Dream [29 Oct 2011]

I am sitting in very last seat in a tiny jet plane. It is the only seat and the walls are on either side of it, narrowing to a point behind. I can see the back of other people's heads in front of me, and they all look the same. I can see the captain at the front as there is no intervening wall. I am confused about where I am going and a bit nervous that this tiny plane cannot make a trip from where I am (Europe someplace) to Columbia and I thought I was going somewhere else. I take out my travel documents - crumpled - from a bag at my feet and they say that I am going to Spain, but the name of the city is unclear. I can read it and then I can't and when I can again it says something else. 

Did I fall asleep? The plane is moving but not in the air, it is driving on a small highway, cars pass going the other way and I see more cars in front of us. The captain is speaking to me though I cannot see him. He says, Don't worry we will get there, it will just take a little bit longer.

I'm jogging in a dirt rut next to a road and it is covered with litter and trash. The road intersects with a wide metal bridge and I look to my right and see a river and across it many small structures on the other bank of the river amidst trees. Someone jogs passed me on the left, I look and it is Bert and as she passes me I say, Sneaking up are you? & it is meant to be funny (a partial quote of Matt K "sneaky phud sneaking up"), and though she looked over, now she is already leaving me behind.

The "lobby" of this hotel is cheap and run down, with a dark shabby carpet and dilapidated furniture crammed along the walls on which sit small groups of people sleeping. But the room is dominated by a large oddly shaped bar, as if the room had once been a saloon and is no longer, shoved up against the bar is a desk covered in papers and a tall young guy is assuring me that everything is alright and he points at my travel papers. I try again to read them and again the words seems to shift and change, looking like they are in Cyrillic at one point. But I am in Spain somewhere and I am going to some unknown city in Turkey next, but only staying for three days.

I approach the service station and there is a bus parked out front with a line of people handing baggage to a man on the roof and waiting to get on this old fashioned bus. I look through the windows into the garage and see a man who looks familiar and next to him a tarp over a car that seems to be partially disassembled. I look at the people by the bus and now the same man I saw in the garage behind me is getting on the bus. I want to talk to him to tell him that I think that somehow, though it seems impossible, that it is my old car in this garage, but I also know that I never owned a light blue Karman Ghia and cannot imagine how it could have made it from the States to wherever I am now. I look into the garage through the window in the garage doors and now I see that it is a wagon (the kind that needs a horse to pull it) under the tarp and not a car at all though I am still wondering about how my old car could have gotten across the ocean. There are piles of metal parts and other trash in the lot next to the station and the bus is still here but I do not see any people on it.

I'm back at the "hotel" sitting down and I see next to me my friend Dariush and he's holding a baby on his chest and rapping to it. The other chairs and couches are all filled with sleeping or dozing people. I think Dar's rapping is somehow funny and I say something both encouraging and ironic. A man sitting across from us looks at me, seemingly with negative judgement in his expression & I realize it is my ex-father-in-law (Mr. D.). But also somehow all these people are a family and I wonder if it is my family somehow.

Looking out window of a tourist bus now and I am Turkey somewhere. I am still confused about where I am and look yet again at my travel papers but they are no help. There are many shops along the street and they look like junk and/or antique shops and are mostly dark inside, but the street is filled with women who are dancing with long silky streamers tied at their wrists. They are all naked and it seems odd that one would find women dancing naked in the streets in Turkey to me, a false stereotype of mine? I wonder if this is a red light district or something but that doesn't seem to be the case somehow, the women all move simultaneously and are equally spaced across the street. They do not look quite real somehow, more like very good CGI.

Happy?

Earlier tonight someone asked me about being happy. 

I hate it when people do that. 

But I was challenged about it and so played along. 

Yes, I can, in the last few years remember some happy days here and there and short periods of more than one. 

There, happy now?

Habits, kicking & cultivation

No wonder I wear a hat so frequently.

Habits. I've often thought about habits. About that which is habitual, reflex-like, automatic, etc. What we do with but a bare minimum of thought. Depending on what field of repeated action we're thinking of habits are always found, I can be quite negative or positive about them. 

With regard to matters poetic, I've tended to be quite suspicious and rarely positive, but that requires some qualification. I've no aversion to a daily writing regime or anything like that. I have a file always open on my laptop where I collect lines for a long-term project that I am working on, if this is a habit. The habit of writing or improvising poetry seems neutral to me in and of itself. Billy Collins, and perhaps even moreso Richard Kostelanetz, have a bad habit, and I wish they'd get help, but that's me and at root I don't much care if they do or don't. But when habits become slurs (my terminological adoption and possibly, if purposively, a misconstrual of what Harry Mathews referred to as "systems of low-level regularity", this being the phrase he used to describe the system of any given author's "inspired" practice of writing), I get increasingly negative in my baseline response. This, again, is me; my bias, and I own it without qualm. It just seems to me more worthwhile to break language habits and reflexes if one intends to surprise oneself, or simply avoid writing the same poem again and again. 

During the time when I was in analysis, I developed a habit that now and then got me into a bit of trouble, that of hearing the things people didn't intend. When one's analyst is incessantly echoing one's slips of the tongue, after a time they start to become almost glaring. I noticed them in my own speech a great deal, and used that to poetic effect when improvising. But when you repeat the slips of others to them, a funny thing happens. Not denial, that's predictable. The funny thing is that sometimes they get really pissed off. Ha ha. After awhile I learned not to repeat them, though I still tended to think about them and what they might suggest which differed from what the person was trying to convey. But analysis is, sadly, some years behind me now and that habit has diminished with time. Recently though I was spending a bit of time with someone and noticed that she, on a number of occasions noticed my own slips of the tongue or caught the implication which I was trying to, if not conceal, then at least not to blurt out. I told her she should become an analyst, which to my mind is high praise. Admittedly though, it didn't work very well as a technique of seduction. 

I've also been at times persuaded by C. S. Peirce's position regarding habits. Basically, that they are necessary things, and that we'd be better off to choose them than to be chosen by them. I do some poetry most every week, whether it be writing, assembling, improvising. But, I doubt that I would in most instances describe my poetic activities as habits as they are usually quite volitional. I tend rather to use the word for activities like smoking, staying up too late, nose-picking, chewing at the corner of one's mustache and the like, and thus, as I wrote above, as things that we do, repeatedly, but with such a minimum of thought that it borders upon no thought at all. 

I have been reading a book called,The Mind & The Brain; Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Schwartz and Begley. The subject matter of this text might surprise some of those who know my interests and stated biases, as the author is both a neuroscientist and a cognitive-behavioral therapist. But if you are one of my small elective family you might have heard me saying a number of things in the last year about wishing to learn more about neuroscience. My reasons for that interest are several, but the dominant one initially was undoubtedly that, as a psychoanalytic partisan prone to making arguments from that framework, the toughest counter-arguments it seems are coming from that neuroscience terrain. My intention was to read Damasio this year and I still hope to get to his work, but I ended up with Schwartz &Begley. 

I'm glad that I bought this book. The authors do make a couple of ill-informed references to Freud (ones that they are apparently so confident of that they felt no need to cite him to substantiate), but that is so commonplace in contemporary writing that I'm beginning not to notice, much. Ok, I do notice and it irks me, but I sense that I might have a better chance of dissuading Homeland Security agents from frisking anyone they think "looks muslim" than countering this trend, so I wish I didn't care (sort of). 

That pet peeve aside (& this book is nowhere near as dumb-headed than many others I could name), this is a very interesting book that combines the neuroscience with CBT and adds in some buddhist meditational material (mindfulness stuff essentially), all of which are coordinated in the treatment of OCD in Schwartz's practice. But a larger, more philosophically juicy aspect of this text's argument is that, contrary to prevailing wisdom (or at least, prevailing until recently) from the neuro camp, "mind" and even "will" are emerging as both therapeutically and empirically valid concepts. Oh yeah, there is also quantum theory on offer here and integral to the broader claims of the text. Schwartz is bucking the trend in neuroscience of refusing all discussion of "mind" in favor of "brain," and is insisting, with a great deal of citational support, that those suffering from OCD can learn to "rewire" their brains by force of will. My terms are sloppy, but they get at the claim made here, and I find that I am positively disposed toward it even as many aspects of the CBT framework still strike me as exceedingly problematic (I'll come back to that below). 

Everything hinges on neuroplasticity. Though there has been contrary evidence for some decades now, the general view in neuroscience was that, while the infant's brain exhibited great neuroplasticity, that in short order it became fixed and quite static, with this batch of neurons "hardwired" to perform these and only these tasks. But that conviction has been undermined by research which shows not only that there is a second period in adolescence when the brain, to borrow some of the metaphors that the author's use, does a great deal of "rezoning". That is to say, that parts of the brain which may have heretofore been engaged in specific actions begin to be involved with quite other actions. There are a great many studies described and explained here, as well as therapies, all of which demonstrate this. I was most impressed by the details of the work of a man named Taub and the therapeutic practice (CI Therapy) that he developed for stroke victims. Without going into the details, this type of therapy, though obviously very difficult, has been successful in allowing stroke victims who may have lost the use of an arm, to regain use of that limb by reassigning the work that the part of the brain which has gone dark since the stroke, to another area of the brain. The success rates of this approach are pretty impressive, with, in some cases, people who had not been able to use their affected limb for 15 or more years, regaining near total use of it. 

Schwartz's primary work is with people who suffer from OCD. He noted that, though those who suffer greatly from this malady, and who are compelled again and again to wash their hands such that they stay chapped and bleeding also know at the same time that their hands are not filthy and covered in dangerous germs. That is, while potent and difficult to deny compulsions are screaming an alarm about the germs and freighting that alarm with great emotional weight (described as dread, among other terms) which the sufferers often cannot resist giving in to, they also know very well that their hands are clean and that the washing is both unnecessary and harmful. It was this 'split consciousness' (referred to as 'ego-dystonic') which drew Schwartz's attention. Again, glossing a great deal of material into a few sentences here, his innovation was to recognize how this is not unlike the situation that a meditator faces when trying not to get caught up in thinking his own thoughts rather than just watching them arise and dissipate. There is no reference has made to the classic line by some venerable buddhist so and so (who I have forgotten), of the moon and the clouds in the pool, but I will as I've always like that image. If one imagines looking at the reflection of the moon on the surface of a pool as the analog of meditative awareness, then stray thoughts would be like the clouds which now and then cover the moon. The 'trick' of meditation then would be not to follow the clouds but simply to attend to them as they pass by and then return one's attention to the moon. Schwartz, through a four step method, teaches his OCD patients to listen to the voice inside them which knows that these are compulsions, that they are just their brains sending dark clouds out to cover over that awareness and distract them from their awareness that these compulsions are expression of their illness and not what they in fact know to be the case. There is of course more to the therapy that this, but that is how it starts. Subsequently they learn to substitute other actions for those which the compulsion had driven them to previously, actions which they have the chance to choose and which are not self-damaging. 

It's a very interesting book and I'd like to post a bit more about it in the future. But getting back to habits…

Some months ago my dear sister Rah read a book about stopping smoking, she'd been given it by a lifelong friend and fellow smoking buddy, L, who read it and quit. Then Rah read it and quit. Then Tony read it and didn't, though I must admit I haven't seen him smoking much at all. I'm reading it now. I had intended to wipe the book out this passed Sunday but I didn't. In part it may be because of the "threat" to my habit. & in part it may be my annoyance with the text's repetitive nature. But whatever the author advisers his readers to smoke while reading it, so I've bought a couple of packs since then. I also have some difficulties with one of the basic claims the author makes, that what keeps the smoker smoking is fear. Actually, many of his claims about what "all smokers" think and feel about smoking strike me as questionable. But whatever. I found while reading it and have noticed afterward that parts of analysis seem to be, for me at least, accurate. I'm thinking of the feelings leading up to the moment when one lights the next one. & thinking of how it is the nicotine addiction itself which produces this unease which leads to lighting up sort of pisses me off, in a similar fashion to, if less pissed off, when I notice while listening back to a series of my improvised poems that I've found a slur, a repeated word or series of sound choices. I nonetheless intend to read some of the book today and try to finish it tomorrow. Stay tuned for details. 

Amusingly, an image search for "CBT" also brings up images of
& devices for "cock and ball torture" 

Now, to return to the uneasiness that I have with CBT as a therapy. When I hear about how it is pursued I cannot help but think of The Power of Positive Thinking, a text which I think gets much too much positive regard. Look around for fuck's sake, the world has serious problems from the macro to the micro level. Deciding to just 'stay positive' feels like an ostrich strategy. I also can't help but to recall an argument I got into with a High School history teacher who was incensed that I was reading Mao's Little Red Book and was interested in Marx. I was in High School remember, and not quite the argument monster that I can be these days in classroom settings, but I tried to account for what I found convincing in Marx, the alienation of labor, exploitation of workers, etc. This teacher did something quite similar in structure to the CBT response to a patient's self-understanding of their suffering. He re-labelled and refocused and so forth. Thus it is not exploitation of labor but a free system where your work was rewarded depending on how hard you worked. It was not alienation at all, but part of the process of cultural development, etc. Capitalism was not an economic system that only emerged fully in the last few centuries which is dependent upon somebody somewhere getting exploited and which cannot exist otherwise, it was the natural outcomes of rational choices and the best way that we can have to satisfy basic human needs and wants. Here that business about how in Texas no student in public school will ever learn of any economic system other than Capitalism from birth to end of High School and whether this isn't depending upon the very strategy in play here, though applied in advance of any deviation.

Now one could obviously just reverse the process here and relabel again, so perhaps this isn't the fault of strategies like CBT. But I have to wonder as well. There are moment's in Schwartz & Begley's book when I question from who's perspective this or that behavior is deemed better. & this would lead to the larger question of whether in the situation of this or that person, feeling miserable and hopeless might not be an entirely rational assessment of the situation. But let us assume for a moment at least that there are ways in which we are, as social subjects, quite thoroughly fucked, as in disempowered. I cannot believe that re-labelling this situation in such a way as to naturalize it, or make it entirely up to the individual rather than a systemic issue, or any such thing is adequate. How many guards at the concentration camps had qualms which they quashed in this fashion? 

Google>Images "Habit" - tho obviously I chose it for looking like the Borromean Knot

BODIES, by Susie Orbach [a bit of Chapter 3 & a few other thoughts]

[This is long overdue, for the hypothetical reader who was hanging on the edge after my previous post about this book, but here it is anyway]

"Google > Images  "Body Image" - this image meant to help you select a bikini

OK, before I finish Orbach's Bodies, I see that I have neglected to mention something important. Orbach is a therapist - something I didn't stress in what I wrote about this text before. So this issue of the body image (or Body Imaginary) being out of sync or at odds with the body of the person is something that she talks about a lot in reference to her patients. In the interests of space I skipped over these people's narratives almost entirely, but the 2nd chapter ends with such a narrative. One of Orbach's points throughout this book is that while, yes, Freud did in fact recognize something crucial in his time - that problems in the psyche could result in symptoms that effected the body - that in our time, and it seems in Orbach's clinical work, that there is also a body distress which derives from the body itself and cannot be cured simply by attending to the person's thoughts (whether conscious or unconscious). I am not entirely sure that I am always convinced by her claims about this as in each account used to convince the reader that this so, it seems to me that there remain questions about the subjects' desires (both analyst and analysand) and that in explicating the therapeutic progress that we are given an account which maps this via language (thus opening the door to understanding it as language that has been lost/repressed and which then plays out its effects through the body, much as Lacan's account runs, at least in the early & middle periods). 

Chapter 3 "Speaking Bodies" concerns itself with transference, or in Orbach's preferred term, countertransference - especially when it takes place from body to body, thus the speaking bodies of the title. I've not seen analytic case studies that mentioned this and so found it quite interesting. Orbach is noting not simply (counter)transference at the level of thoughts or attitudes but as it manifests itself in the therapist's body. If I were to embrace a steady skepticism about the claim I mentioned above regarding the body as locus of this distress, then how is it that this happens precisely? It seems that, in Orbach's account, when the analysand has body hatred let us say, and whatever other transferential issues are going on, that the analyst's body responds to the analysand's body, such that the body hatred of the analysand produces a bodily feeling in the therapist which is a transferential response. In such a moment the therapist's "body, her emotional state, become a stethoscope-like instrument for hearing what might be askew" (63). 

Orbach tells the story of Herta, one patient with a particularly severe body hatred;

Herta's relationship to her own body was twofold. It was an object to her and it was a trouble to her. She had no experience of just living in it. She knew her body - which was an "it" to her - by its burdensome nature. She continually had to attend to it, whether dealing with the ungracious symptoms of loose, sometimes bloody and urgent bowel movements or the severe abdominal cramping that characterises colitis. (65)

What is perhaps surprising is Orbach's transferential response to this which she describes as "a deep physical pleasure, as though I were a purring pussycat. Every part of me felt alive and contented in a way I had never been aware of before" (64). Faced with this experience while pursuing an analysis with Herta, Orbach ponders her own bodily (counter)transference, concluding that "my purring response to her made me want to focus on what her body was needing in its own right" (66). She writes of needing to "enter directly into the hatred Herta had of her body" (66) and to get Herta to 1st accept this so that some new relationship to the body could be developed. & here again, this accepting of the hatred and establishing a new relationship, do they not seem to unfold in and as language? 

Returning to a consideration of her own bodily response to Herta, Orbach writes;

In order to give up her sense of living in a hated body, Herta had created for the two of us in the room a body which felt amply comfortable and alive. It was as though she were starting all over again, only this time with a maternal analyst figure not plagued by memories of poverty and war and anxiety about feeding, but a maternal substitute who sat contentedly and calmly. Her ingenuity had conjured up what she needed. She couldn't give herself a neutral body, let alone a wondrously happy one, but she could evoke one in me, in the hope that I could then bestow it on her. (67-8)

I wonder at this moment what exactly a lacanian analyst would make of this situation were they conducting this analysis. Orbach terms and the psychoanalysts that she references make it clear that she is operating with rather different theoretical commitments. & I have no answer to the question I am wondering about, just the wondering. 

Orbach discusses the length of therapy, something which many complain about or use as a way to dismiss psychoanalysis or, at least these days, anything which takes much longer than writing a prescription. She writes;

Why can't pain, once understood and engaged with, allow for a speedy rewrite of a physical or mental template and thus bring quick relief? It is frustrating. Our brains seem to work so fast to grasp things and yet so slowly to change. A way to think about this is to remind ourselves that the human animal has a long gestation period outside the womb, during which the baby absorbs and personalizes that which will make it human. If we use language as a model and recognise that it takes two to four years for language to become personal and a part of oneself, then the idea that therapy is akin to absorbing a new language, only more so, begins to make sense. (68-9)

Now this could be Exhibit A in an insurance directive about why not to cover psychotherapy. But, be that as it may, the explanation is interesting. I have some doubts about the ease with which Orbach tells us how long it takes to learn a new language - I have lots of personal experience of trying and trying and never truly learning a language - and if this is so, might we imagine that there will be patients who cannot learn the equivalent "language" which will allow them to find a new body image(Imaginary) which might ease their suffering and distress? Surely so. 

There is much else in this book that is worth thinking through but as I have finished it and am reading other things now which I have not had time to post about, I'm going to wrap this up here and now by looking at one critique that Orbach levels at the turn toward performativity in folks like Butler. A lengthy quote;

It has become a feature of postmodernist thought to celebrate multiplicity, to elevate fluidity over knowing and complexity over simplicity, and to see embodiment, like femininity and masculinity, as something we achieve through performing or enacting the body we want to have. In this kind of theorizing, it is believed that the body can be anything we want it to be, with corporeality no more than a symbolic construct.

Playful and enriching as such ideas can be within literary theory, it is painfully apparent that they are not playful or enriching for those whose corporeal rudderlessness propels them to seek extreme solutions to what they experience as their physical incongruities. Postmodern theory is insufficient to cope with the demands of the post-industrial body. It celebrates fragmentation, a fragmentation that, in fact, requires understanding, deconstructing, nourishing and then knitting together. (…) I know from the labile bodies that I encounter in the consulting room that their "owners" are on a search for anchoring which, once secured, perhaps allows for playfulness and masquerade to follow. But there needs to be a body there for the person in the first instance. (…) The celebrating of numerous self/body states that postmodernists engage in seems to applaud the very distress of the pre-integrated body. The celebration of multiplicity unwittingly dismisses the ways in which the individual seeks a bodily coherence. (91-2)

I've heard things like this before. & the point seems valid to me. If one assumed that one was the hybrid postmodern subject par excellence and answered a DSM-based questionaire, I wonder what diagnosis that insurance manual would spit out for you? I doubt it would declare that you were sane and healthy. Though I've enough native distrust of the DSM system that it becomes a balancing act of sorts...

Rip It Up & Start Again

6:25 AM - 7 Oct 2011

That title is a book by Simon Reynolds on the post-punk period. Great book I thought. Not what is on my mind, though the title works for my ruminations at present.

The classic modernist gesture within any artistic medium of reducing it to its bare minimums.

Subjective destitution and traversing the fantasy in lacanian psychoanalysis.

Atomizing then reassembly; some things kept, the rest discarded.

There are other examples, many. Rip it up and start again. As a strategy, I'm attracted to it. But I wonder how well it generalizes. Don't dreams sort of work this way, shredding memory and events and scattering them to be wound together by desires one can't quite grasp? Then we wake and start again.

Back to psychoanalysis, if analysis works to undermine the fantasy supports, is that akin to ripping it up? & if, having traversed one's fundamental fantasy, then there is a moment of freedom in which one can choose… to be different… is that starting again?

Rilke's You must change your life, flits through my head at 6:53 am. I've tried to sleep twice since 2. No luck either time. The alarm is set for 9:50 and I'm due to be coherent and active for 3 hours on campus then a party tonight.

An old friend D.S. who used to get these bouts of wanderlust where he'd sell off much of his stuff planning to use the money to travel or move or something. I don't remember him ever leaving, but he tried. Later he did (I dunno if there was a yard sale beforehand or not).

It is Friday morning, the 7th of October. I last left the fortress of solitude on the 30th of September. I've been trying to rip things up, but sometimes I seem to get no grip, and lack the strength to tear them out. Thwarted, I make another cocktail, smoke another, pour some media into my head and drift.

Castle Lowther (no shit)

Now I'll polish off the soldier at my elbow and go back to bed to listen to the world waking up, the children will begin squealing in an hour, with luck I'll sleep a bit before the alarm strikes. I want to dream of the library in Castle Lowther and all the books there and to rip them all to shreds before starting on the walls.

When does the starting again start?