Irrational Behavior

I started an account on LinkedIn a week ago. I was looking at the "People You May Know" section again today for any additional contacts to add, and saw my father's name listed.
He passed away in 2007.
In the span of about a minute I remembered the call I received while at work, getting the news from my distraught mother-in-law, and thought about all the odd things we leave behind when we pass. I wondered if it was the same Anthony Messina or a different one. I thought about sentimental behavior.
Then I clicked on the "Connect" button anyway.

Merry Christmas, Dad.
(You too, Mom)
T

Shots of Awe: Creativity and Depression

This episode opens with another quote from Ernest Becker:

The creativity of people on the schizophrenic end of the human continuum is a creativity that springs from the inability to accept the standardized cultural denials of the real nature of experience. And the price of this kind of "extra human" creativity is to live on the brink of madness, as men have long known."

Jason Silva, paraphrasing Kierkegaard, draws contrasts between the schizophrenic and the depressive. The former is overwhelmed by too much possiblity, too much ecstasy. He is driven mad because he cannot pursue all of the avenues of creativity he is drawn to. Conversely, the depressive is subject to a failure of the imagination. He is stuck with too much entropy, too much gravity. He is too grounded, whereas the schizophrenic is not grounded enough.

I'll go ahead and state at the outset that I find it a bit off-putting when mental illness is romanticized. I know depressives (I sometimes wrestle with it myself) and both know and have known schizophrenics. Creative urges or no, I would not wish either state on anyone.

The person mired in a major depressive episode truly cannot see beyond himself or his current state, and too often sees substance abuse or death (self-inflicted violence) as the only door of escape. The suicides of Dante's Inferno exist as thorny bushes in the seventh circle of Dante's Hell, alongside the profligates, only able to speak through their blood when a twig is torn from a branch. If the depressive person has any creative urge, he may find expression to be a relief valve, in some cases producing works of artistic value. The list of artists and other well-known people with major depressive disorders is certainly a long one. Given the choice, most would probably choose to be free of the chemical imbalances responsible for the condition, but others might say that there is value in asking questions such as "What's the point in / meaning of life?" especially when one struggles towards an answer. The struggle for an answer to that question means that hope exists and life still has value.

The schizophrenics I've known have been creative, but in very unfocused ways. One was obsessed with an MTV VJ and Nazis, another is convinced that a radio personality hates him and communicates this hate telepathically. He is absolutely convinced that the voices he hears are real, but is also an atheist, arguing that God is imaginary. (Regardless of your own beliefs about God's existence, the inconsistency is plain.) The

man's brother, also schizophrenic, believes that all medicine is absolutely beneficial, and will consume any and all medications found unsecured in the house. Both people are intelligent and creative, but unable to support themselves and will need some level of outside care in the future. Powerful medications have to be continually adjusted, and a restless quasi-sleep that is difficult to watch awaits the schizophrenic at night. Regular work seems nearly impossible to attain, lucid periods last only briefly, and a life spent on disability in a group home is often the best outcome to be hoped for. Like depression, there seems to be a genetic predisposition toward development of schizophrenia.

Silva asks, "How do we leverage these contrasts of visions and live with a little bit of grace?"

One thing I would very much like to see is more readily available and effective assistance for persons with mental illness and their caregivers, particularly in cases where there is demonstrated or high potential for violence. In most mass shootings, there was a pattern of problematic behavior and underlying psych-emotional issues that were either unsatisfactorily addressed or wholly unrecognized. One-third of America's homeless population has untreated psychiatric disorders. This is an expensive and complicated problem to solve, and unfortunately, the political will only seems to exist to treat symptoms of problems, not to identify and solve causes. In the meantime, pharmacology saves. More or less.

When depressives aren't so debilitated by the illness that they can't get out of bed or think of a reason to live, and when schizophrenics are able to be free of voices and the mixed-bag of medicine's side-effects, that might be a better time to talk about leveraging visions. The grace comes first, by helping the sufferer.

Milestone A Achieved

Received news that I've been accepted to LIU Post today. I have an A.A. and an A.S., and will be completing the last 2 yrs of coursework to earn a B.S. in Forensic Science. Apparently my GPA was impressive enough to garner some scholarship money too. (I have to attend full-time to get it; some thought on this required.)

Milestone 1 Achieved

Made the 10K word mark on "Singularity" at 1PM today. Wrote like a fiend last night.
Still feeling like the story wants to take an unexpected turn on me. Probably a sign of amateurishness to not have complete control of it, but am erring on the side of allowing intuition to do its thing. Alan says "Write what you know" and that's what I'm doing.

Singularity Soundtrack

Tracks helping to get this story written:

1. Oats In The Water                        (Ben Howard)
2. I Had Me A Girl                           (Civil Wars)
3. There's No Way Out of Here        (David Gilmour)
4. Serpents (Basement)                     (Sharon Van Etten)
5. Swords                                         (Leftfield)
6. Black Swan                                  (Thom Yorke)
7. Undisclosed Desires                      (Muse)
8. Awake                                         (Tycho)
9. You Are The Wilderness               (Voxhaul Broadcast)
10. Don't Stop The Dance                  (The Bryan Ferry Orchestra)
11. Love Will Tear Us Apart               (Joy Division)
12. Pumped Up Kicks                        (Foster The People)
13. Under The Milky Way                  (The Church)
14. Animals                                        (Martin Garrix) 
15. Born, Never Asked                       (Laurie Anderson)
16. Smoke Rings                                 (Laurie Anderson)

"...an amazing wonder."

In most rural places around North Dakota, and most especially in winter when the air is dense and dry, looking up at night will afford your eyes an almost immobilizing view of a deep black sky dusted with stars surrounding the arc of the Milky Way. The stars and gases making up some of the galaxy's mass orbit at approximately 220 kilometers per second around the center, brightest in the direction of Sagittarius, where a supermassive black hole at the heart is hidden, frame-dragging all the rest to spin slowly inwards. Its an amazing wonder.

Way out on the Orion-Cygnus arm, in the galactic rural area of the habitable zone, our solar system spins and bobs, up through the plane and back down, around and around, far from the high-energy Hadean zone of the center. And around Sol, our planet orbits, stabilized by a moon created in an amazing collision with an object called Theia which struck the young Earth at the exact angle necessary, neither too deep nor too shallow, gifting us tides and seasons and a soft light amid the stars which captivates all romantics. Its disc appears to us by night the same size as the sun's by day. An amazing wonder.

The Lakota people who have lived in the area for generations might call it "nahómni", meaning to spin around of its own accord, or by an outside force. They must have seen these discs often when travelling to the riverside for water as they camped nearby. Nature loves the circle, and a dancing circle spins. Everything spins inward toward the center, toward singularity.

Thoughts of Awe: Critical Essays (Love, Loss & Symbolic Death)

Love, Loss & Symbolic Death: 

This episode in the Shots of Awe series opens with a quote from Ernest Becker:

 “If the love object is divine perfection, then one’s own self is elevated by joining one’s destiny to it. All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.” 

Silva says he has only lost one family member to physical death, but has suffered symbolic deaths through ended relationships. He proceeds to speak of love as fulfillment and overflowing, consecration and consummation, and “aesthetic arrest”, which, per James Joyce, is a sensory state of captivity brought about by art which evokes neither loathing nor desire, only a beholding of the object. Regarding symbolic death through love lost, Silva asks “How could it exist that once we were us and now we are not? Where’d it go? Where’d it go?”

In The Denial of Death (1973) Ernest Becker presents the premise that all of our constructs (civilization, religion, technology, etc.) are merely defense mechanisms against the acceptance of our mortality, and that our individual characters are essentially formed around the process of denying that mortality. This denial is important to our daily functionality because the fact of our impending death can render us immobile. The end result of the coping mechanism or “terror management” is that we become two beings simultaneously; physical beings, aware and terrified of our impending death, and symbolic beings, seeking to imbue our brief lives with meaning and purpose in order to attain a vicarious immortality or “heroism”. Heroism in the “age of reason” requires science to give us better and more convincing illusions of immortality, but in the end, these are illusions and will fail, leading to psychoses and, perhaps more tragically, preventing genuine self-knowledge. Becker believed that much of the evil in the world was a consequence of this need to deny death, and it was his hope that the gradual realization of death (memento mori) could help bring about a better world. 

What is symbolic death? If heroism is symbolic immortality, then symbolic death is…mortality? If we are elevated in consummation, does it follow that we are we somehow degraded when the union dissolves? Anyone who has suffered from love lost might readily agree that it can sometimes be felt so intensely that only actual death is like to quell it. Sometimes people do actually die of broken hearts. But if we came here alone, and must face the end privately as well, what is it that was lost? Where did what go?

Is perfect consummation with divine perfection even possible? Not in this lifetime, which is probably why Becker says it can purge all guilt, fear and mortality. At the moment of death, when we at once realize mortality and cease to be mortal, maybe then we consummate with perfection. Many religious traditions agree with this view. But while earthbound, one of the best impulses love has to offer us is a desire to uplift the other and also ourselves, that we can be nearer our own ideal or nearer the sort of person our beloved thinks we are. A high-energy love particle enters an atom, raises its energy state and now its electron binds with a once-lonely wallflower atom in a covalent bond. (You can’t spell covalent without l-o-v-e.) It’s where the whole becomes greater than the sum of parts. Oftentimes the energy state goes back to ground, and a photon is emitted. Has something truly been lost, or has it only changed forms? Oh, wait- here we are, at death again.

For me, the paradox of perfection appears at the acceptance of imperfection in myself and my spouse. (OK, mostly myself.) If I can acknowledge and attempt to address my own shortcomings, I’ll be more likely to overlook my spouse’s, and since neither of us has any idea what constitutes perfection anyway, we can relax and enjoy life’s surprises instead of trying to mitigate them. That sounds perfect to me.

DISCLAIMER Regarding Critical Essays On Jason Silva's "Shots Of Awe" YouTube Series

A friend recently suggested I check out Jason Silva's Shots of Awe series on YouTube.  Like many of the other friends I'm blessed with, he's a razor in the figurative knife-drawer, so I knew I'd just received an assorted box of brain candy.

I was surprised to find that I was having a bit of a struggle when viewing some of these, and not because of the subject matter. It was the delivery that was getting in the way for me. I’m sure that Jason Silva is completely sincere and honestly excited about the subject matter he presents. However, I admit that I can’t completely suppress my preference that he’d dial the exclamations and gesticulations back a notch to keep from eliciting my reactive fear of cultists and religious zealots. I have to actively work my way past Jason’s enthusiasm to take in his message.

I freely admit that this is just one of many “features” I have: I’m almost immediately suspicious of people who are this excited about so many things. It stems from periodic, attenuated exposure to some unbalanced personalities in my life and suspicion towards people who are always “up”. In most cases this reaction has probably served me well, but I also acknowledge that it may be a stumbling block. I may very well be jealous of the energy. Many people are attracted to and respond positively to Silva’s enthusiasm, as evidenced by the number of YouTube subscriptions, Twitter followers, TV appearances and other outlets that he uses. Good for him!

The critical essays which follow are primarily intended as practice in the writing thereof, and result from a bonafide effort on my part to get past the excitement and listen to what's being said.