ACTING OUT: A RESULT OF GUILT AND SHAME

A few nights ago I was looking for illustrations for something or other I was writing and — as happens every once in a while — I ran across something that stunned me.  It wasn’t one of those pay-for-tattling websites, but just an ordinary newspaper story about a man from Browning, respected and educated, from a good family, a grandfather, a ceremonialist, elected to a responsible role in the community, who had a son who “made it” on one of those legendary athletic scholarships.  Here were his mug shots from an incident in one of the state’s bigger cities.  Evidently he had flashed some people in a coffee kiosk and the mall security grabbed him.

Long ago I was his teacher.  The last time I saw him I sat next to him at the funeral of a respected elder.  Of course the consequences of the exposure were a domino chain: loss of respect, loss of role.  I don’t know how his wife reacted but she’s not a weak woman.  Shame? Or guilt?  For what?
  

Women around here, whatever color, are often caught embezzling.  Usually they say they want money for their families.  But men occasionally do unaccountable defiant but self-destructive things, stuff a junior high kid would do, and though there’s often alcohol or drugs involved, they are stupid acts — maybe self-hating.  Shame, guilt . . . frustration, overwhelmed by everything.

It took me a long time to understand that Native Americans feel so very ashamed that they could not defend themselves from the Euro-invaders.  They weren’t equipped, they didn’t understand what was happening, and Euro-disease wiped out many.  There is no justification for holding them accountable and yet they feel that way.  For generations now.

It’s not so different from young Jews who feel that a Chosen People ought to have been able to find a way to prevail over Hitler, a way to explain or escape or even offer some kind of accommodation, the way England did at first.  Maybe you remember how Americans tried to shame the French not so long ago, because that nation criticized the invasion of Iraq.  They renamed “French” fries to be “American” fries and they tied the whole thing to the German capture of France in WWII, claiming that the French didn’t fight.

It’s like family crackups that the children feel they caused, that they ought to be able to fix, so when they can't, they leave home, hoping that will make it all settle down.  This is never real and most people never get it resolved because they can’t see past blaming.  Often the blaming is so clever, so accurately aimed at a soft spot, that the one who takes the blame punishes themselves, clear to the point of death, taking desperate chances to prove that they are brave or else maybe giving up.  

Especially women can sink into depression, a terrible burden on their right to live, always trying to propitiate the mysterious gods who made them inevitably come up short.  Stockton links this to the suicide of Virginia Wolff, probably accurately.  She never could satisfy her father, whose standards were impossible anyway.  He caused her to be ashamed of her beauty, her talent, her intelligence.

Those young Indians who finally refused to take the blame were in the cities, talking to defiant Blacks, but defiance and blame only perpetuate stigma.  It becomes a rebound weapon against themselves.  A tool for their enemies.  When Bob Scriver’s museum burned, the FBI was quick to say it was AIM that did it, which only pushed the fear and rage up higher.  No one looked at the structure of society and how it traps stigmatized young men; the same thing happened in Ireland.  Plenty of evidence, many strong theories, individuals who saw clearly.  But the little worm of debasement ate into them like toxoplasmosis making rats love the smell of cat pee.

Blacks have a different context.  They were not victims of invaders that they failed to repel — rather they were captured, chained, taken across the sea to a different country, and kept enslaved by a strong cultural consensus and brute force.  Ever read “Mandingo”?  Slaves were penetrated and boiled into soup.

Down deep in many Native Americans is the idea that they might be able to restore their tribe to its former power.  Whites make noble angels of them, and they kind of believe it.  Casinos with all their glamour and clatter of money sort of appeal to that.  I suspect that Englishmen — and certainly Scots — have that same wish to reconstruct past glory.  It’s unreal and finally makes them angry.

My first impulse is to go have coffee with this man and try to understand what happened, why he was so out of character.  But I suspect that he was IN character, that something festering had broken loose and burst constraints.  When I try to imagine how he would react if I tried to talk to him, I see that there is no way he could believe that my intentions were good and he probably doesn’t have that much insight into himself anyway.  It might take a sweat lodge with wise older men.  But where are they?  HE was supposed to be them.  

I don’t think a Western style therapist would be any help because they all work from theory and NOT experience.  Not many have experienced being mocked, excluded, and shunned.  Maybe that’s why the most effective analysts are often Jewish.  “Jimmy P” has nothing on the reality of being “Indian” and I’m not going by the movie — I’ve read the book carefully several times.  “Winter in the Blood” is closer.

My mother’s family were major blamers and ridiculers.  My father’s family is deniers, people who are nice no matter what.  I’ve got both in me.  My strategy has been to think things out, to learn how things work, to explain and justify.  But none of that ever changes the accumulated shame-and-blame feelings.  The feelings just sit there like toads and stare.  Someone said to me, “Why can’t you believe that I love you?”  Well, there’s the answer: a panel of toads, all with their webby little thumbs turned down.

The toads say,  “Why couldn’t you save your marriage?  Why didn’t you finish your doctoral thesis?  Why couldn’t you save your brother from death on the street?  Why haven’t you written a best-seller?  Why didn’t you cure your step-daughter’s cancer?  Why couldn’t you save her daughter from suicide?”  

All this assails me until I have to laugh at such grandiose narcissism.  But that’s not the same as taking on the burden of the loss of an entire culture, the destruction of a continent.  The actual offense of the man in the mug shot — he just pleaded no contest, paid a fine or something — would never have become public if he hadn’t been Native American, but it was a satisfaction to some to once again punish people they stigmatize.

The shrinks call such incidents of disruption in the middle of a lifetime of constructive work “acting out.”  It’s considered a defense mechanism, a way of relieving pressure.  I like the image of a container (hot philosophical concept at the moment) that holds a roiling hot mixture, reacting, getting deeper, until it causes the container to leak — tell things, do things, provoke, make something happen even if it’s bad.

I like that container idea because it offers a way to address the guilt/shame issue that triggers so much frustration.  Two ways, actually:  one is to make the container bigger or stronger, and the other is to stop adding to the heat inside.  Ways to do those include reframing the situation, finding a community that understands, increasing one’s skill level in any way, and others, including the Native American favorite:  laughter at the absurdity of little fool Napi — yourself — trying to save the world.  Well, we DO manage to save little patches here and there.  But some atrocities can never be reconciled.

SHAME VS. GUILT

This "embarrassment" is an illusion.  

Polar bears have nothing to be ashamed of.

Googling reveals lots of material defining “shame” versus “guilt”, mostly explaining that shame is something that is inherent in one’s being (“you should be ashamed of yourself”) sort of like original sin, but guilt is knowing you’ve done something wrong. You've broken the rules.  

Both will estrange a person from any community, because both are factors of culture, categories developed over time and meant to keep people (in the back-and-forth between culture and individual) under control for the good of the community.  Their game is blame, which imposes a stigmata like forcing people to sew a yellow star on their coats or, more drastically, branding the faces of runaway slaves.  it is an excruciating vulnerability affecting one’s worthiness, their sense of love and belonging.  They must always feel they are not good enough.

Dogs feel guilt -- cats do not.

Dogs are social -- cats are not.

If shame is something that the culture imposes on groups and individuals because of their perceived characteristics, like skin color or way of dressing or food choices or — worst of all — poverty; and guilt is something a group or individual sees as a rule broken, a bad behavior, then we express that in the idea that one can love an individual but hate their behavior.  Or sometimes that we hate the individual regardless of his or her appeal because of his or her behavior, especially if they are shameless and refuse to accept their guilt.  Because then what hold does the society have?

Global warming is starving polar bears.

I want to introduce a new factor:  bad things that happen that seem totally unrelated to either shame or guilt, but introduce both in such dynamic quantity that the whole culture gets involved in blame, wanting to sacrifice someone in order to restore order.  Hurricanes, tsunamis, famine, wild fire, and pandemics are natural events, but war, economic inequity, overpopulation are human group overwhelming events.  They are all full of shame and blame, from the New Orleans disaster to the children dying in the streets of our cities.  (You don’t see them because they try to diminish their vulnerability by hiding.)  Attempts to deal with all this seem ineffective.  In fact, even the most innocent and praiseworthy efforts, like providing food to starving people, become corrupted or objectionable.  We are facing helplessness, which makes us scared, which makes us angry, which is of major use for politics.

Queen Elizabeth II

In a time like the present, when the rules of the culture are changing and uncertain, individuals suffer.  Should one be shamed for not being thin, sexy, blonde and sixteen?  Should one feel guilty for wearing a headscarf while not being the Queen of England?  If one is either shamed or guilty, does that mean punishment, debasement, confinement, permitted penetration, exploitative research, is deserved and proper?   BLAME:  a way to discharge pain and shame.  It’s everywhere.  It wins elections.  It’s too scary to react in a sensible way.  Understanding is not a priority anyway — someone yells fire (the president has no birth certificate, vaccination will make your children autistic, drinking coffee will either give you cancer or save you from cancer) and we get so jammed in the exits that no one can escape.

A triangle forms:  shame, guilt, and I’m going to add frustration, being blocked.  Shame and guilt are tools of the predominant culture.  Frustration is what finally will break through to change.  I was surprised when I googled “penetration” that many of the definitions were about knowledge -- getting to the heart of things, I suppose.  Frustration and penetration are individual responses to oppression that trigger evolution, both social and personal.  Aggression, withdrawal, finding allies, artistic expression might also be responses.  “Find a way to cope or die”, is the message to the individual, but the message to the culture is “cut off too many of your people and you no longer exist.”

Black "bottom"

The issue seems to be one of boundaries, often expressed physically by the places people live.  Stockton speaks of "bottoms" where blacks live, because in the South those are the jungly marshy places where diseases lurk.  In Browning the equivalent was called “Moccasin Flats”, built parallel to the school blocks, originally as 1900 log cabins for old people who had been living in scattered tents.  Over the decades the cabins became a jumble of lean-tos, derelict trailers, abandoned cars, and crooked TV antennas.  They were mostly cleared away after the Sixties drive to improve housing.  Highway patrol housing, three modern houses built near the top of Snowshed hill, were jokingly called “Moccasin Heights” and a sign was put up.

Stockton talks a lot about anal focus, which is, of course, about biologically discarding, but in other acts of sex (arousal), hygiene (enemas) or even rectal feeding -- which is to save an infant in Morrison’s book, but in real life done for torture and punishment to the Gitmo captives protesting by fasting.  These are the crossing of boundaries, social as much as physical (sphincters), meant to reduce captives to an infant’s involuntary existence.  Until our culture became so obsessed with medical and enforcement issues that it gave permission to meddle with bodies (coffee enemas, storing contraband in the rectum) no one would ever address these matters.  Even now people worry about smells and feel violated by a colostomy, a third “hole” no one finds attractive.

Cancer and trauma are phenomena that are entwined with shame and guilt and treated with denial or exploitation by the culture.  Our professions (medicine, law and clerical) have become corrupted by this, removing the dignity and solemnity that once marked them as consciously dealing with privileges that affected lives, such as cutting into them (penetration), incarcerating them, or shaping them into institutions.  But "Medicins Sans Frontieres" give new life to the concept of transcending limitations, even those of the culture. Out of the oppression of one big group, comes the transcendence of a small opposing group.

A doctor responding to need.

Some parts of all cultures value this.

All three professions are connected to a writing-based culture where the “pen” is the penetration.  (Laws, Bibles, Prescriptions.)  Writing that deals frankly and vividly with these three categories will often be stigmatized and destroyed as though they were the people instead of the synecdoche (metaphor) for them, only marks on paper.  Even this little discussion of shame and guilt may get me into trouble if it has as much penetration as I hope.

On Medium.com where beginning writers are struggling and even seasoned writers are trying to monetize, I suggested that if there were authors’ discussion groups out there, they ought to devote an evening to discussing two movies:  “Authors Anonymous” and “Pinero.”  The first is not just culture-compliant but culture corrupted and stereotyped, presented as comedy.  The second is a confrontive portrayal of the life of a Puerto Rican man in New York (Newyorican) trapped by racial and nationalistic barriers plus poverty and early trauma.  Drugs, friendship, sex, are there aplenty and will attract people looking for scandal, arousal by misery.  These people ("trolls") are now interested in Medium.com.

If a writer is just writing for profit or good feeling, that’s fine, but maybe they have not earned the respect for dedicated penetration to “truth” as Pinero did.  Or did he?  Did he sell out to self-destruction?  Should he feel ashamed of himself?  Or should we feel guilty that gifted people are destroyed even as they may be leading to evolution that will save us all?

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?  (Degradation Part 2 -- not Chapter 2)

Frontispiece photo is J.B. Higgins photograph “Andre"-

http://www.jbhiggins.com/black_and_white/bw_galleries2.html

Okay, here’s a very intellectual and introspective way to look at degradation.  If you want the really basic experiential gruesome details, go look for something by Vollman, who experiments with how low people can go.  There ought to be a body of writing about/by Native Americans, not by people with the genetics but people who actually live on reservations, but I only see streaks here and there.  Publishers would resist.  (The gutter drunk version of “Indians” doesn’t sell unless it's funny and makes "Indians" look stupid.)  

If that’s what you want, look for Adrian C. Louis.  (He wrote the book on which “Skins” was based.)  His new book is “Random Exorcisms”.  “. . . these poems tackle a broad range of subjects, including Facebook, zombies, horror movies, petty grievances, real grief, and pure political outrage.”  http://www.amazon.com/Random-Exorcisms-Lena-Miles-Poetry-Series/dp/0807163716

I haven’t gotten Louis’ book yet.  The book I’m still trying to figure out, alongside my own degradation issues, is Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame.  Stockton says shame “has often been a meeting place for the signs “black” and “queer” and for black and queer people—overlapping groups who have been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been embraced by blacks and queers? How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? How and why is it central to camp?”

I'm not black, I'm not lesbian, and I don’t “get” camp.  I’m very hard to shame, but I carry a lot of guilt.  As Kenner used to say,  “What does it mean?”

Scene from the movie version of "Beloved."

“Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, semiotics, and gender studies. She brings together thinkers rarely, if ever, read together in a single study . . . Stockton asserts that there is no clear, mirrored relation between the terms “black” and “queer”; rather, seemingly definitive associations attached to each are often taken up or crossed through by the other. 

The results of flogging.

"Stockton explores dramatic switchpoints between these terms: the stigmatized “skin” of some queers’ clothes, the description of blacks as an “economic bottom,” the visual force of interracial homosexual rape, the complicated logic of so-called same-sex miscegenation, and the ways in which a famous depiction of slavery (namely, Morrison’s Beloved) seems bound up with depictions of AIDS. All of the thinkers Stockton considers scrutinize the social nature of shame as they examine the structures that make debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable, and creative, even in their darkness.”

Since I haven’t read all this stuff yet, and might not understand it when I do, I’m going to start with the small domestic end.  I notice that some people, usually women, when they are guests in my house, will choose the cracked cup, the bent spoon, the chair that wobbles — anything defective or even painful or a little risky.  I have a hanging candelabra that is never lit because my company protests, “Oh, no no no!  Don’t light it for me.  I’m not worth it.”  Neatly depriving me of a chance to show off by honoring them.  It’s not debasement so much as self-erasure.  Is there a connection?  Are they afraid of something?  Me?  Are they topping me by saying, “an honor from you means nothing to me.”

Indeed, there is often a faint tone of mock admiration — or am I imagining it? — because I went to college, twice, at fancy places  (NU and U of Chicago) and even managed to get ordained.  They say,  “You’re so smart,” and there’s an edge that says, “you betrayed us, you look down on us, you’re an outsider now.”  Native Americans would recognize this.  Probably Blacks as well.  

It’s not jealousy, it’s messing with the universe.  Achieving females don’t break the standing order as much as people of color, but they do.  If the standing order is broken, my female cousins’ husbands will no longer owe them (in the best sense, totally earned) their protection, the home they provide, even their love.  (True love, not invented.)  The whole equation that holds the family together will collapse, or so they feel.  When I left for college, one of my more world-wise high school friends said, “You’ll never be our friend again.  We won’t know you.”  It was almost as though I’d suddenly revealed I was gay — different but unimaginable by “normal” people.

Because of my jobs (mostly taken because it was the only choice on both sides) I know a lot of “degraded” people.  I mean, I’ve worked with them,  talked to them, thought about them, tried to figure them out, written tickets for court and gotten convictions.  I didn’t have them over for dinner.  (I never have ANYONE over for dinner.)  I’m not good at “doing good.”  That’s the source of some of my guilt.

One rez man had a nice life, a good wife, a house and all that.  He walked off from it to join the “street people,” those we used to call winos.  One day I saw him propped against an alley board fence in the sunshine and weeds and decided to go interview him.  Why had he made this choice?  He said it was for freedom, that the house was full of bossy people.  He did not mention that in the past he had caused the accidental death of a child.  

This is not to mention my life as a "dogcatcher" which my mother, totally embarrassed, called “a government job.”  Not elective.  It was a civil service job with a panel interview.  The deciding vote was from a Black man, partly out of solidarity with a minority (female) and partly because he really got off on my stories about Browning: bears and wolves, cowboys and Indians.  If filth is degrading, I know a lot about animal poop and hideyholes where drunks have been peeing and throwing up.  Sometimes I need the ego-defense of dissociation.

In fact, since I always took low-pay, low-prestige jobs (even in the ministry where success is defined as a big congregation in a very nice building), I discovered that one way to buy books instead of paying rent was to take on a really repulsive old wreck of a house, scrub it out, throw on some paint, and do without dishwashers and so on.  I drew the line at trailers.  NO trailers.  

The other line I draw is that the space must be MINE.  I will not share.  I don’t want things moved around.  I don’t want anyone breaking the protocol that keeps thing functioning.  It’s happened and the consequences are never good, though the intentions might have been.  It’s my biggest paranoia in Valier where people might want to come over and “improve” you.

I don’t know whether Stockton considers this freedom dimension.  I also think that she and her cohort do not experience degradation very much — just the idea.  I do hear stories about her fancy thinkers, the ones with French names, turning up at the San Francisco bath houses.

What I discovered about myself was that I can bear almost any degraded environment — unheated, rusted, filthy, even stinking.  (I don’t mind mice but bugs and rats are deal breakers.)  But I will not tolerate being degraded or confined or dominated socially.  I think that’s partly what I mean when I say it’s very hard to shame me.  

Most people around here are the other way around: if they have an nice house, good clothes, and esp. a new, clean car, they will accept an incredible amount of personal degradation.  In fact, they won’t even realize it, because it can be the norm for blacks, gays, women and drunks.  I dress in baggy old men’s work clothes, a “skin” that protects my disguise.  Stockton offers a whole chapter. 

There are a LOT of articles listed by Google that try to work out the relationship between guilt (usually defined as something you did that you knew you shouldn't do) and shame (something essential about yourself that is disgraceful, that can't be erased).  But I want to add a third factor that comes for me from aging:  frustration.  Something you want to do, have the ability to do, but are prevented from doing by circumstances outside your control.  The climate changes, the economy falls through, you catch a disease . . .you get old.

Jim Harrison

Now that I'm aging, I can't unscrew lids of containers, pull apart either the little blisters of meds or the plastic wraps on string cheese.  I can't hammer nails straight, see to thread a needle, and so on.  I'm often a little off balance, forget sequences like closing up the house at bedtime.  Jim Harrison has just died and I reflect that the one thing that I remember most vividly of his writing is a passage about him always forgetting how to take a bath and ending up sitting on his bed, still soaking, getting the bed wet.  He saw another world with that errant eye and went there.  In the end a friend (male) sat with him a little while and taught him a simple routine he has used ever since.

Did I forget what I was writing about?  Stockton's Chapter Two is entitled "Anal Economics in the History of Black Neighborhoods."  I need a couple of days to get the lid off it.

THE KALEIDOSCOPE OF MEMORY

We think of memory as a beam of light that reveals something real and actual, but now research reveals it is more like a kaleidoscope, so that when we put it to our eye, we see bits and pieces in patterns that change, mostly with the same pieces in different arrangements but possibly with some bits dropped out and possibly new bits added (perhaps bits of mirror) have fallen in.  

This is emotional for two reasons.  One is that the actual mechanism of memory which is at the interface between what it out of the skin and what is in-skin, is “filed” for retrieval according to the sensorium pattern of the moment being noted and its attached emotion.  We call this association, evocation, and sometimes flashback, re-living, maybe in an uncomfortable way, moments of intense fear, rage or possibly more positive feelings.  Since this function developed before we had evolved the ability to talk, which is associated with the pre-frontal forebrain, it is developed and held in the older, more “limbic”, parts of the brain.  Animals can do this.  It amounts to a whole “feeling” system that is pre-verbal concepts but particularly accessible in art and always going on under our conscious verbal lives.

Who me?

As time pushed on with its evolutions and mutations, memory became entangled with the idea of “truth,” which then -- like just about everything -- became a lever of authorities against lessers, which invented the categories of lies and fantasies.  These might be conscious, to escape punishment -- which is a kind of deviousness that chimpanzees can learn -- or it can be a sincere mis-remembering, at variance with the evidence or recordings of various kinds.  (I am drawing on Joseph LeDoux’s book, “Synaptic Self” and though I have it at hand with a lot of markers in it, I might not get all this quite right.)

By the time a human being is barely beginning to remember (which might or might not coincide with learning to talk) the culture is insisting on certain standards.  These things are formed in the pre-frontal cortex with the actual mechanics handled in places like the hippocampus over the ears, the nearby cortex cells, the thalamus, and the amygdala -- all maturing at slightly different times so under slightly different environmental circumstances like safety or nutrition or exercise. 

We used to consider this normal and effective discipline.

Then, of course, every culture and every mom has slightly different ideas about how to handle memory, particularly “truth.”  Controlling moms need to know what you’ve been up to so they can intervene if necessary.  “Where did you go?  Who were you with?” and even the intimate matters of excretion, so that “mom wants to know” gets entwined with toilet training.  “Did you do your duty?” 

All this information is great for sibs who are tattletales or blackmailers.  In my childhood there wasn’t much money so after we three became fascinated by toilet paper and enjoyed creating great bouquets of it, the rule was made that you couldn’t use a piece longer than your arm.  Since I was female and my arms were short, my two brothers were happy to inform my mother that I was a paper-waster.  Thus the truth gets to be an element of crime and testimony, but also a source of guilt, so I’ve remembered and resented this all these years, though now it’s pretty funny, a petty crime indeed.  Still, it linked the earliest back-of-the-brain feelings of infancy with all today's little Miss Manners niceties of polite society.

LeDoux points out that though we’ve insisted for centuries that the brain is once-and-for-all the same, now we know that it is constantly growing and withdrawing.  It is a process, a dance, and the result of time-arts, so that the brain we use to record what happens and to thereby guide the modification of our neuron protocols is not the same as the brain we use after decades to re-assemble and reflect upon our memories.  Our problem is not quite the same as that of the music lover who begins with 78’s and must update through 33-1/2 to reel-to-reel to cassette to MP3 -- but that sequence is suggestive.  Some songs can't be played anymore.

Remember the little cylinder you had to put over the turntable spindle?

The “machinery” or “software” of the brain is far more complex than we thought, so that’s the reason there are so many margin notes, high-lights and stickies in this book.  It’s a used book, so I also have the previous reader’s marks.  I’m working on a little glossary because some of these tiny instant phenomena have never been detected before and have names invented by scientists with their Latinesque prefixes-and-suffixes way of thinking.  But then they discover that they were wrong about whatever, so it gets a new name, and then they call it by initials or use lab nicknames.  It’s like reading a Russian novel.  

The actual structures, the channeling of the electrochemical impulses that come from the basic sensorium touching the out-skin world, the necessary molecules on hand (hopefully you’re not starving or missing a basic element), the limbic emotional attachments, the moral censoring from the pre-frontal cortex or perhaps the adding of fantasy shadows from a movie, the genetic instructions that argue among themselves (they can intensify or mute), the accumulation of endogenomes that (we are shocked to discover) can cross generations, the interfering chemicals from mind-altering substances like alcohol -- all this stuff makes a difference in what gets recorded.  And then what can play back.

Tentatively, my understanding is that the pristine bit of impulse from hearing a sound goes through a series of steps beginning with a little dashboard close to the perceiving cells.  Then it is filtered and annotated by half a dozen structures who pass it on as short-term memory, which again sorts and passes it on to another structure where it is prepared for long-term storage by dissecting it and classifying it, tagging it with the emotions of the moment.  There is a “master dashboard” or “working consciousness” that can only handle seven or eight concepts at once, so it chooses some and drops out some.  We don’t know a whole lot more than that.

Since memory is a major component of consciousness and since we think of consciousness as defining identity and since “felt-concepts” are not very conscious but those pinned down in words are certainly more conscious -- though choice of vocabulary (skinny or slim, naughty or nice) will not be value-free -- and those enshrined on paper whether as direct journal notes or as highly analyzed and distilled into written words acquire a kind of aura of valuable truth.  

Until now.  Words in code are now “set free” -- easily altered, transmitted out of context, contradicted by witnesses who would formerly have been suppressed.  You can't rubber stamp "for eyes only" on computer code.  You can't even really delete it.  The truth and memory are now hydra-headed chimeras that politics and advertising (is there a difference?) try to collar -- to no avail.  The point of God used to be that at least he/she (like mom) knew what was real and what was enduring.  But now that God (Deus Absconditus is a formal theological term) and possibly Mom have left (it’s no longer just Dad who elopes with the secretary) we wonder whether the category is even useful.  Do we need new words?  Probably.

Halfway between writing and drawing.

And what does this do to a system of justice that depends upon testimony?  Will it reveal new realities about people unlike ourselves?  Will it uncover a final solipsism in the world that paralyzes us between trust and fear?  Yes.  We embark on the trial of the Boston Bomber with deep misgivings.  Can we handle the truth?  Are there elephants hiding in the trees?

Writing on water -- FROM the water.