PASOLINI'S "GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW"

“The Gospel According to St. Matthew” is the earliest of the four gospels included in the New Testament (there are quite a few more that were left out). It is also a movie by Pier Paolo Pasolini, a film auteur I didn’t know in my cine-years (1957-1961). Anyway, “St. Matthew” was made in 1964 and by that time I was in Blackfeet country. I was grateful when in the past few years a sophisticated friend turned me on to Pasolini, though I started at the other end of Pasolini’s reputation with “The 120 Days of Sodom” from a novel by de Sade. This sensational 1975 film is what sticks in people’s minds. I haven’t been able to look a cocktail sausage in the eye ever since.

But Pasolini is one of those disconcerting people who refuses to stay in his “platform” (box, category, genre) as the marketing geniuses recommend these days. Even in his most intimate life he was confusingly loved by women but actually loved men. Even in his death, which was murder by his own vehicle running over him, the culprits were believed to be either a hustler, or an extortionist, or anti-communists, or -- you guess.

When people say to me, “I’m not religious” they fail to realize that religion at its core is not a platform either. When one attends a good seminary, it is a revelation to understand that the four gospels (all of them written long after Jesus and not in the language Jesus used) are different from each other because they are different kinds of writing, ranging from straightforward accounts to poetic revelations. Most people have assumed that religion is institutional and that institutions believe that the Bible is literally and immutably true. What these people mean is that they don’t go to church and they don’t believe in God. They consider that a sort of mark of sophistication, a defiance of authority. But that’s far from all there is. In fact, that’s just the foam on the beer. For the real stuff you have to drink much deeper.

Pasolini was much impressed by Tolstoy and shared with him a love of peasants. Though I’m far from being informed about Pasolini, my guess is that he’s an immanentalist -- that is, he sees true sacredness as something that arises from the land, life on that land, and the people who live closest to it. The rest is all speculation and prone to corruption. So “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” is his depiction of the simple people and a man who came among them in a difficult time, giving them ideas about how to live.

The movie is black and white, each frame shot with glowing composition worthy of a master painting. The sound track is a mix of classical symphony and Odetta singing gospel. The people are local and the land, though it was actually Italian is clearly not different from the eroded, rumpled landscape of switchback pathways, square stone buildings, and shallow fishy seas of Jesus’ life.

It’s always a puzzle what sort of person should be cast as Jesus. This time it was a nineteen-year-old Italian/Spanish student, Enrique Irazoqui, His unibrow tops the knife-blade nose of a Sioux. Jesus’ mother in her older version was easily cast: Pasolini’s own mother, her face luminous with pride and love. The younger role was played by Margherita Caruso, hardly the soft little non-threatening figure of many incarnations, but rather a fierce dark-eyed woman with a voluptuous mouth. Like many of the actors, she was locally cast or drawn from among Pasolini’s circle of friends. One thinks of Caravaggio using his friends for models when he depicted some of these same events. Pasolini’s angel is a barely adolescent boy/girl who simply delivers the message without wings, without trumpet, without flying.

This movie is disconcertingly simple. The dialogue is what Matthew reports Jesus said and nothing more. The draped figures simply walk through the land, talking to people. There are many close-ups of attentive faces, as eroded and creased as their surroundings. There is none of the guiding, manipulating, weighting of events through cine-trickery that we’re used to. It’s as though we were there ourselves and trying to understand this revolutionary news. Because of that, it could be shown anywhere, even in a non-Christian land. But these words and events are so familiar that you begin to believe you understand Italian. The movie is on Hulu for free. It’s an excellent Easter meditation.

Now I’m going to switch over to thinking about evolutionary brain theory. It is asserted that perhaps the strongest evolutionary jump forward came from the creation of a little structure in the brain that is attracted to the human face and seeks to understand that other person. An infant will react to a face, even a simple drawing on a paper plate and will rejoice when it sees the face of its mother. This may be why some long so much for the “face of God” and look for faces everywhere. We know this little brain whatsis exists because if it’s destroyed by trauma or infection, the result is a man who thinks his wife is his hat. Perhaps the success of Christianity is due to Christ providing a face for an unknowable God. (Theological writers speak of the masks of God.) People want to see faces like their own -- maybe black, maybe female, maybe gay -- but those who control the institutions are the ones who are usually able to commission the portraits -- until recently.

We are so used to masked actors -- made up, coated with latex, digitally altered, perhaps even totally cartoon -- that it is shocking to see the real and deeply worn faces Pasolini is recording. He was not at all portraying a projection of himself: handsome, well-dressed, swinging along the wide ways of a built environment. Not that he didn’t earn his skills by exposing himself to scorn and danger.

Wonderful as the great cathedrals are, appealing as some actors portraying Jesus can be, powerful as religious institutions grow, contentious as dogma, absorbing as rites, in the end few do not believe in the faces of their beloveds or the shores of a well-loved land. Only those are not religious.

TWO HANDS CLAPPING

When one reads about the evolution of mind it is clear that percussion, dancing and chanting pre-date the Stone Age or even hominids themselves. Chimps are enthusiastic burlesque performers. In fact, it’s hard to resist their joyful hooting and prancing. Therefore, I suggest that if one is constructing a liturgy of joy and celebration, the key might be in NOT using the concept of the "neuronal platform" that normally coordinates thinking and action, that which may very well be the late-evolving brain element that finally distinguishes between humans and their relatives. Successful liturgies of joy might have to shut down or evade that super-egoish “working neuronal nexus.” Alcohol does it easily, of course, but there may be other ways if we think about civilizations that have learned how to be publicly and physically joyful. Zorba the Greek, for instance, and his love of dance.

Some peoples have managed to avoid performance -- which tends to be about a bunch of people watching few persons -- by emphasizing participation, a pre-theatre mode of expression. One could argue that rock n’ roll, hip-hop, and “flash” events where people come out of nowhere to perform in a public place are a partial return to participation, a reaching back for joy. It seems we agree that the Puritans were a repressed and sober bunch who sat in pews, resisting the wild May Day celebrations of Merrymount. And we know that the hands-up, swaying, lung-busting celebrations of the evangelical and black churches express happy ecstasy.

I was thinking about a kind of theory of sensory context: which are the earliest, which sense prevails, how that relates to the culture. One of the ceremonies I will discuss in the “Molten Chalice” is a New Guinea jungle event where the beat is kept by men jumping up and down to make the gourd fitted over their penis smack sharply against a belt studded with shells and nuts. It occurred to me that in jungle-based locations where one can hardly see very far, sound would become extremely important, more highly significant than sight as one listens for the rustling of prey. Smell would also count big.

But on the grasslands and shorelines of the early hominids, binocular eyesight would take precedence. Whatever that did to the development of the brain processor (probably pushed it right along) it would have been crucial to see and identify objects at a distance or shapes glimpsed but incomplete behind an outcropping. The ability to see and remember shapes might be the platform on which writing and reading developed. Writing and reading may have been what got everyone sitting in pews or at least standing at attention in a cathedral while a priest read from a big book chained to the pulpit. One takes a missal or bible or order of service to one’s seat to read along, so to that extent there is participation. In the beginning books were important to the point of being magic. (So far church goers don’t seem to follow on iPads, but students do that.)

The significance of smell is a great subject but I won’t develop it here. In fact, I’m not going to go on with this idea of puritans on the plains and bacchantes in the forest, but it would be fun -- worth someone’s time to research. It does suggest to me that we have made life so safe, so repetitive, so channeled, that we crave some excitement but our passive regard of pictured explosions, murders, political fiascoes, and natural disasters has no outlet. We never get up and run off the chemicals these images create. I suppose we become habituated and numb, incapable of either despair OR exultation. Stuck like a mouse in a glue trap, as the therapist who is in therapy himself puts it on “In Treatment.”

At the third-year UU Leadership School I attended, we were invited to design our own event. Out came the newsprint and the fibertips so we could write our lists. One item was an evening devoted to “fun.” The problem of how to design a “fun” event was solved in a way predictable if one knew the audience: middle class, white collar, conscientious, socially conscious, etc. They decided on an event of reversal (very Victor Turner): a cross-dressing Miss America pageant. (We had a lot of raving feminists at the time. No “out” gays, which there are now.) So the men would have a swimsuit competition. They had never been on a bright stage in swimsuits before and though they weren’t wearing Speedos, they weren’t used to public “gaze” and had not brought along dance belts or athletic supporters. As some pranced across the stage, intending hilarious social comment, they sported commendable and quite apparent “boners.”

No one knew what to do. It seemed the women could do such a thing without embarrassment, but these quiet officemen could not. Finally someone draped in an armload of beach kelp charged the stage as the “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” Everyone ran off screaming. Much of the night was spent discussing, particularly between married partners.

So the next night Peter Raible decided unilaterally on a “do-over.” (This was the year we got stuck several times and had to jettison democracy in order to save ourselves. At one point we elected a “queen”-- the most sensible and trustworthy person among us -- to tell us what to do, which DID work.) Peter and his helpers told us all to be at a certain place at a certain time, to bring a cup and a dollar, and to wear old clothes. A van pulled up, someone jumped out and took our money, and then they left. We milled around nervously for a while. Then the van returned with -- VOILA! -- champagne !! Just as we got out our cups and were ready to imbibe, the windows above us opened and we were barraged with water balloons. Being surprised, remembering childhoods, imbibing a little alcohol, risking little, at last we were having fun. If the van had unloaded a troupe of nude dancers there would never have been another leadership school. So much of success is knowing the audience/participants. We were bold talkers but timid riskers.

Experiments in sensory elements of liturgy are fun. More is out there than drumming groups and liturgical dancing. One year at Easter I used as a theme Tolstoy’s “somewhere in the world there is a green branch and on it is written the word that will save the world.” I handed out raw asparagus with “peace” or “love” printed on each stalk and -- after assuring the worried that the words were written with food-grade markers -- we ingested the “branches,” thus internalizing the lesson. At another event dedicated to the earth we had a gummi worm “communion.” But it would be a mistake to call it a communion since there has not been a salvific worm. Or has there? Maybe considered in toto as preserving the topsoil of the planet?

At a ministers‘ meeting, one of the jokesters offered a banana communion in honor of penises. It was funny until it turned out there were too many ministers for the number of bananas and some had to be cut up. (Bananas, not ministers.) Another time I told the Demeter/Persephone story and handed out to each person six little kernels of pomegranate -- a minor disaster since the juice stains clothes. After that I used six red beads about the right size. If I were doing it again, I would string them together in clusters of six in order to save time counting out. It is not EASIER to include sensory information into liturgy. And it is not easy to make sure it’s joyful.

Here’s a liturgical story, which was told to me as true. A minister wanted his Easter sermon to be memorable, so he paid a small boy to go up above the ceiling of the sanctuary with a dove in a cage. There was a trapdoor up there and the idea was for the minister to cry out in amazement, “Lo, the Spirit was among them!” Then the boy would release the dove to fly down over the heads of the parishioners.

The minister gave the cue -- nothing came down through the trapdoor. He repeated again, louder. Still no bird. One more time, practically bellowing. The boy’s wavering voice from above: “Reverend, the cat ate the bird. Shall I send down the cat?” It’s meant to be a joke, but I wonder about possible interpretations. By being so serious in our worships, have we let the cat among the pigeons?

Oh, well, let’s just beat out a rhythm on the back of the pew just ahead and sing with Bobby McFarin, “Don’t worry -- be happy!”

ANIMACY: A BRAIN MODULE

The research for this liturgy project keeps luring me off into side trails. One of the most interesting just turned up when I tried to research a concept called “animacy.” That’s when you see something you think is alive. The first example I heard of -- though there was no label for it then except the idea that people see things that aren’t there -- was a guy who saw a rabbit on his lawn. He wanted it gone, and ran at it, but halfway there could see it wasn’t reacting, so he slowed down, thinking after all it was a piece of crumpled paper. But when he finally got to it, the object turned out to be a patch of extra bright sunlight coming through the trees.

“Animacy” is one of those little brain/culture modules that is developed by experience. It’s vital to know what is and is not alive, but the quality is not so unambiguous as we might think, especially when it comes to thinking of religious concepts like God or angels. But also in daily life, some people, either because of cultural assumptions or because of their own predilections and wiring, see the things around them as alive. Emily Carr, if you look at her writing, saw the broom as “taking its place in the corner” and the chair as “tripping her up” as much as she had a great mystical conviction that the forest and sky were living entities with purposes and souls of their own, which is what shines through in her paintings.

Here’s a little experiment a professor ran to see what people interpret as “alive.”

http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/opfer/lab/research/supplements/animacy.html

wiki

Here are a couple more ingenious “morphing” exercises. In the Victorian times a great fuss was made about “worshipping statues” and praying to them for interventions -- the rationalists wanted to mock that. At what point do you stop seeing a human being and begin to see a doll or a statue? This one is reversible. Most of the cues seem to come from the eyes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti9o_HDAXwk

animacy demo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2v6Jvj7ckI&NR=1

animacy demo

(If these links don't work, just google "animacy.")

Here’s the formal Wikipedia explanation for the term “animacy” which was originally addressed as a grammar concept. In fact, Blackfeet has three modulations for words depending on whether you are discussing a person, an animate object like a talking tree or rock, or a supernatural being. Some systems, like Navajo, have as many as nine different DEGREES of animacy to which their language responds with changes to their names.

Animacy is a grammatical and/or semantic category of nouns based on how sentient or alive the referent of the noun in a given taxonomic scheme is. Animacy can have various effects on the grammar of a language, such as choice of pronoun (what/who), case endings, word order, or the form a verb takes when it is associated with that noun.

In languages which demonstrate animacy, some have simple systems where nouns are either animate (e.g. people, animals) or inanimate (e.g. buildings, trees, abstract ideas), whereas others have complex hierarchical systems. In such a system, personal pronouns generally have the highest animacy (with the first person being highest among them), followed by other humans, animals, plants, natural forces such as wind, concrete objects, and abstractions, in that order. However, it is impossible to generalize completely, and different languages with animacy hierarchies could rank nouns in very different ways. For example, deities, spirits, or certain types of plant or animal could be ranked very highly because of spiritual beliefs.

We always pay more attention to persons than things -- the French and others further distinguish intimates from strangers. In the hunter/gatherer context when these modules formed in the paleohuman times, one’s survival depended on the ability to spot living creatures, either because you wanted to eat them or because they wanted to eat you. You would also need to distinguish between those that mattered (saber-toothed tigers) and those that didn’t (mice). Hence, it’s easy to see why those that mattered got painted onto cave walls to show their importance and how aware of them every person had to be.

My cousins lived on a ranch that ran sheep. On summer evenings the deer would come down from the timber and mingle with the flocks. The family enjoyed driving out to look at them. Once my cousin, who was still small, couldn’t spot a deer everyone was exclaiming over. His mother took his head between her hands and turned his face in the right direction. After that, when he had trouble locating something, he would cry out, “Quick, Mom! Point my head!” Soon he was better at spotting the deer.

Driving through Marias Pass in the Sixties, the road followed the Middle Fork of the Flathead River through its canyon. Across the river was a hillside that had burned off a few years before. Elk browsed there but Bob Scriver had to teach me how to see them. It took practice to get my brain to register the patterns of their bodies, interrupted and mimicked by brush. I was learning animacy.

City dwellers seem to have trouble realizing the animacy of anything but humans. No that’s wrong. They see their computers and cars as sentient, maybe more real to them than their families. Maybe it’s a matter of interaction. What impact does it have on our humanness when we watch so many flat-screen simulations of sentience, have the idea that there can be monsters we’ve never seen (and, in fact, know don’t exist), who have intentions towards us. What about the soldier who cut fingers off dead people because he maintained they were no longer sentient, no longer mattered?

The simulation of sentience in representational art or photography is to some people part of the allure, but to others it is only a distraction from the patterns of shape and color. What does that mean? Is this what the Islamic and Puritan peoples have been after in their prohibition of images? Neither rejects the idea of a sentient and engaged God, so why would they want to prohibit “graven images”? Too powerful? A distraction?

Most recently we have shifted to seeing the patterns of ecologies as the locus of life, though I don’t think most people see the planet as having much of a mental life. Still, it is a responding, moving, life-supporting being. It seems to have intentions.

THE PULSING WORLD

BBC 7/14/10:

"Plants 'can think and remember'"

"Plants are able to 'remember' and 'react' to information contained in light, according to researchers.

Plants, scientists say, transmit information about light intensity and quality from leaf to leaf in a very similar way to our own nervous systems.

These 'electro-chemical signals' are carried by cells that act as 'nerves' of the plants.

In their experiment, the scientists showed that light shone on to one leaf caused the whole plant to respond.

And the response, which took the form of light-induced chemical reactions in the leaves, continued in the dark.

This showed, they said, that the plant 'remembered' the information encoded in light."

_______

Okay. Now we know something about plants, but how about something about animals, like “US.” Recent research suggests that if plants operate on light, receiving only, then the human brain operates on a different wave/chemical reaction section of the possible vibrations and weaves them together in immense complexity, a symphony in electromagnetic molecular relationships. The following ideas are from a “New Scientist” article called “Alpha, Beta, Gamma: the language of brainwaves.”

1. They really are waves, based on the ion excitement of cells, which build and exchange among them.

2. There are four kinds, defined by the segment of the frequencies they are: alpha, beta, theta, and gamma. Each segment does different tasks.

3. “Signal synchronization” is the key to thought. Sense organs pick up info that is separate depending on the info (color, sound, shape, temperature, taste) and then it is assembled in the brain into the actual concept and its uses or attributes. The messages must arrive at the same time and the same frequency to “make sense.” If those characteristics are not present, the whatchamacallit will be invisible, imperceptible. If you’re “out of sync” you’re “out of touch.”

4. Gamma brainwaves control memory. The hippocampus “plays” three kinds from two of its parts: CA3 plays memories from the past; the medial entorhinal cortex (MEG) monitors right now. They send this info to CA3 which coordinates and sorts.

5. Malfunctions of the above brain waves may account for one of our definitions of schizophrenia, which is the misattribution of information -- too important, disconnected, too vague or whatever. (“Schizophrenia” is a junk category and we need a new word. Anyway, there are malfunctions of other little bits of the brain.)

6. Stuff called GABA is a neurotransmitter enhancer that might help. Experiments are proceeding.

7. Transcranial magnetic stimulation might also help. It’s a short burst of magnetic waves -- NOT the electrical shock of horrific legend.

8. It is possible for a person to train their own brain waves if they can see them. With a hookup that translates them to a screen, this has been done and seems promising.

The bottom line is that a symphony is only music when it’s in sync. Otherwise it becomes a jumbled cacophony with no patterning to it: no melody, no recurring motifs, no grand chords, and so on. But it can be restored to synchrony, re-patterned.

It follows that all education is patterning: becoming adept at patterns of thought, memory, inspiration, and dreaming. The patterns of history, math, art, dance, are disciplines of entrainment and performance that nearly define what human is. “Behavioral modernity” is the formal “term of art” for the point when humans began to do such things, which was about 40,000 years ago. That’s when the anthros and paleos begin to see decorations, signs of religion, tools, fishing, long trade routes, wild grain processing www.institutnicod.org/Sterelny-WhatisBehaviouralMordernity.pdf
In this magificently thoughtful piece, Kim Sterelny suggests four factors in human cognitive evolution:

1. Cultural inheritance like the “natural history competences of foragers:” knowing what’s good to eat, how to recognize it and where it grows in season.

2. Cultural learning, so you don’t have to figure out things yourself -- you can learn from watching or hearing from others.

3. Human cognition, like the rest of human bodies, is plastic, so it is shaped by environment.

4. Part of culture is learning how to “suck information out of the parent generation” and “pump it into the offspring.” But it is important to protect it from distortion, so thus “school.” This is what Kim believes is the key to “behavioral modernity” and it is no doubt also what is provoking the re-thinking by Cinematheque, charter schools, home schooling and so on. Their “curriculum” is basically the four things above.

Previously, so far as I know, the idea has been that there was a mutation in the human genome (like the one in Africa 250,000 years ago), or some kind of cultural development, possibly in response to weather, that triggered “behavioral modernity.” The pattern has been the development of agriculture 10,000 years ago that was evidently a response to the withdrawal of the northern glaciations combined with rising seas and population pressure in the Mediterranean. On the high prairie of Montana the pre-horse peoples were using “behavioral modernity” to sustain their lives, but had no necessity or opportunity, except in pockets, for agriculture to replace foraging and hunting. It was a rich environment. The first signs of “behavioral modernity,” ornament and ochre paint, however, were present and still persist.

What were the critical intellectual capacities that had to be present before the spread of these cultures: some say the ability to abstract and the ability to work with others to plan and coordinate efforts, for instance, maritime technology so that a small group could operate and benefit from the management of a larger boat and longer voyages. Mastering the technology of fire means not just cooking and some protection, but also an ability to manage the environment as the Blackfeet did when they burned off the old grass of the prairie. The technology of Cinematheque is twofold: the internet and the treatment of HIV/AIDS.

Kim wants to think of symbolic activity as a way of defining and coordinating groups, so here’s the payoff for my “poetics of liturgy” line of thought: the poetics of liturgy are ways of synchronizing the group. The “symphonic” brain is the prerequisite for the “symphonic” culture we call “civilization.” Kim goes on talking about these things in potently meaningful ways, but this post is supposed to be a thousand words, more or less, so more later.

The central point, the axis, is that everything is pulse, pattern, waves and there is power in synchronizing them. They conserve and innovate our identities, our cultures, our future welfare, and -- eventually -- the state of the planet. Right now we’re out of sync.

They say that there is a wave signature of the planet itself -- it is a giant gong, still ringing from its creation. We must learn to hear it, dance to it. If plants can do it, so can we.

CITY STREETS CAN BE CATACOMBS

When they think of catacombs most people think of the catacombs of Rome because of the stories about Christians who hid there to celebrate Mass, even though they had to keep a napkin over the wine chalice so no untoward substances from the bat-infested ceiling would fall into the wine. But the Catacombes de Paris, officially known as l’Ossuaire Municipal, are also famous. Built on valuable deposits of “plaster of Paris,” clay and other building materials, the city has long been under-tunneled with caverns and mines. When the mining stopped, the spaces were pressed into service as ossuaries, in order to reclaim the overcrowded and fetid cemeteries of Les Innocentes and Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs. Bodies of the dead from the riots in the Place de Grève, the Hotel de Brienne, and Rue Meslee were put in the catacombs on 28 and 29 August 1788.

The catacombs contain the indissolubles, the indescribables, the spines and phalanges and skulls of the lost. But they also shelter those who are hunted, seeking burrows like any other mammals, a literal underground society of those too wicked or too virtuous or too revolutionary for those walking above.

Once we leave the Latinate word and think of tunneling, we think of the Vietnamese underground towns; the tunnels that bypass the walls we build to keep Israel from Arab, Mexican from American; escapes from jails -- many patient hours of slow small labor in confined spaces. A list of notable burial “catacombs” includes Anatolia, Turkey; Sousse, North Africa; Naples, Italy; Syracuse, Italy; Trier, Germany; Kiev, Russia. The Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, Sicily were used as late as the 1920s.

Underground galleries and mines are dangerous, collapsing without warning, creating sinkholes that swallow houses. But we continue our tunnels for sewers, water mains, subways, raceways for wiring, reinforcing as necessary and -- hopefully -- keeping accurate maps. Tunnels are scary and yet we dare to drive the Chunnel between Franch and England; mock danger by floating in small boats through “Tunnels of Love.” Coastal cities have underground labyrinths created for smuggling inland from ports as recently as prohibition or created in small Western towns by Chinese hiding from authorities and hostile ruffians. Everywhere the piling up of new construction on top of old buildings, the filling-in of streets, have caused what was once ground level to become subterranean.

Very early caves surrender neolithic hair and not-yet-coprolites for analysis, high and dry places preserve ancient artifacts of remarkable fragility and ingenuity -- in America, sandals said to be 60,000 years old, even though no humans were supposed to be present so early. But the most touching are the early art like the painted figures at Lascaux, ghostly animals and handprints so deep in caves that the sun has never seen them. We almost know what they mean: something religious no doubt, something about good fortune and success in the hunt.

What worries us about the underground is not being able to see. Miners and spelunkers hope they have enough fuel, enough battery power, to last through their work. We feel our way through our dreams, not quite able to see what looms over us, what falls away beneath our feet, what paralyzes us.

Human thought is topographic so we speak of the subconscious, that part of the mind that cannot be consciously, deliberately, conveniently accessed, but that constantly controls from underneath our feelings and ideas -- only now and then surprised into observation by a clever psychoanalyst or poet. Now and then we feel something “in the back of our mind,” know it’s there but can’t quite drag it out with memory or logic. We hate not knowing our own minds. We pry at the doors of perception with drugs or lately with mild magnetic currents applied to the temples, hoping to see through to some bright vision.

Likewise, on the social level, for every culture there is a subculture where forbidden things happen: drugs, sex, violence, captivity. The underground is where messages are passed and censored information is accessed. Books you aren’t supposed to read. Like the tiny filaments of fungus that crisscross beneath groves of trees, unseen unless they pop to the surface as mushrooms, these mycelia surreptitiously supply elemental substances that support the trees, things that polite society doesn’t want to know about. Death, disease, perversion, sociopathy, betrayal, slavery, murder, infanticide and forbidden love. These surface in novels, plays, opera -- all the arts. Sometimes they burst out in revolution. Everyone is curious, but most don’t dare go into the dark, unless safely removed to a stage or a book or a screen. We are always there to watch. Car wrecks and pornography, or are they the same thing? (J.G. Ballard thought so.) The insane deaths of famous artists, movie stars and princesses: we review them endlessly in search of what? A key? An explanation. There is none.

When we wander the catacombs, we hope to meet the dead, the dear faces we used to know -- not the old mother we last saw on her deathbed, but the young mother who came to us at bedtime. The once-so-well-known faces of the past wax and wane, so that we wonder whether losing the memory of the faces means we are losing the person.

I remember many things. Portland, Oregon, where I grew up, is portrayed as a green city, honorable and progressive. It has its street people. It has its runaway kids, sleeping on the porch of the Outside-In, an agency run by First Unitarian church, because in the Sixties, when they were allowed inside to sleep on the cushioned pews (in spite of semen stains discovered on Sunday morning) one of the crazier runaways set a fire in the organ loft that destroyed the sanctuary as well as (temporarily) the sanity of the minister. In the Seventies someone showed me where the young boys sat along a parking structure, waiting for the chicken hawks who came by in expensive cars to choose someone for the evening -- maybe the night. It was dark and we didn’t get out of our own car, but the street lights were strong enough for us to identify a few politicians.

But would you want to take one of these boys home? To save, I mean? What would make them stay with you? What would you do with them? Who do you think you are -- Orpheus? Or Jesus? What do you know about the catacombs of their minds? What do you know about how AIDS reduces boys to bones?

REFLECTION ON A REVIEW OF A REVIEW OF GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

“Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life” by Gerald Martin.
“The magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez": A Review by Marcela Valdes,” the books editor of the Washington Examiner.

(This whole review was in the LATimes. I just want to pick out some quotes to note but I got the review through a forward from Powells, so I don’t have an url.)

"Everyone has three lives," Gabriel Garcia Marquez once told Gerald Martin. "A public life, a private life and a secret life." I would add to those three a virtual life so deep that it is in the developed structure of the brain. I’ve never read any Marquez, partly because so many Boomers -- including my younger brother -- have tried to MAKE me read his books, esp. “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

Here’s the fame of that book caused: “One night, as they attended a theater performance, a spotlight flicked on and followed them to their seats. "Bravo!" someone yelled. "For your novel!" another woman chimed in. A moment later, the entire theater was on its feet and gave the 40-year-old a spontaneous ovation. "At that precise moment," a friend recalled, "I saw fame come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, like Remedios the Beautiful, and bathe Garcia Marquez in one of those winds of light that are immune to the ravages of time. "”

Well, that’s why some of us write. How can we help wanting to sail before “winds of light”? And yet, we are the same person before and after writing a book. What is it that people react to?

Other Marquez books include: Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), A Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), Love in the Time of the Cholera (1985), The General in His Labyrinth (1989) and his 2001 memoir, "Living to Tell the Tale." “As Martin observes, ‘he has told most of the well-known stories about his life in several different versions, all of which have at least an element of truth.’ It has been Martin's Herculean labor to unearth the real story.”

Why do we so lust after “the real story” when the message of the writing is that a person has multiple lives, depending on how you look at it and from which point in time and from which person’s perspective? There ARE some things we can pin down: birth place, education, work history, relatives.

“‘Gabo’ was born in 1927 in Aracataca, a small town of fewer than 10,000 (mostly illiterate) people in the Banana Zone of Colombia.” That might be useful information if you knew what Aracataca was like by visiting there and talking to the people. But how many stereotypes immediately leap to mind after reading the phrase “mostly illiterate” or “Banana Zone”? We don’t think of these places as the birthplaces of authors.

“The key person in his life was his maternal grandfather, Nicolas Marquez Mejia, a prosperous jeweler who fought in Colombia's most devastating civil war, the War of a Thousand Days (1899-1902), and rose to the rank of colonel. (He was also famous for crafting little gold fish.)” A jeweler/soldier is indeed a unique combination of assumed characteristics. Was it attention to detail that united the two roles, or an understanding of value, or worldly awareness? “Little gold fish.” I’d love to see photos.

“Gabo lived with him until he was 9, when his long-suffering mother and his erratic, philandering father swooped down and reincorporated him into their impoverished, peripatetic nuclear family.” Having an idyllic life that is then broken off seems to be a good way to create an artist of some kind, who will forever try to recapture those early images of happiness. Yearning for a lost past, esp. when the break comes when one is still a child, just at the point where scientists tell us the human brain is taking a leap forward in complexity and awareness, pulling in a massive integration of forces at that time, is a powerful experience. Probably it is “organic,” recorded in the structure of the brain.

“The magic, Martin reveals, came from Gabo's grandmother, Tranquilina, a superstitious woman who organized her daily activities according to "atmospheric signals": thunder, black butterflies, dreams, passing funerals. Thus, little Gabo was nursed on opposing philosophies, his grandfather's ‘worldly, rationalizing sententiousness’ and his grandmother's ‘other-worldly, oracular declarations. ‘” The reconciliation of paradoxes can drive a person to deeper, or higher, more meta-level thinking. It’s interesting that these two forces, present always in most human thought, are gender-assigned in this way. (For Louisa May Alcott it was the father who was the dreamer and the mother who was a practical realist.)

The reviewer picks out his “hostile relationship with his father, his early introduction to prostitutes (at age 13), his experience as a brilliant scholarship boy in frayed hand-me-down suits, and his chivalric courtship of Mercedes (which lasted more than a decade and began when she was 9 years old).” I don’t how unusual these experiences are. I see them repeated in European movies all the time.

There’s more. I was reading this having just read J. G Ballard’s sequel to “Empire of the Sun,” which is called “The Kindness of Women,” and then have begun “Crash” which is represented as a meditation on carnegraphic relationship between humans and machines -- merged by brute force and erotic possession. Clearly his interest in the problem and his unique approach come out of his biography: plane crashes, bomb impacts, murders, and then in civilian life forever-after a near-magical obsession with car crashes. Ballard was interned at about the same age as Marquez being removed from his grandparents.

I’ve always been interested in this age, just before adolescence which fascinates us so much, but when I tried Googling about it, I didn’t find much. There is something about the smooth-bodied child who can think like an adult that grips our imaginations. It is about that time we form our aspirations: “hoping for fame to come down from the sky, wrapped in a dazzling flapping of sheets, to bathe us in one of those winds of light that are immune to the ravages of time.” Maybe to blow us back to the pearly world where we were cherished. But we never admit that. It’s part of our most secret lives. We might not even let ourselves know.

YOUR BRAIN AS A FIST

This explanation/map of the brain is the best I’ve found so far. It’s from “The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog.” (p. 21 in the pb).

“Our four brain areas are organized in a hierachical fashion: bottom to top, inside to outside. A good way to picture it is with a little stack of dollar bills -- say five. Fold them in half, place them on your palm and make a hitchhiker’s fist with your thumb pointing out. Now, turn your fist in a “thumbs down” orientation. Your thumb represents the brain-stem, the tip of your thumb being where the spinal cord merges into the brainstem; the fatty part of your thumb would be the diencephalon; the folded dollars inside your fist, covered by your fingers and hand, would be the limbic system; and your fingers and hand, which surround the bills, represent the cortex. When you look at the human brain, the limbic system is completely internal; you cannot see it from the ouside, just like those dollar bills. Your little finger, which is now oriented to be the top and front, represents the frontal cortex.

“While interconnected, each of thee four main areas controls a separate set of functions. The brainstem, for example, mediates our core regulatory functions such as body temperature, heart rate, respiration and blood pressure. The diencephalon and the limbic system handle emotional responses that guide our behavior, like fear, hatred, love and joy. The very top part of the brain, the cortex, regulates the most complex and highly human functions such as speech and language, abstract thinking, planning and deliberate decision making. All of them work in concert, like a symphony orchestra, so while there are individualized capacities, no one system is wholly responsible for the sound of the ‘music’ you actually hear.”

What is striking and revelatory about Perry’s work is that he saw that deficits in functioning could be due to a flaw in any one of those levels, that the glitches in the most basic levels would be underlying the more obvious “higher” functional problems, and that (since, as he repeats often, the brain is an historical record) the organic and very real deep problems would have been laid down at the time that part of the brain developed. (Development never really ends, but the main unfolding program is complete in the early twenties.) It was often thinking through the relationship between the history of the person and their present difficulties that made it possible to find a solution.

There is no solution to some of the problems. For instance, a deficit resulting from the sensory starvation imposed at birth by isolation and confinement will cause the brain to simply be too small and limited to become fully human. One of those starvation is “skin hunger” which was demonically imposed at the time when pediatricians believed in a sterilized set of rules about not getting emotionally involved with infants. (At that time they also believed newborns and pre-borns could not feel pain and so they were provided no anesthesia if surgery became necessary.) Isolation is also imposed on children by crazy people who need social intervention -- if you can find out about the kids they keep in closets and cages. Or maybe the most notorious tragedy was the huge number of babies in orphanages in the Eastern European countries who were kept like pigs in industrial hog operations -- each in its own small crib -- staying alive by reaching to each other between cribs and inventing their own language. In some ways this neglect damaged them as much as infecting them with HIV contaminated blood meant to make them stronger, since they weren’t thriving.

Dr. Perry is eloquent about the need for rhythm in brain development: first the mother’s heart-beat, then the rocking in her arms, the rhythm of walking, then music. He has good success when children with this deficit are put into rhythm classes, Orph be praised! And then there’s Mama P who thinks no one is too old for a lap and a rocking chair. (In the early colonial days, very old folks were sometimes kept in giant cradles that could be gently rocked on the hearth. Of course, in rural places there was the rhythm of milking and churning butter.)

To develop social intelligence, brains must be in a community. Perry feels we have tragically created a society where community is broken, isolated people struggle with depression all alone, sucking what ought to be their own memories off of the television screen. We make our memories, he says, and our memories make us. So is it any wonder that so many people are flat and glassy?

Oddballs are shut out in our society. Kids with brain deficits, like autistic kids, can become victims or isolates in kid society, learning to be withdrawn for self-protection or aggressive to create some space for themselves. Perry had good results in a primary class when he asked the kids to help his patient as a new student. He explained the brain problem that had left the boy’s reaction askew so that the little kids wouldn’t be alarmed at his slightly off-center behavior, and suggested ways to guide him back to the norm. The kids turned out to be brilliant therapists.

Among the most interesting ideas are Perry’s understanding of our internal drug systems and how behavior is often a way of triggering those internal opiates and adrenalines. One girl, faced with the possibility of the return of an abuser, went into something like catatonia. The doctors couldn’t figure it out. Perry felt it was very much like a heroin overdose, flooding the system into a state called “dissociation.” He gave her the heroin antidote (which is safe enough that he feels confident letting private individuals carry it, just in case) and immediately she “woke up.” (This was a literary gimmick in the movie called “Orlando,” the protagonist faced with impossible conflicts slept through every effort to wake him/her up for a while. Sleeping Beauty Syndrome. Snow White had it, too.)

So, to review, the human brain is an accumulative organ; early deficits will cause later “higher” systems to malfunction; a rich environment with supportive people in it, lots of music and movement, will create a large dense brain with lots of connecting neurons; such a brain needs ideas, community, stimulation, and rewarding things to do; the culture and such a brain interact in the ways that make us human. And such people can much improve the lives of those not quite so lucky, healing trauma and making niches for oddballs. But a brain is made, not bought.

I’m so pleased by this book!

THE BOY WHO WAS RAISED AS A DOG: Review

"THE BOY WHO WAS RAISED AS A DOG, And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook" is quite plainly meant to remind you of Oliver Sack’s beloved collection, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.” You know how those crazy people do crazy things and boys are sorta like puppies anyway. Bruce D. Perry, perhaps because of the help of his co-author, Maia Szalavitz, is up to the task. There’s a second sub-title, in case you didn’t pay attention to the first one: “What Traumatized Children Can Teach us about Loss, Love and Healing.” The boy in the title really was raised in a dog cage, but had the advantage of being in there with real dogs. One case is a true sociopath, a cold killer. And the Branch Davidian children, those spared from the confrontation holocaust by early removal, were cared for by Dr. Perry.

My favorite anecdote is about Dr. Perry arriving to see those Waco children for the first time, but being stopped at the door by a classic Texas Ranger, tall and armed. He did not believe that Dr. Perry, who had long hair and wears sandals, should be allowed inside. Dr. Perry explained that he was a child psychiatrist. The Ranger countered that all these good children needed was love and time. Dr. Perry saw a girl sleeping on a couch in the room behind the ranger. “Go check that girl’s pulse,” he asked. “Then tell me whether she needs help.”

The girl’s pulse was 160. The Ranger knew that was twice what it should have been. “This girl is in trouble!” he said. “Call a doctor immediately!”

“I AM a doctor.” One of his useful discoveries was that heart speed is an excellent indicator of emotional stress and that the kind of monitor runners wear to pace themselves can be an accurate “lie detector” even when the child doesn’t know whether he or she is lying.

The Ranger turned out to be one of the best adults in the lives of those children. Steady, practical, protective, and warm. In fact, years afterwards when the children were traced and visited as a follow-up, it turned out that the ones who were put in homes with those qualities, regardless of whether the families were surviving Branch Davidians or entirely secular, were the children who had found their balance and went on with their lives.

Perry’s book stories are not so dramatic as Barrus’ “The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping” (who couldn’t save his boy) or any of Vachss’ mysteries. But they are as profound and more explanatory. Perry uses cutting-edge brain research to guide his gentle therapies with children mostly younger than those of Barrus and not so criminal as those of Vachss. Perry understands a brain is something “built” by responding to what is happening to it and that damage at different points in the development of the brain leave it with deficits in characteristic places, affecting behavior in different ways. The answer is not surgery, is sometimes drugs, but is mostly social interaction in a way the brain can respond with new growth. Often the help is so basic and obvious that one groans that it hasn’t been provided earlier.

For instance, Perry tells us about Mama P, a huge “grounded” earth mother in a muumuu. All the children she cared for were “her babies” and when they freak out, even if they are seven years old, she simply holds them and rocks them. What she is doing is nothing like the grotesque exaggeration of “holding” that Perry also describes, a kind of restraint and injury that forces a child into distortions of reality. Mama P knows what she is doing and subscribes to no fancy theories. When Perry is confronted with an institutionally raised mother whose child is wasting away because she gets none of the natural cuddling and play most mothers love to provide, he asks Mama P to take in BOTH the mother and baby to live with her. This is done FOR A YEAR and saves them.

Perry makes it clear that one of the major deficits in the lives of children is the loss of the extended family and the alert community. This last week I was questioned again by former friends who could NOT understand why I would live in a village of 350 people on the prairie when I “could” be living in a city. I would not have to explain to Perry, whose original training was at the University of Chicago a while after I was there. He makes this clear right at the beginning by describing his two supervisors in the clinic. One, who might as well be called “Herr Doktor,” is all suit and theory, advising against anything but distance and analysis. The other is a male version of Mama P, doing what is obviously natural and helpful.

When Perry the beginner sees the little family of a girl he is trying to help going out into an arctic Chicago night, he knows that theory says he should keep his distance and let them cope, which he does a few times until he can’t stand imagining them at the several bus stops they will have to take to get across town. So he drives them home, agrees to stop at the grocery store on the way, and finally helps carry the heavy sacks up the stairs to the one-room apartment. That way the mother can carry the baby.

Was she just manipulating him? Playing games? Or wasn’t it simple decent practicality to get this woman and her young children home as safely as possible? Does one have to ask “what would Jesus do?” He is afraid to tell his stiff supervisor about it, but his human advisor is delighted he has made a “home visit.” “We should require EVERYONE to do that! It is SO valuable!” Perry is able to explain why the latter supervisor was right. He was not able to explain how that woman found the drive and strength to get help for her child at such a cost.

For many decades I’ve read this kind of book, partly to help myself. I had no great suffering in my life, but always a bit of a deficit somehow. I can trace them to public context (WWII), generational deficits (a maternal great-grandmother and then grandmother who died young), core family dynamics (a father who made his living on the road), and genetic vulnerability (hot-wired, introverted and near-sighted). I have never found any huge traumas, though there were some painful incidents. Blundering along, I found Bob Scriver and the Blackfeet who together healed some shortfalls. I think this is most often how the lives of most people are. But once in a while things go terribly wrong and unlucky. That’s when you need someone like Perry or Vachss or Barrus, depending on the problem.

You know where to start? Art. Barrus’ boys have portfolios. Perry begins with his children on the floor with coloring books and crayons. They don’t necessarily color inside the lines.

PROUST & THE SQUID: A Review

“Proust and the Squid” has gotta be a high-end book -- you can tell from the title. If there was ever a high-end author, it’s gotta be Proust. And what do ordinary people know from “squid” unless they eat calamari? This is one of those trendy Something-and-Something titles that are supposed to make you curious. But it is a justified title. Ironically, the copy I bought is cheap paper, rough cover, physically about fit to wrap a squid.

The content is revolutionary, just as promised in the several reviews and radio interviews that attracted me to the book in the first place. It’s in three parts: a history of how humans learned to read; what happens in the brain when an individual reads; and what these ideas mean for people who can’t or don’t read. This is not about literacy and Harold Bloom’s list of must-read prestige books. This is not about cultural collapse and how we’re all doomed if schools don’t do a better job. This is about the phenomenon of reading itself.

The first “book” was a little clay pocket like pita bread that contained some dime-sized tokens like game markers. Each shape meant a unit of a commodity (sheep, wheat, oil, wine) and the pocket was supposed to hold the equivalent of a shipment: it was an invoice. The idea was very simple: this token means this real thing ought to be there. Then someone figured out it was easier to just “write” the tokens onto wet clay. Gradually that elaborated out into systems and conventions of business.

One day SHAZAM !! someone realized that it would be possible to symbolize spoken words. This happened in several places and in two main ways. One was to draw a little token for each word: this is the system Chinese follows. They call the tokens ideograms.

The other system was to symbolize the sounds of the words with “letters” that each stood for a sound. All the rest is alphabet. The “trick” of doing it depended on three things: the ability to hear the individual sounds of the consonants and vowels that made up words; the ability to associate each sound with a letter of the alphabet; then to juggle the recognition of the ensuing words into their meanings and what the sequence of words actually means in terms of ideas and reality.

Socrates was adamantly opposed to this. He felt that written language would be such a “prop,” such a “cheater,” such a Google, that real understanding would be totally undermined. The hard-won skills of discussion and thinking on one’s feet would be lost. He was probably right. But on the other hand, there was a gain that Maryanne Wolf, the author of this book, feels was world-shaking, because it enabled much slower, more thorough, broader and more in-depth ideas. (I felt this was the shakiest part of the book, asserted more than demonstrated.)

This jugglers’ trick with words, “writing,” was not easy to learn and only the elite or even the “set-aside” members of the elite (like the religious) ever got really good at it in those days. When the fMRI crowd got to investigating the brain functions necessary, they discovered why. Reading and writing are not done in a certain “part” of the brain but rather requires the participation of several parts and is dependent on the connections among them. Not only that, but culture and individual experience “build” brains (and constantly rebuild them) according to what they need to do in their unique worlds. A yak herder in Mongolia has a brain that is thick and thin in different places than a Jewish kid in Brooklyn. People who read ideogramic writing have different brains from people who read alphabet writing. All people have different brains, though most have the same parts. They just learn to use them differently and store different information in them, acquiring slightly different skills.

Some people are are “a-lexic.” They cannot learn to read and write. Something is missing. A higher proportion are “dys-lexic,” either learning with difficulty or learning in their own way. Some will be very gifted in other ways than reading, because they just happen to be thickly connected in other ways. Not all dyslexics are gifted. Some of this seems to be related to the left-brain/right-brain allocation of functions.

But reading is not just dependent on brain structures. You can’t learn to read if there’s nothing to read. If the culture is limited in the subject matter they talk about, it will be hard to read about things that are never seen or discussed. In a family that never sits with the children, reading out loud to them, maybe following the words with a pointing finger, gives the child few clues about what’s going on.

So to successfully read, a human being needs the proper brain parts, needs to learn to make them interact properly to decode spoken sounds, needs examples of people translating the marks on the page or screen into spoken language, needs a family that values reading and keeps written material at hand, and needs motivation to read: to be hooked.

I’ve tried to read Proust. I wasn’t hooked. I’m aware that it’s a marker of education and so on. I’m still not sure I understand the concept of “modernity” of which Proust is a part. I think it’s about investigating the nature of memory and reconstituting it in a kind of dream or spell of story in written language. So that means it’s about being able to share one’s internal life with other people. Once that was a matter of writing letters to friends. Now it seems to be about texting and twittering.

Just mastering reading and writing in terms of vocabulary and culture is not enough. That’s just about at the level of choosing brushes and mixing paint -- the Big Picture is an art form and always will be. Not everyone will appreciate every “school of art” and it might take as much skill to write Mickey Spillane as Proust. That’s not what this book is about. This book is a prescription for the future.

We must do a better job of understanding children as they come to school, esp. since we are now mixing ideograph-reading people with alphabet-reading people; we must have a better collection of strategies and materials to teach those children appropriately; we need ways to diagnose what’s not functioning properly in the dyslexic child (which structure, which connection, which developmental thickness or thinness); and we need courage as we enter the next stage of communication based on electronics and the Internet. Already the children read video better than the teachers can.

JOE & HARRY & ACTING

When I get really good at writing, I’ll try to write about acting classes from Alvina Krause. They were mysterious, not just because she was a powerful teacher with considerable charisma, but because somehow they dealt with identity, the tending of that flame that is one’s self, probably the most mysterious subject of all.

I’m going to start this short piece with Johari’s Window, which turns out not to be some exotic bit of Near Eastern magic, but simply a way of making order that was thought up by Joe and Harry somebody one rainy afternoon in the psych department. It’s called a window because it has four “panes” and is about seeing. But it’s simple: a division between two things, which are then divided into two things each:
1. What you know about yourself and everyone knows about you.
2. What others know about you but you don’t know about yourself.
3. What you know about yourself, but no one else knows.
4. What is totally unknown: you don’t know this about yourself and neither does anyone else.

Examples:
1. Mostly this is physical appearance, vocation, obvious skills like baseball or scrabble. Day-to-day apparent things.
2. Some people have a beautiful voice and don’t know it. Some people have sleep apnea and only their bed partner knows. Sometimes you’re about to win a prize, but you haven’t been told.
3. You know what you dream at night, what your secret wishes are, what you THINK you’re saying when you accidentally say something else. Others might be surprised.
4. Once there was a time when this would be described as what only God knows. Maybe now one might say TBA (to be announced) or maybe people go through life with many an undiscovered aspect that might have been seen if someone had troubled to look.

These quadrants don’t have to be the same size. In fact, I suppose the relationship size-wize among the four might be pretty interesting to think about. A good counseling strategy is to get a big piece of paper, divide it in quadrants, and then write in what the counselee and counselor or group can think of. If I were doing it with a group, I’d turn it on the group at some point and ask the counselee what he or she knows about the group that those people don’t know about themselves. It is, of course, tragically impossible to know everything about a person even if you try and even if you spend a lifetime together and maybe that’s as it should be.

But this started out to be about acting. An actor uses what he or she knows about the character to step into them. One can do it from the outside, imitating a walk or a way of gesturing or a particular facial expression or a voice. They will find their inner life changing. One can do it from the inside, drawing on one’s own experience when in a similar situation to remember what it was like. They will begin to walk and gesture like the character. (The way to access memories is often to recall sensory information, so all actors should keep a sharp awareness of their surroundings.)

There’s a good deal of talk now about “mirror cells” behind the forehead that only humans and the higher primates have and that let them feel what others feel. Not just say in their head, “Oh, he’s sad,” but to join the sadness and feel it. Some people will resist this with all their might, maybe because they feel it’s pulling them away from their own identity. The counseling term is that they “have weak boundaries,” can’t really tell where they end and the other person begins.

A person with weak boundaries doesn’t become a good actor, though a strongly manipulative director might psych them into walking through the role in a way that would photograph and edit into something convincing. But that person is a puppet and the art expressed is the director’s and often the editor’s. This works out pretty well in film. I once had a student who made a video about a family that was all desk accessories: the scissors were the mother, the stapler was the father, and the children were pencils of various sizes. He moved them around and talked for them, and they were remarkably effective. We project into objects and people can be objects.

But a truly good actor doesn’t entirely dissolve into the character: rather he or she splits in half, one part really being the role while the other monitors the blocking so as to be in the right place at the right time, remembers to cheat towards the audience, knows that the phone is about to ring but doesn’t anticipate it. I have no idea what happens in the brain when this is going on.

Ideas about what’s happening in the brain keep going back and forth between thinking that there is an assigned part for each brain function and on the other hand assuming that the whole brain is involved in everything. Both seem to be true. But that is different from knowing how to manage one’s brain from the inside.

Alvina Krause taught a course in acting that was by invitation only. Anyone who was in it had been sworn to silence and they always kept their vows. I wasn’t invited, but I suspect that it was something akin to a “growth group” meant to explore the actor’s own brain from the inside, so that he or she knew what was there. During my four academic years, one woman and one man broke down badly enough to need hospitalizing. (Not because of the class, which might have saved them.) Both were tuned pretty tightly and the guy was a little “double,” meaning that he tried to maintain a front. That meant that as an actor he had to manage three personas: the character, the acting person, and the person who was his constructed front. The group was meant to get rid of that constructed front, so as to put all the energy into the character and the actor. It was also interested in making that fourth “window” -- the one about the self you don’t know and no one else knows either -- as small as possible. This is very frightening to some people. They should probably not become actors.

Art requires courage. At least REAL art does.

IDENTITY: Personal or Political?

Surely by now we know we are animals, which is to say creatures with capacities in some ways greater than those of other animals but in other ways just the same or even lesser. I can’t smell as keenly as a dog; I can’t see as sharply as a cat. (Why are senses described as though they were knives? What do they cut?)

I’m so aware that I’m a candle, that my mental/emotional identity is a dancing flame supported by my burning blood. Sometimes my mental image of myself is a little can of Sterno and I get an imaginary whiff of that characteristic smell. (When we kids were little and traveling, my mother heated my youngest brother’s bottle over a can of Sterno. I smelled it as I drifted into sleep. I have a little stash right now, just in case the electricity goes out.)

I am a flame, I am a process. I consume. I throw heat. The constant flow of sensory and narrative information through the limbic system of the brain where everything is sorted for reasoning and storage IS me. It filters everything else, both coming and going, as it has learned to do by my experience in life, the same way the junk category on my email works. I’ve been lucky to careen from rarefied heights of learning to low drudgery in the muck. Both were valuable.

In the broad sense this is the source of art, the writing and painting and singing and dancing. The culture gives us a “line” and then we either elaborate it or work against it ironically. It’s also possible to go off to the side and start a new line, but that’s much harder, like inventing abstract art. It helps then to be part of a group that can help explore and critique -- if they were trustworthy. (How do you know? They might be worthy, but trust isn’t in their hands, is it?) If the art is powerful and intense enough, it makes more identity, maybe a new identity. But it can also destroy identity, so it helps, when you come out of a coma or simply a confusion, to have a group that can say, “Oh, yes. This is who you are.”

Sometimes humans WANT to destroy their identity, like alcoholics who strain Sterno through an old stocking and drink it to be drunk, blotto, not thinking, deranged, chemically asphyxiated by the clotting of their blood corpuscles in their capillaries. A semi-suicide.

People get invested in having you be the way they want you. They coax, they bribe, they describe you to others from their own point of view, and how do you resist? The easiest is to do a bit of shape-shifting, to give them what they want -- for the moment. If you can do that without losing who you REALLY are. My middle brother used to advise me to do it that way, wave ‘em on. I never would. Got lumps from that.

My friend Eavan O’Callaghan, who knows a thing or two about the “hospitality industry,” talks about giving people an idea of yourself without ever really giving them yourself, sort of like a movie star projecting a persona of smouldering glamour when really they mostly lay around the house in sweats and read, say, Edith Wharton. Part of the secret is props, since we are so conscious of branding that some people write short stories packed with the names of ketchup or cigarettes. Part of it is synecdoche, supplying a little part and letting the observer fill in the rest to suit themselves. A cartoonist said that in order to draw a tree, one draws a cluster of leaves superimposed on the general shape of the tree, and then the observer will recognize “tree” and remember it as having all its leaves.

Part of the illusion is setting, since certain kinds of people are expected to be in certain kinds of places. When I say I’m in Montana, there are mental assumptions on all sides. When I say Blackfeet Reservation, the same thing happens. When I wanted to slip onto an Indians-only bulletin board, even though I am white, I didn’t lie directly. Instead, when the moderator asked, “what tribe do you belong to?” I said, “I’m from Browning.” He knew what that meant. Or thought he did. That’s when I began to be Prairie Mary. The reason I am here in this village is that I really DO want to be Prairie Mary. Just not too far from the mountains.

I’m always interested in people with multiple personalities. (Who isn’t?) It’s the relationships among them that are most intriguing: some will know about the others, some will not know they are ever anyone else. What is actually happening in the brain? It’s not like acting, when you deliberately find pieces of yourself to fit into the framework of the character. It’s not like mirroring, when you’re with someone, deeply in tune, and begin to gesture, choose words and sit just like the person -- all without quite realizing it. Doesn't every author have multiple personalities?

Yesterday Dear Abby printed a letter from a woman who said that a fellow employee kept asking her what she was really like. A few times she had gotten upset and then that employee will remark, “Oh, now the real you is coming out,” as though “realness” is defined by something ugly. Yet the business page of the newspaper is constantly advising people to be cool, to present an agreeable front, not to get too chummy at work. Maybe it’s impatience with this “fronting” that makes so many people intent on unmasking.

When I was working at the City of Portland, one of the other clerical specialists remarked about how “powerful” I was. “You’re one of the most powerful people here,” she assured me. Actually I felt aged, trapped, stifled -- not in the least powerful. I thought about this for a long time -- still do. That woman is one of the few who has called me up now and then, though we were never close.

I think what she meant was not really “powerful” but something more like “authentic.” I really was who I really was. Not that I went big-footing around, not that I didn’t try to be tactful most of the time, but -- I suppose because of the kind of “therapy” and group talking that I got in preparation for the ministry -- I was pretty clear, focused even. It’s an old counseling mantra that clarity gives a person power. In the case of ministry, it was the power to leave but in that last job I didn’t have that power.

But maybe too much analysis and reflection is a mistake as well. I’m big, hearty, wear no makeup, have short hair and dress in workshirts and jeans. Therefore, taking on these clues, city people ask me if I’m lesbian. (Country people don’t.) One day in the city I got to fussing about whether I was “feminine” enough. An impatient friend said, “Good grief, look in the mirror. You’re a woman. That’s what women look like. Now shut up.”

Put THAT in your limbic system!

CINGULATE GYRUS and IDENTITY

My family, like my mother’s family -- in fact, BECAUSE of my mother’s family -- was preoccupied with issues about who inherited what physiology from which line of descent. It was a big worldwide issue (soon to be perverted by Hitler) at the time my mother was forming her identity and she carefully chose my father (she said) for his genetics, esp. intelligence, good teeth and eyes. We got the intelligence. Of course, no one really knew much of anything about genetics at the time -- as if we do now. We’ve only just begun figuring out the basics and now realize we have proteomics to sort, a MUCH bigger issue and more focused on present function rather than inherited “plan.”

My cousin really got into this family thing and said, as he’d heard his elders say, “The Cochrans [our maternal grandmother’s birth family] are better than the Pinkertons [our maternal grandfather’s birth family] because the Cochrans came across the Oregon Trail which requires toughness. But the Pinkertons came on the train which only requires a ticket.” The underlying idea is a common frontier figure of the privileged and educated woman and her family being shaped by hardship, versus the vigorous man who takes shortcuts to success. But my cousin hadn’t even considered the timing: there WAS no train when the Cochrans came to Oregon. I’m sure they’d have been happy to take the train if they could have. Their alternative choice was taking a ship around the horn of South America, which might have been a lot riskier than walking across the continent.

This cousin has OCD. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He stores papers in his bedroom, where his bed is now five feet off the ground because he puts it on ever higher blocks so he can store paper under it. There is only a tiny passage for him to squeeze through to get to that bed. (An old man who lived across from Bob and I in Browning had this disorder. When he died, they found his corpse standing up, because there was no room for it to fall over.) Which brings me to the next bit of the limbic system, the cingulate gyrus. OCD can be an inherited condition that relates to the functioning of the cingulate gyrus.

The cingulate gyrus seems to be about the management of attention. When it goes wrong, it produces the “attention deficit disorder” that haunts the schools, as well as what is sometimes called “oppositional disorder” unless you’re two-years-old when it is simply “the terrible twos.” In one extreme the person can’t settle down in a blizzard of thoughts -- in the other, the person can’t stop churning around and around whatever is preoccupying them. Ideally, a person would be able to concentrate when that’s the demand of the situation, or be exploratory and sensitive to small cues when in a different context. Adapting to environmental needs (including other people) is part of the skill of being human, so losing that function can make everyone think the damaged person is just miserable, unreasonable, stubborn and ornery. But the person himself has no consciousness of his thinking -- or at least thought processing -- being faulty.

I watched “The Three Faces of Eve” twice, the second time with the comments turned on. It is, of course, about this woman’s split identity. What struck me the second time was how rigid, obstinate and punishing the husband was, and the commenter’s voice-over (as opposed to Alistaire Cooke’s comments which were part of the movie) noted that the two psychiatrists had felt the husband was part of Eve’s problem. The only attitude he would accept from her was total compliance and self-denial. So maybe HE had some brain damage! Though his behavior is culturally endorsed, or was in the South at the time. The real Eve’s case was treated in 1953, the year I graduated from grade school, and the movie came out in 1957, the year I graduated from high school. My mother’s threat when I acted like I had something wrong with my cingulate gyrus was “no one will ever want to marry you.” Then the culture changed around and I didn’t want to marry anyone anyway. Suddenly being stubborn and persistent was an advantage on the female gender side.

We think of our identity as the accumulation of experience, memories especially of sensory material including kinesthesia and the visceral generation of emotion, with emphasis on rational reflection. This is natural enough, given that this is what we can access by reflection. But much of identity is also “personality,” which is mediated and shaped by the limbic system without us knowing it at all. Even hypnotism would not bring to our consciousness the way our cingulate gyrus sorts and modulates our personal styles. But other people notice and you can see it on the screen with an fMRI. Maybe realize it when confronted with video, but not from inside.

Recently one of the political campaigns was monitored and filtered by using computer technology developed for sports events. Alongside the “talking heads” appeared bullet lists of how many times they had used a particular phrase, or putting into print statistics that had quickly passed in the discourse. The words themselves were slowed, emphasis removed, loudness made consistent, and so on. Many of us are familiar with sound-mixing boards. The cingulate gyrus appears to operate along these lines. Things that don’t get through this system simply “don’t compute.” It’s as though they don’t exist to that person. But beyond that, what gets through can be broken up by attention that switches around or is shunted to the side by attention that won’t leave something previous.

How many times do we demand “why aren’t you listening to me?” or “will you please pay attention?” But it hasn’t entered the public consciousness that the person’s cingulate gyrus is lagging or erratic. What worries me is that if there is a true physical cause for social dysfunction, some will immediately take pharmaceutical advantage by selling pills to “cure” people who don’t want to be cured. On the other hand, maybe the reason so many people have a problem with this sort of dysfunction is rogue molecules in our environment, by-products of manufacturing. Prions.

It may be that techniques like meditation are addressing the limbic system, that music might have a similar function, or maybe all the arts. Then it would be a great pity that the schools have discarded this sort of education thinking it is a “frill.” In any case, it appears that management and especially SELF-management of what is just below our consciousness is crucial. If people can learn to control their own blood pressure via bio-feedback, then why not learn to focus one’s cingulate gyrus, or at least tell when it’s out of sync with what’s going on.

Why am I so interested in this sort of thing? In his later years my father became marginally demented in a sort of Parkinsonian way. He would seemingly function all right, but sit down and sleep instantly with reading material in his hands. If you asked him questions, he would stare at you and say, “Duuuuuh!” He forgot things easily but went through his routine without problems. His idealism and fiery reactions went flat. My mother despaired but didn’t divorce him. It was against her moral principles. Were they inherited? Embedded in her limbic system? Conscious choice? What did I inherit?