FOUCAULT AS EXPLAINED BY KOOPMAN

Foucault

This post is selfish, because it helps me but I have a strong hunch it will be gibberish to most of my readers.  It is about philosophy, about which I know very little because it is complex, arcane, and turns human thinkers into adjectives — one studies these guys and then refers to them as shorthand for their main theories.  They are all constructs using rational methods, logic but not research.  Therefore in the end their ideas comes from their life experiences, their context.  To know their stories is always my favorite means of understanding their ideas.  

Their lives dictate their “point of entry” into the field of thought and since most of them enter through academia as invented by Europeans, the path markers are degrees, articles and books.  Few, if any, consider my fav philosopher, who is Suzanne Langer — her point of entry is feeling.  She is part of a tissue of thought that I take to include Eliade, the new neurology research, the actor’s “Method” thought to be justified by Stanislavski, and so on.  This lets me consider the thought of indigenous people, poets, and sexual nonconformists, whether based on biology or not.  Once, I was interested in the “structure of the subconscious” as pursued by psychoanalysis, but it is a dying art, outdated by lack of time and money though there are still people fascinated by their own dilemmas.  Luckily, Lakoff’s ideas — which have a literary dimension through metaphor — have come along and I embrace all that.

Doesn’t this sound pretentious and learned?  I assure you my grasp is weak, but sometimes this stuff is actually useful.  Here’s the “cheater” provided by Colin Koopman in his Aeon essay called “The Power Thinker,” which is showing up in several publications.

Plato = forms

René Descartes = mind

John Locke = ideas

John Stuart Mill = liberty

Jacques Derrida = text

John Rawls = justice

Judith Butler = gender

Jacques Lacan = the unconscious is structured like a language

Richard Rorty + Jurgen Habermas = ‘grounding the social sciences in a theory of language’

Foucault = power

“Foucault remains one of the most cited 20th-century thinkers and is, according to some lists, the single most cited figure across the humanities and social sciences. His two most referenced works, "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" (1975) and "The History of Sexuality, Volume One" (1976), are the central sources for his analyses of power.”

“Herein lies the richness and the challenge of Foucault’s work. His is a philosophical approach to power characterised by innovative, painstaking, sometimes frustrating, and often dazzling attempts to politicise power itself. Rather than using philosophy to freeze power into a timeless essence, and then to use that essence to comprehend so much of power’s manifestations in the world, Foucault sought to unburden philosophy of its icy gaze of capturing essences. He wanted to free philosophy to track the movements of power, the heat and the fury of it working to define the order of things.”

Foucault is fascinating right now for several reasons.  One is that his topics of prison and sex are so “hot” in several dimensions.  Another is that he paid no attention to boundaries, moving from one formal “discipline” to another and ignoring the conventionalities of them all.  And maybe one of the most intriguing attractions is that somehow he managed to escape his dominating and punishing father, the preoccupation with morbid self-destruction that seems characteristic of a “queer” man trying to justify himself at adolescence, and the ordinary forces of conformity.  It’s hard to know how he managed this.  Probably through a series of intimate and admiring relationships plus a huge capacity for work.  Some will want to know whether SF gay culture, the study of Zen, his practice of kindness to others, or some other “defined” context or practice was the source of his final serenity.  He did contract AIDS and died from it in the early wave of SF infections at the beginning of the Eighties.  His partner’s reaction was to start an organization to address the pandemic.

“The theme that underlies all Foucault's work is the relationship between power and knowledge, and how the former is used to control and define the latter. What authorities claim as 'scientific knowledge' are really just means of social control. Foucault shows how, for instance, in the eighteenth century 'madness' was used to categorise and stigmatise not just the mentally ill but the poor, the sick, the homeless and, indeed, anyone whose expressions of individuality were unwelcome.

— Philip Stokes, Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers (2004)”

It is a given among counselors that “power” in the sense of socially compelling people to behave in certain ways, believing that it is their only option, is not just a matter of forceful domination (sovereignty).  The underdog, the dominated, the co-dependent also have their power.  (Watch what happens on a rez, where sovereignty is being pursued on grounds of victimhood.)  An obvious example is that Trump, who seems so powerful and rich, is controlled by what Vaknin calls his praise stream, which to Trump is a product of media — mass sensational stories.  It appears this is also what creates the reality of the people who voted for him.

Foucault “queried” (as they say) hierarchy, its source and structure.  I take Trump et al as being driven by a desire for “status”, for being at the top of the hierarchy, but accepting indicators on the terms that North Korea would recognize: the power of weapons, inheritance, titles, and control.  Marked by vulgarity of display, poor persons' idea of sophistication.  In my life experience the hierarchical indicators of status my family accepted (education, helping others, and the middle class indicators: neatness, fashion, and possessions — matters of presentation) have been emptied by some social movements with a religious dimension, valuing simplicity and humility, living close to nature.  Hippies, granolas, Bioneers.

More painfully, my family’s respect for teachers, doctors, religious leaders, police, soldiers, has been challenged by removing the protection of secrecy over their mistakes and shortfalls.  The larger society now seems to value only power and status in terms of money and laws, esp. those controlling imprisonment and investigation.  The sexual revolution has meant not only that everyone is free to “sleep around” but also that things like abuse of children, hypocrisy among religious leaders, and betrayals of trust cannot be covered up.  I find all this so painful and confusing that I elect not to participate.  But not to deny the mess.  And not to become “a docile subject” in Foucault’s phrase.

Now the practice of data collection, the details of our ordinary lives, is becoming a surveillance with power.  One of the first studies, “A Billion Wicked Thoughts,” about the recorded sexual proclivities of people who used the internet to access pornography, was a challenge to realities of people who didn’t know much about conventional forms of interaction.  (Of course, those without access to computers remain unknown.) Recently, the makers of a device that translates telephone or computer code into genital stimulation were sued.  Each use of the codes was recorded — a little diary of where and how much stimulation with whom.  The lawsuit required the destruction of the records but there’s no way to use code without it being recorded.  And cyber records are never really wiped.

So the international use of code for spying has the same dimensions.  It’s a form of intercourse.  The conventional (weapons, money, oppression of the weak and needy) is right up front.  But what about “queer” intercourse among nations, especially the ones that are “deconstructing”.  Is the result disease?  Dissolving borders between nations?  Or is it an evolution towards a whole new reality, not yet negotiable because we can’t quite see it.  So far, we only feel it.


PS:  https://www.newscientist.com/article/2124201-web-creator-tim-berners-lee-speaks-out-on-fake-news/?cmpid=NLC|NSNS|2017-1603-new-newtemplateGLOBAL&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS
This post discusses government use and misuse of data compiling.

NESTS DO NOT MAKE BIRDS

A group of techies

Not just on Medium.com but in a number of places there is an ideological struggle going on that most of us don’t even realize exists.  It is between the young mandarin techies of California (mostly) who have the idea that nests make birds (if you build it, they will come), and the aspiring entitled young writers whose acquaintance with wordsmithing is mostly gained through the lyrics of pop and punk songs DO come.  But no one cares.  Ev Williams is involved in some of this, since he links Twitter, Blogspot, and Medium.com.  Maybe the hopes for Medium were just too high.  But the hopes were secretly not about good writing at all -- they were about profit.  I use Blogspot, myself,  NOT for profit, but because it holds still so I don't have to figure out something new all the time -- NOT because I want to tinker with the html.

The American premise is that success is the product of “progress” in the sense of actively pushing numbers up and adding more gimmicks.  They are wrong.  Often success is the product of just sitting there, thinking.  Because the “nest” of thought and writing is in the brain, which is a lot of neurons, not a computer game.  The catch phrase is “generative plasticity” meaning that the brain physically re-shapes itself constantly to accommodate new experience and the thought it evokes.  I have read ever since the “eureka” moment about 1944 when I realized that the marks on the page were words and “Jack and Judy” plus their parrot (a primary school reader alternative to “Dick and Jane”) were in a virtual world I could visit at will.  This was the nest for writing.  It didn’t just grow, it transformed as it went to fit what rested there.

Song bird nest built by a BIRD.

One cannot attract condors by building robins' nests.  The real trouble with Medium is that the techies are conventional, the pride of their families, and utterly blank when it comes to breaking out of the crowd -- they didn’t want to do that anyway.  They just want to overachieve on some scale they learned in grade school -- stickers and A+ grades.  It doesn’t work like that.

What you think about, you become.  If you think about money, you become money.  If you think about technical coding, you become technical coding.  If you think about writing, the number of neurons in your brain about writing increase, complexify (there are over 200 KINDS of neurons that specialize in aspects of awareness), and swell into literature worth reading.  

Condor nest in the crevice of a cliff -- bird in center, I think.  

Remember how big a condor is.

What many readers are after is feeling.  Coding will not let you feel.  Feelings are the foundation of being human.  Trauma takes it away.  Coding takes it away.  Modern suburban successful swimming pool espresso sophistication takes it away.  It is a mistake to think that extreme sports/sex/
vehicles/stunts will make you feel.  Extreme things like fire-eating and wire-walking are not the point, though they will teach you to concentrate.  Well, at least it will eliminate all the people who can’t concentrate.  But coding is not a bad thing to do while you learn to feel.  Maybe relearn.  

I prefer reading print, even to film and other arts.  That’s partly about my age, but the point about being old is that I’ve had decades to expand my neuron plasticity.  And in my case, economic necessity forced me to take on environments and kinds of people I barely survived.  That’ll make your nest bigger in a hurry.  It might teach you to fly -- or eat worms.

In my case, teaching English taught me grammar.  English teachers don’t teach grammar anymore -- in fact, they don’t even know it themselves, nor do they know the reason for it, nor can they transform an appositive into a prepositional phrase.  They just pour out words on a wave of emotion that imitates every other wave of emotion.  I’m not saying you have to know grammar to write.  A lot of people know it intuitively, not from taking quizzes but from reading fine writing the way one intuitively learns how to ride a bicycle.  You want to do it, you want the momentum and the control, and you learn them by FEELING, not by logic or tech gimmicks.

Animal control taught me tolerance and to be alert.  Forget “beware the dog” signs -- watch for large-bore poop.  And never think you’ve seen everything now, because going through neighborhoods and knocking on doors soon reveals that some people are on the edge, some people are intensely driven to control their neighbors, and some people are dead and have been that way a while, but no one noticed.  I also benefited from sudden surges of adrenaline when under attack.  You remember that “black swan” guy?  Nassim Taleb -- not the ballerina.  Taleb says humans are MEANT to have sudden moments of danger, we're built for it, and I think he’s right.  But I cherished the moments when I was on a dog stake-out, just sitting and ruminating early in the morning while I watched for some uncatchable trespasser so I could see where he came from.

Writers will be constantly pressed to write what a monied investor or an internet audience wants to read, something spectacular that will make them pay.  Techies and investors don’t know how to do that kind of writing, and they don’t know it when they see it -- only when the stock market says so.  That’s their only yardstick and it doesn’t measure “real” writing.  In fact, whoring for the stock market will kill profit.  It’s a form of VD.  (A.B. Guthrie, Jr. always repeated “We kill what we love.”)

I’m "barebacking".  No income from publishing.  I assume you will understand what I’m talking about, judging from what I read in pop markets, via the Internet.  (You cannot buy magazines in Valier.)  What I mean is that I’m not writing for sale -- I’m only after the un-mediated experience of writing, the addition of more neurons, the ones I can feel meshing in my head so that I wake in the night suddenly understanding something -- not in words, but in endorphins or something, in my gut.  If I can’t get to that point regularly, I get very very cranky.

Particularly aggravating are the few people who still press me to write something different from what I write.  Some have not realized that I write for a global audience -- this is not a local column in a regional paper -- or they have a favorite thread on the blog and want me to get rid of all the others.  They want the time-lines to include only their own families, history as endorsement.  But I’m after the meta-trends, mutation, evolution.  I love the anthropologies and analyses and quotes from grownup books written by seasoned observers.  I do not want to cheer up, settle down, or pull in my horns.

Academics have been suffocated by corporations or have fallen so in love with post-everything theory that they have abandoned reality because it has too few syllables.  Ministers have become therapists and fund-raisers.  "Smart" guys spend their days trying to invade other people’s lives -- someone is trying to hack this computer.  If I value something, I put it on the other computer that isn’t in contact with the world.  If I value it even more, I commit it to paper.

I’ve given up the idea of preserving things for the ages -- it’s just not possible in a world where ideologues blow up ancient statues in order to prove they’re better.  But I do save some things that look as though they might be useful in my lifetime.  I’m always surprised by what they turn out to be. 

Techies are mayflies, their work obsolete overnight.  But . . . so is a lot of writing.  In my experience there are too many high-school-level Friday essays stacking up that ought to be burned.  Grading tapioca is a fool’s task.  I once tried a Seventies sort of experiment:  I gave everyone in a class an A at the beginning of the quarter to see what would happen.  The kids formed the same curve as always.  And they worried more about how they were doing.

Sometimes I think that China had it right -- the students ought to go out and plant rice instead of sitting in a desk learning other people's big ideas.  But China is infamous for sacrificing its children.  We would be, too, if the truth were known.  All those mind-rotting Saturday morning cartoons have come home to roost in our computers where they leak out into kid brains.

THE RAFT CALLED WRITING

When my stepgrandson was six, he lived with us for the summer and he was very welcome. There was a run-off ditch just across the road along the house, which was the boundary street of the town. The ditch was necessary because Browning was built in a swampy meadow because, they say, of the beautiful flowers blooming there in the spring when the Indian Agent in charge saw it. (Because at that time all Indians and reservations were assigned to the federal Department of War, the agent was a military man.) So on the hillside that was the north side of Willow Creek, he built a parade ground where mounted cavalry could practice maneuvers, ringed it with buildings, mercifully putting the hospital at the top of the ridge. In the wind.

Ancient Blackfeet Fertility Ceremony just south of Willow Creek.

Why am I telling you all this? I started out to write about “friends” and (verb form) “friending” which is different from “befriending.” I wanted to say that this tow-headed boy saw the rafting possibilities for that slowly moving stream of ditch water, maybe three feet deep because it was spring, and his grandpa helped him built a raft. Every few hours he came into the house dripping because he fell into the water. It was ground water, uncontaminated, I thought. We had no clothesline so we just draped his shorts and t-shirt onto the low fence. By the time he was soaked again, they were dry. At suppertime he announced, “Today I made twelve new friends, counting dogs.”

We suspected the friends were thinking of his raft. The dogs had purer motives. Sure enough, a bully took his raft.

“Friend” in the age of internet is a term that leads to complex and unfortunate events. On one level it can connect people with deep affinities who would never know of each other without the keyboard. On another level it can make you carrion, fed on by jackals. Which end is commercialism? Is an acquiring editor or agent REALLY a friend or aren’t they just making a living in the culture of the Ferengi where everything is measured by cashing out or cashing in.

GOT ROMANCE?

The most dangerous are the innocents who romanticize writing almost as much as those who romanticize murder and war and get rich by feeding off both. Aren’t I feeding off that by watching CSI programs? Aren’t all novels really CSI programs, dissecting the crimes and deaths of ordinary lives? “Trace” they say, the tiny bits of giveaway that a good writer slips into smooth sentences, then dumps out onto the page-as-couch, justifying “feelings” that everyone was reading in order to “feel.” “I feel you.” “I feel just like you!” (NOT.)

Innocently, the forum leader urges us to “write together” and there are, if you google, lists of advice about how to “write together.” I once got interested in the Progoff journaling movement which structured group efforts in workshops that timed and suggested and urged metaphors for segments of your life. Someone stole my journal. Not the ideas. The physical journal.

Human beings are biological predators and barnacles, using both and being used by both. When one reveals the most hidden things and stands naked, the only result worse than being eaten on the spot is discovering that all thirty people in the room are exactly like you and we are all attached to the hull of the same doomed ship of fools, all out of control, all liable to be scraped off as unwanted.

Writing is merely putting letters in a row so they form words, and then words in a row so they form sentences and so on, cumulatively, until you have a school of thought. But writing is really the dark concept-shadows in the mammalian (possibly reptilian) pre-cerebrum brain, a little stem like that on a gooseneck barnacle, connecting ideas to the sensorium that we so constrict and neglect, because that’s the way you sell things. When you get to that level, “friendship” is a whole different thing.

We need a new word. “Soul-mates” is claimed by the Christians and too suggestive of marriage or at least romance, too much bait for sad pubertal girls with their hearts and rainbows. Ambiguity means people will tell you what you mean, really. Dark and painful will attract those same pubertal girls, this time wanting to put wet cloths on your forehead. Getting gender out of the picture is impossible.

One strategy is to just eliminate the “picture” thing. Let it all flow through you, acid and turbulence and laughter as it comes — accepting it all, no matter how much it rips your guts with doubt. Leave the questions unanswered until they don’t matter anymore. Extreme wrestling. Cage fighting.

I sound too female. “You’re so HEALTHY, Marie! Like a peasant!” “You’ve got balls.” “Did you stay in the ministry?” “Your job is to give me what I need.” “Going to a fancy college means you’ll never be our friend again.” “We think you’re so un-cool you must be crazy.” “But why aren’t you published?” “Calm down.” “Why don’t you take care of yourself? You have a pot belly and your feet stink.”

You know, when you type a free-association list like this, as you go some of the phrases will make your eyes sting. Those are the ones to address or avoid, according to your strategy. My minister said, “A really good shrink will probe around until he [male minister assumes male shrink] finds the place that makes you scream with pain and then dig in and dig in.” A rich man asked, “Why do you always do hard things? Why can’t you do easy ones?”

My cousin said, “Why can’t you write amusing little pieces about kittens?” Offended, I rebuked her. She said, “I wish I’d never said that.” I said, “I wish she’d never had that thought.” She’s a constant reader and does not read about kittens — she’s only presenting a front, hoping to appear conventional and harmless when in fact, she’s always in fear herself. She’s afraid I’ll see her and turn her out of her pillowed retreat. She’s dangerous but thinks it’s a secret. She wants to stay dangerous.

I wouldn’t join a group that would have me. It’s not low self-esteem but something more like arrogance. History has taught me that others don’t see me accurately. Sometimes this is like my cousin, who wants no trouble — please, no trouble — and sometimes my counter-phobia demands that I charge and unmask those mistaken people who think I’m helpful, intelligent, well-intentioned, "a real achiever who refuses to achieve so why don’t you stop being so self-serving and do some good in this worthless world because I think if you finally tried you’d be really wonderful and it would all be due to me because I saw it and prodded you into achievement."

Got voices? All the pubertal girls will say yes. Angels. The answer to an angel is a sword. Take theirs away from them and use it on them. Both angels and swords have names. “Oh, and would you like to be my little writing friend, my little buddy? What did you say your name was?”

"Stay on your raft, Huck honey. Keep moving and take the dog along. I pay attention real good, so I’ll stay here with the cats."

EPIPHANY

“The physiological mechanisms of epiphany, not necessarily religious.”  Catchy little subject, don’t you think?  NOT.

I used to preach about this -- the moments that some of us feel (not everyone) in which we are flooded with awareness of how hot and sweet the world is.  We stand motionless for a moment, not wanting it to end.  It’s real, but we don’t seem to have control over when and how it happens.  What the heck is it?

If you’re a god-believer, you might use the terms “theophany” meaning god (theos) breaking through to you or if not religious, “epiphany” which the anonymous writer at Wikipedia broadens and secularizes as a sudden insight into a problem after a long period of study.  In fact, the entry illustrates our Western cultural tendency to make everything explicable (explainable) and the product of rational thought or else some obscure Christian doctrine.  Those are your choices.  Be a grad student in the sciences or be a learned old guy in a church, both male.  

I’m trying to evade all that.  It’s not easy because the idea is SO deeply embedded in us and anyway it is the product of a lot of underlying ideas that people aren’t even aware that they believe, even after decades of countervailing strategies from feminists, Aquarians, and even psychologists.  Their sorting categories prevent them from having a place to put the knowledge and therefore it evaporates.

I’m saving for reflection an article on fMRI studies in which the experimenters challenged deeply held beliefs of people and actually got them to change their minds, to shift to a new point of view.  You can SEE it on the computer screen.  The experimenters did not record what it felt like, because now the idea is to switch from the logical rationality of people to their computerized brain synapses.  Both logic and neurology neglect “feelings” and yet feeling is our true guide in life.  

Suzanne Langer developed many relevant ideas.

Feeling is the whole-body response to one’s inner metaphors.  All thinking is metaphorical.  Rationality is a particular metaphor system -- it is the SUBset of thinking, which is really feeling.  By over-emphasizing rationality, particularly that which is represented in writing, we have suppressed and denied much of our feeling and therefore distorted our humanity.

We’ve lost our ability to perceive subtlety, what the Japanese used to call “shibui” -- elegance, sensitivity to small nuances.  We commodify everything into the symbolic invention of money and then play with its value by making it “worth” more and less according to mysterious rules about gambling on the stock market.

We help the needy according to symbol systems that render the help useless:  convening to wring our hands, writing poems about the emotion of compassion for others without any sharing of the plight of the objects or translating it into effective help -- turning it all back to ourselves in the Mother Teresa image of self-denial and sadness.  We don't let the needy speak for themselves.  Yet people in the most broken societies of the planet are often joyful, full of song and dance, giving it away.

Of all the most obvious “felt” symbol systems, sex in the most direct sense of body contact
is the feeling most commodified and disconnected from the new reality created by lab technology: petri dish conception, three-parent children from mitochondrial donation or from surrogate gestation, viagra-caused hydraulic responses without eroticism or bonding, deflected paraphilias, dab-on pheromones, transgressions of all kinds.  I was startled that a philosopher seeking a “new religion” would give as an example of degradation the habit of “watching porn.”  How does one tell porn from mainstream programming?  

More than that, how can one seek a new religion without first breaking apart the old ones into the hierarchical, institutional, patriarchal corporations they are.  The word "religion" as we were taught in seminary, is rooted in semantics.  Remember Wikipedia is a collaboration of male grad school students with tenured academic pedants, both types common in the “Western world” still yearning after empires.

“The Latin term religiō, origin of the modern lexeme religion (via Old French/Middle Latin) is of ultimately obscure etymology. It is recorded beginning in the 1st century BC, i.e. in Classical Latin at the beginning of the Roman Empire, notably by Cicero, in the sense of "scrupulous or strict observance of the traditional cultus".

“The classical explanation of the word, traced to Cicero himself, derives it from re- (again) + lego in the sense of "choose", "go over again" or "consider carefully". Modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell favor the derivation from ligo "bind, connect", probably from a prefixed re-ligare, i.e. re- (again) + ligare or "to reconnect," which was made prominent by St. Augustine, following the interpretation of Lactantius.”

See?  Everything defined by categories and specific men whose thoughts have been saved in writing and used by ecclesiastical authorities to bind together their constituencies, which are always based on money, more pleasantly called “prosperity.”

I’m thinking that “religion” works best in times of distress, then deteriorates when the crisis is over.  The people who nearly starved in the Great Depression and then desperately fought to save the world from Nazi ideas felt they were honorably religious and that a big entity overhead was therefore supporting them.  The two forces, one-two blows, in spite of being deeply felt, have by now been corrupted and commodified into terrorists and plutocrats.  It’s all forms of blackmail, extortion, and piracy.

Unless you step clear out of that metaphor system. 

Luckily, sort of by accident, I have an alternative.  I did not enter through mathematical logic, but through actor’s training which is about feeling.  (The Method, as taught by Alvina Krause.)  Not one’s endless stream of feeling, the narcissistic pondering of one’s reflection in a puddle, but rather the empathic sharing of experience.  Inhabiting the Other.  Not just humans, not just pets, not just working animals who have been bred to know what you want, but extension into the metaphorical “feelings” of things and their way of fitting into existence.  People love to make fun of trying to become a tree, but it’s less scary than trying to become, for instance, Tim.  Or one of the boys.

They can explain it themselves, but not necessarily in words.  Image, music, and maybe a private language, jargon or slang.  I love it because it makes me feel.  Not from out here, but from inside their desperate lungs, their spasming guts, their stinging feet.  And their seeking hands, their soaring leaps, their nobly shaven skulls.  

My level of success varies.  The effort is always rewarded.

There’s another source of my metaphor system, which is the Blackfeet reservation.  They teach me that what seems solid might be illusion and might disappear, that deceptions can be entrances never suspected, that -- as the Asians teach -- one must pay attention.  Always.  

In the end, it’s geology: watching the mountains being forced up from the depths, feeling the catabatic winds warm your face, walking past a tipi circle of stones, realizing that you’re smelling sweetgrass.  Even as I struggled to grasp theology, I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern.  The class, three women, were all writing fiction, though no one said we had to.  What Stern was urging us to see (urgently -- sometimes impatiently) was how to build a metaphor system, a poetry of living, so often shocking but more dangerous when quiet.

How can anyone devise or discover a theology for boys who have been thrown out on the street, making a living with their bodies, stunning themselves with drugs?  There’s nothing rational about it; nothing is bound together (ligere) for the sake of institutions.  But it can be felt.  If one has the courage.  There’s no reading list.  DO something.  I’ll go on trying to figure out how to trigger an epiphany, hot and sweet -- salvific.

SURVIVAL DEMANDS EVOLUTION

What lurks in us?

The crown of evolution turns out not to be rational thought, but rather empathy: the ability to see what others are feeling in their own heads and to respond to it.  Of course, those who don’t believe in evolution don’t believe in doing that.  But then, they don’t believe in rationality either.

Rationality is one of the excellent reasons for empathy-driven social progress, when the evolution of memes is prompted by understanding how other people feel and using that understanding to benefit us all.  It is rational to make social progress -- meaning developing a world in which everyone has a place and all of the individual worlds are woven together into a planet where survival at every level is possible.  It is irrational to let huge populations of any life form be eliminated out of failure to understand or deliberate destruction that DOES understand but only wants benefit for our selves.  Some of us still think that survival is a matter of taking everything for ourselves.

I’m talking about all the life forms, all the territory, and the air -- the basic fabric of life for creatures.  Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean the biggest, strongest, most potent -- it means what can survive the circumstances.  The planetary circumstances become more and more subtly hostile to humans, in spite of their evolved empathy which has helped them work together to create circumstances that diminish disease and send research vehicles to the moon.  We aren’t saving the frogs, the bees, the coral reefs, the acid/alkalai balance of the ocean.  This is irrational.

My sort-of denomination has been trying to attract new members and improve their reputation for do-goodery based on 19^th century reforms, marching at Selma, and developing principles.  They are doing this the high school way: t-shirts and slogans.  At least the t-shirts aren't pink, but the slogan is “standing on the side of love.”  Every teen can get with that -- there must be a song.

Compassion: does she know how he sees the world?

But it makes me think of a meeting in the eighties at the former Beacon Street headquarters.  In attendance were newbies like me, but also some of the most revered and dignified of our leaders -- all white males over sixty at that point.  We were in a conference room with ground-level windows that opened behind a lot of shrubbery.  Suddenly we were distracted by a shabby whiskery young man who was inadvertently mooning us because he was doing his business in the shrubs, not realizing he was presenting his nethers to a mixed group.  One of the most intellectual and brilliant of the leaders opened a window and berated the man with profane and damning shouts.  The man, unimpressed, took his time rearranging his jeans and leaving.  I forget what his t-shirt said.  Given the times, it probably said "peace."

25 Beacon Street

Why do people want to be do-gooders and why doesn’t it translate into rational provisions for the needs of others?  If a minister can't understand the urgent need to move bowels, what CAN he understand?  Do we ignore such matters because we think angels don't shit?  Politics is one reason.  But it’s not enough to have the American flag flying over the front door and be located by the State House with its gold dome, if there is no support downstairs for rest rooms the public can use.  Oh, well.  The new building has no shrubbery.

Love is an emotion so Hollywoodized and splintered into sex, dependence, and commodified into Valentine candy and diamond rings that it’s pretty much empty now.  The internet is jammed with pastel glittery butterflies and clever infantalized ponies and rainbows, all declaring love.

Compassion is often the watch word.  It’s taken me a while to realize that compassion is not about the receiver but about the provider.  This is why Christopher Hitchens got so upset by Mother Theresa -- it was all about how “compassionate” she was in the many images of her in her plain cotton sari, embracing babies and dying adults.  Our own empathy went out to her as we “became” her, and felt the aching desire to help those suffering.  We didn’t even look at the faces and bodies of the emaciated people on racks of beds -- who would want to empathically share what they were feeling?  Questions about providing meds or preventing starvation didn’t come up until late in her career.  And then we found out that our ability to empathize accurately was faulty.  Her journal describes a terrible darkness, depression that holding infants did not help.  Nor did her fat bank accounts get used rationally to improve conditions.

Can you empathize with this man?

Without scolding him for smoking?

Rational response to suffering is addressed by our nation and our various religious affiliations who send subsidies, food, used clothing, various chemicals produced by our industries.  It’s true, as Rev. Bill Holway used to say, that it feels good to give, but that’s about us, isn’t it?  It’s sometimes a good chance to get rid of stuff we don’t want: the two worst (but funniest) examples I remember are crates of high-heeled strappy shoes sent to Saharan tribes -- evidently because they were labeled “sandals”-- and tons of canned tuna fish but no can openers, also sent to the desert where no one even knew what a fish was.

Such nonsense is good for the survival of politicians who want to please those who provide generous election donations by disposing of excess production of food or by providing living experiments for pharma corporations.  Opportunities for international extortion and blackmail abound when large segments of a nation are dying from malaria or HIV.  Empathy never arrives, but the sudden realization that ebola travels by airliner can speed up our meme evolution to at least protect us -- which can only truly be achieved by protecting those interfacing with the diminishing jungle.  

Not Mother Theresa

Justice is a more stern and durable source of rational intervention for the common good.  Médecins sans Frontieres provides a valiant and life-threatening counterforce to ebola.  For once there is focus on the victims -- the engulfing spacesuits prevent us from even distinguishing the doctors from the local practical nurses, their billowing tyvex other-worldly against the black and bloody bodies of the dying, every figure in front of those ubiquitous turquoise walls. 

Still, less noble and professional institutions are careless enough to let pirates and profiteers skim off profit for their own survival.  What would empathy with the bad guys tell us?  Crippled brains, irrationality, desperation, dead hearts.  But they DO survive.  Up to a point.

Empathy-based compassion is not pretty stuff, often painful, but it offers the real stuff of survival: if not truth, than reality or as close as we can get to it.  When Jack Nicholson sneers, “you can’t handle the truth,” he’s really saying we can’t handle empathy, the knowledge -- no, the FEELING -- of what the others are experiencing.  Of course, that was a movie character he was playing when he said that.  In real life he had no insight into the people who loved him.  He didn’t allow empathy to penetrate his personal life even though the work of an actor is exactly that: empathy.

The model of compassion is often mothers, who undeniably must empathically understand what their infants need and who mostly will privilege the child’s survival over their own.  But this pattern can become controlling, a capture.  A father who is constantly “mothered” instead of partnered, can be crippled.  “Love” can be used as ownership, entitlement, justification for imposing goals “for your own good.”  Then empathy thins and disappears.  The Lover becomes the Joker.  And Batman?  We hope for justice at least.

THAT WHICH IS BETWEEN US

D.W. Winnicott might be the best expert at talking about the “space” that forms between two people intent on each other while engaged in a common subject or pursuit.  It becomes a living entity in itself.  He talks about the exchange between the mother and her child as they play.  The rest of the world disappears as the focus encloses these two, creating something larger than either of them, or both of them, something emergent, something synergistic, something “more.”

We say we “connect” with someone who offers absorbing conversation or maybe flirtatious body language.  It’s as though filaments weave us together in that moment, something emergent.  Hard to describe.  You had to be there.

When the theatre succeeds, the actors and the audience weave that space between them.  When I used to preach the magic space didn’t always form, but when it did, the feeling was transcendent, the sharing was intense, the time was memorable.   Speech coaches will say,  a sermon is something created in the sanctuary BETWEEN the congregation and the preacher.  It is not words on the page but something living.  It is different from reading and having the ideas come alive between your eyes and the page.  It won’t:  it will be all in your head.  I’m a manuscript preacher -- if I handed you my text, it wouldn’t be the same.  When I was circuit-riding, I preached each sermon four times: it formed something totally different every time.

This seems to be close to what Victor Turner means when he talks about “liminal space.”  It is one of the secrets of the “creativity” everyone obsesses about so much, but it cannot be achieved by “trying.”  It’s about attunement, participation, engagement, exchange.

When David Press tried to interview Alvina Krause about her teaching methods, she often found it hard to explain why she had done what she did.  “It just HAD to be,” she would say.  Of course, everyone makes decisions and takes actions that are based on thinking down below the water level that marks consciousness, but there was something more than that.  I often saw it when I sat in the back of the auditorium, tne one now named for Alvina Krause -- though Annie May Swift Hall is now occupied by the Performance Studies department.  It was partly eye-contact and body tension, but more than that, it was the empathy between the actors on the stage and AK just off the apron.  She was feeling them.  

“Feeling” is often put down.  When I found Suzanne Langer’s “Feeling and Form” and went head-over-heels for it, I was quickly discouraged by my advisors.  (I snuck around and read the rest of her books anyway and now she is respected!  So there!)  She is a good guide to Krause‘s thought.  In a university environment, one is supposed to be rational and NOT touchie-feelie.  Fine, but not when ACTING, when so much of the thinking is IN the body.  Like love-making, though I hesitate to say so because in this culture so many things are defined by sex that it has lost most of its meaning.

In 1957-61 the terms of “liminal” or “emergent” or “whole body thinking” or “mirror cells” just didn’t exist yet.  AK didn’t have the terms for what she was doing.  But she wasn’t about to give up the idea that she was definitely doing SOMETHING and the inability to explain made her fierce and stubborn.  Neither did David Press -- writing his thesis in 1970 -- have terms, except through the theories of Stanislavsky and the Method.  But no one likes to be defined by the work of someone else.  AK resisted. 

Let’s go back to babies.  It’s clear from videos that very young babies gaze into their mother’s eyes and try to imitate their expressions.  At the very least, the warmth of the maternal gaze makes them kick their feet and blow bubbles.  A baby who is not moving, who is not looking, is in big trouble.  But an adult human, not obviously in danger, may freeze while thinking -- all energy going into the thinking, but not necessarily the brain.  Maybe the gut.  Maybe a clenched muscle group.  Maybe that stare is covering for a kaleidoscope of remembered sights.  The paused moment can contain a flashing multitude of thoughts.  Then comes the decision and the inevitable action.

Part of expanding consciousness so that one can participate in shared exchange is making it safe.  Can any taped or footnoted interview ever be safe?  In the classroom the teacher has much more safety than the student, but also needs more internal space because of layers of consciousness: awareness of the student’s history, considerations of style.  The student needs to be in the “now.”  This is very hard to convey but once you’ve hit it a few times you know the surge of energy, the vividness, a kind of light that comes.  Then you can feel for it again next time.  So AK would push until they got it through trial and error.  Then she would recognize and mark it for the student.

So much of acting is about the management of one’s consciousness.  As I understand it (and I have not studied Stanislavsky so I’m coming off of counseling and general life), this is what the Method amounts to.  If one can transparently produce the authentic conscious feeling the character has, maybe by remembering one’s own, then the audience can see it and feel it as well.  What makes the technique so difficult is that it is the water in which we fish swim.  It’s always there, but usually beneath consciousness.

Both the neuroscientists (the real ones like Antonio Damasio, not the pop writers) and the Internal Family Counseling experts say that a person is a active process that can handle several personas or parts or layers at once:  you as actor, you as character, you as student, you as guy-who-heeds-to-remember-to-pay-a-bill.  Onstage some of those must be put on hold, self-protective as they may be, so there is more room internally for the actor and the character.  The teacher or director merely stands in for the audience.  An actor freely and confidently moving through the feelings of the character will cause the audience to do their part in creating the actual play in the space between the proscenium and the back wall of the theatre. 

This quote is from Winnicott’s “teddy bear” book: ”Playing and Reality.”  (Technically, it’s object-relations theory.)  “Psychotherapy [acting] takes place in the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient [actor] and that of the therapist [audience].  

Psychotherapy [acting] has to do with two people playing together.  The corollary of this is that where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist [teacher or director] is directed toward bringing the patient [actor] from a state of not being able to play [act] into a state of being able to play [act].”

(This post was also put on www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com.)