Rough Fractals

Three Prayers...

2012-01-21T16:20:00.001-05:00

Maybe prayer is a way to self induce a sense of connectedness (even if just for a split second) that (somewhat paradoxically) transcends self absorption (if there even is such a thing, really).

Here are three poems that I like in that vein. In Witness, Denise Levertov's "mountain" may be hidden in veils of inattention, apathy and fatigue but despite refusal or forgetting the mountain remains just a few yards away, there for the seeing.

And in The Wild Geese, Wendell Berry, similarly wants to be released from the clutter in his head. To be led by "abandon" the way we are in love or sleep, that, like it does to Geese on migration, would hold us to our way clear to what we need, to "here" (Does he mean what we need is here (geographically) or does he mean "here" as a noun - like we might need a hammer or a bell - in this case what we need is "here-ness")? (The sheer abandon of the geese as they pass - in a way its own kind of "faith").

Both Levertov and Berry evoke the far away.. the mountain... the Geese high above us as the sky closes...to bring us to the not very far away at all; to ... here...or to a few yards up the road. It's like CS Lewis's wardrobe, you open the door to enter a new universe that is actually in your own living room all along. Or like Ram Das's simple suggestion about where and how to find the mountain: Be Here Now. Or what Marie Howe tells us in What The Living Do is "the everyday we speak of "when we feel a "cherishing so deep" it renders us speechless (or as Berry says "quiet in heart, and in eye, clear.")

I like these poems a lot. They seem like prayers to me.

WITNESS

Sometimes the mountain

is hidden from me in veils

of cloud, sometimes

I am hidden from the mountain

in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,

when I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day,

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.

~ Denise Levertov ~

The Wild Geese

Geese appear high over us,

pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,

as in love or sleep, holds

them to their way, clear

in the ancient faith: what we need

is here. And we pray, not

for new earth or heaven, but to be

quiet in heart, and in eye,

clear. What we need is here.

— Wendell Berry

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.

And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.

It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I can't turn it off.

For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those

wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.

Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want

whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,

say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:

I am living, I remember you.

~ Marie Howe ~

The Three "A's"...

2012-01-09T12:24:00.000-05:00

Two quotes that I think go together quite well and which, between them, cover what is, as far as I can tell, the marrow -- acceptance, awareness and action:

“We are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and detached, miserable and mentally disordered, or whatever.”

-- The late American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan.

"To choose compassion and consolation, requires a measure of obstinacy, a muscular and brutish willfulness that is also an authentic kind of grace."

-- A.O. Scott, New York Times film critic on the movie, War Horse.

Q for Child Psychiatrists: Ritalin and Substance Abuse?

2012-01-06T21:38:00.000-05:00

My limited understanding about our knowledge of alcohol, benzodiazepines and certain stimulants is that they permanently change the brain. I think the reasoning is that the brain seeks to maintain homeostasis, thus, if a depressant like alcohol is used in excess, the brain produces more stimulant receptors to compensate. Those receptors can go to "sleep" when alcohol use is curtailed but are not eliminated. That is why the term "sleeping tiger" is sometimes used to describe the disease of alcoholism and used as a caution to even the long term sober. It also explains why the long term sober are often hyper sensitive to substances upon relapse. A 10 bag a day heroin user who is sober and relapses years later can overdose on only one bag (which formerly would not even produce a high when he/she was active). It would not surprise me at all to know that stimulants prescribed to children with ADHD (such as Ritalin and Stratera) might also permanently effect brain chemistry in a way that would similarly make someone more susceptible to the effects of certain drugs later in life. I think the question of whether that might also make a child more prone to drug abuse or addiction as an adult is, however, unclear and, I think, complicated and extremely worthy of research.

Classic Song Of The Week - If I Were A Carpenter...

2012-01-05T21:53:00.001-05:00

"Some songs - Dylan's most obviously- have a special quality of loyalty: except on very rare occasions - as when Hendrix covered "All Along The Watchtower" or Keith Jarret "My Back Pages" - they come fully alive only when they are played by their composer. Others drift from performer to performer, happily, promiscuously."

-- Geoff Dyer from his collection of essays: "Otherwise Known As The Human Condition".

I think Tim Hardin's, If I were A Carpenter, is like that. Here he is performing it at Woodstock:

Poem of The Week - Monet by Mueller

2011-12-31T13:26:00.001-05:00

Monet Refuses the Operation

By Liesel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.

The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.

Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

Basketball, politics and contemporary art - a year end note.

2011-12-27T14:39:00.001-05:00

Mark Rothko

Agnes Martin

Metta World Peace

Not only is the world too complicated but so is basketball.

All of a sudden the LA Clippers are contenders to make a playoff run. Ron Artest (on the Lakers) the former poster child for angry, has changed his name to Metta World Peace. Lebron James, one of the most gifted 26 year old athletes on the planet, has become a villain for making a perfectly reasonable career move to Miami...I am baffled by it all.

Watching the action I feel like I am watching rabbits scramble and I can barely see where the rabbit was. I cannot figure out why fouls have been called, or even follow the ball. I have no idea why Lamar Odom was ejected from the game the other day or why he married Khloe Kardashian. My New Year's resolution for this year is to tune into women's basketball. I think the slower pace will suit me...less baffling.

Not only are the world and basketball too complicated but so is contemporary art.

This week we (including my bro-in-law, Billy, who is a walking art encyclopedia - which makes museum going with him fantastic) walked through the permanent collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Here's my take away - I am a convert to the notion that the world would be way better off if we passed a global rule that from now on only women can be in positions of political power. I had this thought when I saw side by side works by Mark Rothko and Agnes Martin. Both use simple horizontal fields of colors. Both have been compared to the experience of looking at natural landscapes. Rothko is muscular - his colors heavy and strong - he paints with a brutish willfulness. Martin's horizontals are pastel - soft and inviting. They whisper compassion and consolation.

I think an Agnes Martin world makes a whole lot more sense than a Mark Rothko world. Or maybe not, who knows? Anyway, Happy New Year and World Peace.

Guest Post: Eloi and Morlocks

2011-12-18T11:11:00.000-05:00

My friend, David, is such a terrific writer I could not resist posting another piece he wrote. (His is the immediate prior rough fractals guest post as well).

This one in response to my describing to him my experience this past week visiting old friends who recently moved near Yosemite in north central California to start a "community". By community I mean that they bought a large enough parcel (70 acres) to build a number of small houses which they are hoping friends and neighbors will do. The current main house will then serve as a central community center. Right now they are using the main house as a Bed and Breakfast for "seekers" - that is to say anyone who would like to spend a few days in a beautiful area to meditate and contemplate (and visit Yosemite). Having moved there 18 months ago many of the locals have joined in the pursuit. When I was there there were blessings before meals and regular group meetings. On Tuesday night ten neighbors came over and after a short meditation we discussed the topic of friendship. For some, the discussion was philosophical for others, personal. We have known each other for 40 years and despite our different paths our friendship has been sustained and when we spoke of that in the group there were a few moist eyes (mine among them).

Below is David's reaction to what I described. He is always smart and has a way of writing that makes neither too much nor too little of the subject matter. I wish I could do that - I always seem to ricochet between the two. (By way of background David is a public interest lawyer who works in health care).

"Sorry I couldn't respond sooner, but on this side of the moon I was preparing for a hearing that I did yesterday. I think I told you about it, surgeon who left his patient in the OR and, in another case, concocted his own stent and implanted it into his patient. Since I worked all last weekend preparing, I'm giving myself today off.

It's been irresistible to compare our respective experiences on the two different sides of the moon. I've been sunk to my eyes in the realm of bad motives and bad acts, the lies that cover them and the hard work it takes to reveal them. And, of course, what it does to me for that to be my work and the world I live in. Meanwhile, you're in a sunny garden world where the locals are trying to recreate Eden. To sharpen the contrast, I spent the morning watching a move called "Saint Misbehavin'," a lovely documentary about Wavy Gravy.

I have to fight against the notion that those folks out in the garden are good hearted Eloi, and I'm just a debased Morlock. In truth, I'd make a pretty bad hippie, although I'm far from immune to the attractions. After some consideration, I think the core difference between the two worlds is more scale than substance, the fact that one is large enough to require institutions and the other isn't and doesn't. I think it's as simple as this: big city, big needs (in this case, health needs), big and complex hospitals arise to serve the needs, norms and rules arise to make sure it's done right, fallible and otherwise imperfect humans contravene the rules and much ugliness ensues.

All of that is at the "Duh" level of obviousness -- so why recite it? Well, part of it is defensiveness on my part. I want to show that there is some necessity for people to do the work I do and I'm not just a dope not to live in the garden. But it also helps me understand some resistance I feel to the tendency of at least some of the Gardeners (yes, let's call them that) to feel that they have hit on something of world transforming relevance. It's not just that they're making their world, but that they sometimes act like they are remaking The World. I see arrogance and lack of perspective in that attitude. If the underlying values have merit -- simplicity, generosity, tolerance, balance -- as they certainly do, it's fine to emphasize them. But even we Morlocks esteem those values, but we also know that they are only part of the prescription for living in a complex world.

Now, that I've justified my existence, I'll proceed on my Morlock way."

(I sent David's response to my friends who agreed with everything he wrote. Their choices are not about saving the world or even suggesting trying to. I think it is about questioning the paradigm for themselves, their friends and their community. Artists, scientists, social activists, inventors, innovators have always been outside. Someone's gotta do that.)

PS: On further thought about this, David added a post script wondering about the tendency to think that others' lives mean something about our own. That they stand as critiques or confirmations or something to be aspired to. Often taking the form of envy. I am not sure he is right about that. Envy seems to me to usually have a built in reservation, a bottom, bottom line belief that the choices we make are, despite our doubts and our envy of the conviction those we aspire to be like seem to hold, the best we could do. That might be denial or it might be honest but either way, there is something to the notion that we all are right where we need to be - that everyone is doing the best they can. Put another way, maybe there are no Eloi and Morlock, no "us" and "them". Not ever. Not deep down.

Guest Post - The Artist

2011-12-05T20:42:00.001-05:00

This is a Rough Fractals guest post written by David Engel. David is a friend of Rough Fractals and the author of the McGraw Hill Guide to World Literature. He sent his interpretation of the recently released movie, The Artist, over the transom.

The Artist is a 2011 French-American film directed by Michel Hazanavicius, starring Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo. The film is itself a silent film and in black-and-white. The story takes place in Hollywood between 1927 and 1932 and focuses on a declining male film star and a rising actress, as silent cinema grows out of fashion and is replaced by the talkies. Dujardin won the Best Actor Award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, where the film premiered.

Below is David's take on it which I really like: (spoiler alert - you might want to see the movie before reading this so as to come at the movie without any preconceived notions (or knowing certain plot developments ahead of time). Watching it is a little like eating those fizzy-popping-exploding-in-your-mouth candies for the first time. You might want your brain taste buds unsullied. So if you like, bookmark this, go see it and then read this.)

"It came to me in the middle of the night (I had a dream) that the Artist’s reluctance to speak – and the movie as a whole -- can be understood in terms of inhibition. Like an inhibition, it’s a mystery (to us and very probably to him as well) whether he won’t speak or can’t speak. Remember when his wife confronts him? – “Why won’t you talk?” It’s not clear if she means talk to her or talk on film – we certainly think of both -- which helps us see that he’s stymied by issues beyond cinematic technique.

In the early part of the movie he’s purely in love with himself, and the film does a good job keeping us from disliking him despite his vanity. In the first scene, he upstages his co-star when they’re taking their bows. He ignores his wife, and he sort of gutters out whenever he’s not in the public eye. I think one of the reason he’s given the dog (and his driver) is to help humanize him, give him a relationship with someone.

I don’t usually think in these terms, and I’m not pandering to the shrinks among us when I say that he makes me think of an infant that just expects to be showered with love without doing anything. And the whole beginning of the movie operates at that fantasy level. Peppy Miller just has to show up at an audition to be instantly made a star. There’s no gap between wish and fulfillment.

The scene where Peppy caresses herself through the sleeve of the Artist’s coat is a vivid image, and critique, of the kind of magical self-love that both buoys and isolates the two of them. And it does isolate them because, although they’re clearly destined for each other they can’t get together. Or won’t. Their relationship with each other has the same stymied quality as the Artist’s can’t/won’t relationship to the prospect of speaking in the movies.

I think their self-love saddles them with inhibitions because like all extreme self-love it’s terribly vulnerable. It can only exist if protected from certain inner shames and doubts and from real or imagined external threats. He’s afraid to hazard his self-love by trying something new – a new way to perform, a new woman. He wants to, but can’t or won’t.

The end is such a pleaser because it overthrows all inhibition for both of them, and the inhibitions of the form as well. Suddenly we have, for the first time, a full sound stage, syncopated music with drums up front, and their wonderful, completely uninhibited dancing. And they’re dancing together, of course.

I think we respond to the movie because it embodies the structure and feeling of inhibition over 90 minutes and then gloriously releases it. It feels true and moving because it’s built out of primal stuff -- our own experiences of, and attitudes toward, early self-love, inhibition, and adulthood. "

-- David Engel

Song Of The Week - Miike Snow - Black and Blue

2011-12-03T13:07:00.001-05:00

Below is a video with lyrics of a song I like by the band, Miike Snow, (spelled with two ii's) called Black and Blue. I cannot figure out what it is about so have given it my own highly subjective interpretation...

There is a saying that captures the insidious nature of the disease of alcoholism: "the longer you are sober, the closer you are to your next drink.". The notion being that the disease is powerful and patient. Put another way, "while the alcoholic stays clean, the disease is doing push ups" waiting for the "all clear" chance to relapse. Insidious. That is what I think this song may be about. But if it is a better title might be something like "The Sleeping Tiger". I do not know what black and blue refers to.

Addiction and Learning...

2011-11-28T15:13:00.001-05:00

Our brains are wired to learn stuff - to speak a foreign language, play music, or do arithmetic. We can learn what makes us feel good about ourselves and how to prioritize. A big part of addiction is the learning of it. Drugs and alcohol teach the brain certain pathways to pain relief, euphoria, numbness, lessening feelings of grief, loss and guilt, anxiety control, mood stabilization and relief from depression and other psychiatric disorders. At first drugs work, until they don't work anymore, and it can be years and lots of damage before an alcoholic realizes that he/she needs a divorce from Mr./Ms. Smirnoff. (footnote 1)

So how do you get a divorce from the only thing you have ever really known, this thing your brain has learned to crave as strongly as it craves food, sex, air and sleep? Craving is a mystery - the diet business thrives on low rates of weight loss success - not for lack of desire to lose weight. Wanting to get clean and staying clean are two different things but if an addict does not pick up his/her drink or drug he/she will not get high. So until the neurological brain chemistry mystery of craving is solved the practical question is not what stops craving but what stops relapse. (footnote 2)

There are a lot of approaches to relapse prevention - psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, hospital or clinic rehabs, outpatient treatment, etc. but the approach that has the most consistent and highest success rate is "working the program" of Alcoholics Anonymous and/or Narcotics Anonymous, i.e., go to AA/NA meetings, get a home group, get phone numbers, use them, make a coffee commitment, get a sponsor, work the steps, lose the old friends, develop a sober network, avoid "people, places and things". Early recovery is a full time job. (AA does not work for everyone - I am just reporting what experience has shown to have the highest success rate - by a wide margin).

If you want to be a lawyer you need to learn what lawyers do. If you want to be a teacher you have to learn what teachers do. If you want to learn sobriety you need to learn what the sober do (and I do not mean just the sober in recovery, I mean what regular non-addicted civilians do - what the poet Marie Howe calls, "What the living do").

The 12 steps of AA are what the living do. Some people think the 12 steps can be divided into 3 categories; 1) accept that substances are making a mess of your life, 2) fix your mess, 3) going forward, do the right thing. Some think that is pretty much what non-addicted civilians do - if they make a mess they clean it up and they move on. It can be tough sledding. Life on life's terms is rarely euphoric and often boring, sad, hard and way too frequently brushed by tragedy. But the living somehow know, deep down, (footnote 3) that while pain is inevitable, suffering is a choice.

Sobriety does not guaranty the absence of pain and suffering but it does provide a chance.

****************

Footnotes:

FN 1: That you come to want what sobriety gives you more than you want what Mr./Ms. Smirnoff gives you.

FN 2: You probably have to learn how to stop using before you can learn why you used in the first place. Rarely is the order reversed.

FN 3: You need a deep reason to stay sober because white knuckling it only works for so long. By "deep" I mean a reason of the heart (whatever that means).

Debates, The DMV, Genius and day to day...

2011-11-26T16:42:00.009-05:00

Watching the Republican debates and seeing the likes of Perry, Cain, Bachmann et al. I have the same feeling I get when I go to the DMV or to Costco, or to the post office or to a third world country - a feeling that there is a flaw in the design, though given the setting, the dysfunction seems organic and culturally interesting - the result of certain parameters that dictate behavior and expectations that require you to suspend disbelief and accept the lunacy. As my friend, Alexis, commented the other day (I am paraphrasing, she said it better, less caustic)- it's as if Palin opened the barn door of stupid and now stupid is seen as a positive. They should rename them the Banana Republic Debates.

We have learned that Steve Jobs put off cancer treatment while first pursuing fruitarian therapy. Very bad unscientific decision coming from a genius. Alexis and I wondered if this means that his Apple genius might have been less genius and more about finding the right market for his obsession. There are lots of examples of really successful people believing in really wrong things. It takes a certain delusional obsession to take the big bets that can lead to becoming a zillionaire. And like the Palin effect - once crazy works, crazy no longer seems crazy (often the dazzling hedge fund managers of one or two years crash spectacularly the next). Once you are wildly successful in business, cinema, religion, politics (anything?) it seems that going forward it can be challenging to be rigorously honest about your own character defects and personal moral inventory. Let's just say that no matter how many true believers a guru might have I would find it hard to use the words "enlightened being" and "chain smoker" in the same sentence.

Anoher example that presses my skeptical button is the guy who founded PayPal, Peter Thiel, a billionaire with some odd notions - universally lauded as a genius. PayPal was a brilliant secure on-line payment program that filled a need in internet commerce - (Thiel made $50 million when he sold PayPal to eBay - he then invested, on a lark, $500,000 in his friend, Mark Zuckerberg's, Facebook start up - that stake is now worth an estimated $1.7 billion) but does that combo of luck/genius/timing outweigh being a born again libertarian whose latest project (along with Patri Friedman, grandson of Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman) is called SeaSteading - investing in sea worthy free standing oceanic platforms as autonomous experimental communes in international waters?

Day to day life in the trenches doesn't stand a chance.

Rubber bands, Slinkys and Occupy Wall Street...

2011-11-16T21:15:00.008-05:00

I am ready to admit that humans are powerless over the world's economic systems and that the world has become unmanageable.

Check this out: (hat tip to http://davidusher.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-cant-scale-without-social-and.html)

" throughout all of human history up until 2003 we created 5 exabytes of data (five billion gigabytes). We now create that much every day. In 2011, we’ll create 1.8 zettabytes of data (a zettabyte is a 1000 exabytes) and we’ll be creating over 20 times that by 2020."

The world has too many moving parts for anyone to understand or manage. So complex that not only can't we figure out the answers to the problems that face us (economic, social, scientific) - there are no answers.

Imagine that the world is made up of rubber bands and slinkys. If you stretch a rubber band and then release it it snaps back to its original length. A slinky once put in motion down a set of stairs will continue down the stairs (In other words some things go back to the way they were and other things once set in motion continue to keep going). Now imagine a bazillion rubber bands and slinkys comprising a giant Rube Goldberg contraption and all the comings and goings and interactions and interrelationships of all these zettabytes. And there behind the curtain stands whoever... Obama, Romney, Berlusconi, Papandreou, Hu Jintao - people - talented people but human (i.e. flawed and imperfect (some more flawed and more imperfect than others). I am not sure any human can even tell which are the rubber bands and which are the slinkys any more.

I think that is what Occupy Wall Street is about. I think it is not just about economic reform (although that is a part of it). It is not just about a political point of view (although that is a part of it). I think it is about a belief that the world has too many moving parts. It is about the kind of community and society people want. It may even be about our existence.

As one Occupier was reported to have said:

"It is not OK for the richest 1%, to make us bend to the will of the financial institutions and the labyrinth of dividends, offshore tax havens, and money making schemes. Stop referring to fair taxation as socialism. Stop telling dishwashers and migrant farmers that you earned your money, that you work hard for what you have, because lots of people work hard and don't have. There are a lot of hard working people who are not rich. Don't look down from your fairy tale and tell us that people get what they deserve. Stop quoting Reagan. Stop telling us that riches beyond imagination breeds innovation. Stop pissing on our leg and calling it rain.

Occupy Wall Street is not a set of demands, it is a statement: We exist."

PS. I read this piece to my wise and now 87 year old Uncle Yoda (who lives in Santa Barbara, CA because he says it is the only place on earth where calling heaven is a local call) and he said that it was "Typical Rough Fractals, lovely, well intentioned, idealistic and full of shit". He did add however that he does think that "the problem with the world is that it is run by humans and that does not bode well for the future of mankind".

What The Living Do - Poem by Marie Howe

2011-11-02T21:34:00.001-04:00