Hallucinating Foucault

The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. It cannot be proven to exist.

Hallucinating Foucault is an intricate, intellectual novel, a light shining into that dark corner where romantic passion and scholarship meet. It is as deeply flawed as only a first novel can be, but charming. It features a young graduate student, studying the works of famous and wild French author Paul Michel, whose Germanist lover pushes him into tracking down the author. Michel, a paranoid schizophrenic, has been living in an asylum for ten years.

I found myself swept off my feet by this novel, willing to forgive even it most improbable twists and bizarre characters. The narrative has a dreamlike quality, held together by its own internal logic. The first half of the novel is especially captivating, dominated by a love affair and academia: everyday stuff, if a bit surreal. Dunker’s second half is a little shakier, as the schizophrenic Paul Michel takes on a larger role and the narrator leaves his everyday life behind. Michel goes sane a little too quickly under the narrator’s influence, playing too easily into the old trope of mental illness cured by the power of love. The narrator, on the other hand, carries the story forward, with a delicate voice and that captures Duncker’s fine eye for detail. In the end, his cool, almost clinical descriptions of passion pulled me through to the end.

Foucault plays a part in the back story but, disappointingly, completely fails to appear.

Poetry: Alberts Goldbart’s “Library”

This poem ranges between funny and sad, between obvious and breathtaking, with the same kind of strange logic that books cluster and accumulate. A passage:

This chapbook was set in type and printed by hand, by Larry Levis’s then-
    wife, the poet Marcia Southwick, in 1975. It’s 1997 now and Larry’s
    dead — too early, way too early — and this elliptical, heartbreaking poem
    (which is, in part, exactly about too early death) keeps speaking to me
    from its teal-green cover: the way they say the nails and the hair
    continue to grow in the grave.
This book is two wings and a thorax the size of a sunflower seed.

Defining Religion

I look at religion as a scientist might, as something to be dissected and studied, rather than experienced.  I grew up in an agnostic household, the kind with a Christmas tree every December.  My father, culturally Jewish and rather agnostic himself, used to quote the New Testament the same way that he quoted Shakespeare.  I’ve spent more time reading St. Augustine than I have in church.  As a child, I thought of of the Bible as literature, and even now I tend to look at sacred texts as stories, heavily influenced by the contexts they were composed in, rather than religious pillars in their own right.  Particularly in cases dealing with womens’ rights and the like, I may be too quick to dismiss religious beliefs that clash with my ideals as ’simply’ products of a particular culture.

In literature, in art, in architecture, I find religious works beautiful and compelling, but I find that I tend to distrust the actual practice of organized religion.  I never did it, after all.  My mother was a member of a Christian cult for several years, and left disillusioned after seeing the way they spent their money.  I don’t recall her ever speaking poorly of religion as a whole, but I can’t imagine that haven’t I completely avoided absorbing that distrust.  The value of religion for me, then, tends to be less in the actual practice in more in the cultural artifacts and traditions that spring up around it.

Religion is a slippery concept, easier to identify than circumscribe; as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, possibly indefinable, “but I know it when I see it.”  It has certain characteristics, chief among them a belief in some sort of god, higher power, transcendent human spirit, or mythical experience that cannot be touched without religious aid.  It has a narrative, a mythos, and it places the person who participates in it within the scope of that greater story.  It makes people a part of something larger than their ordinary groups.

It is a cultural phenomenon, a belief system than can both embed itself within a culture and transcend cultures.  A religion requires groups of people, even in the sad cases where all but one of them are past, dead, existing only in memory.  Even given all other factors, a religion cannot exist for only one person.  To transcend ’spirituality’, it requires some form of community.  Perhaps because of this, religion often functions as a vessel, carrying cultural information, tradition, or prohibitions through generations and across space.  It has a tendency to pick up the native ritual and belief systems of those who adopt it, and so is dynamic, liable to change and absorb new culture as well as maintain the old.

Religion is a symbol system,  but it’s a symbol system that serves a purpose.  It’s a set of stories, but those stories mean nothing without the storyteller and the listener.  Effectively, religion is a tool that people use to perceive the world, a lens through which they regard the things around them.  This doesn’t imply that God, or gods, or the spiritual experience is nothing but a way of looking at the world.  Gods may or may not exist, but their existence is a question of fact.  Religion exists beyond the factual.  The divine may live in heaven, or shoulder to shoulder with humans, or within the human heart, but although that divinity is often the basis for religion, it is a part of religion only by extension.  Religion is the stories that spring up around it, the way that belief takes hold in everyday practice and changes the way people look at life.

Quote: On Boredom

Being bored doesn’t mean that “there’s nothing to do,” as children imprecisely complain to their parents on a rainy day, dragging their feet on the rug and kicking the sofa. It means that something big—whether it’s rain, other people, or our own hot-to-the-touch fears—is keeping us from doing what we want to do, from playing outside, from expressing ourselves, from moving forward.

Patients, Patients: Television: The New Yorker

Competitive Neuroticism

Recent research by Australian researchers shows that, in the context of strategic video games, neurotic AI may do better than rational ones. From Mind Hacks:

They used the popular strategy game Age of Mythology and created four software ‘bots’ to play the computer which were loosely based on the ‘big five‘ personality traits.

When they compared their successes, the version designed to simulate ‘neurotic’ personality traits came equal first in number of games won, but was the clear winner when the average time to victory was compared.

This AI was programmed to distort the its own perception of resources and flip between aggressive and defensive styles of play unpredictably. In trials, the neurotic AI beat Age of Mythology more often than any AI except the ‘aggressive’ bot, and won faster than even the agressive one did.

This study doesn’t prove much of anything, at this point, except that Age of Mythology favors a slightly uneven playing style, but the implications fascinate me. Against humans, perhaps in a poker game, it’s easy to see how a bit of unpredictability could make for a better game. It’s pretty easy to confuse and blindside a person. However, I don’t think Age of Mythology’s program is intelligent enough to develop complex thoughts about what strategies a player is using. (I could be wrong, of course.) I don’t think machines are susceptible to the cognitive traps that humans might fall into. In light of this, I’m not sure how the neurotic AI managed to win. Reason dictates that a well-informed person will have better strategy than a misinformed person, right?

If mild neuroticism really does allow people to win more often then their purely rational counterparts, it could provide a great deal of support for theories arguing that mental illnesses are more severe forms of adaptive habits.

Painful Life: photos from a Chinese asylum

Courtesy of Virtual China, images from an exhibition of photos from a Chinese asylum. I couldn’t find any sort of date on these, but I assume the Chinese government wouldn’t permit an exhibition in China unless they were reasonably old.

These do remind me of the old photos of American psychiatric wards. The mentally ill have been treated with too little care everywhere.

Zen Psychology: Morita Therapy

Shoma Morita founded Morita therapy in 1919 to treat shinkeishitsu, a Japanese culture-specific anxiety disorder characterized by hypochondria and social phobia. Since then, its use has expanded to anxiety, depression, bereavement, shyness, and some inconclusive trials for schizophrenia. In addition to cognitive-behavioral therapy, it is one of the primary therapies used in China.

Morita therapy encourages its patients to accept their feelings as natural, without trying to change them. According to the Morita framework, feelings cannot be controlled. Patients learn to focus their attention away from their emotions and simply act without trying to change how they feel. The focus is on a “reality-oriented attitude”, which is less self-centered and more in touch with the external world. According to the ToDo Institute:

Cure is not defined by the alleviation of discomfort or the attainment of some ideal feeling state (which is impossible) but by taking constructive action in one’s life which helps one to live a full and meaningful existence and not be ruled by one’s emotional state.

Morita is called a “psychology of action”, because it trusts that the actions people take will improve their moods and feelings, while introspection will not.  It greatly resembles modern-day behavioral therapy in this regard – startling for a therapy pioneered when B.F. Skinner was barely fifteen.

The Upside of Depression

Do you know that old question about what might have happened to Van Gogh if he’d had antidepressants available? It’s a stupid question, in a lot of ways. He killed himself, probably as a result of the same mental illness that shows up in his work. If he’d had Prozac, he might he might have lived to see his own work become famous.

And yet, people ask. Didn’t he gain something? Didn’t we?

There’s no glory to a life lost to mental illness, whether through time wasted away in sickness or through suicide. There’s nothing romantic about depression. (I write this a few days after hearing about Heath Ledger’s possible suicide.) We, as humans, have lost too many people to mental illness, to early death, to unbearable pain. We have lost brilliant people to psychotic worlds of their own creation. No amount of creativity will ever justify the raw cost of mental illness. No benefit can justify this degree of human suffering. So, maybe Van Gogh never would have painted The Starry Night, and the world would go on without him. Maybe he would have become a better painter, tempered by age and experience. Maybe he would have prevented World War I. We will never know.

I’m going somewhere with this, actually. There’s an article up on The Guardians’ Joe Public blog asking, Would you vote for an MP with mental health issues? The attached poll, at this moment, is resoundly in favor of doing so, but I’m inclined to wonder if Americans would so easily say the same thing. Americans seem to like strong leaders, and I can imagine the fear that someone with a history of depression might break under stress. But I think of Winston Churchill (depression), and Abraham Lincoln (also depression), and I know that these people made spectacular leaders.

Here’s where Van Gogh comes in. People with mental illnesses are, above all, people; some are full of wisdom and some seem stuck in their own minds. However, I think that people with mental illness must derive some advantage from it. I don’t honestly believe that depression has an evolutionary advantage, but as we see in Van Gogh, it does have some connection to creativity. Various studies have found that people with depression tend to gravitate towards creative professions.

I think, also, that depression makes people more aware of the pain of others. Suffering builds compassion, and the pointless suffering of depression helps us to feel for people who have gone through things without actually enduring them.  On a fundamental level, this means that people who have gone through depression and overcome it are more equipped to help those in trouble, tend to those in pain, and console those living with grief.  Where depressive episodes make people less sociable, depression in life can make people better social animals.

I would never wish Van Gogh’s life on anyone. Whatever benefits depression may offer, they aren’t worth hurting innocent people for. I believe, however, that the people out there with mental illnesses can find some benefit in what they’re experiencing, instead of letting themselves suffer for no reason. What differentiates Van Gogh from so many others is that he used his illness to give something to the world.

Insight 1-22-2008

Paragraphein has a beautiful post about the new PBS documentary, The Lobotomist:

The common practices, the reactions to anyone “deviant…”, they’ve all evolved over the years. All products of their times.

What tends not to change, though, is the voices of the people who’ve lived through the basic, core experience: losing a child to adoption; suffering from a mental illness.

You’d think, this being the case, that whenever the “experts” have the next great idea, whenever they want to implement a new practice, they might thus stop to consult us–you know, the people who live it, and the people who–across the ages–tend to use the same metaphors for our experiences.

But too often, the “experts” don’t listen. Too often, they don’t even ask. And too often, it doesn’t even occur to them to ask.

King and Clergy in Birmingham

I wrote this academic essay of King’s “Letter to Birmingham Jail” this summer. I’m a great admirer of King, and although I don’t have time to write a post on his thoughts today, I don’t want to let today’s celebration of his life pass unmarked. May your message live on, Dr. King.

On April 12, 1963, with Martin Luther King in Birmingham jail and tension mounting in the city, eight white Alabama clergymen issued a statement condemning the “extreme measures” of the Birmingham demonstrations as “unwise and untimely.” Although King responded directly to this statement with his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the clergy’s statement didn’t actually address him at all. Aside from a brief disparaging remark about protests “directed and led in part by outsiders”, in fact, it never mentioned the leaders of the civil rights movement at all. (Carpenter et all) Instead, they addressed the statement towards “our Negro citizens.” King’s choice, then, to address his open letter to them directly, rather than to the black citizenry he depends on, strikes an odd chord at first. Wouldn’t his response be better directed to the same people the Alabama clergymen target? Why does he bother with those white preachers at all?