4/26/04

I'm not a born Loonytarian, mind you -- I was fully six or seven before my mummy got fed up with trying to answer the weird questions me and my sibs kept bringing home from Presbyterian Sunday school, which she sent us to mostly because it was two blocks away and her parents approved, and went denomination shopping, settling at last on the Uni's as the best of a sorry litter. I myself was only mildly scarred by my brief exposure to The Baby Jesus Swindle, and I was happy going to a church that taught you to honor nature and look for Gawd in the living world, frequently cutting class to do just that.

Less intuitive was their notion that all faiths had truths to impart. Like Linus in the 5 and 10, I was too short to see much more than the side of the display case for this department store principle at first. Ma, on the other hand, got right into her newfound church community and started teaching an interfaith survey course for the eighth grade Sunday schoolers, which in due course I took myself. She exposed her students to such examples of sacred diversity as were available in late-60's San Diego, including a Muslim mosque, a Buddhist temple, a synagogue (natch), Catholics (double natch) and a few stolid Protestant services. She was hesitant to take us to Pentecostals, fearing we'd "laugh at the holy rollers," which may have been her problem, not ours. We of the younger generation did have some chuckles at the expense of the Buddhist children's hymnal, though ("Don't cry, little cat/ Buddha loves you, little cat/ meow meow meow meow meow...").

Nearly all the religions we studied had some variant on that venerable old sawsall, the Golden Rule. While the wording veered wildly from language to language, the idea was remarkably resilient and unified. Whether in the familiar "Do unto others..." form or in the more uncommon double-negation ("That which is hateful to you, do you not unto others..."), the GR receives the sort of respect usually accorded a law of nature, or at least of human nature, as if it were a universal standard of conduct. Right, that's why it's the Golden Rule, duh.

The GR is usually treated as a moral constraint: people are better/happier/holier when they treat each other the way they wish to be treated. But there's always the nagging thought in my mind, what if the person doing the treating is a sadomasochist? A professional victim? A ruthless Social Darwinist? Is the GR logically reducible to Kill Or Be Killed?

I myself am strongly convinced that there's more than one skin to this particular gilded kitty. The surface nicey-nicey stricture makes sense only if you scratch some subtext out of its glossy exterior. In particular, there are two other interpretations: those of a behavioral principle and a communications protocol.

Like this: take the admonishment out of it and the Rule of Gold becomes the Golden Observation: people treat others as they wish to be treated. The simple Freudian notion of projection comes in here -- people find their worst suspicions about themselves mirrored in the behaviors of others, and it's ever so much more convenient to pin the tail on some other ass than your own. A person's social actions are frequently a much better meter of their self-image than any carefully prepared press-releases they might issue.

A magickal component to this psychological interpretation would be to suggest that treating others better constitutes a viable (and commendable, though that's beside the point) form of the Great Work, the perfecting of the human spirit. But like many magickal principles, such a process could not be derived logically from the original rule: A -> B != B -> A. On the other hand, substituting "Do it to ennoble your soul" for "Do it to keep the Boss from foreclosing on your corporate career and sending you to the Big Snuff Pit" brings you back to where you started with a more entrepreneurial spin on the matter.

Taken even further, the premise transmutes into the Golden Hack: to better the chances people will treat you in a given way, treat them that way first. Instead of a should, the Rule becomes a could, a predictive instead of a stricture. This one makes a lotta sense, especially to little kids who just found out, to their sorrow, that tormenting Kitty will indeed inspire it to retaliate in kind. It also provides a kinetic principle for the kind of interdependent social ordering anthropologists term "gift cultures," where doing unto others is not just a good idea, it's the law. While frequently verging on idyllic, such cultures, from the South Seas to hippy communes, produce their fair share of sleazoids ready to share everything you've got, happy to give you the stanky shirt off their back in the expectation of access to your 40 room mansion and mebe your trophy wife as well.

And speaking of wives, I seem to have wandered from the difference of opinions I had with S re those Wacky Uni/Uni's (remember Alice?). Despite the obvious utility of aiming our progressive experimental woo-woo friendly act toward their musical functions, S always received the idea less than enthusiastically. I finally wormed out of her that at an impressionable age she'd heard a Unitarian minister admit that he didn't even believe in God. As far as she was concerned, that was beyond the pale.

Well, do unto others. And, when in Rome. Word.

4/19/04

While I'm all in favor of such things, I'm also more than a little peeved and heaved at my own current prospects of lightly turning to anything especially practical, being as how my main squeeze is once again shipwrecked in the hospital with hip trouble.

There's a certain Bill Murray::Groundhog's Day quality to the whole matter -- after all, this is only the fifth or so time that this particular hip (her left, as it happens) has gone west over the last nine years. Practice is supposed to make for perfection, and you'd think by now we'd have come up with a more effective strategy for dealing with the whole horrid thing. And truthfully, we have evolved a bit in our approach. Unfortunately, it hasn't always been for the better.

When S was first diagnosed with degenerative arthritis back in the early 90's, I walked out of the orthopedist's office convinced that my life was over. It was time to find a job with medical coverage. It was time to plan ahead for disability access. It was time to wise up and stop being the flighty, poofty, runamuck creative butterflies that we'd delighted in embodying for the bulk of our marriage and squeeze back into our chrysalides, there to demetamorphize into dull, creeping larvae of mundane duty.

Fortunately, sanity reasserted itself, and we resolved to do right by our own mythology and Have Fun Anyway. For the inaugural joint replacement in 1995, we organized the vaguely legendary Get Hip Benefit, with scads of vaudeville friends pitching in to raise a little extra bread towards the ugly necessities of confinement. It was the event that first presented me with evidence of the principle which I later generalized in the form, "Anything can be accomplished with enough volunteers and enough food." S was undisputably the ringleader of this circus, but I was Lord High Everything Else and happily dashed about like a puppy with ADD all evening keeping things going, from managing the sound and recording setup to staging a slide-show manifestation of an absent performer to playing improvised jazz trombone with (or against) improvised juggling, for which the jugglers may or may not have ever forgiven me. It was one of the best nights of my life.

Over time, however, the festive quality of allopathy grew less and less evident. While the first hip surgery went well enough, S became caught in a cycle of dissolution. Each successive skeletal repair instigated more damage elsewhere as different portions of her frail infrastructure caught the strain of upright mobility in a gravitational field. The process chivvied her inexorably down a grim spiral stair from painful limp to folding walker to mobility cart to power wheelchair, with occasional forays into operating table near-death, weeks in the ICU and months in the nursing home along the way.

All this led to some predictable reactions on my part, roughly corresponding to the five stages of grief (denial, denial, denial, denial and depression). I did my share of crying on friend's shoulders until I belatedly realized that all it did was run up their laundry bill. I reconstructed my house and my life to suit the demands of medical entropy, railing and swearing the while at the cost of building materials and the asinine requirements of governmental agencies. I grew pretensions of saintliness which were skewered unmercifully by my periodic lapses into mad-dog fury at anything handy. And little by little, I began to grow numb, forswearing both the temporary relief and the longterm exacerbation of picking at the scabs of my discontent.

Human beings are remarkably adaptable -- given time and motivations, they can get used to practically anything. Refugees, prisoners, dwellers in war zones, all still rise in the morning and put on their pants or skirts or djellabas or dashikis or loin clouts and go out after it again, be it clean water or a scrap of food or tracking down a missing relative, with all the aplomb and attentiveness of a workadaddy suit hung from a strap on the 6:23 from Hartford. Fleeing the Cylon tyranny is every bit as much a career as being a lawyer -- insert your preferred punchline here. Over time, some people can get so used to life and death matters intruding into their daily toilet that they can't settle down when peace breaks out again, leaving them constantly trying to provoke a little action out of a stubbornly placid world.

Despite the utility of the response, getting over it isn't necessarily a good thing. Reducing the rich pageant of life's unbearable iniquities to a monochromatic grunt of "whatever" neither decreases their deleterious effects nor gives you any possibility of breaking the fourth wall of your own personal drama and just possibly finding something better to do with your time. Any form of resignation is an admission of defeat, whether justifiable or not, a dreary motel room right down the street from Heartbreak Hotel.

Of late, every time I've been grabbed by the scruff of the neck and jammed nose first against the Great Whirling Blades of my own and S's pickle, it's seemed such a patently stacked game that I've simply refused to ante in. But that's gonna have to change. My current peppy little slogan is that it's not enough to want something, to envision it, even to plan out the course of action needed to achieve it. You must have resolve. You must make up your mind and set about doing what you want. Or as brother Moh says, "You better start rowing/ cause the other half of getting there's going."

I'm through being a passive little saint. It's active saint time, by cracky -- whur's that injun gal I'm s'posed to rassle?

4/12/04

I've had my share of this stuff in my life, enough to have even taken the currently fashionable SSRI route. Don't be so sad, Sparky, just take one of these every day. They worked tolerably well, barring the side effects. The real problem was that they were bloody expensive and I couldn't always score them with a low-income discount. Eventually I just stopped using -- I got as much utility out of cutting back on coffee.

When you're depressed, everything you're doing seems futile, everyone you know including yourself is pathetic and everything you observe is surrounded with a foggy nimbus of triviality. It's as if somebody snuck into your brain when you weren't looking and unplugged the meaning module. If the essence of rational vision is the perception of connection in the random input of the senses, depression is the exact opposite, the reduction of ordinary patterns of living to spaghetti code that probably has some purpose, just nothing you're particularly interested in.

Left to itself, such a state of mind is fairly painful and incapacitating. After all, what are we if not our embeddedness within the structures of our lives? Every day in every way we extend our consciousnesses into our surrounding environment, organizing the world through the lens of our own perception. Ants can't live without other ants and we can't live without the hundred reflections of ourselves in our rooms, our friends, our jobs and all the other information receptacles into which we pour our personalities. Worse, the ability to perform the duties of a civil individual gets bogged down in the same mire. How are you supposed to fulfill your role in the great totem-pole of being if you lack the fundamental perception of it to begin with?

While there are probably writers with hard-to-pronounce French surnames who consider depression a superb metaphor for some variation on Post Modern Existential Theoretical Man's dilemmas, most of us see it as either a mental illness (common) or a moral failing (thankfully, uncommon and getting rarer). But I see at least one other side to this particular turd: Depression as Teacher.

Life is big, vague, complicated and difficult, and the harder you look at it the worse it gets. It's an accepted notion of psychobiology that we evolved and grow up utilizing the wetware equivalent of a network firewall in our sensory mind, choking off the excesses of daily experience sufficiently to get on with the down and dirty protocols of survival without being so distracted by the pretty flowers that we miss the cobra in the coal scuttle. But the same helmet that protects you from slings and arrows can blinder you to a battleaxe from behind. All protection is also incumbrance, as anyone who's found the week's business email lovingly scraped off into the garbage disposal of the spam folder by their Bayesian filter can attest.

This was the thoughtline of the early psychedelic experimenters, whose response to the perceived discovery of the Helmet was to yank it right the whoopie off, man! Yeah! Whereupon, o' course, they were pounded to jelly by the impact of the Whole Thing on their puny unprotected noggins. Apart from leaving you with the vague recollection that there sure was a lot more going on out there than you thought, the psychedelic experience ended up being better at imparting bogus delusions than Kozmick Trooths, to the low-tragic chagrin and dissolution of half a generation.

Depression, on the other hand, is a deception of an entirely different order. Instead of replacing the ordinary maps of rationality with leftover issues of Mad Magazine, it simply takes the maps away entirely. Welcome welcome to the darkling plain Mister Anderson, we hope you enjoy your stay here. Can we interest you in a dull gray uniform? No, you can't go to the bathroom.

The condition is not without its uses. Many esthetic technicians have cultivated this headscape as a source of dread inspiration. All those ghastly wretched amorphous blobs of post-expressionist painting and sculpture born of hungover vitamin-deficient artistic sentiments are trying to convey to the unwary (or overwary) ordinary viewer the Terrible News of the utter lack of ulterior motive in the universe. You too can be an art snob.

And during your vacation getaway, if you can remember to remember that it's only that, to the quaint, picturesque Kingdom of Blah, you can improve the occasion by taking note of the Actual Truth Actually that is being revealed. You're getting a free glimpse of the grim revelation that Nobel laureate scientists spend small or even medium fortunes and years of grinding study to wrest from the pinnacles of theoretical physics and cosmology: the electromagnetic, gravitational, atomic/subatomic matter and energy Real World is as devoid of plot as a last-season episode of The X Files. Such a deal!

Eventually, if you're lucky, the brown stinky acid wears off and you come back to being just yourself in all-too-familiar Youland. And the real teaching to absorb from the whole crummy dolor coaster is that if there's anything to be made of the highly questionable tinkertoys of common experience, you'll just have to take on the heavy lifting and DIY. Making sense of sensation is a fulltime job, a personal responsibility, you gots to walk that lonesome ballyhoo, ain't nobody else gonna walk it for you.

Hey, if you're any good at recycling, you can even turn your infirmity into an essay and publish it on your website. Talk about straw into gold. Okay, straw into strawman. Still.

4/5/04

In every culture in every society in every square millimeter of history and prehistory there have been haves and have-nots. From a strictly statistical point of view it's inescapable (did you know that half the people in this country are below average?). Not only that, but there are so many different things that people want, from a dozen children to golf clubs to 40-room mansions to cream corn hot tubs to George Bush's head on a plaque hanging in the den, no way is anybody going to feel they have exactly the same lot as someone else.

Back during tg Experimental Animals Month (October '03 in the archives, that would be), we stood amazed at the report of the discovery of a hardwired unfair-o-meter in monkeys. It was demonstrated that not only could our fuzzy brethren recognize when they were being shortchanged in the reward department, they could kick up a fuss about it as cogently as any 3 year old lawyer trying to cop another five minutes before beddie-bye.

At the time, the researcher termed this behavior an innate sense of justice, but there's another, uglier word for it too: Envy. Yesindeedyfolks, Original Sin is in the house, and it wants its fifteen minutes back. Without a lot of imagination one can easily picture the equivalent instinctive processes of Greed, Lust, Sloth and the other seven dwarves residing in our germ plasm like so many cockroaches in a Miami refrigerator (myself, I got a sloth gene you could recite Shakespeare from).

This is exactly why we weak-jawed strong-minded primates came up with social organization in the first place, be it religious or governmental. It's like my old pal Alan Scrivener's concept of The Cosmic Joke: Man: Why are we born only to suffer and die? Genes: What you mean we, white man? While our brute physical bodies evolved by and large as efficient DNA replicators, our (somewhat) higher selves have other plans that don't necessarily coincide with those of the meat machines we play bumper-cars with. In order to pursue those goals, order is exactly what we need, that public order I was ranting about a week or three ago.

What we have here is a tag team from Perdition World Smackdown sent to torment the race of puny human even worse than reruns of Diagnosis Murder. Scratch your head raw and bloody over this conundrum: how do you structure social behavior to compensate for Inevitable Evil Inequity and its Equally Inevitable Evil Twin, Envy? It's not just a trick question, it's the trick question. What is the minimum ordering principle needed to keep little Sleazy and Cheesy from tearing each other into bloody quivering bits, along with all the rest of us?

Our current societal answer appears to be slanted to the side of inequity, which is regarded as a right, while envy is chided as a sin -- or class warfare. It should be noted in all fairness that when the Soviets tried it the other way, the results were even worse. At any rate, they lost. Our way has its points -- as noted above, like the poor, the rich will always be with us. Whether or not their ancestors were thieves, they're here, they're queer, get used to it, right along with those "No Justice No Peace" t-shirts.

Perhaps the most obvious concept to apply is one we've partly instigated already: Everyone Plays By The Same Rules. And, as a corollary, Nobody Gets Treated Special. If you're going to have wealth, the rich have to be bound to play nice and not just hog the sandbox. Contrariwise, nobody gets to use "Gimme!" as an entitlement, either. It's not the old notion of the Great Chain (around the neck) Of Being -- while the wealthy may be immortal, Deepak Chopra and his {Material Abundance == Spiritual Abundance} mahooha can take a long walk off a short bestsellers list -- just equality before and in the law. Places where the U S of A could improve their implementation of this concept include such trifles as equal access to the mechanisms of justice (nationalize lawyers right along with medicine) and an end to cronyism and old-boy networks. Our system kicks ass on many other countries in this department, but we ain't there yet.

Another great little idea is useful universal education, not the smoke and mirrors that passes for public instruction hereabouts. Having to mortgage your future just to get into the game in the first place is a real good way to breed resentful slackers who'll default on their student loans and everything else when they don't walk out the college doors into that good paying job they read so much about. Some minimal safety net to prevent the contemptible disgrace of homeless men, women and children reduced to sleeping under bridges in the wealthiest country on earth might be nice, too.

Am I being simplistic? Very well, I'm being simplistic. This ain't rocket science, gang. None of this is an abstract quest for some unreachable utopian paradise. Injustice is inevitable too -- that's why there are courts. All we're trying to do is create as balanced and peaceable a civil environment as we can, one where unequal distribution of goods is a tractable fact of life, not the blatant biproduct of devious weasels with friends in high places.

Otherwise, sooner or later we're all reduced to Hey Kids It's Nature Red In Tooth And Claw Time! HonkaHonkaYeaaaah! They have revolutions for that sort of thing, you know. And you don't want to be around when they happen. Trust me on this.