Jay
This sounded like everything I'd want in a sci-fi compilation, but it didn't pan out for me. For the expansive fields of writing it's pulling from, it felt oddly near-sighted—the research writing in particular. The AI-generate poetry felt like soulless novelty, even after being edited. The most imaginative pieces, I felt, were the oldest writings in the compilation. Part 1 of Quinzinzinzany (1935) was my favorite. It's worth the price of the magazine and the reason why I'll purchase issue #2 (it's being published in two parts). I also enjoyed Robert Sheckley's Cost of Living (1953) and Bruno Munari's musings on traditional Japanese homes, written in 1971. Out of the contemporary pieces, I enjoyed Hannah Gersen's “Dud Planet.”
What We See When We Read, more aptly titled What I See When I Read, is a collection of Peter Mendelsund's musings over the imagery and consciousness conjured by some of his favorite writing, mainly the canon.
The book is divided into a series of themes (Picturing “Picturing”, Co-Creation, Synesthesia, etc). Each theme starts off with an excerpt followed by exposition about the writing's significance and a few illustrations. Mendelsund's insights are incredibly thoughtful and beg for more in-depth exploration. Sadly, he spent more time on kitsch illustrations (which account for the bulk of the 425 pages) than extruding his ideas into essay-length literary criticism.
The illustrations felt clever at first, but then became an annoyance as they continually interrupted latent insights. With such a staccato rhythm, each new chapter felt like it started without a proper segue or a meaningful development having arisen from the previous chapter. Despite the inclusive title, the writing felt warm with conceit. “Hey, check this out! I thought of this! ...And then I thought of this! Which could mean, but this! I also think of this! Did you ever—Hey! I'm over here now...”
Even so, there are a fair share of gems. I especially enjoyed:
“Often, when I ask someone to describe the physical appearance of a key character from their favorite book they will tell me how this character moves through space. (Much of what takes place in fiction is choreographic.) ... It is how characters behave, in relation to everyone and everything in their fictional, delineated world, that ultimately matters. (“Lumbering, uncoordinated ...”) Though we may think of characters as visible, they are more like a set of rules that determines a particular outcome. ...Aristotle claimed that Self is an action, and that we discover something's nature through knowing its telos (its goals). A knife becomes a knife through cutting...”
“A thing that is ‘captured' by an author is taken from its context in the real world, where this event or thing may exist in a state of flux. An author might notice a wave in the ocean (or a “silvery pool”), and merely by remarking upon this wave, the author stabilizes it. It is now removed from the indiscriminate mass of water that surrounds it. By taking this wave and holding it fast in language, it ceases to be fluid. It is now an immobile wave.”
“Maybe elaborate descriptions, like colorful descriptions, are misdirection. They seem to tell us something specific and meaningful (about a character, a setting, the world itself), but perhaps such description delights in inverse proportion to what it reveals. The writer Gilbert Sorrentino takes John Updike's A Month of Sundays to task: When the aim is ‘vivid' writing, it seems that anything goes as long as the surface dances ... The work buckles and falls apart time after time under the weight of this concatenation of images, often linked together by comparisons that work to conceal the reality they are supposedly revealing: ‘... newsletters and quarterlies that pour through a minister's letter slot like urine from a cow's vulva.' Such writing is, Sorrentino tells us, ‘Shiny and meaningless.' The relationship between a mail slot and a cow's vulva is confusing. Two objects are compared in order to help focus our mind's eye, while in fact just the opposite happens—we focus only on the bolder (or in this case more grotesque) of the two images. By contrast, Jean Giono writes: ‘Look up there, Orion–Queen Anne's lace, a little bunch of stars.' I see the flower, then I see the flowering of stars in the night sky. The flower itself doesn't appear in the night sky of my mind, but the flower determines how the stars are arrayed. Giono's stars are clearer to me than Updike's mail slot. Maybe that is because Giono would like me to see his stars, whereas Updike would like me to see—what? His prose? Giono's flower and his stars are held in balance. One image assists the other. (Giono could have written: “a little cluster of white stars.” But this description doesn't bloom in quite the same way.)”
“There is no real unity without incorporeality.” Moses Maimonides ... Maimonides subscribed to an approach known as “negative theology” in which one comes closer to God by enumerating the things he is not. Characters have only implied corporeality. And our imaginations grant them unity. But characters are also defined by what they are not. By asserting that Vronsky was a squarely built, dark man, not very tall... ...Tolstoy informs us that Vronsky is neither blond, nor short.”
“Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader.”
The writing in this adult picture book is a sardonic rip at our culture's obsession with zombies through the lens of reappropriated artwork from (my guess is) the 1950-60's. It has the feel of a collection of New Yorker comics focusing on the theme of the Apocalypse:
“Sebastian is manning the Ventnor comms station on the Isle of Wight. An island is a safe place to be because it is easily quarantined, but supplies from the mainland can be irregular. If the islanders find out Sebastian is hoarding the last roll of toilet paper, they will break in and kill him.”
I expected a few laughs from the absurd juxtapositions, but was surprised to find an analogizing of our current paranoia over zombies with our history of casting indigenous peoples as primitive savages.
Social commentary on deeply ingrained racial biases gives this book more of a reason for being besides a few cheap jokes about how oblivious people of the 1950's seem to us today.
In Lewis Lapham's “Preamble,” he likens the enigmatic state of intoxication to a “house with many mansions,” of which we are offered the full-scale tour—told through first-hand accounts, from hallucinatory grandeur and theatrical revelry through political protest and crestfallen destitution. Broken into three parts—“the urge,” “the high,” and “the hangover”—the polychoral compilation yearns, awes, and then writhes through a singular experience of intoxication sung by the voice of the many who experienced it.
In “the urge” we hear from Harpo Marx with drinking buddy, John Barrymore:
“No matter where Barrymore stood, you had the illusion that he was under a spotlight. He was every inch, ounce, and fiber a masterful actor. He was also a masterful magician. By the time we sat down to eat, he was fried. He had stolen two drinks from me alone, before I'd had a sip of either one. I was under his spell and didn't know what had happened until it was too late.
During dinner I noticed that he was drenched with sweat. His shirt and jacket were soaked through, and sweat was streaming down his face. I told him to go ahead and take his coat off, if he was too warm. When he found my eyes, he gave me the piercing, pained look of a wounded eagle. “My dear Marx,” he said. “To perspire is a gift of Providence. It saves me the trouble of pissing.”
And what's not to love about Honoré de Balzac's madness for coffee:
“Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and with legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous (a chemical term meaning without water), consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, which, as you know from Brillat-Savarin, is a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quickly march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”
Followed by a sober view of the effects of alcohol addiction on Native Americans—Little Turtle, from a speech to the Baltimore Annual Meeting of Friends:
“Brothers, when our young men have been out hunting and are returning home loaded with skins and furs, on their way, if it happens that they come along where some of this whiskey is deposited, the white man who sells it tells them to take a little and drink. Some of them say no. I do not want it. They go until they come to another house, where they find more of the same kind of drink. It is there again offered. They refuse, and again the third time; but finally the fourth time, one accepts it and takes a drink, and getting one he wants another, and then a third and fourth till his senses have left him. After his reason comes back to him, he gets up and finds where he is. He asks for his peltry. The answer is, you have drank them. Where is my gun? It is gone. Where is my blanket? It is gone. Where is my shirt? You have sold it for whiskey. Now, brothers, figure to yourself what a condition this man must be in—he has a family at home, a wife and children that stand in need of the profits of his hunting. What must their wants be, when he is even without a shirt?
This, brothers, I assure you, is a fact that often happens among us. As I have before observed, we have no means to prevent it. If you, brothers, have it in your power to render us any assistance, we hope the Great Spirit will aid you.”
Fredrick Douglas spoke of similar disenfranchisement among enslaved African Americans through the employment of holiday intoxication as a means of crowd control:
“From what I know of the effect of these holidays upon the slave, I believe them to be among the most effective means in the hands of the slaveholder in keeping down the spirit of insurrection. Were the slaveholders at once to abandon this practice, I have not the slightest doubt it would lead to an immediate insurrection among the slaves. These holidays serve as conductors, or safety valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. But for these, the slave would be forced up to the wildest desperation, and woe betide the slaveholder the day he ventures to remove or hinder the operation of those conductors! I warn him that, in such an event, a spirit will go forth in their midst, more to be dreaded than the most appalling earthquake.”
From “the urge” we move on to the glory of “the high”:
“Now, little by little, I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent form and color.” —Albert Hoffman on LSD, 1943
Dennis Covington while investing snake handling in West Virginian churches:
“It occurred to me then that seeing a handler in the ecstasy of an anointing is not like seeing religious ecstasy at all. The expression seems to have more to do with Eros than with God, in the same way that sex often seems to have more to do with death than with pleasure. The similarity is more than coincidence, I thought. In both sexual and religious ecstasy, the first thing that goes is self. The entrance into ecstasy is surrender. Handlers talk about receiving the Holy Ghost. But when the Holy Ghost is fully come upon someone like Gracie McAllister, the expression on her face reads exactly the opposite—as though someone, or something, were being violently taken away from her. The paradox of Christianity, one of many of which Jesus speaks, is that only in losing ourselves do we find ourselves, and perhaps that's why photos of the handlers so often seem to be portraits of loss.”
And even an amputation facilitated by mesmeric trance:
“The operation was now commenced. “Mr. Ward, after one earnest look at the man,” in the words of Mr. Topham, “slowly plunged his knife into the center of the outside of the thigh, directly to the bone, and then made a clear incision round the bone, to the opposite point on the inside of the thigh. The stillness at this moment was something awful; the calm respiration of the sleeping man alone ... Yet, notwithstanding all this, the patient's “sleep continued as profound as ever. The placid look of his countenance never changed for an instant; his whole frame rested, uncontrolled, in perfect stillness and repose; not a muscle was seen to twitch. To the end of the operation, including the sawing of the bone, securing the arteries, and applying the bandages, occupying a period of upward of twenty minutes, he lay like a statue.” —John Elliotson, 1843
One of my favorites comes from Walter Benjamin on the riddle of trance:
“To begin to solve the riddle of the ecstasy of trance, one ought to meditate on Ariadne's thread. What joy in the mere act of unrolling a ball of thread! And this joy is very deeply related to the joy of intoxication, just as it is to the joy of creation. We go forward; but in so doing, we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy this pleasure of discovery against the background of the other, rhythmic bliss of unwinding the thread. The certainty of unrolling an artfully wound skein—isn't that the joy of all productivity, at least in prose? And under the influence of hashish, we are enraptured prose-beings raised to the highest power.”
In “the hangover,” John Addington Symonds ponders having an actual Experience after the effects of chloroform and laughing gas have worn off:
“To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain. Yet, this question remains: is it possible that the inner sense of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God?”
And from a closing essay by Sven Birkerts on how intoxication helps pierce the veil of superficial experience to taste the underlying essence:
“For Emerson, the intoxication is not escape but access, a means of getting closer to “the fact,” which might, with heartfelt imprecision, be called life itself. What he means by “public power,” I think, is something like what Carl Jung and others later meant by the phrase collective unconscious , the emphasis falling on the unconscious , that posited reservoir of our shared archetypes and primordial associations—that which reason by itself cannot fathom, for it is, in essence, antithetical to reason. Only through this other communion, through short-circuiting of the mediations of the day self—the order-making Apollonian ego structure—can the poet reach what is the truer immediacy. For this to happen, the tyranny of time—the feeling of being trapped in a forward-moving sequence of moments—must be banished. Intoxication is, among other things, the destruction of the timekeeper, a release into the duration state.”
Quite the mix of insight! If you're curious to know more about the lot of the inebriated, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better compilation.
In caring for us, our parents not only bestow our livelihood but imprint upon us, whether consciously or unconsciously, their worldview, belief system, and biases. In this way, parents shape not only how we perceive reality, but also our personal identity. Eventually most children realize that their parents are not gods—they are ordinary, fallible people. And while this can be a traumatic realization, coming from the supple gossamer of childhood dependency, it is integral to adulthood.
On a much broader scale, governments produce a similar effect in their citizenry. For want of nationhood, local governments employ compulsory schooling as a means for creating a cohesive populace. A sense of national identity is imbued through the careful discipline of historiography outlined in American history textbooks used in schools across the country.
Loewen lays out some of the narratives underlying American history texts, and deconstructs them to illustrate how they contribute to unconscious biases that lead to racism, ethnocentrism, imperialism, and even genocide.
The analysis begins with the process of heroification—illustrating the ways in which history texts flatten our understanding of historical figures such as Helen Keller, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and Woodrow Wilson into decontextualized anecdotes. Taking Wilson as an example, the majority of history texts share his involvement in forming the League of Nations and support of women's suffrage, but leave out his racial segregation of the federal government and how under his command, US-involvement in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas. Students also will not find this quote in their history texts, from Wilson's “An Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association,” made while President of Princeton University in 1909:
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
Loewen builds from the individual to the collective process of heroification, showing how it fortifies our sense of American exceptionalism:
“As part of the process of heroification, textbook authors treat America itself as a hero, indeed as the hero of their books, so they remove its warts. Even to report the facts of income and wealth distribution might seem critical of America the hero, for it is difficult to come up with a theory of social justice that can explain why 1 percent of the population controls almost 40 percent of the wealth. Could the other 99 percent of us be that lazy or otherwise undeserving? To go on to include some of the mechanisms—unequal schooling and the like—by which the upper class stays upper would clearly involve criticism of our beloved nation.”
“Textbook authors seem to believe that Americans can be loyal to their government only so long as they believe it has never done anything bad.” As we become aware of this educational movement we are left to infer that “criticism is incompatible with citizenship.”
After exposing the effects of selective history, Loewen then investigates the causes:
“In interviews with me, publishing executives blamed adoption boards, school administrators, or parents, whom they feel they have to please, for the distortions and lies of omission that mar U.S. history textbooks. Parents, whether black militants or Texas conservatives, blame publishers. Teachers blame administrators who make them use distasteful books or the publishers who produced them. But authors blame no one. They claim credit for their books. Several authors told me that they suffered no editorial interference. Indeed, authors of three different textbooks told me that their editors never offered a single content suggestion. ‘That book doesn't have fifty words in it that were changed by the editor!' exclaimed one author. ‘They were so respectful of my judgment, they were obsequious,' said another. ‘I kept waiting for them to say no, but they never did.'”
“The American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Reviews in American History do not review high school textbooks. Thus, the authors' academic reputations are not really on the line.”
“There is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between the sophisticated understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by teachers.” —Marc Ferro, Historian
Quite disconcerting, yah?
Much like the traumatic realization of the mortality and fallibility of our parents, the same realization must be made in relation to our country, our government. If we are to pursue a democratic society, we have a civic duty to seek a critical understanding of our nation's sordid past and how it inevitably shapes the events of today. If any of this sounds worthwhile, then this book is a great start.
“In history, accuracy is political.”
When I first tried to encapsulate Amy Leach's writing I came up with the description: “picture a 12 year-old Annie Dillard over-dubbing a David Attenborough documentary after guzzling 40 oz. of Mountain Dew.” But then I realized that's pretty degrading and doesn't come close to capturing the depth of her poetry. What I was trying to get across, which I think most readers will notice first about her writing, is the gravitational force of her energy. There is so much vitality in her writing! How the hell does she confine it all in her singular being?!
In pondering Amy's existence I'm reminded of this Susan Sontag quote:
“If the outside corresponded to the inner life in people, we couldn't have “bodies” as we do. The inner life is too complex, too various, too fluid. Our bodies incarnate only a fraction of our inner lives. (The legitimate basis for the paranoid endless anxiety about what's “behind” the appearances.) Given that they would still have inner lives of the energy + complexity that they have now, the bodies of people would have to be more like gas—something gaseous yet tangible-looking like clouds. Then our bodies could metamorphose rapidly, expand, contract—a part could break off, we could fragment, fuse, collide, accumulate, vanish, rematerialize, swell up, thin out, thicken, etc. etc. As it is, we're stuck with a soft but still largely determinate (especially determinate with regard to size + dimension + shape) material presence in the world—almost wholly inadequate to these processes which then become “inner” processes. Our bodies become vessels, then—and masks. An imperfect design! An imperfect being!” —As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh
Amy's imaginative use of language alone makes Things That Are a worthwhile read, but underlying such luminous adornments is a deep poetic sussing of the nature of existence. In rococo flair—decked out in crushed velvet tutus and opalescent piping on holographic bodices—her metaphors twirl, dip, and dander around the essence of light, the process of manifesting consciousness, self-actualization, and the human yearning to be to be truly manmade, machines.
“Your blessing is your curse and your curse is your blessing. Because you see details, you cannot see hints of light; because you see hints of light, you cannot see details. You would need diverse eyes if you wished to be equally penetrating and sensitive. You would need to have eyes like the box jellyfish, with its sixteen light-sensitive eyes and eight acute camera-like eyes—all twenty-four eyes hanging down on stalks. However, you would also need a brain. But maybe that is not possible; maybe, in fact, the brainlessness of the box jellyfish is a direct consequence of its tremendous powers of sight. Perhaps neither the animal nor the prophet has been invented who could process so thorough a vision. It is disquieting enough to be hyper-acute or hypersensitive; perhaps being both would very soon melt your brain and leave you quiescent, hanging transparently in the giant dancing green waters of the world.”
WHOA! So many “whoas” while reading Things That Are. And how is it that Amy has time to write? How is she not the sole guest of a radio broadcast where people call in from 6AM to 6PM to ask her what she thinks about cellular mitosis, aspartame, and the former Soviet Republic? To then host a banquet on the mating habits of Neolithic ideas? Followed by amending 40 new words to her fledgling language, Z1pE? I suppose it's because she's selfish. So we're left to wonder...
“Stars are my bonfires, blue is my diaphanous land”
Prior to Hallucinations, my first reading of Oliver's* work, I've been a fan through his appearances on Radiolab and recommendations by friends. What I found most enjoyable in his writing is the characteristic way he elucidates neurological phenomena through a humanitarian lens. I have a rudimentary education in science and lean towards the humanities in interest, so being able to read the first-hand accounts of patients made an otherwise dense topic approachable and relatable. It also allows for the reader to empathize with these patients in their search for understanding and consolation, which seems most important when dealing with neurological disorders that are so readily stigmatized as psychosis. Our contemporary scientific and medical practices have a tendency to isolate the person from the ailment in the search for understanding. Oliver trekked against the tide by placing the patient back into focus.
Here are the four concepts I've found most insightful after reading Hallucinations...
1. Perception is a two-way street, involving not only reception but also generation:
“We are not given an already made, preassembled visual world; we have to construct our own visual world as best can. This construction entails analysis and synthesis at many functionals levels in the brain, starting with perception of lines and angles and orientation in the occipital cortex. At higher levels, in the inferotemporal cortex, the “elements” of visual perception are of a more complex sort, appropriate for the analysis and recognition of natural scenes, objects, animal and plant forms, letters, and faces. Complex visual hallucinations entail the putting together of such elements, an act of assemblage, and these assemblages are continually permuted, disassembled, and reassembled.”
2. The stigmatization of hallucinations, especially hearing voices, is a recent societal development:
“Psychiatry, and society in general, had been subverted by the almost axiomatic belief that ‘hearing voices' spelled madness and never occurred except in the context of severe mental disturbance. This belief is a fairly recent one, as the careful and humane reservations of early researchers on schizophrenia made clear. But by the 1970s, antipsychotic drugs and tranquilizers had begun to replace other treatments, and careful history taking, looking at the whole life of the patient, had largely been replaced by the use of DSM criteria to make snap diagnoses.”
3. Hallucinations are an incredibly common neurological phenomenon, occurring as a result of sensory deprivation (sometimes within one hour), the loss of limbs, migraines, Parkinson's disease, post-traumatic stress, intoxication, hypnagogic and hypnopompic “sleep” states, exhaustion, sleep deprivation, epilepsy, brain damage i.e. strokes, dementia, delirium, and schizophrenia—to name a few.
4. The meaning-making that we place on hallucinations is an entirely subjective exercise largely influenced by the superstitions of the current social climate, i.e. witch trials:
“In Charles Bonnet syndrome, there seems to be a mechanism in the brain that generates or facilitates hallucination—a primary physiological mechanism, related to local irritation, “release,” neurotransmitter disturbance, or whatever—with little reference to the individual's life circumstances, character, emotions, beliefs, or state of mind. While people with such hallucinations may (or may not) enjoy them as a sensory experience, they almost uniformly emphasize their meaninglessness, their irrelevance to events and issues of their lives.”
“But one can readily see why others, perhaps of a different disposition, might interpret the “sure knowledge of the close presence of a sort of mighty person' and ‘a startling awareness of some ineffable good' in mystical, if not religious, terms. Other case histories in [William] James's chapter bear this out, leading him to say that “many persons (how many we cannot tell) possess the objects of their belief not in the form of mere conceptions which the intellect accepts as true, but rather in the form of quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended.
Thus the primal, animal sense of ‘the other,' which may have evolved for the detection of threat, can take on a lofty, even transcendent function in human beings, as a biological basis for religion passion and conviction, where the “other,” the “presence,” becomes the person of God.”
* * I think I would've enjoyed the book a bit more if it started with the chapter titled “Altered States.” In this chapter we learn about Oliver's own experiences of hallucinations, often under altered states of consciousness while on his “drug holidays.” It concluded with a revelatory story about how Oliver learned of his life's purpose while on a 10-hour amphetamine bender. This story vividly displayed the depth of his curiosity and intensity with which he approached life. It aptly frames the rest of the book as the thesis for his writing, but we only learn of it six chapters in.While there's a clear sense of Oliver's compassion for his patients, I feel like he relied too much on his patients in telling their own stories. The tone of the writing felt a bit hands-off in providing grander insights into the mystery of hallucinations, which I found surprising since it was written at the end of his career. I wanted more connective tissue between stories. While this came in full force during Oliver's own accounts of hallucination in Chapter 6, afterwards my interest began to waiver. It felt like I was being handed a stack of case studies to sift through, although each of the patient stories has its own poetic brilliance:“I am maneuvered into a delightfully soft chair. I sink, submerged as usual in shades of night...the sea of clouds at my feet clears, revealing a field of grain, and standing about it a small flock of fowl, not two alike, in somber plumage: a miniature peacock, very slender, with its little crest and unfurled tail feathers, some plumper specimens, and a shore bird on long stems, etc. Now it appears that several are wearing shoes, and among them a bird with four feet. One expects more color among a flock of birds, even in the hallucinations of the blind...The birds have turned into little men and women in medieval attire, all strolling away from me. I see only their backs, short tunics, tights or leggings, shawls or kerchiefs...Opening my eyes on the smoke screen of my room I am treated to stabs of sapphire, bags of rubies scattering across the night, a legless vaquero in a checked shirt stuck on the back of a small steer, bucking, the orange velvet head of a bear decapitated, poor thing, by the guard of the Yellowstone Hotel garbage pit. The familiar milkman invaded the scene in his azure cart with the golden horse; he joined us a few days ago out of some forgotten book of nursery rhymes or the back of a Depression cereal box...But the magic lantern show of colored oddities has faded and I am back in black-wall country without form or substance...where I landed as the lights went out.”—Virginia Hamilton Adair, poet (who suffered from Charles Bonnet Syndrome after losing her eyesight to glaucoma)I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in altered states of consciousness and the peculiar powers of perception. I plan to follow up this book with Oliver's memoir, On the Move, to hear more about this endearing man who turned over rocks looking for pure indigo, “the color of heaven,” “the color of the Paleozoic sea!”Oliver's writing style feels like he's writing more to a friend than an unknown reader, and “Oliver” has a much more pleasing sound than SACKS!
The Road Less Traveled begins with two very basic premises—suffering is integral to life and avoidance of challenge is a characteristic of human nature. What follows is a selection of case studies from M. Scott Peck's pyschotherapeutic practice. Each of them illustrating the remarkably creative ways we let our emotions circumvent rationality in decision-making, from the mundane to the life-altering. We so easily choose the path of myopic, infantile, self-destructive behavior, because remaining unconscious, passive actors in our own lives is less painful than confronting the difficult path we are required to traverse in order to achieve mental health.
“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” —Carl Jung
So we trudge along, carrying all of our unresolved disorders imprinted upon us by our parents, their parents' parents, and on. There are certain people we do not get along with. We know them well. They fit a “type.” So we avoid all characters that fit the bill. There are certain situations we do not get along in. We also know them well. They also fit a “type.” So we avoid all situations that fit that bill. There are even certain thoughts we do not get along with. We've got their type marked and we do pretty damn well at avoiding them too. People, places, things—all covered. With our neurotic blueprint in hand we know exactly how to raze all the walls in the labyrinth.
At last we are secure in our comfort zone where resistance is our path of least resistance. It's a quiet place. Low humidity. Warm, but not too warm. Occasionally it rains, but we've got buckets for the leaks. We learn to keep tempo to the drips. All good news comes in quarter notes. Then one day, in the budding ennui, perhaps over a bowl of Cheerios, while changing the kittie litter, or hitting reply-all, you lose your vision. Complete darkness. Then your hearing, touch, smell, and finally taste—your most dear friend, gone without a trace. And there you are, lying in the middle of the room, waiting. Time must be passing, but you're not sure, there's no dripping. You feel like you're shaking, like you're heating up, like you smell smoke, like you hear a voice...
“Oh, how happy I am to see you.”
Your eyes flick open, the light registers, and you see the face. Two eyes, a nose, a mouth. It's a human face and it's terrifying. This is the face of Satan and you are going to die.
“SATAN IS GOING TO FUCKING KILL ME!”
“Shhh. Shhhh. Come, come. You are in no harm.”
“I'M DYING! SATAN IS KILLING ME RIGHT NOW!”
“That is not true at all. Look, just take a deep breath.”
“FUUUUUUUUUCK!!!”
“You will close your mouth and breath in deeply through your nose.”
...
“Now exhale through your mouth.”
...
“Very good. Welcome back. Now, it took me a long time to get here. You on the other hand have been lying on the ground in this dingy hovel for, a while. So I am going to do the talking. You may answer my questions. Otherwise, you will remain silent.”
...
“Perfect. Now, before I got here. Were you in discomfort?”
“Yes.”
“And now that I am here. Are you still in discomfort?”
“Yes.”
“Let me ask you again, but first take another deep breath.”
...
“Now that I am here. Are you still in discomfort?”
“No.”
“Perfect. Now, do you like the sensation of this feeling?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like to remain this way?”
“Yes.”
“Then you will do exactly what you were doing before I arrived.”
“But—“
“What did I say earlier?”
...
“Yes, that was a rhetorical question.”
...
“I repeat. You will do exactly what you were doing before I arrived. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Now if you see me again, you did something wrong and our conversation will go a bit differently.”
...
OK, so that definitely was not Satan. [PeeWee Herman laugh] It was an excerpt from an inner dialogue at a moment of crisis. Those lovely moments where we are shown how much power we have through our ability to make decisions for ourselves. How funny that we often feel completely impotent in those moments, right?! That's the pain of freedom. If we truly want to rid to ourselves of dysfunction, we must accept responsibility for our own problems, inherited and self-inflicted, so that we may confront them and work through them.
“...the problem of distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this life is one of the greatest problems of human existence. It is never completely solved; for the entirety of our lives we must continually assess and reassess where our responsibilities lie in the ever-changing course of events. Nor is this assessment and reassessment painless if performed adequately and conscientiously. To perform either process adequately we must possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination.”
“Does that sound like fun?”
“Nope, no fun to be had there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I'm good. I think I hear the drips calling my name.”
Turns out there is more than fun to be had by accepting responsibility for our disorders and committing to working through them, there is joy:
“What transpires then in the course of many years of loving, of extending our limits for our cathexes, is a gradual but progressive enlargement of the self, an incorporation of within of the world without, and a growth, a stretching and a thinning of our ego boundaries ... we become identified with the world. And as our ego boundaries become blurred and thinned, we begin more and more to experience the same sort of feeling of ecstasy that we have when our ego boundaries partially collapse and we “fall in love.”
So this silly little thing called love is the vehicle for transmogrifying pain and suffering into spiritual evolution. Love, the fundamental ordering process, working against the fundamental disordering process, the force of entropy:
“The process of evolution is a miracle, because insofar as it is a process of increasing organization and differentiation, it runs counter to natural law—the downhill flow of energy toward the state of entropy.”
And there we have it, the fundamental opposing forces: laziness and love. And we get to choose. All the time.
“Those who have faced their mental illness, accepted total responsibility for it, and made the necessary changes in themselves to overcome it, find themselves not only cured and free from the curses of their childhood and ancestry but also find themselves living in a new and different world. What they once perceived as problems they now perceive as opportunities. What were once loathsome barriers are now welcome challenges. Thoughts previously unwanted become sources of energy and guidance. Occurrences that once seemed to be burdens now seem to be gifts, including the very symptoms from which they have recovered.”
I've found The Road Less Traveled to be the most insightful synthesis of wisdom on spiritual growth and self-realization I have yet come across. The source of insights range from M. Scott Peck's personal experiences as a psychotherapist to Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, T.S. Eliot, William Johnston, Edith Hamilton, Joseph Campbell, Erik Erikson, Carlos Castaneda, P.D. Ouspensky, and Buckminster Fuller to name a few.
The essential message is nothing new, but what's most helpful is how that path is elucidated through rational analysis and real-world examples of people discovering, understanding, and ultimately changing their dysfunctional behavior. It's always easier to recognize our own disorders in the actions of others, and the patients' stories offer many entry-points for revelation.
My only criticisms are of occasional unnecessary language and the slave-owner analogy used for controlling one's emotions. Phrases like, “In a sense,” “By virtue of the fact,” “First of all, as has been pointed out,” are clumsy and do not add any clarity. The slaver-owner analogy comes off embarrassingly callous. For such a comprehensive conception, this one comes out of nowhere.
My favorite part of the book is Peck's speculation on the purpose of spiritual growth and where our collective evolution may lead. It's such a wild concept, I think learning of it is reason enough to read the book.
“The healing of the spirit has not been completed until openness to challenge becomes a way of life.”
Tomi's illustrated journal of life in Nova Scotia reads like one of his peculiar stories. The lives there as ephemeral and acerbic as the tides, leave the people feeling more like apparitions. Their intermittent visits an offering of comic relief in a place where humor's only service lies in making light of loss. And that loss in Gull Harbor, steady yet unpredictable, becomes an immutable fixture of the landscape, taking on a life of its own.
Life in New York City (what drove Tomi and Yvonne to Nova Scotia) favors callous, and that callous shelters a burgeoning romanticism for reclusion. If you're feeling the hermit's itch, this book will indulge with a hearty scratch and makes for an especially poignant read in winter.
“I had often heard the expression ‘a car wrapped around a telephone pole.' Well, we actually saw one. This car had missed a curve and hit a simple, modest, unpretentious little pole. The pole did not break, but the car, an American whale of a thing, had its chassis bent so that the front bumper literally met the rear bumper. That vehicle must have practiced yoga for quite a while to be able to accomplish such a feat. The driver, his pals, and the telephone pole walked out unharmed.”
“As my wife said the other day, ‘One always exaggerates by telling the truth.'”
I really enjoyed reading How Music Works, and I think that's saying a lot, because I am neither a Talking Heads fan nor a musician. Byrne's writing is casual and easy to read. He favors an impartial tone for most of the book, but opens up with more personal insights in the chapters “Creation in Reverse,” “Amateurs!” and “Harmonia Mundi.” This is where I found Byrne's candor and curiosity most engaging. He makes one hell of an amateur ethnomusicologist for an art-school-dropout-turned-pop-icon.
Aspiring musicians will find the chapters, “In the Recording Studio,” “Collaborations,” and “Business and Finances” incredibly insightful. Byrne uses his own financial history to illustrate different ways to cover the costs of recording, distribution, touring, etc. I really admired not only his transparency (when do celebrities voluntarily share their finances?), but also his attention to detail.
As a primer in music history and ethnomusicology, How Music Works has provided a great jumping off point for plenty of personal research.
“Music was the main poetic metaphor for that which could not be preserved.” -Walter Murch
Bill Coperthwaite, syncretic journeyman extraordinaire, was a man who lived his life as if it was his greatest work of art. A Handmade Life is the testament—a beautifully designed distillation of his philosophy of education (centered around the home), insight gleaned from mentors, cultural wisdom acquired from excursions abroad, and practical instruction on home-building.
Here is one of the more poignant summarizations:
“There was absolutely no way, that I could see, that society could avert catastrophe. Everywhere there was pollution of air, water, minds; everywhere there was crime, poverty, political corruption, war, land and food poisoning...I viewed the mass humanity as easily duped, with people willing to sell themselves for material gain, while remaining provincial and violent. Democracy had become a system in which the many were manipulated by the few. Yet slowly it became clear to me that the basic human stock was sound and that the “democracy” I saw was not democracy but a distortion of it. As I became aware of our untapped potential as human beings, I began to grow in optimism and belief in our latent ability to solve problems...Only a minute percentage of our abilities has been developed...[I was not] concerned with what economic, political, or social system is best.. I [was] concerned with education—the development of human beings, their growth.”
Out of this despair Coperthwaite began a quest compiling the world's cultural wisdom necessary for living a life of simplicity, nonviolence, and the pursuit and dissemination of education.
What I most enjoyed were the wry commentaries on the absurdities of modern life interspersed throughout the book, i.e:
“We started leaving the home to go to work in order to support the home. We have been doing this for so long that we have forgotten the purpose for which we sold ourselves in the first place.”
“...machines can be used to create any form of chair we like, but commercial interests can make more chairs (and more money) if the simplest designs for the machines is chosen for production. So we end up surrounded by furniture designed to fit the needs of machines.”
“Wouldn't it be grand instead of jogging, to pedal exercisers that generate and store electricity? ... Why not seek a way to build up your body and help others at the same time?”
“Are we so afraid of becoming one with the earth that we need to fill dead bodies with poisons and seal them away in caskets to slow their return to the soil? To deny our nature in this way demonstrates a fundamental insecurity and lack of appreciation for life and its cycles.”
“In the past, success has generally been relative and competitive—measured by the failure of others. It now behooves us to think in terms of cooperative success, wherein we feel happy as the group about us succeeds. After all, what does it gain us to be “successful” in a failing society or, as J. Goldsmith has said, “To win in a poker game on the Titanic?”'
If you enjoy the writing of Wendell Berry, Buckminster Fuller, and Dick Proenekke you'll find kinship in Coperthwaite's words.
“How one lives is fundamentally a political act.”
This is the kind of book that I've anticipated for a very long time without knowing it. So it feels like this book came out of nowhere for me. I don't even remember how I stumbled upon it. It might as well have appeared on my dresser after a night of lucid dreaming. And thankfully, it has retained that sense of peculiar existence even after reading.
I really think the conception of this essay collection is perfect. Upon reading the synopsis my mind shot off into an expanse of possibilities. There is easily an entire genre of interpretations latent in this one idea, which I'm only at the beginning of sussing out.
With that said, I placed way too many expectations on this one book. I went into it expecting an entire genre's worth of exploration, recounting, revelation, and discovery. While there certainly are instances of each, they come off in a similar vein to Daniel's prescriptions, microdoses.
These essays are a wonderful display of being present in an aesthetic experience and reflecting on the consciousness that arises from that presence, but there are very few instances where the author connects those aesthetic experiences to anything else in his life. For such an intimate subject I came away feeling like I do not know much about the author, or even the chemical compounds and the process of their curation.
Despite all this, I truly enjoyed reading The Museum Dose, and highly anticipate Daniel's second book. I hope this book becomes an entry-point for similar exploration to many others.
I went into this expecting magic and was disappointed in finding mere admiration. I wanted the planets to feel alive of their own accord, not by the breath of their teller.
Ackerman's writing is exquisite and imaginative. You will certainly feel the depth of wonder and energy that went into these poems, but sadly they do not emit that same life.
Sara's honesty and humility in sharing the trials and tribulations while learning how to homestead while also raising her first child sheds light on the practicality and planning required in successful permaculture design, rather than conveying a romanticized dream of living off the land.
I found her summary on the United States' shifting away from home economics most insightful:
“The government cannot focus on your household, and so they consistently fail to support the best interests of the home. If we accept the national model of what success looks like, then we cannot focus on our households either. A government that demands production and consumption on an endless cycle of growth undermines the very notion of household security. Growth and stability are at odds with one another as long as more human and natural capital is required to generate growth. In the end, you're left to your own devices when it comes to fighting for the integrity of your household. As an alternative to the growth of financial and other types of capital, we can focus on the growth of human capital—education, community and security as valuable investments for our homes.”
Don't judge me. No, no, please do. That's what these reviews are for ... Like many curious young boys, I too went through a “magic phase” although in late-blooming fashion, I entered that phase at the ripe age of 20.
I read this book during the holidays after experimenting with some card tricks and slight-of-hand with my cousin. Details from this book evade me (perhaps that was the intention), but I do remember being entertained enough to read it in two sittings. The most enjoyable parts were the recounting of the lives of Blaine's heroes Max Malini and Harry Houdini.
And now that I think about it, there was supposed to be a treasure hunt with clues hidden in the text revealing where $100,000 have been hidden somewhere in the United States. I never did find out what happened with that contest or Blaine's career post-2002.
—-
“You'll wonder when I'm coming, you'll wonder even more when I'm gone.” - Max Malini
“Human beings don't like to see other human beings lose their lives, but they do love to be on the spot when it happens.” - Harry Houdini
“The most beautiful women you see in public, none of them are for real. They're just men perpetuating their perverted stereotype of women. Just the oldest story in the world. There's a penis on every page of cosmopolitan magazine if you know where to look.”
Not a descriptive summary of the book, although it's definitely my favorite quote. This one gets at it a little better:
“In ancient rome, at the coliseum, the “editor” was the man who organized the bloody games at the heart of keeping people peaceful and united. That's where the word “editor” really comes from. Today, our editor plans the menu of murder, rape, arson, and assault on the front page of the day's newspaper.”
Overall the story felt like Chuck's exhausted his visceral formula and relied on shock value to carry this one over the finish.
Sadly, I think high expectations spoiled the experience. And when you consider having already read the better part of Chuck Palahniuk's collected stories and experiencing the internet as a teenager, Venus in Furs tends to lose it shock value.
—-
“I now had the leisure to muse about the riddle of human existence, and about its greatest riddle of all-woman.”
This quote for me seems to embody the thread connecting each of the stories:
“You seem incredibly faraway to me, like someone on the other side of a lake. A dot so small that it isn't male or female or young or old; it is just smiling.”
A yearning for connection, despite ultimately untraversable separation. Regardless of the fixation on desperation, Miss July has a way with words.
“The interesting thing about Positive is that it never mentions HIV. If it weren't for the advertisements-Retrovir, Sustiva, Viramune-you would think it was a magazine about staying positive, as in upbeat. For this reason it is my favorite magazine. All the other ones build you up just to knock you down, but the editors at Positive understand that you have already been knocked down, again and again, and at this point you really don't need to fail a quiz called “Are you so sexy or just so-so?” Positive prints lists of ways to feel better, kind of like “Hints from Heloise.” They seem easy to write, but that's the illusion of all good advice. Common sense and the truth should feel authorless, writ by time itself.”
and a personal favorite:
“...letting go of mammalian pride.”
Perfume is a wonderfully perverse character study of the dichotomy between being an acutely sensual artisan and a callous sociopath. His descriptions are as vivid, ethereal, and visceral as the scents the protagonist determined to capture.
—-
“For people could close their eyes to greatness, to horrors, to beauty, and their ears to melodies or deceiving words, but they could not escape scent. For scent was a brother of breath.”
A cultural study on people who's basic instinct of self-preservation became secondary to the desire to produce original works.
“Our current obsession with creativity is the result of our continued striving for immortality in an era when most people no longer believe in an after-life.” - Arianna Sstassinopoulous
