POLYPERSONA

Persona:  the aspect of someone's character that is presented to or perceived by others.

Also, "A public persona", a role or character adopted by an author or an actor.

"image, face, public face, character, personality, identity, self, front, facade, mask, guise, exterior, role part.

The idea of the polypersona is opposite to the formerly accepted standard desirable ideology of being "genuine" and "authentic", finding one's true self.  To the unsophisticated and insecure, a human identity must be single, stable, and  complete.  This was shattered by wartime double agents and used car salesmen, but restored by mental health workers.  Nevertheless, distressingly for some folks, we each have many "faces" to use, plus the more private and subtle "frame of mind" version of variations.

The polypersona is a term I invent in order to go around the dogma of split-personality, schizophrenia, and various roles as with Bridey Murphey.  https://www.amazon.com/Search-Bridey-Murphy-Morey-Bernstein/dp/0385260032  I mean something more like adjusting your demeanor according to the context: speaking to your lover differently than you speak to your boss or your dog.

There are also a few more drastic adjustments of one's operating system, like dissociation, an involuntary state, going into a kind of fugue of a grayed-out world when under extreme trauma.  Porges' research into the brain's ability to move the body among flight/fight/paralysis, and shut down is relevant, not least because he points out these are below conscious control, evolved from states that came with being a little mammal in a dangerous world.  He has not addressed "thrashing" which is something like "spaniel rage" when a normally docile animal goes crazy, mobilizing every exertion at once as a last chance of survival.

I'm interested in mid-level understanding of persona, like the definition at the top of the page and also the derived understanding that as well as unconsciously moving when there is reason, we can consciously move from one system to another.  Say, you're at a party with drugs but the cops arrive.  Or suppose you are waiting for test results, and then they come, and good-or-bad you go from the tenseness of waiting to either joy or despair.  The shift might be minor, like talking to one person when another -- maybe not so well-known to you -- and you become a little more guarded.  

Controlling one's public persona is the stock-in-trade of actors and sexworkers.  Actors using the "Method" reach for memories to alter the most subtle muscles of the face and posture.  Memory is their frame of reference.  Sexworkers are working with their perception of the "trick," what words or touches of their own are calling up reactions from the other.  Salesmen often have a repertoire of personas to persuade customers.   

My totally naive premise is that these different personas are underlain by what are called "circuits" in the brain, networks of connections among neural cells that activate the elements of complex personality.  The study of these circuits, the "connectome", can be traced by a computer image which offers the results in color.  

This is the kind of thing you probably don't need to know:

"There are 4 main types of neural circuits called diverging circuit, converging circuit, reverberating circuit and parallel after-discharge circuit. In a diverging circuit, a nerve fiber forms branching and synapses with several postsynaptic cells. Each postsynaptic cell may further synapse with several other neurons." 

You need to know this:  "According to Wikipedia (Neuron), each of the one hundred billion neurons in the human brain has on average 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons."  When more brain cells are added, they don't come higgletypigeltypop, but form into chains that are the like the rules or operating systems.  They are organic "programs". 

Writer's block and insomnia are both caused by denial of brain access to the effective system that triggers the behavior.  The cause might be interference from a competing system, like worrying, or could be some kind of failure to access the proper system.  Knowing what will trigger writing or sleep -- and being able to actually do that at the point of desire -- is a big part of being a happy human. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/19427516/  Is an article from a reliable professional website (National Center for Biotechnology Information) that could blow you away unless you've got background and vocabulary.  Here's a sample:   "Synapse formation involves pairing of the pre- and postsynaptic partners at a specific neurospatial coordinate. The specificity of synapse formation requires the precise execution of multiple developmental events, including cell fate specification, cell migration, axon guidance, dendritic growth, synaptic target selection, and synaptogenesis."  Synapses are the points of snapping together, if I can be forgiven for thinking of neural cells as legos.  Dendrites are what reach out like extension cords.  What DNA stores is how to make synapses (plug-ins) and dendrites, what makes them connect, how information travels around.

Knowing that above might not help you to control your mental states so that they are appropriate, but it might avoid feeling so much like a pawn in the hands of an inscrutable power.  So simple a thing as nutrition or hydration might help.  Whisky probably will not, though many writers think it will.  In terms of the connectome, alcohol slows, censors, lifts prohibitions, which changes writing but may not make it better.

"Synaptic biology" can be both ghastly and enchanting.  This is one of the developmental processes that can be disrupted to the point of self-destruction if children are exposed to trauma, dislocation, broken attachments. failure of cues or lack of them.  This is the destruction happening at the Mexican border now and in abusive households.  The body is present, but the operating system is failing.  The study of this sort of thing is called "synaptic biology."  But Colon-Ramos, a primary researcher from Puerto Rico now working at Yale, offers this definition: "Synapses, which are points of cellular communication between neurons, were first described by Santiago Ramón y Cajal as 'protoplasmic kisses that appear to constitute the final ecstasy of an epic love story. '"

A startling beginning that attracted the media was cutting the main connectomes of the brain which are between the two halves. "When Sperry and Gazzaniga presented stimuli to the right visual field (processed by the speaking left hemisphere), the patient responded normally. However, when stimuli were presented to the left visual field (processed by the mute right hemisphere), the patient said he saw nothing. Yet his left hand would draw the image shown. When asked why his left hand did that, the patient looked baffled, and responded that he had no idea."

They had created two personas.  Maybe.

"To try to get to the bottom of things, my team at the University of Amsterdam re-visited this fundamental issue by testing two split-brain patients, evaluating whether they could respond accurately to objects in the left visual field (perceived by the right brain) while also responding verbally or with the right hand (controlled by the left brain). Astonishingly, in these two patients, we found something completely different than Sperry and Gazzaniga before us. Both patients showed full awareness of presence and location of stimuli throughout the entire visual field – right and left, both. When stimuli appeared in the left visual field, they virtually never said (or indicated with the right hand) that they saw nothing. Rather, they would accurately indicate that something had appeared, and where."

"Based on these findings, we have proposed a new model of the split-brain syndrome. When you split the brain, you still end up with only one person. However, this person experiences two streams of visual information, one for each visual field. And that person is unable to integrate the two streams. It is as if he watches an out-of-sync movie, but not with the audio and video out of sync. Rather, the two unsynced streams are both video.

"And there’s more. While the previous model provided strong evidence for materialism (split the brain, split the person), the current understanding seems to only deepen the mystery of consciousness. You split the brain into two halves, and yet you still have only one person. How does a brain, consisting of many modules, create just one person? And, how do split-brainers operate as one when these parts are not even talking to each other?"

I predict this puzzle will come back to the complex bazillion connectome, constantly being added to and subtracted from as the body experiences the world.  More about this later, esp. in terms of interference in the child's connectome when the body (embodiment) is used traumatically.

"ACCUSED" -- maybe convicted and maybe not

At this url is an amazing episode in an ongoing series written and co-written by Jimmy McGovern, one of the most gifted and insightful of the Brit crime serieses that come out of Manchester.  It is one of dozens of stories about "ordinary" people, this one about a mild English professor of Romantic Poetry (leaning on "The Lady of Shalott", a fav of "Anne of Green Gables") and a little corny, out of fashion.  https://acorn.tv/accused/series2/tracies-story/  McGovern was the inspired author of the "Cracker" series, about a man who exceeds all boundaries, even that of size, while stoking a joy in life that makes him irresistible.

Sean Bean as "Tracie"

In a reverse Superman premise, the professor on his own time is what is called "a transvestite" which he himself calls -- when it is noted how unconvincing he is as a woman -- that he is  actually "a man's notion of what a woman is like."  Long blonde hair, blood red nails, high heels, long legs.  This is enacted brilliantly by Sean Bean, about as masculine as anyone this side of a bull buffalo.

The other side of this confused couple is played by Stephen Graham, another of the fine BBC repertory company.  If it were not for the excellence of these people and the wide boundaries of the genre, this could not have been so meaningful a story.  "Sex" and gender are braided together most of the time, and often contradict each other, but the complexities of human identity and the underwater monsters of culture that drown whomever they catch, can be at least described, as they are here, for people who are not gripped by their own emotional obsessions.

The plot is simple.  The two men meet when Stephen Graham is driving taxi.  He is the one who is crossing the boundaries in a toxic and secretive way, by using Bean's character to be his sexual partner while his conventional het wife is pregnant.  He becomes less and less able to handle his idea that it's not cheating, not socially unacceptable, until he finally throws his own transgression onto his innocent wife and kills her.  Bean's character is at first wary, then overjoyed to find someone to accepts this alter ego he has invented.  Then realizes who this bland-seeming taxi-driver really is.  He barely escapes.

Usually this material is exploited for shock value and pictured as sordid, dirty, and impoverished.  That's not the case here.  Everyone has a job with adequate pay.  When the Bean character reaches out to his partner's actual wife, the two appreciate each other and meet as equals.  The wife is a make-up artist who helps Bean be more feminine.  This is before the Trannie surgical approach and the social change that would allow a college professor to be sexually fluid, or at least double.  

When the feeling of being "loved" as a woman wakes him up as a teacher, his students also wake up to his new energy.  Knowing and liking the wife makes her murder much more horrifying, her innocence established.  She is not a reprehensible nagging or punishing figure who would push an unstable person into going outside guidelines.  This aligns with McGovern's author principle that love of life is so valuable.

Booze figures largely in the story as it almost always does in crime tales where people go outside their boundaries, as is encouraged by alcohol.  If they were users of "weed", violence would be much less likely.  But there is also the caution against leaving conventions like marriage, like gender assignments.  Even the "English professor" day-role is prescribed by our stereotypical ideas about what such a person should be like.  Today they might be more likely a young black woman and the "poetry" choices would be quite different.  

Much of this story -- like the theme of this whole series -- is about the inevitable conflict of justice and law.  As time passes and the "ecology" of society changes, the two systems of how to behave get out of sync, leading to terrible economic restrictions and conflicting kinds of behavior.  At the end of this show plot, the English professor is allowed to continue with his imitation female pretense joyfully and his cohort -- wakened by his trial for murder and having attended the trial -- welcomes him to their fav hangout.  He has a new sense of belonging somewhere.

Some of the pleasure of this piece is watching Sean Bean the actor do his sometimes uncanny replication of an accommodating woman, the little gestures and phases that are fake but as recognizable as his false bosom.  One of the most memorable scenes is that of him shaving his legs and underarms in the bathtub, which reveals his tattoos but not his genitalia.  It is quite erotic.

Tracie's costuming, related to cosplay, has that awkward cheap glam feeling of someone who is being a bit phony, maybe on purpose if not consciously.  Leopard prints, imitation fur, costume jewelry pearls.  Likewise the long blonde hair, so ubiquitous among the set who define themselves as "arm candy."  Few studs are bold enough to choose escorts who are black or bald or both.  Mostly they're rock stars used to trashing any boundary they can find, which makes the rest of us timid souls rejoice so long as we're only watching.  

The rest of the stories in this series (on Acorn.com) are equally challenging:  two very best female friends when one's son kills the son of the other; a woman whose beloved husband's killer turns out to be his mortician.  They are "what-if" but possible and no doubt really happen in ordinary life.  The solutions, apart from compassion and understanding, are not definite.  Sometimes the court system is unjust and other times it ends in a good result.  The art of the story is letting us unravel what happened in a suspenseful but inevitable way.  It's not about the cops.

it is also a very Brit series about the problems with Rule of Law, hierarchical roles, and class systems -- not just high and low, but who's supposed to do what, even if you don't fit.  The true frontier is always in the individual human.

ALL THESE OTHERS

When I was an animal control officer, going door-to-door in answer to complaints about animals (barking, biting, pooping, cruelty), I used to joke that we ought to pass an ordinance that prevented neat, orderly, and quiet people from living next to slovenly, risk-taking, raucous people.  The powers that be ended up dividing people with "white" skin from people with "dark" skin.  This affected wealth, politics, and peace of mind.

In about the same period Ursula LeGuin was living in NW Portland while she invented "Earthsea", an imaginary place that looked a lot like the islands off the coast of Puget Sound.  Many of her books are based on a division between luxury-loving, high-tech, and rather louche cultures (often planet wide) and a contrasting context of ascetic, highly moral, intensely thinking people.  The plot was what happened if the latter somehow visited the former.  LeGuin's family had lived on the California coast which suggested the opulent luxury society.

Some said this was a veiled discussion of America vs. Russia.  Others thought it was Church of England vs. Puritans.  I suppose writing today it would be about the wealth mal-distribution, which will soon in reality be challenged by climate change, which we are experiencing as unlivable heat waves, drought, and floods.  The money-haven island nations will be underwater.

Someone tweeted a statement referring to "the Schelling model for geographical segregation of human communities."  Chasing the meaning and implications, which are related to "game theory", has my reluctant attention.  Schelling was actively involved in reorganization after WWII and still developing theories when he headed a commission for Carter in 1980.  Stanley Kubrick said reading Schelling prompted "Doctor Strangelove" (1964) but Schelling's second wife claimed his fav book was "Smoky the Cowhorse."(1929).  I presume this was about the negotiations between horse and cow, guided by the cowboy.  This is a man worth investigating.

Game theory is like chess, many small move patterns in service to a larger goal.  Sequences of specific moves acquire names so they can be spoken of conveniently.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chess_gambits.  The invented moral problems of today's psych majors, many of them impossible choices between disasters, intrigue some people but not me.  Yet ecosystems present need for a different sort of theory.  Given what has evolved from past conditions already, how long before a new being or system develops that is adapted to it?  We are currently trying to understand this in the most realistic terms.  The secondary consideration is what consequences will result from adding this adapted introduction?  

What consequences have resulted from the result of 500 years ago enslaving kidnapped Africans to use as human "machines" to create agricultural wealth?  Misery, death, and the dehumanization of the "owners."  What has resulted from PTSD-afflicted Vietnam war veterans taking shelter on remote Indian reservations?  A dilution of the indigenous genome?  An injection of political thought verging on violence?  Defining the divisions, describing the participants, judging the end-games -- it's all dynamic novel and movie subject matter.

A tweet from an English farmer, James Rebanks, suggests that fencing off squares where thorny scrubs can grow might create spaces where oak trees can also grow without being eaten by sheep.  This turns out to be highly controversial, depending on what sort of landscape one prefers and what consequences might result, depending on climate and the behavior of the enclosed life, both plant and creature.  These ideas come from BEING THERE and developing sensory attachment and experience.  The idea appeals to me deeply, because the much beloved farms of my aunts were at the southern toe of the Willamette Valley in Oregon, at that point full of oaks and sheep.  The place was totally changed by logging and prosperous Californians.  But in my childhood, South Deer Creek was my idea of Eden.  Luckily I had a backup Eden on the East Slope of the Rockies.

Part of the reason I rejoice over this kind of thought is that it takes into account the embodiment approach to the nature of humans that has begun to oppose the pyrex-and-stainless steel rationality derived from math or maybe hard sciences.  There were already challenges to this domination that emerge from the extraordinary discoveries due to drastic changes in scale: deep time, sub-atomic quantum behaviors, and genomic interacting multiplicities and inclusion/intrusion of totally other genomes due to pregnancy or absorbed twins in early gestation or blood transfusions.  Life is not all data.  There are so many surprises, often in the face of common sense.

Our basic assumption about life is binary oppositions, which is why the sharply contrasting cultures of LeGuin and the stark choices of psych people presenting moral dilemmas.  We've put very little thought into what alternatives can be found by taking a different point of view or by changing the situation.  Climate change is going to force us to do this.

The hardest part of pushing religion in the West away from the search for a hero and over into community interaction is not just that this Trinity of Big Guy institutions are based on hierarchy and hegemony, though that's serious.  The hardest part -- at least for me -- is giving up the emotional search for a hero, a daddy to make the way clear (more pressing since mine didn't), a gunslinger to get rid of the bad guys and then clear off.  Lovers are great, but the limerence wears away and -- if there's not a partner underneath -- they dissolve or leave.

Likewise, our ideas about leaders are always about One Big One, a chief, a hero, maybe descended from gods.  Why is there only one President of the United States, who is only a CEO but forgets that.  Why is there no COO?  Why is there no one with the power to hold a president accountable, even if he's a madman who endangers our lives and our country?  Even Putin is owned, secretly.  If Putin called Trump tomorrow and said, "George, I've been thinking about it and I want you to go over the nearest hospital and ask for a complete neurological workup."  Do you think Trump would do it?

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

My father proudly and sometimes obnoxiously declared he was an atheist.  His grandfather, the hot-tempered Archibald Strachan, taught him to avoid any angry gods, but did not cause him to give up patriarchy -- just the fantasy justification.  In fact, his claim of being religion-free was just a failure to recognize that nations, national monuments, battle sites, the industrial revolution, and progressivism were his true religion.  Empire.  Dominance. Virtue. He had no real understanding of Christianity except for obvious institutions, which his parents respected but did not join in the sense of being members of a congregation.  

Also, he did not understand that his nationalism had no tolerance for the weak, the faulty, the nonconforming.  Scots pride brushed off the indigenous, the black, and even women by considering them children. He stigmatized by diminishing.  Yet he himself was not powerful except when he was spanking his children.   Every August the family took a car trip to the Co-op convention he was paid to attend and which he managed to leverage into a kind of pilgrimage through American engineering feats and patriotic admirations like Mount Rushmore.  But he never tried to explain, say, Fort Ticonderoga, or Hoover Dam.  They never came to life for us kids.

My most impressionable adult years were in Browning, Montana, and now I've lived for twice as long in a little mostly white village just a few miles away.  The population of this town is roughly the same as my elementary school in Portland where I lived until college: about 3 or 4 hundred kids.  The population of the Blackfeet rez is about the same as my college when I attended, maybe 8 thousand.

Another 8 thousand tribally enrolled people live somewhere else, maybe on another rez or, going back generations, in some coastal city or a foreign country.  So far, the boundary has been set by provenance; that is, inheritance from ancestors which is inaccurately described as having blood quantum, which cannot be determined from blood.  (Provenance is proven by DNA, but the main thing is birth certificates/baptismal records and oral claims by old ladies.)  It's expressed in fractions, though it has nothing to do with genetic inheritance, which is always totally re-assorted at conception.

The problem is that by neither appearance nor culture do the actual persons add up to a category in any other way than fantasy.  This is sort of the dilemma of being an American.  No longer is patriotism or citizenship definable by appearance or culture, though since the original whites  -- whom we pretend are British but are actually by majority German -- maintain the power of determining the terms of the Rule of Law and the ordering of government.  Losing that makes them crazy, as we observe.

But what do we do when different ways of categorizing people and the measurement of the boundaries among them simply aren't there?  I remember the joke -- which might have been true -- about the full-blood man in the army determined to maintain segregation.  The sergeant issued his order to the lines of men:  "All blacks to the left, all whites to the right!"  Left standing was the indigenous man.  The sergeant didn't even know that's what he was.  

The indigenous man asked, "Which way should I go, Sarge?"

Sarge bellowed, "I don't give a fuck!  You choose!"  There's no punchline about which way the "Indian" went.  No man's land?

He didn't have the choice of those dealing with paper, who simply leave out the people who don't fit the binaries.  Like the full-bloods who are the products of different tribes being gathered into schools at the romantic age, so that no parent or grandparent provides a big enough fraction of a tribe to be enrolled in any of them.  A reality that doesn't fit the paper plan.

Why is our census still including race when we're all mongrel?  We are no longer "breeds" like cows or dogs.  What how else can we be grouped? I was always fascinated by the sizeable group of indigenous/Asian/Latino people in Portland.  Skin not so dark, glossy straight hair, a little different lilt in their voices but not from any one place except where they are now.  I called them "Tomorrow's People" because they looked like those computer tricks where all races are combined into one face.  If there was a little black in the mix, they might have fluffy hair.

In the end nations have nothing to do with the way people look or eat or talk or descend from.  They want to be safe, to have families, to have health care, and to work. Many of us in rural Montana have doctors from India and do well with them.  People are human in both places.

"If the social contract is broken, and people turned to authoritarians for better lives, then it is exactly this deficit that must be repaired. Democracy isn’t giving people what they are desperate for — that is what every authoritarian moment tells us.”  -- Umairh

Here are some interesting tweets to read or hear.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/feb/15/the-us-hidden-empire-overseas-territories-united-states-guam-puerto-rico-american-samoa

This long-read blog post is about the legal empire we never really understand because it is so vast and scattered.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/07/is-the-gop-finished-history-weighs-in.html

A columnist and a college professor talk about the history and nature of this scary time we live in.  They don't focus on individuals so much as process.  Process is what I'm after, too.

The Theological Triplets (Christian, Muslim, and Judaism) come out of the same place/time, the land they call "Holy," and all three support this deforming idea of kowtowing to the emperor to get what we want.  We must move to an ecological "fittingness" model of ecoplace.  We can abandon or diminish our imposed legal boundaries in favor of natural living, conditions that come from participation by all who are there in that place, which is a New Religious and Scientifically Supported way to organize, then maybe we can dump this idea that survival is a matter of power and wealth.

We don't form an enduring future from "owning" the water supply, but rather by sharing what there is, as best supports us all.  And working together to find the new aquifers, the new ags, the new desalinization plants and methods.  This realization is coming to life through our children.  The planet doesn't wait on us.  Many will die of thirst in the future until we understand.  It's a hard way to learn.

ORIENTEERING OR PARCOURS?

Joking metaphors are made comparing checkers (them) and chess (us) or three-dimensional chess (who?).  Another saying is "he's bringing a gun to a knife fight." But that's weapons. Am I writing as a weapon? Possibly.  But now I want to consider writing/thinking as a kind of "trip", not psychedelic.  Is what I'm doing either "orienteering" or "parcours"?  Orienteering is traditionally following a trail, a matter of understanding clues.  Parcours is inventing a way through a dangerous environment.

Here's the terrain:

The planet has been changed by us, but was already changing anyway.  Volcanoes, droughts, variations in the mega-patterns of jet streams and ocean gyres can wipe out whole populations, or can support ag enough to allow a few to feed the many. For a few centuries. Gaea always has the last word, but -- as they say -- it is how the humans respond that makes the difference about who and how many survive.  We have very little power and even less awareness about this.

The idea of Nations is changing.  This involves things like boundaries, money, ownership, crime, war . . . so much.  It is challenged by the internet which wraps the globe in words and images, music and food which are cultural idea-carriers that encourage exchange, by suffering people forced to migrate in order to survive, and by the overcomplexification of the Rule of Law and hierarchies that used to save us but now seem oppressive.  Strangely they have no relationship to virtue, so a madman can be at the top of the conventional pyramid with no way to bag him and carry him outta there.  Any effort to level the pyramid is labeled socialism in the way we used to speak of communism.

There's no real way I and many others can escape the assumptions of a particiular stream of culture that evidently began millennia ago with horse people on the plateaus of northern Eurasia and washed south over the population that had bazillions of years earlier migrated up through the Mediterranean from Africa.  Nor do we have much awareness of the Asian, the South American, the Australian, ways of organizing life until the mercantile silk roads and big sailing ships convinced us that sales and resources were the key to Empire.

Empire is the practice of coming in over the top of a population because of the power of militarized kingdoms and the industrial complex that has now progressed to predator drones controlled by young people in a darkened Indiana room, killing with no risk.  No longer do we have the luxury of organizations that can restore order or at least protect the vulnerable, groups like the Red Cross, or monastics who in their friar aspect could go among us respected and without damage.  Today hospitals are bombed and all religious are suspected and convicted of sexual transgressions against the vulnerable.  Churches are empire builders.

"Professionals" who were once self-policing and committed to high ideals that qualified them for respect, are now corrupt, intent on finding exceptions to the rules.  The binaries of reason have become the double-binds of justice vs. law, healing vs. authority, knowledge vs. inability to give up old ideas that don't fit anymore.  Money is all that matters, to the point of accepting the idea that debt is worthwhile because it is an investment that will guarantee a comfortable life.  It only crushes people.

Somehow we've been bamboozled into the idea that a group of investors can control a corporation owned by a few super-wealthy people with special hidden knowledge and connections.  Co-ops fail because no one had time to participate in them -- they are BUILT on participation.  But no one has time.

Those who have big money spend it on big houses with glass walls and vast terrazzo floors, so that it's necessary to invest in industrial machines for cleaning them and a small army of people to run the machines -- plus the people who maintain the landscape and the pool.  They have fabulous kitchens but always eat out, and state-of-the-art computers and vid screens in every room, even suspended over the bathtub, but can't run them beyond operating the on/off button.

At the bottom are people starving, camping on sidewalks, dying of curable diseases and loneliness.

If orienteering is a game in which one follows a trail left by someone else who has gone before, following compass points or scraps of paper, usually in the country, and if parcours is a game in a which those who are able travel athletically and daringly over urban landscapes often at rooftop level and at risk, then which is writing?

I say both, unless one is just picking up repetitious and half-digested ideas for sale, another money corruption of media.  Even the so-called elite websites like Edge, Aeon, or Google are still based on the same prejudices of those who control writers: editors, owners, agents.  Over and over the news is told that dogs can communicate with their eyes because of evolved muscles, along with wry comments about people who invest their emotional lives in pets.

This time in the history of the world was foretold.  We CAN fly now with bat suits, para-sails, and jet assists.  Women can escape the tyranny of child-bearing.  There is no draft.  Etc. etc.  We expected to be overwhelmed by the numbers of people and are surprised by the pain of shrinking, esp. since surviving people are so different.  Not just immigrants with a new culture, but also our own children -- raised in what we thought were enlightened and adapted ways -- ignore parents and depend on each other.

We didn't expect that this changing world would work -- they could figure out what to do.  It's just different and sometimes the experiments don't work.  Households are trying to get off the grid.  Authorities are not respected and are carefully scrutinized, often revealing some majorly compromising stuff.

Most of all, no one imagined a demented President.  (Except Putin, Bannon, and the cabal of evildoers who pretend to be cabinet members, though they can barely get their aging bottoms into the chairs around the table of flattery and ignorance.)  I keep having this vision of the palace guard of Marines in the White House taking a big bag into the Oval Office, stuffing Trump into it, and carting him off the best hospital.

So -- clearly this is parcours that I'm doing when I sit here.  It gets harder and harder to jump the gaps between shelters.  

WORKING ON IT

When I was a kid, I never did understand "work."  It wasn't just that my father always disappeared and no one could explain what he did.  (He was a public relations/field representative for a wholesale cooperative.)  And it wasn't that my mother slipped her work (book keeping, mostly) past my father so as not to embarrass him for not making more money, until finally she became a teacher, which didn't seem to be "work" so much as a social role.  I understood jobs, counting beans and making things to sell, but not "work."

Nevertheless, I searched until I found a way to understand work as a process, but not quite how to do it.  Today I watched this online vid:   https://www.edge.org/conversation/robert_axelrod-collaboration-and-the-evolution-of-disciplines  One of the men at the table asked something close: "What are you really working with?"  He meant that in the disciplines defined by things, people have substances on lab benches and prototypes in workshops or at least formulas on whiteboards, but where are the "things" of people who study the processes of thought and history?

The moderator (Axelrod) told about a theory of the origin of sex that was new to me. (Surprise!)  It goes back to the development of meiosis, the ability to reconstitute two genomes into one that was original, combining both.  We know that accidental things happen, providing variation, and that the differences may help some beings and hinder others.  That's evolution. Diseases fasten onto specific aspects of our genetics. If those change through recombination, the germ is defeated.    

The agents of infection (viruses, microbes and funguses) are very inventive, multiply so easily and often that they create variations all the time.  Humans are big and complex and take a lot of years to create a new generation.  But if their genomes are always slightly different from one individual to the next, they can outwit the infective agents that prey on them.  Not ALL the time, or the infections would die out, but enough to save the whole of the community.  Sex evolved as the drive to mingle genomes, which we didn't even know existed until a few years ago.  But we admit that sex is about "chemistry."

Robert Axelrod himself is intriguing.  He's a good example of a seemingly obscure and irrelevant scholar who becomes of prime importance because of circumstances, a sudden fittingness.  This from Wikipedia:  "Robert Marshall Axelrod (born May 27, 1943) is an American political scientist. He is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan where he has been since 1974. He is best known for his interdisciplinary work on the evolution of cooperation, which has been cited in numerous articles. His current research interests include complexity theory (especially agent-based modeling), international security, and cyber security..."

"Axelrod received his B.A. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 1964. In 1969, he received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University for a thesis entitled Conflict of interest: a theory of divergent goals with applications to politics. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1968 until 1974."  These are very strong academic contexts that press their students hard.  

One of the most influential books of our time was written by Thomas Kuhn.  (I'll use Wikipedia again.) "Paradigm shift, a concept identified by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. Kuhn presented his notion of a paradigm shift in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)"  The simplest version of this key idea is that when an understanding of what is true and real is changed by a convincing series of evidence that doesn't fit, then a new "true and real" must be developed.  Preventing new ideas is a kind of disease.

This is one of the crucial understandings of the philosophy of science.  As Axelrod says, at once time biology was about plants vs. animals as the most basic two categories.  That has been questioned, as he says "turned on its side" until now the two categories are "what's inside the skin" versus "what's outside the skin." Many forms of life have skins. Some are neither plants nor animals.

When I found that category of books in the Seminary Co-op Bookstore serving the U of Chicago students, I had found my "religion."  But my professors -- who were my age -- were not compatible.  They didn't look at this concept as significant because they were committed to what I consider sub-categories:  Sixties-style social reform, historical movements, and what their own experience taught them.  None of them had been ministers, so it was a bit puzzling why they were teaching in a seminary meant to create ministers.  As it turned out, the more I was gone from academia and dealing with social community, the less suited I was for it -- until I finally left.  But as soon as I could, twenty years ago, I was able to recreate seminary in a Montana village.

I don't look like a success.  (I dress like Steve Bannon in old baggy clothes and even have an old-age "lady beard," though mine is blonde.  Don't get the idea that I approve of SB.)  But I am very pleased with the freedom to WORK on my own terms.  When I was struggling with my thesis, which was about embodiment theory, completely against the body-denying "rationality" of the Div School, I appealed to a professor of rhetoric who worked with poetry, thinking she would appreciate the sensuous.  She found me impossible to understand and scolded me, saying, "You must go someplace quiet and work, really work!"  I didn't understand her, either, but today I begin to understand work.

It's not "Chop Wood, Carry Water," (a book) though that's a big part of embodiment.  It's more like mental weaving one can even do while taking care of tasks.  In a time so terrifying for someone with my moral values (which are not immutable and not conventional) this weaving (refer to David Brooks) keeps me from running over the horizon, screaming.  The main thing I come back to is how many people absolutely refuse to accept the process Kuhn describes, the updating of convictions that is at the heart of science.  They insist on 19th century reality which they learned years ago as absolute FACT and which they have taken as the rules, obeyed as RULES.  They cannot accept modern reconfiguration or even a different view on things.

Toward the end of my ministerial career, a sad man, a man who had come to UUism as a way of escaping sexual guilt, told me that he had lifelong been faithful to his wife, avoided aggression, admired beautiful and attractive women from afar -- and that it had caused him great pain to be so virtuous.  He had missed out on joy.  Now that the culture no longer enforced sexuality so rigidly, he was ready to abandon it, but he felt too old to act on it.

Next to that I put an internet exchange with a "boy" prostitute.  (I don't know how old he really was.)  I said I was too old to worry about sex, might not even be able to respond.  He became indignant and said, "I can give ANYONE pleasure, no matter how old they are!"  It was his work and he knew he was good at it.  He wasn't coming right over to demonstrate; he was in Paris and I couldn't afford him anyway.  But he gave me a wonderful paradigm shift.  I smile as I work, writing this.

READ IT AND WEEP

A great body of consumers out there wants to know "how to write" and keeps the advice coming from both people who know and don't know.  The most recent is a series called "MasterWorks.com" featuring big names who describe how they work, with the assumption that imitating them will make one's own self also great.  A number of forces interacting are the REAL reason why some people are praised and/or make a lot of money.  (The two aspects don't necessarily go together.)  

The first necessity for a writer is to go out there and LIVE.  Otherwise, you won't have anything to say.  But it's not necessary to do exotic or dangerous stuff, just to really absorb and reflect as things happen.  The way a brain works is by building circuits from experience.  It is closely paying attention -- while also considering possibilities -- that makes the brain able to build a circuit, which is not a conscious process.  It's electrochemical and entirely real. Organic.

Creating habits is also circuit building.  If a person does not have or know how to get to the "frame of mind" that allows them to write, then the rest is useless, sealed off.  Often a dependable schedule and familiar equipment will help build the circuit, but also reading, not necessarily any particular thing, because your brain will be recording and digesting it all.  You will begin to pull it into your circuit.  You will know without knowing you know, just feeling it.  Sometimes certain music helps, a fav food, lots of coffee, a little fetish about pencils.

Those who don't write think it happens when the marks hit the paper (or screen) but in truth the necessary part of writing is the thought world it comes from, which is probably quite wordless: diagrams, doodles, daydreaming, dawdling.  These not-yet-circuits, plus some others, like observations about life and what it all means, are the basic equipment.  But a person can use them exquisitely, produce regular or even inspired writing, and still not be a success.

The secret no one tells writers (though some figure it out) -- but publishers know very well -- is that writing is only half of what happens: there must be reading.  Those who read control the book.  If they "get" it, want it, want more like it, and experience the writing as though they had lived it, then the point of a book is achieved.  A book, closed, on a shelf, is nothing.  Paper.  Though it also exists in potential in the mind of the writer until there are readers who will "get" it.  But, for instance, indigenous people believe that white people have some advantage because they are white, but the truth is that white writers have readers because the READERS are white.  Or gay, or political, or feminists, or whatever.  Few people read outside their "lane."

Indigenous writers so far are mostly read by nice suburban liberal ladies -- white.  For the most part indigenous readers don't have the kind of income to buy many $30 dollar books.  So they don't go to bookstore readings.  And they don't critique and promote indigenous books.  Publishers know that.

The point of publishers is to figure out what people want to read enough to pay for.  They ask, "What is the mood of the buyers?"  Publishers gamble on their ability to guess this, because it's just a potential as well as not being something that can be measured.  But it can have a contagious potential and, if it works as well as measles, it can catch fire and pull dollars, lots of talk, and more books like it.  Publishers vary a great deal and will try to control writers to make them write what they think is more saleable.  Managing publishers and their apparatus, like agents and editors and publishers and critics, can consume all the energy a person has for writing.  And the publishers will try to bill the writer for the cost of it.  It only works because of the honor of it all.

At all levels it is important to make connections, to know people who know how to find things, to make introductions, to link you up with sympathetic and encouraging people, access research, and so on.  The dark side of this is that because no one teaches English in public schools anymore and many of the students don't speak English anyway, at least not as a first language, so reviewing and understanding books in English drifts over to trying to interpret and label the writer.  If you become popular, you and your friends and your grandmother will be ransacked, assigned nationalities they never heard of, and sometimes vilified, accused of dirty treasons.  These are what we consider interesting and worth reading about.  

This afternoon I briefly glanced at a paper claiming to explain why "Anne of Green Gables" is racist.  (Which the original is.)  But the dingos and hyenas still have not got gotten hold of the reality of L.M. Montgomery, her miserable marriage to a depressed minister and her final surrender in suicide.  Instead they promote her sentimentality.  It helped that she was in Canada a lot, where everyone is nice.  Even if you offer a colorful backstory you made up yourself, it may be torn apart to make room for the journalist version.

Publishing without thinking about money is possible.  That's often forgotten.  As the medias change, narratives go from being something told around a campfire, to being something written in a private diary, to being copies of something (Bible) penned by hand and then -- much later but by the same impulse -- to copies by xerox.  For a while and maybe still today there were what I call "backpack books."  Typed, xeroxed, stapled, maybe missing any kind of cover, often half-worn out and marked up by avid readers who rarely loan them willingly.  Some become "properly" published later. 

My "thing" is long-form blogs.  Accessible to anyone who knows they exist and can get to a computer but strangely double: hard to erase and, yet to a techie, easy to remove, and in fact sometimes disappearing for no reason anyone knows.  It has some resemblance to a campfire narrative, except that on any day it is read by two or three hundred people and on an exceptional day it can be read by a couple of thousand all over the planet.  If numbers are a measure, that's beyond books.  Good or bad?  No idea.

SENTIMENTALITY

Yesterday's post about "The Apology" with echoes of Trump's relationship with his daughter, whom he insisted on taking to an international political meeting where she dressed like a little girl, awoke some thoughts about the figure in Western thought of the pure, barely pubertal, blonde virgin.  Partly arising from the first blonde people coming into the Brit world, which already had a dark underclass that became mixed with coal mining, and partly amplified by American racism. the ideal woman for a certain kind of male became this specific set and a mythology grew up around the image.  Hugh Hefner picked up on it in Playboy sometimes, but there was a photographer who made a career of nubile pretty blonde girls in fields with straw hats, charmingly teasing each other.  "Angels," you know.  There can be boy versions.

This innocent image can arouse the most evil and degrading behavior from some.  A desire to possess mixes with need to destroy.  Such blameless creatures are not seen as dangerous, except by what they arouse in the viewer.  They are said to attract unicorns and you know what that horn stands for.  An almost-defense against this is sentimentality, the Hallmark card reduction of reality to formulas about childhood, covering over abuses with bows and ribbons.  It's about power concealed.  

I've thought about it over the years, but this linked article is a good place to get an idea of what I'm talking about.  https://vancouversun.com/news/staff-blogs/the-dark-side-of-sentimentality  The article says, "Sentimentality can be a way of denying reality."  Trump's declaration of his daughter's attractiveness to him is more honestly a way of denying he is not capable of intimacy with an adult, separate being.  He can only rape them. Deform the cheerful little dark-haired girl into a "model" in Victoria's Secret lingerie catalogues full of kitschy crotchless black lace, showing off breast implants.  You can find photos of her "modeling" through Google, calling eyes and promoting the goods.

The article goes on to cite a book by Johanna Skibsrud called "The Sentimentalists" about her father's experience of the Vietnam War, which ties the concept to narcissistic psychopathy.  The dependably caustic Sam Vaknin says "The narcissist is a human pendulum hanging by the thread of the void that is his False Self.  He swings between brutal and vicious abrasiveness -- and mellifluous, saccharine sentimentality."  Mom and apple pie.  Puppies and kittens. Weddings and babies. God and country.  Death and nobility.  War.

Another harsh book is "Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality" (2010) by Theodore Dalrymple who says kitschy sentimentality is a substitute for true morality.  People don't like the book much.

I.A. Richards, a literary critic, is a bit more palatable.  "We cannot judge whether any response is sentimental unless we take careful account of the situation."

My own father -- indeed, most of my cousins on both sides are sentimental rather than moral.  They are guided mostly by social context, as are most people, and my own re-framing seems to them eccentric and possibly insane.  I finally just blanked them out, partly because I get impatient with their obtuseness and partly to spare them.

Sentimentality is about presentation, not motives and dark depths.  It is middle class and curiously German, having some connection with the idea of the natural innocence of nature, which we know to be quite relentless.  There's a connection to curing disease, and also a dimension about insuring primogeniture, so that the "right" boy inherits the big house.

Those persons who were once innocent sentimentalists but found themselves nearly destroyed by the sentimental fascists and torturing dominators of the world can resort to a rhetoric of obscenity, rotting remains and bitter despair which have their own aesthetic.  When I praised a friend's poetry in an online poetry forum for being "stripped and burned," girls rose up to condemn me for not saying "nice" things because they believed that poetry was a safe and rosy place for sentimentality.  Hallmark again.  But if you google "Innocent nubile girls", at the top of the list will be Pornhub.  The thrill is in the access to and the supposed corruption of innocence, the dark dimension of sentimentality.

Yesterday's blog post included two books, "The Apology" which is dynamically reviewed at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/12/the-apology-eve-ensler-review  and "Lolita".  Both books speak of their actions through the imaginations of the authors.  Can we trust them?  Can we trust ourselves as authors to read and remember them accurately?  So many men speak of Lolita wistfully, not at all mindful of her abuse, just thinking maybe they could make her love them.  Make. 

Maybe I'm noticing too much, but it seems to me that many plots in vids recently have focused on fathers and daughters.  A theme is Iphigenia, the daughter in Greek mythology who is sacrificed for her father so that ships may sail.  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/12/the-apology-eve-ensler-review  How do we sort true sentiment from sentimentality in a world where we have no time?  When is sacrificing a daughter ever a true way of saving a wife or a male cohort or a father's success?

The sentimental tactic is a social box, dictating how to behave.  When sentimentality is captured by advertising and money-making, the result is going into debt for weddings worth tens of thousands of dollars or taking dying children to Disneyland instead of really listening to them.  Bringing flowers and chocolates after a quarrel.  The greater community finds it's good for business to promote gifts instead of real emotions, which can't be bought and sold.  Traditional kitsch replaces reality,  When I was clergy, I sometimes told brides who insisted on too much fancy stuff to have a big coming-out party and then, weeks later when the excitement died down, come back for a quiet exchange of vows.  It made them angry.

Denying sentimentality can be what is lately called a "trigger," meaning that it releases a flood of emotion that hasn't been dealt with.  It works in the short term, but the truest reality we can summon up will save our sanity and possibly our "souls."