described. (Her mother never kept enough food on hand so she ate her way through the spice rack.)  In college (Vassar, remember) she rumbled the garbage dropboxes, reinforced by the risk and repellence.  Therapists would be very interested in her first months and years of life with two such narcissistic over-controllers.  Such extreme people get built into an infant’s brain.  Cheney seems to have no consciousness of these forces.  She’s a pill-popper with sex on the side.  Maybe she’s saving the psych stuff for a later book.

This is a fast and exciting read, like the incidents it describes.  I don’t trust this woman.  She hasn’t gotten to the bottom of it yet.  But there are lots of video interviews of her on YouTube and they’re pretty interesting.  See for yourself.