On the Doukhobors

I'm always a bit excited about anything that gives me a larger perspective on things but, strangely enough, it's often a small, particular event which does that for me.

The latest was my reading of Vi Plotnikoff's stories about a young Doukhobor girl's life in Canada in the 1950's.

Each story has these spiritual wrestlings that recall their originally disparaging name, Doukhobors, as “the spirit wrestlers,” and which engage me directly in the present. Sometimes I had to put the book down, do something else for a half-hour, before I could go on to finish a particular story.

The Doukhobors emigrated from Russia to Canada in the late 1890's, largely funded and assisted by Leo Tolstoy, but their questions are apparently still alive in Russia. I first heard of them as a young student in Montreal in 1959, and what I heard was derisory about the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors' nude protests, but with that hidden respect that you often see in such situations. I knew absolutely nothing of Tolstoy's part in their lives.

A Haunted Letter

There is this piece of paper, about 8 x 18 cm, that I keep in my bedside book case. It's haunted. I found it buried deep inside one of the used books that I bought at a book fair last year. And there is the following large, round script on it, written by a feminine hand:

Don't be sad. Remember you are loved. C.

I imagine, although I have know way of knowing for sure, that there was a woman who wrote it who loved the man who owned the book. The small piece of paper written in love is of more value than the book, in my opinion. I wonder if the guy who owned the book realized that, too.

That's Funny

Canadian humor appeals to me more than any other for some reason, probably because of my family background and my experiences in Canada, and because of its special interweaving of French, British, USA, native and other cultures. Here is Jim Carrey being very Canadian:

This topic of humor is actually a much more central issue for us than physiological, physical, neuron-based, biochemical psychology gives it or can give it. Wise, observant people have long noticed that humor is one of the distinctive, uniquely human characteristics. Traditional philosophers recognized that there was something about laughter that was crucial to our identity and being.

My favorite philosopher held that humor was just one more consequence of the ability to put one's self in the place of an other, to see things from an other's point of view. He said that when we are taking the other's point of view, and thus become aware of both our commonality and difference, there is a release of tension and worry.

Here is a classic performance by Foster Brooks, playing at being a drunk, roasting Don Rickles, the Beast of Beverly Hills:

Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679

Old Thomas Hobbes often had a pithy way with words in expressing the dominant philosophy of the last three or four hundred years, so congenial to materialist science. He defined laughter as “those grimaces most incident to the idle and unemployed.” The natural state of human beings was a war of all against all in which there are "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death: and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." The only hope for escape from that condition was a contract with a giant of “terror,” a “Leviathan,” - both Hobbes' words - who would keep everybody in order. He said just before his death that “I shall be glad to find a place to creep out of the world at.”

I find myself laughing as I read that. I understand the point of view and that it is widespread. I've sometimes felt that way myself. The funny thing is that there is clearly something missing in it - love - and a larger view to be taken.

You Gave Me Permission to Be Me

Evaluations of teachers always miss the most important, most valuable, fact about a truly good teacher.

And that is the fact that the student whose mind has caught fire senses that he somehow did it himself.

The good teacher has allowed the student to be what he natively is, to recover the curiosity and interest in discovery with which he was born, before it got squelched by the traditional educational institutions' obedience training and carrot/stick manipulation.

Carl Roger's book, “Client-Centered Therapy,” uses a quote from Emerson right on the first page that captures this to some degree, although in a different context. The breakthrough feels more like a recovery of something we always deeply were inside than something from outside that a teacher stuffed into us.

“We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had, in the dreary years of routine and sin, with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were.” -Emerson, Divinity School Address, 1838

Another consequence of this is that the good teacher himself will often not realize that he is a great teacher. Not only the official evaluators, but the good teachers themselves, may never know when the true education is going on. I've had one or two of my students say to me, years later, that the essence of it was “You gave me permission to be me.” But the student will probably never even speak of what happened, perhaps not having the words to express it. And the typical “teacher evaluation instruments?” Just forget it. Completely clueless.

The Harvest of Hurt

I had a serious physical injury during the past week which put me in a hospital trauma ward for a couple days. I slipped while getting out the door of a big truck and fell about two meters to the street, getting a concussion, a head laceration and losing consciousness for a few hours.

The seemingly purely physical aspects of such injuries are fascinating and deep – the brain, the cerebrospinal fluid, the blood and all its constituents, the protective structures and functions, the repairs and the physical therapy. There is also an infinity of people and social institutions that comprises the health industry, from the first responders with the ambulance to the nurse's aide who pushes the wheel chair out the door at the time of hospital discharge. All are astonishments without end, especially to an older person who increasingly appreciates everything as he approaches the end.

But what mostly absorbed my attention and sense of the miraculous as I regained my consciousness and continuity, were the psychical/spiritual aspects of it all. My first introduction to this appreciation was as a teenager when I heard a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto give a lecture about how he first became interested in psychosomatic medicine. He cited various instances in which patients' physical ailments were frequently caused by and complicated by psychic realities.

And then it was seeing the physical effect of “suggestion” in hypnosis that first got me into the study and practice of hypnotism, and even into the study of the dreams and the subconscious.

So, I thought about and explored these psychical/spirituals a lot during my time in the hospital this last week.

The first thought was about all the people who came before me, for millions of years before my immediate parents, whose evolutionary experience of suffering led to my having a thick skull and sturdy bones that did not break. All the other protective and recovery systems involved were given to me by those people, and I felt this direct communion with them as if time didn't exist at all.

The second set of psychical thoughts were about how much memory is involved in various of our physical parts that we do not ordinarily appreciate. I once met a physician who believed that he could discover most of the psychical issues of a patient's life just by probing the musculature of the patient's back. I could grasp that quickly because “in back” can easily connect with “in the subconscious,” the back of the mind. 

The specific psychical connections in my case this past week were related to sharp pains I had in the musculature in my chest area and around the sockets of my arms at the front. Just the slightest touch to these very painful muscles brought a flood of thoughts about what is meant by “embracing,” having something “on your chest” or someone “in your bosom.” Our fronts, no less than our backs, contain an unknown wealth of psychical stuff within them.

Finally, a third set of thoughts came to me a day or two after I got out of the hospital were very definitely around humor. There were certain nurses whose humor and playfulness made all the difference, and there were a few whose deadly seriousness felt, well, deadly! I've met a few people – Elizabeth and Nicolas come immediately to mind – who were able to have humor in the middle of disaster and I well remember their effect on me and others around them. I've seen it in Shakespeare. And once, I remember my father telling me how some Eskimos/Inuits came to the gates of his radar station in Thule, Greenland, in the middle of a raging, howling storm. They said when they got inside that the storm had blown their tents and everything they had away. But the funny thing was, my father said, that they laughed and joked about it as if it was all just the greatest fun, whereas we would have considered it a disaster. 
 

There is a song that Old Tex Ritter used to sing that came to me as I was thinking last night of the blood I had lost and my trauma. He said that a friend of his, Everett Cheetham, wrote it in response to a cowboy being injured in a rodeo in Wickenburg, Arizona, but when he started singing it, “People started laffin',” No, it's right. Here is Tex Ritter singing it, below:

Der Frühling will kommen, Der Frühling, meine Freud

The very first signs of spring are appearing here in Ohio now and bring to mind some other delightful signs that the outcome of all the death and horrors will be joy in the end.

The first thing is Schubert's “The Shepherd on the Rock.” My amazing sister first brought this piece, one of the last things Schubert did, to my attention many years ago and it has been there in my mind since, particularly during the difficult hours.

There are many versions available, each one bringing out elements of the experience that are, well, holy. I've listened to many renditions of and of course I am incapable of picking out the one that would touch you most closely. But if I had to choose one of the full twelve-minute performances, it would be either that by Arlene Auger or that by Kathleen Battle. Here is Barbara Bonney doing the last two minutes or so, the Allegretto finale, the joy, the “Freud,” the “Der Frühling will kommen:”

There is an unusual performance of the first part using the 'cello rather than the clarinet. The 'cellist's phrasing and expression seem to me to have the whole so I include it, also:

A parallel translation of the lyrics is here.

The second thing is the increase of Elizabeth Warren. The video of her recent questioning of bank regulators “went viral” and I also liked the Bernanke questioning on "too big to fail" banks this last week. The hatred the Wall Street Journal people have for her is beyond shocking - I've never seen anything like it – but there are also many right-wingers who agree with her. She is very clear and to-the-point. The DNC speech, although political, is a lot of fun and a good introduction to her:

Here is a letter she sent to her supporters this morning:

Valdemar --

Attorney General Eric Holder indicated in testimony before the U.S. Senate that some Wall Street banks have gotten so big that they are now above the law.

He actually said earlier this week:

I am concerned that the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.

This is wrong -- just plain wrong. We are a country that believes in equal justice under the law -- not special deals for the big guys. And that's not all the special deals that the big banks get.

According to recent calculations by Bloomberg, the top ten biggest banks receive an $83 billion subsidy every year in the form of lower borrowing costs -- something not available to your community bank or credit union. The markets think that, if things get tough, the government will be there to bail out the big banks again but not the little guys.

To put things in perspective -- that $83 billion subsidy is about the same amount of money being fought over in the sequestration.

So why are we still debating this issue at all? Isn't it obvious that the "too big to fail" problem still exists and is bad for small banks? Bad for taxpayers? Bad for our economy? Bad for justice?

Here's one theory that worries me: maybe people believe that the banks have in fact become too big to shrink. They have started to say that we can't cut these banks down to size.

I'm not one of them, and neither are colleagues of mine like Sen. Sherrod Brown who have been fighting hard on this issue. We know we can take on the big banks and their army of lobbyists and win because we've done it before.

When banks are too big to fail, too big to jail, too big for trial, too big to manage, too big to regulate, too big to shrink, and too big to reform... they are just too big.

We're just getting started here.

Thank you for being a part of this,

Elizabeth

It Was So Refreshing

We look to experts - the famous, the respected, the elite, the peer-reviewed, the learned, people who are supposed to know, the well-paid, the acclaimed, the degreed, the successful - but feel no hope, see no light. Dry as dust. Same old, same old. Like that.

La Bohémienne endormie by Henri Rousseau

But then some fresh reality, like a child even, comes along and surprises us with the truth we were looking for in the wrong places.

I think now of how an art historian, probably my truest teacher, once described to me how he felt on visiting an exhibition of Henri Rousseau's paintings. He spoke of the experience just like a child, directly, purely: “I just felt so refreshed by it.”

 

The immediate reality before my eyes is a newly-published book by Nick Flynn, “The Reenactments,” in which a theme is that our consciousness is like a series of movies that run electro-chemically inside our heads. That's the latest mistaken metaphor for consciousness. That's the exact word being used - “movies” - not “film” not “cinema” not “shows.” My best guess is that this latest metaphor is derived from digital film files such as we download from YouTube or Netflix. It's the very latest metaphor in the materialist tradition. Quote used by Flynn, p. 47:

HEADLINE: Scientists Use Brain Imaging to Reveal the Movie in Our Mind (UC Berkeley News, 2011)

Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching ones own dream on YouTube. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people's dynamic visual experiences – in this case watching Hollywood movie trailers.

As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed [in the lab]. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.

“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today in the journal Current Biology. “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”

Now, as you read the original research report, here, a first reaction might be, 'Oh well, I guess these very sophisticated people know what they are talking about and have honestly confronted the philosophical/metaphysical assumptions about perception on which their research is based.

Is there someone inside the head who is conscious of the movie/consciousness? That's the “simple” but fundamental question that Flynn and some neurobiologists ask about this sophisticated scientific research. If consciousness is assumed to consist of electrochemically-formatted movies, then all there is is movies about movies! Is there some independent perceiver of the movies, or is this just same-old solipsism and lack of acknowledgement of the existence of anyone or thing else outside of one's own head?

I come back for the millionth time to love - appreciation of an other - being the basic but missing question of science, as Eben Alexander might put it, as well as everything else.

A neighbor lady needed some help with her car yesterday, and after I got it done I picked up and held her little four-year-old grand daughter who was with her and watching what was going on. This dear little girl was full of questions and also wanted to tell me about some gadget her mother had just given her. I thought that, yes, here is the essence of true non-solipsism. It was so refreshing. The Berkeley scientists' “breakthrough” seemed delusional and true-death beside it.

Onion's Take on "Bob Dylan"

Bob Dylan Lays Off 2,000 Workers From Songwriting Factory

I think that the above Onion video about "Dylan" is an excellent example of fiction sometimes expressing the truth better than non-fiction could!