Knee, Happy New Year

This is my knee, before the surgery I had yesterday. The picture was taken at the ski resort, you will have to imagine the snow. The bones are fine, but I tore my ACL ligament. Now I have a new one threaded inside there, taken from a cadaver and sterilized with gamma radiation. There are 6 holes in the skin. I will spare you the technicolor pictures of the inside of my knee. I am supposed to be able to walk on it with a brace, but it hurts. Maybe tomorrow! Meanwhile, I am icing it using a special machine and writing the alphabet with my toes every hour so my muscles don't waste away.

I am not sure if I should drink champagne tonight on top of the pain meds.

Anyway, I liked this version of Auld Lang Syne (links to Scotland TV):

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne ?

CHORUS:
For auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
And surely ye’ll be your pint-stowp!
And surely I’ll be mine!
And we’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu’d the gowans fine;
But we’ve wander’d mony a weary foot,
Sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

We twa hae paidl’d i' the burn,
Frae morning sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar’d
Sin auld lang syne.

CHORUS

And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere!
And gie's a hand o’ thine!
And we’ll tak a right gude-willy waught,
For auld lang syne.

CHORUS

(According to Wikipedia, these are Robert Burns' original 1788 lyrics)

For some reason everything makes me feel like crying

Maybe its the knee injury
although it doesn't really hurt

Maybe its because my old friend stopped by
and I can call you my friend now
because the whirlwind of emotions I felt a year ago
is gone. We talked. We stroked my dog and cat,
who were sitting on the bed.
My heart pounded when I heard your voice.

I felt teary before, though,
thinking of my friend's kindness
helping me when I was injured,
taking care of me and bringing me stuff.

I cried in the night. Mourning,
perhaps, the loss of freedom.
Like you said, I was lucky
not to have learned to use crutches by our age.
Freedom from blaming myself.
Freedom to dance.

Brights, knee injuries

So I am back to resting my knee, having torn my ACL ligament yesterday while skiing. I feel angry with myself for not being more careful, but it was a run I had skied earlier in the day without any difficulty. The view from the top was amazing, I'll post a picture once I locate my camera card reader. Clear blue skies with blue ice-capped mountains in the distance, the nearby snow crisp and white like the sheets in a laundry detergent ad. I wanted to cry when I realized I had missed the sunset. My friend skied down behind the stretcher and put his sweater around me when I was shivering in the cable car, it would have been very cold and lonely without him.

On Christmas Day, while browsing the internet, I came across the Brights. They are the proselytes of a new religion, that has Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet for prophets. The aims of this new religion are to organize around disbelief in any mystical or supernatural elements, and advocate instead a 'naturalistic worldview', to gain public recognition for people who hold this worldview, and 'educate society' toward accepting such people. At first I felt worried about this new religion, that preaches intolerance toward other religions and attempts to convert people to its philosophy. But on second thoughts it is perhaps no worse than many traditional religions. I feel sad that while paying lip service to humanitarian values their website contains no volunteer opportunites or suggestions for doing good in society, either toward other brights or anybody else. All you can do as a Bright is help the Brights by promoting their faith. I worry a little that in a few years time it may become as unacceptable in scientific circles to be non-Bright as it is now in the Bay Area to be a Republican. The following statement, quoted from their website, is one I find particularly disturbing: "The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview." It is disturbing because I believe that ethics and actions should come from consideration toward others, both innate and socially sanctioned, and feelings of love, kindness and duty. It is not clear to me how a 'naturalistic worldview' accommodates such concerns, or in fact tells you anything about how to act morally.

My own atheism is pure apostasy. I have no interest in replacing God with a 'naturalistic worldview'. Doubt, curiosity, experiential and rational inquiry seem far more important to me than finding something to believe in.

On the one hand, I am fearful of promoting their cause by the mere fact of writing about them. On the other hand, I am playing with the idea of joining them to see whether there is any openness to change from within by promoting a more humanistic agenda. Thoughts, anyone?

Aha moment

I realized the other day, as I was biking up Mount Diablo, that I still have probably most of my life ahead of me. I thought about the fact that I've only been having sex for about half my life, and how much more of that there is to come. I thought of all the things I've learned in the past 38 years, and how much more I could learn in the next forty-odd years. Perhaps I should keep a scrapbook, otherwise it might be too much to remember.

The view of the sunset as I rode down the mountain was magnificent. If I could paint a picture in words, it would be a pink sky with the crisp lines of blue hills in the distance, the red sunbeams snagging the fog in the valley as it rolls over the pale dry grass beside the orange tinted tarmac. I had a flat near the bottom and my friend helped me change the tube by the light of a bikelamp in the cold dusk. It would be nice if he noticed I love him and if he stopped wanting to date other women, but we always have such wonderful adventures together. Maybe I am too forgiving.

Today I learned a new yoga pose from a book. Garbha pindasana or womb pose involves sitting in lotus and squeezing the hands and forearms through the space between the shins and the calves and then balancing with the chin resting on the hands. I taught it to my students, who seemed to have a good lotus position.

Things I would like to change about me

1) I seem able to write only 10 pages of dissertation per day before going online and randomly reading Wikipedia or blogs.
2) I still think about you when I visit the opera to hear La Boheme or watch a romantic movie. Why can't I just enjoy the beautiful music and sentiment? Why do my thoughts turn inward?
3) Why does there always have to be a you, for f**ksake?
4) I knowingly take on more than I can easily manage, and then I regret it because things turn up that I would have wanted to do, like taking classes at this cool new acrobatics studio.
5) I need to pay more attention to detail.

Questions about the soul

I used to think I was not a dualist, taking in the critiques of Descartes with his ridiculous partitioning of mind and body and strange notions of how they interacted and affected one another. The upside-down image on the back of the retina that needs to be re-rotated for the benefit of some strange homunculus, looking at periscopically it via the pineal gland. How would he even know which way was up? Much more insidious was Descartes' identification of the self, 'I', with thought. I think therefore I am. Hegel pointed out that only stopping up the eyes and ears made this mode of existence possible. But the identification of the self with thought, and obsession over the existence of consciousness, has continued to dog Western philosophy and its latter day manifestations as pseudoscience.

Materialism posits that all facets of existence can be reduced to physical arrangements of matter and energy in space and time. I have no qualms about this idea. The problem is that we still don't know exactly how it happens in a way that produces our everyday experiencing. I venture to hypothesize that while individual consciousness manifests as the complex patterns of activation of many different neurons in the brain, together with the chemical signals that they use to communicate with one another, it is also determined by the people around us and the cultural legacy of historical brain activity in many, many people now dead who first came up with concepts such as the soul and God, and found words and language to communicate them with their contemporaries.

It would be a sad thing if our ability to transcend our individual existence once again in this same way became bogged down by neurobiological hyperbole.

Dog ritual, science as religion

This morning when I took my dog for a walk his friend Chauncey was out in the yard, barking to greet him. We crossed the road so that the dogs could say hi and to my surprise, after wagging tails and sniffing both ends through the gate, my dog peed on the gatepost. I was just about to reprimand him for what looked to me like bad dog etiquette, when Chauncey proceeded to do exactly the same thing. They both stood there, taking turns peeing in each other's general direction on opposite sides of the same gatepost. It must have been a ritual they developed together, away from the broader dog culture. My dog almost thinks he is a cat anyway. He adores our cat, who regularly joins us on our evening stroll. The dog tries to make friends with other cats and is at best indifferent towards other dogs, a mixture of frantic fear and aggression signaled by loud barks and fur bristling along his spine.

Taking turns peeing in one another's general direction from opposite sides of the same gatepost. I wondered sadly if this what many human interactions have become as we immerse ourselves in increasingly unnatural environments.

Somebody asked me what I thought about the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, so I watched it. My view is that science as religion is no more harmful than any other religion. Analysing the movie, we seem to have replaced God with the Quantum Universe (both out there and within ourselves), Bad or Evil with Addiction (chemical addiction and, slightly more troublingly, addiction to emotions) and Good with Self-Evolution, Awareness, Knowledge, Creation/Creativity and/or nonattachment. Genuine scientists as well as chiropractors and spiritual leaders served as the priests and prophets of this new religion. If badly spun metaphors of quantum theory and neurobiology are what gives you those tingles down the spine associated with spiritual feeling, then karma to you. I vaguely remember experiencing that when as a 17 year-old physics student I finally understood Dirac's matrices. Sadly the moment was fleeting as it took a great deal of mental effort to follow the math. My one qualm about all this is that if Jesus were nonattached, why would he have bothered? The same goes for Moses or Maimonedes, who was among other things a great physician. Show me someone who did some great thing for the benefit of humanity who was not emotionally attached to the world and the creatures on it. Oh, and what about the imagination? If all these other things are Good, then why not also Imagination?

What are the rituals of this new religion? The two ritual actions depicted in the move show the deaf protagonist (illustrating the limitations of our senses) tattooing herself with hearts using an eyeliner and then immersing herself in a hot bath. Later, she tosses away her anti-anxiety pills. Perhaps watching the movie is a ritual in itself in some circles. What the Bleep do I know?

Night hike

Yesterday evening I went hiking in the dark with my friend. It wasn't really nighttime, the sun sets so early this time of year, and it was just getting dark. We walked in a loop in Tilden Park. To our surprise, there were as many or more joggers and dog-walkers as there might have been during any other time of day. It was warm as we walked up through the meadow, and the first stars appeared - maybe Venus and Mars. Then we walked into the Eucalyptus grove and it became pitch black. Fortunately, my friend had a headlamp, and I was happy to hold hands and let him lead the way. We met no more people after this point. I mentioned the possibility of mountain lions. Several years ago, a woman was mauled by a mountain lion as she jogged along this trail in the early hours of the morning. I didn't feel scared, but my belly started aching. As we walked down by the creek, the air was colder. The smells seemed to be different at night. Suddenly we heard something large splashing across the creek ahead of us. Probably a dear. I was glad when we arrived at the meadow towards the end of the trail, and there was enough light from the sky to see the trail ahead. As we were leaving the woods a coyote cry rose up behind us, and another coyote answered in the hills over the way. I took a sip of cold water from the fountain at the trailhead, pretending it was spring water.

Some Thoughts

Pursuing men is not a worthwhile activity. I feel sorry now for ever having tried it, and although I feel tempted to do it again I am better able to control the impulse. I learned a lot in a year or two of dating. What I learned is that friendship is much more valuable to cultivate. I really needed friends, and it can be hard to turn acquaintanceships from dating into friendships. If I rely on my friends I can avoid pursuing men and all the feelings of loneliness that inevitably arise from this activity.

Notes for Practical Philosophy

Can philosophy be practical? I would argue that it always is, in the sense that philosophers believe their views to be of worldly merit. Probably even the most abstruse philosopher is not analyzing something simply to find out how it is constructed, but is writing about it at least in part in order to have an impact by changing people's thoughts and actions. Philosophers such as Plato, Confuscius, Machiavelli, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Marx or Nietzsche all had ideas not only about what is but also how it should be, which they presumably believed in. The difference between a religion and a philosophy is that the former derives its justification from authority, personal or divine inspiration, whereas the latter derives its justification from reasoned inference usually based on replicable or universal phenomenological observations. However, it would be misleading to say that Philosophy as a whole system of knowledge can be practical, because there are as many different philosophies as there are philosophers. A life lived according to Spinoza would be very different from a life lived according to Nietzsche!

As a system of knowledge, philosophy has been losing ground to science over the past few hundred years, as more and more content becomes subject to empirical research. Like philosophers, scientists these days seem to be flirting with proscriptions for life, or at least neurobiological theories of why we humans are the way we are. Scientific theories derive their validity from a particular kind of observation and inference. I somehow doubt that Darwin wanted us to live by his theory, although he probably wanted us to change our minds about some things, but try telling that to Richard Dawkins.

I would argue that philosophy is of practical value as a way of thinking about things, not only about so-called philosophical questions but everything that can be addressed with thought, including (but not limited to) how to live, and other questions that have now become the provenance of science. Philosophy as a method concerns itself with critiques of the connections between ideas, thought in other words, and without such a critique ideas can become connected or disconnected simply by spurious juxtapositions. A train of thought can lead to a conclusion that might be false or erroneous, and philsophy urges us to beg the question 'but does that really follow?'

The philosophical method is discursive, and will not necessarily lead to one right answer in questions of practical life value such as whether to change careers, relationships, or to commit suicide, any more than it results in a single decisive view on what things are or why we are here. But it can help us avoid certain kinds of errors that come from wrong thinking, whether our own or others'.

The motivation to come up with a solution generally originates in feelings. Perhaps it's like a cooking timer.

Writing Difficulties

Writing is hard. This morning, I talked on the phone with my aunt in Israel, who is a very good chronicler of family histories. She asked how I was getting along, and I told her that I had finished reading, but I was still writing my dissertation. I said it was really hard. She reflected that up until now, everything has been easy for me. I finished my undergrad studies, my first doctorate, without every experiencing any difficulty, and now I was finding something that was difficult, that had already taken a long time and was going to take even more time.

I'm not sure why this is. Maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew, the topic keeps expanding. I prune stuff and then it expands again. My first dissertation was about visual perception and eye-movements. I just clapped together the two papers I had already written (one in press, the other already published) and a talk I had given at a conference. The hardest part was making the changes requested by the external examiner. Now I think that would be easy, I have certainly learned in the intervening ten years to be less defensive. But the writing itself is hard.

Here I am, sitting in a cafe, writing this instead of continuing with the 20-odd pages I have down. Perhaps it is hard because last time all I had to do was describe the mechanics of things, and now the problem I am facing is more complex and my own view on it shaped by the integration of many different perspectives. It would take a book to write down exactly what I think about pain and how it can be treated. But I have a clear action plan, just to summarize the 9-10 books that have shaped my opinions, and worry about integrating them later.

A friend and fellow-student from the days of my previous degree just sent me a draft of her first novel. When we were both studying science, we each said we would write a novel by the time we were 30. Well, that deadline has been and gone, but if she can finish a book then so can I.

Yellow Moon

Yellow moon stretches
Yawns, rising like a balloon.
Silver trails the bay.

On Being Goal Directed (or Not)

Last night I had a conversation with a friend on being goal-directed, or not. He thinks that both of us are not, and that one needs to be, in order to accomplish things in life and make a difference to the world. Earlier in the day, I was reading in another friend's blog about life-goals and deadlines, realizing that I never seriously set myself any, except perhaps to write a novel by the time I was 30 (which I did not do, and I can't say I feel too bad about it). I was surprised that other people set goals for life events, like getting married, having children, completing a doctorate, owning a home. Those things just happened, like sickness, deaths, other losses - but instead in a positive way. I definitely seem to have a more passive approach to life than most people in this society.

I had a conversation with my best friend a long time ago, before he was my best friend, about how goals just make you unhappy, and unable to appreciate the blessings of the present moment. He pointed out that as a species we evolved to set goals that we could attain the same day, like hiking up a mountain that we can see in the distance, whereas we live lives with the expectation of long-term goals. He feels happy after riding his bike or hiking to the top of a mountain, something we have done together numerous times since that conversation. One time, there was another person up there. We said hi. The other person was surprised that once we arrived we spent so little time at the top, but for both my friend and I it was more the getting there, the momentary glimpse of the view and the feeling of having reached the top, without any lingering desire to stay.

Perhaps there is more to it than that. Some months ago we read Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty for the philosophy group. I struggled with it, because in my mind there is a conflict between reverence for beauty and for duty, as expressed in these lines by Dante Alighieri:

"Beauty and Duty in my soul keep strife
At question if the heart such course can take
And 'twixt the two ladies hold its love complete.
The fount of gentle speech yields answer meet
That Beauty may be loved for gladness sake
And Duty in the lofty ends of life."

We climb up mountains for the sake of beauty. But reading On Beauty made me realize for the first time that perhaps duty can involve having a vision of a more beautiful world, which itself requires appreciating and being inspired by beauty.

Maybe it seems contrary that I am motivated by a strong sense of duty but lack goals. I stumble upon things that demand my attention, like another person's need or how interesting pain is, and what can be done about it. Probably I would get further if I knew where I was going. If I had some vision and followed resolutely in its pursuit I might have a greater impact on the world and others. But I don't feel as though I'm flailing, just bending down to smell the wild roses and pet the stray cats.

When we look at the trail maps before starting a journey we seek out the loops.

Facing the Catastrophe

I finished reading Jon Kabat-Zinn's book on stress reduction. Now I have to face the catastrophe of actually writing my dissertation, since I'm done with my self-selected reading list. I wonder whether to go about this by returning to the beginning and summarizing the first book I read, The Worst of Evils (a history of pain relief) or start by summarizing the treatment (Kabat-Zinn's book). It's a lot less scary writing here than opening up a Word document, so I'll start, in the spirit of things, with where I am now.

Kabat-Zinn outlines in his book an 8-week stress reduction class that he taught at Massachusets General Hospital over a period of many years. The first two weeks are devoted to a meditation he developed, called the 'body scan', during which patients notice and feel the sensations in all the parts of their bodies, literally from toe to head, while lying supine on a mat. In the next two weeks, they learn to breathe while doing yoga stretches. The next weeks include sitting meditation, sometimes with a focus on an image of a mountain, or on lovingkindness, or simply breathing. He included guidelines for walking meditation. During the final two weeks of the course, patients practice on their own, first without and then with Kabat-Zinn's meditation tapes. The book is studded with vignettes of patients' miraculous recoveries from pain, or at least regaining control over their lives or learning a new sense of dignity in the face of adversity. Following the chapters describing the different techniques are Kabat-Zinn's views on stress, meditation, mindfulness - all presented in a straightforward manner easily used with a general audience. What impressed me the most was the high rate of continuation with the practice, about 90% of people who attended the course were still practicing 6 months later, 42% 3 years later and 30% 4 years later. I heard from a professional who attended the course that Kabat-Zinn has a profoundly empathic style and a talent for relating personally to each of the students in the class. He must also be very charismatic, to have achieved such a high practice rate at followup, since meditation is hard to practice regularly on one's own. Reading the book makes me want to start a class like that, I think my patients would have a lot to learn from it.

On a more philosophical note, I am not sure about some of Kabat-Zinn's views. He says that we are not our pain, we are not our thoughts - but if so what are we? A disembodied intention, a stream of awareness, a renegade shard of some greater unity? My own view is that I am part of a larger tapestry, but at the same time 'I' am a discrete part of it with ends (birth and death) bound to my body by the reality of my pain, filled with thoughts and feelings that as much as they are shared with others within the cultural milieu are also a defining part of who I am. This doesn't matter so much except that instructions such as 'being in the pain' have to be explained a lot more clearly to someone who believes that there is somewhere else to go.

So this afternoon, instead of facing the catastrophe and beginning to write, instead of resting my knee so that it will heal faster, I went on a lovely leisurely stroll with my friend, up on the Berkeley Fire Trail. This trail was described by Dorothy Wall in her book, Encounters with the Invisible, about her struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. In fact, it was where she first met her husband, before the disease overcame her and when she was still able to jog. I felt sad that I couldn't run on the trail, where I have ran many times before. On the other hand, I enjoyed walking hand in hand with my friend, whereas when we run he always runs ahead.

Truth, Torture and Bicycles

I've been wondering why you were still on my mind, after I forgave you for everything last year, and I realized there was something I hadn't forgiven you for yet. You asked me to lie to you about a certain thing, then you asked me about that thing and broke off our friendship because I lied. On another occasion, you told me, you stole some woman's bike because she was shouting at you, and then you felt indignant that she wanted you to return it instead of coming to pick it up herself in her car. (It was actually somebody else's bike that she was keeping in the first place, but while that has parallels too in this story we will leave it aside for the moment). Anyway, I realized it's kind-of the same thing. I said something that upset you (like the woman with the bike, shouting at you) so you stole my truth (like you stole her bike) by asking me to lie about it, and then when you asked me that question you expected me to reclaim my truth instead of handing it back to me. You could have said, I know I asked you to lie about this, and that was confusing, but now I want to know what really happened. It's your truth anyway, I had no business taking it away from you in the first place, and now I'm just asking and you can give it freely or choose not to give it to me. Instead you rode around on my truth. I don't even know where you went with it, so I couldn't come and get it if I had wanted to. Can someone ride on somebody else's truth? Maybe that's what torturers do. They forcibly take somebody's truth, leaving that person in pain. I forgive you for torturing me.

I hope that by writing this down it will finally go away. The magical power of words.

Why do I prefer lego to baby showers?

Maybe there's something wrong with me! But I am infinitely more attracted to the idea of going to a party tomorrow night to play with legos, than I would be if it were only to talk about baby showers. I don't mind babies, especially if they like to play with lego - or dance around the room, open and close water bottles, etc. It's just the baby showers, the knitting, the wedding dresses - the girly stuff, in other words. I would rather have a game of chess, hike up a mountain, go hang gliding. One wedding I really enjoyed was my cousin's, because we had a belly-dancing lesson for the hen-night (aka bachelorette party) and then we belly-danced together on the dance floor.

Sometimes I feel as though I am some third kind of sex. Not male or female, straight or gay, but differing along another axis of variation, a third dimension. Feminist, perhaps...

I like pink accessories, though.

Modern Yoga

Finished reading A History of Modern Yoga by Elizabeth de Michelis. I love the title of her concluding chapter: "Modern Postural Yoga as a healing ritual of secular religion." Here are some selected quotes:

"... the term 'secularization' refers, in a general sense, 'to the gradual decline of [institutionalized] religion as a consequence of the growth of scientific knowledge and [to] the continued diversification of social and ethnic groups in the Occident' ([Fuller, 1989]). All of these elements would be especially prominent in conditions of 'urban living', and it is in such environments that MPY grows and thrives. Adopted and cultivated in conditions of marked privatization and relativization of religion, MPY is successful, like other Harmonial belief systems, because it provides 'experiential access to the sacred'.
Such experiential access to the sacred, epitomized by the 'secular ritual' of the MPY practice session, represents the third key to understanding the current success of MPY, along with its fitness and de-stressing applications...
Thus the MPY session becomes a ritual which affords various levels of access to the sacred, starting from a 'safe', mundane, tangible foundation of body-based practice... there is room for the practitioner to decide whether to experience her practice as 'spiritual' or as altogether secular. Except in cases of thoroughly utilitarian (fitness or recreational) performance, however, some notion of healing and personal growth is likely to provide the deepest rationale for practice."

"Health is religious. Ill health is irreligious." (BKS Iyengar)

De Michelis' book is a thorough and thought-provoking look at a discipline that repeatedly emphasizes experience over knowledge. Because of this, the book is inescapably written from an 'etic' (outsider's) perspective, but is nonetheless empathic to the 'emic' views of yoga practitioners. What I have learned is that far from being a claptrap religion cobbled together to fill the void left by science, Modern Yoga was carefully crafted by a series of Indian intellectuals in a reverse mission to the West that began in the 19th Century. More recently, BKS Iyengar initiated the Modern Postural form of yoga, with its emphasis on the practice of asana poses. It came out of an expression of his own experience of yoga and his artistic creativity, carefully setting up the structure of the yoga session that has become a framing ritual for many Americans and people around the world.

The Language of Rain

When God made the flood, he said to Noah
Gather up your children and all the animals
And build them an ark, to keep out of the storm.

Then they built a tower, and hid from the elements
Sacrificing each others' lives for the sake of progress.
Everyone spoke the economics of growth.

But God had signed the rainbow, promising
Never to destroy his creatures again.
So instead he gave them politics.

The people scattered all over the Earth
Finding solace in their homegrown words,
Learning the language of rain.

East-West Madness

Happy Halloween, or Day of the Dead!

Finished watching Zorba the Greek, to trace the quote from the title of Jon Kabat-Zinn's book Full Catastrophe Living. The line comes early on in the movie when the Englishman played by Alan Bates asks Zorba if he ever married, and Zorba says is he not a man? Is he not stupid? He had a wife, kids... the full catastrophe. Kabat-Zinn's book is about using Eastern meditation practices to help American chronic pain patients. On a smaller scale, perhaps, this is played out in the movie - at the end Zorba tells the Englishman that all he needs to enjoy life is a little madness. I was just reading in a history of Modern Yoga how one of the Hindu leaders, maybe Vivekenanda, said exactly the same thing about the West. Funny that in both cases the madness is claimed by an Eastern source, and yet Greece was the cradle of Western civilization. At the same time, in Kazantzakis' original novel, instead of an Englishman the 'boss' character is a Greek intellectual writing a book about Buddha. It's as though the roles are set out, but they're playing musical chairs.

The message of the movie is strangely clear. You try to put stuff up, it crashes down, and then you dance on the sand. You need to learn that lesson, my friend. But I'm not sure if I want to be there to teach you. I feel like I'm chomping at the bit. Why the hell are we so needy? I need a break. This is too hard.

At least it's still raining. That makes it easier to rest my knee.

Pain, yoga, harp music

My knee is not chipped, just sore. If it still hurts in a week I might need an MRI, but hopefully it will heal by then. I somehow doubt I will be able to teach yoga next Monday, however.

I skipped the whole ambulance/ER part by going directly to an orthopedist, who ordered the x-ray. Waiting in the main hospital lobby, with its high glass windows and mix of real and fake, indoor and outdoor plants was actually quite pleasant. An excellent harpist played popular songs including Lord of the Rings, that sounded really good on harp. The music helped take my mind off the pain for a while. I found someone else playing it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjW2Bk_2x-g

Ouch

I think I may have chipped my kneecap. Falling off my bike after taking the curb at the wrong angle, I grazed my knee. All seemed fine until I passed out with the pain of having to sit with bent knees on the bus for almost an hour. About halfway through I decided to call and cancel my yoga class. It's an x-ray for me tomorrow morning, I guess.

I was hoping to be able to write something coherent about Modern Yoga by now, but it will have to wait. This I can say, I discovered that between my facebook networks and friends there are only about 50 people who list yoga among their religious views, and over 500 who list it as an activity. In contrast, there are over 500 who list Jewish among their religious views, and only 24 who list it in their activities. Tentative conclusion: many more people practice yoga than believe in it, whereas the opposite is true of Judaism.

Intersecting circles

At the end of her book, Encounters with the Invisible, Dorothy Wall writes about planning a trip to the mountains, the first in ten years after she collapsed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. She and her husband spread maps of the Sierras on the bed, planning their route. I finish reading this book after returning from my trip to the mountains, and think about illness as an internal journey, one that is unplanned and unmapped, into uncharted territory, without even giving one's consent to go along for the ride.

Just last night, I was saying to my friend how healing it was to go out to the mountains, healing for the spirit to experience all the varied scenery, the change in air, and the sense of aloneness while at the same time being in the company of others. As we were walking, I thought about the people who had laid the trail, carving stairs in the rock, the people who must come out every spring to mark the trail with rows or piles of rocks on the white granite shelf, and all the footprints from this summer's hikers that must wash away if not with the first rain and snow then with the meltwater. My friend said that in the past, before cars, most people never traveled more than 30 miles from their birthplace. I don't know if that was ever true. But I do think that places used to be more varied than they are now. Even in my own childhood, in the 70's and 80's in Britain and Israel, I remember each town having a different local character whereas now they are populated by the same chain stores, the same shopping malls and people. The villages in the mountains here in California retain their own character, for better or worse. We were lucky to find someone awake at midnight to give us a room to stay!

When I got back to the office today, somebody asked if I had makeup on, she thought I looked nice. I explained it was just being outdoors all weekend that put some color in my cheeks.

Dorothy Wall talks about a picture taken before her illness that she used to look to for reassurance of who she was. Then, in a later chapter, she realizes how one can never return. I think this is best captured in TS Eliot's Four Quartets: "Fare forward travellers! Not escaping from the past/Into different lives, or into any future;/You are not the same people who left the station..." We assume a continuity of self which is shattered by an illness that flies in the face of our ordinary can do mentality. Wall remembers her grandmother and her father reading to her from The Little Engine that Could the lines "I think I can, I think I can... I thought I could, I thought I could." Interestingly, the author of the eponymous engine was a house pseudonym of the publishing company, and the story one that had been retold many times. My grandmother used to read me that story, as I was reminded when I heard my mother reading it to my children. I believe that in life we are to some degree following tracks, but our engines are generally facing backwards and we spend most of our lives running away, even if we think we have eyes in the backs of our heads to see the next mountain and chug up it. My mother used to believe in geographical solutions to her problems, generally problems of the body that she attributed to the physical environment, both internal and external. She never realized that they were her fellow travelers and simply changed.

We generally choose the path of our physical bodies through space, and this helps us feel alive, like the Little Engine. We can spread out maps and navigate through the world. The effects this will have on our inner experience are less predictable. I think of all the times I might have bumped into Dorothy Wall in the streets of Berkeley, like leaves floating on a stream bumping into each other, maybe never to meet again, maybe to cross further downstream.

I think of my relationship with my friend, who thinks too much. Now he's got me thinking as well! As we walked through the burnt forest at the end of our hike, I was thinking for some reason that I would give him a facing edition of Dante's Divine Comedy for his next birthday, when he turns 35. Apparently, that was Dante's age when he wrote that or started writing it, contrary to the common myth that people in those days only lived to 30. "Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita..." I wonder if there is a particular circle of hell for overthinking, where all the Little Engines that Could chug up and down a mountain, never realizing that they are traveling backwards and going round and round in circles, never noticing that it's always the same mountain, and that they are not all alone in the woods.

Gem Lake, swimming

To appreciate the water you need to sense how it moves, sounds, and feels. Brrr... that was cold! Tasted great, though.

Gem Lake, sunrise

Gem Lake, afternoon

Gem Lake

Photographed upside down while doing yoga on the rocks.

Lake in Emigrant Wilderness

Where the Devil?

Where did this idea of the Devil come from? I just returned from watching Dr. Faustus. It seems anathematic to the Jewish religion, I guess it must have come from somewhere else but it's so prevalent in most forms of Christianity and in the general culture. I've heard from people who believe they are the battleground of Good and Evil, and experience dreams of Spiritual Warfare. My view, after this evening, is that Evil comes from taking life too seriously. If you don't do that, then there are only mistakes.

I do like the idea of the seven deadly sins, however. Those, apparently, were invented by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th Century. What I like about them is the concept of responsibility, that I am responsible for my own lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride - not others to blame for providing temptations, challenges and irritation. The one thing I would add would be jealousy - in Hebrew there are no two separate words for envy and jealousy. It took me a long time to figure out what those words meant in English. Just as there is no word for Evil, only bad or wickedness.

Back to project sleep. Gotta wake up to teach yoga tomorrow morning.

Identity and Pain

I presented my idea that pain is essential to identity in my philosophy group, during a discussion on identity and the internet, and it led to some stimulating conversation which I will attempt to recapture here. To put my argument in a nutshell, when I'm dreaming (or online, in some assumed identity) I can't pinch myself to sense if I'm real. Some people objected to the distinction between what is real and what is not. Others argued that identity is a social construct determined by our interactions with others. One person said that emotional pain is equivalent (or identical, in the mathematical sense) to physical pain, and somebody else took that further to argue that emotional pain experienced in online relationships can have the same function of binding one to one's identity as physical pain has in real life. These arguments helped me crystallize my idea as follows:

The term identity has many meanings. One of them is how I see myself. Another is how I present myself to others, which may take the form of several different identities or fictions. Yet another is how others see me - although I can assume different identities, I can't entirely control how others see me. How I see myself is then influenced by how others see me. It's as though I look in a mirror and make myself up a certain way, then I go out in the world and copies of me are created in other people's minds, none of which are exactly the way that I wanted them to be, and then I see myself as I am reflected in their minds have to go through the whole process again. The internet, chat and e-mail communications with people have been for me a very distorting mirror in which to see myself, and I hypothesize that is because it's much easier to lie online so people are used to others wearing masks and project a lot more of their own interpretations about what might be hidden behind the mask. So I end up being reflected in all these people's distortions, and having to endlessly recreate myself. Some people suggested that this is a bandwidth problem, that text communication online lacks the richness of interpersonal, non-verbal communication. I agree that is part of the problem, and it sets the ground for the bigger problem of the possibility of lying (false identity) and consequent distrust or suspiciousness. Anyway, this realm of identity seems to be all mirrors and smokescreens.

Another realm of identity is an attempt to answer the questions, who am I and how do I know? This is where pain comes in. Pain is different from the other senses because my pain is in some way unique to me. We can all see the same table, touch it, taste the same ice-cream - albeit our experience might differ somewhat. But only I feel the pain in my body, and you feel the pain in your body. I can feel your pain, but this is qualitatively different from feeling my own pain. Emotions, like the other senses, tend to have objects - and can therefore be stimulated by objects of the imagination. I can imagine or recollect or meet online something terrifying, and feel fear in my body, feel my heart beating, my palms sweating, etc. Equally I can imagine something that makes me cry or laugh, or feel sexually aroused. But I can't imagine something physically hurting me and feel the pain in the same way. I can't even 'remember' the sensation of having an attack of gallstones a few months ago and the pain in my abdomen, because I can't imagine the object associated with that. Unconsciously, I think there is a way we can experience pain (or its absence) by hypnotic suggestion, but not by conjuring up an object of the imagination like with the other senses and with feelings. This unquestionable experience of pain, together with its inevitably aversive nature - I can't feel pain and not want it to stop - prevents me from getting lost in the hall of mirrors described by the other realm of identity. It also impacts my choices regarding inflicting pain on other sentient beings, whereas while I'm stuck in the hall of mirrors of the internet I have little or no compunction to act morally in the sense that my transgressions will not result in somebody getting beaten up or bleeding to death. If they exist, they will simply come back in another form.

I wonder if emotional pain, and the feeling of another's pain, bear the same relationship to the experience of pain as does memory of one's own pain? Going back to the idea of a community of pain, and how when I was in pain different people looked at me and communicated with me non-verbally, I am reminded that the sharp, shooting pain of gallstones brought to mind the searing abdominal pain of puerperal fever, when I felt as though I was going to die.

There is an inherent contradiction in the questions who am I, and how do I know? Because at some level I invent who I am and then I know it's a fiction. How do I know pertains to the I that came before the invention and that is the I that is raw intention, and the I that comes after the fictions, the bodily sensations that I do not invent or wish into existence.

When I started talking about this idea with my children, somebody (it may have been me) brought up the serenity prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Meanings of Identity

I was thinking that identity is related to pain, in the sense that when I hurt I know that I'm real, and that I'm really me. Now, reading Dorothy Wall's book Encounters with the Invisible, on her experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I think of a different meaning of identity. She writes about 'passing' for a healthy person, when really she is ill - both in her own mind, for many years, and then when her body denied her that pretense at least during those times when she went out into the world. Experiencing her pain internally, she refused to identify externally with an image of pain and illness. Her picture on the dust jacket, taken perhaps during this illness, shows a friendly, lively woman smiling engagingly at the camera from behind her large glasses. Yet she was exhausted, in pain, and had to rest for weeks after a walk in the park or a visit to the acupuncturist. This brings to mind at least two meanings of identity, how I see myself, and how I present myself to others. Then also, is it how I see myself (implying a mirror or a camera, a disembodied eye) or how I feel myself to be from the inside?

My experience is that there is a secret community of those in pain. When I twisted my knee dancing and then took a bus along Mission Street, a black homeless woman saw me standing and offered me her seat as she was getting off at the next stop. I don't know how she knew I was in pain because my sprain bandage was hidden under my pants and I was trying to look and feel normal. Another time, I was suffering from the pain of gallstones while shopping at the Farmers' Market, and the vendors at the fish stall looked right through me as though I wasn't there, moving on to the next person in the line. When there was nobody else waiting, I finally caught their attention, and they sold me a piece of fish without ever making eye-contact. On the other hand, the man in a wheelchair looked up at me and smiled, and the saxophone player playing blues on his saxophone held my gaze for a moment and nodded. I felt like one of the dead, in the story Where the Dead Live by Will Self. In this story, the author suddenly notices that his mother who has been dead for many years is actually still walking the streets and she tells him that when you die you simply go to live in another part of London. But maybe I'm not as good at hiding my pain as those who experience this more of the time.

So identity is how I present myself to the world, how I see myself, and how I feel on the inside. In math, identity means more than just equality. It is symbolized by equal with an extra, third parallel line, and signifies two quantities which are always equal, not just arbitrarily so in the present context. There are many circumstances in which how I see myself is not identical to how I present myself to the world, and then there is also how the world sees me, that can cause a re-interpretation of me to myself. I am thinking of my friend who had a Lithium atom tattooed on his wrist, expressing his identity as a nuclear physicist, only to discover it contains a star of David which has a whole different set of meanings, and is used as a symbol of identity by people with bipolar disorder because Lithium is often used as a medication in that condition. I might have my identity indelibly carved on my body, only to find out that other people see it differently from my intention. Bodily sensations such as pain, even the sensation of having a tattoo or piercing, are unquestionable, unlike all these images and how they are seen. Maybe I mean something deeper than identity is bound up with pain, a felt sense of who I really am.

Why is it so easy to spend 40 minutes fussing around on facebook as I just did, before I started writing this? Probably because of the limitless play around identity and its representation or misrepresentation. I listed myself as no longer single and a couple of friends sent me their cheery regards. When really I am still single, just no longer listed as such, taking a break from dating. And for some reason, I felt a need to take the trouble to correct them... Plus I invited my friend to play chess. Maybe he will ignore my request, that would probably be best for both of us.

Help! Mother's in town

Yesterday I returned to my old demons, checking e-mail multiple times per day. I hoped to get some solace by doing that, but in fact it only aggravated my anxiety.

I've been paying more attention recently to exactly how my mother undoes me. This morning I did not want to get out of bed, because she was throwing stuff around in the garage. She started doing that last night, while I was out at the theater with one of my sons, and my other son called because he was worried and scared. First I called a friend to see if I could find sanctuary at his apartment, but he was busy. So I gathered up my courage and went to ask my mother if she had found the thing she was looking for, which last night she blamed me for losing. She holds me responsible for taking care of the things she left in my garage, without telling me about them, because she has been carefully hoarding the stuff I left in my grandmother's house in London, which I told her she could throw away. Anyway, I don't say anything. Not about that, or the foods she left in the refrigerator and told me, which I stored on a special shelf for her while she was gone.

So she starts on at me about how she always thought I would make a contribution to humanity with my brilliant, mathematical mind and she doesn't see how I can possibly make a living in the present economic climate by being a therapist. I say nothing about the fact that when I was a teenager, she encouraged me to go to art school when I dropped out of my undergrad in physics and math. I say nothing about the fact that she has never held down a job of any kind or supported herself financially by working. She goes on to talk about recent research in clinical neuropsychology, and how someone at Stanford found that baby rats who received more maternal touch thrived, physically as well as mentally, compared with those receiving less or no touch. Ironic, I think silently in my head. Well, you did at least touch me, for the first few years until my brother was born and then he was so sick that he took up all your attention. But what about saying forever that my first sentence, at 9 months or some ridiculous age, was 'squirrels eat acrons but people don't. Why?' You proudly thought I was showing signs of being a budding scientist, when in reality I just wanted to eat the acorns. Not sure what would be the rat equivalent of that.

Then she goes on to suggest that I should introduce my shy son to girls by having an au-pair or sending him for tutoring, or language school in France. I remember the young men she employed as housekeepers when I was that age, and the tutors, and being sent away to Europe. Maybe that's what it was all about. All I say is that he'll learn to talk to people in his own time.

I patiently try to explain what I'm doing with my life, the degree to which I know what it is, and the degree to which it might just be a fad or a phase I'm passing through. Not sure why I try. I proudly announce that I've been asked to teach another yoga class. Here I am, working both in paid and volunteer jobs almost every day of the week, completing my second doctorate, trying to excuse myself to someone that dropped out of a Masters' in Art History and never worked.

I thought that it wouldn't get to me this time. You've been here for two and a half days, and I just want to cry.

You are very sweet about it now, trying to take it back after, this is new. I'm sure that your parents never did that. Your mother threw stuff and worse, she knowingly threw words in order to cause serious harm. And your foot and knee hurt, after falling last week, so you can't walk as much as usual to get the energy out that way. Pain can make one irritable.

Maybe I need to stand up and object to some of this. Just waiting for the storm to pass over, there is not a lot of point in yelling at the sky. Not sure what I'm dealing with. Are you a force of nature, or an angry kitten? Or maybe just a storm in a teacup.

Bodies are interesting

When I was in my 20's I co-taught an undergrad anthropology class on 'The Body and the Senses.' At the time, I saw my role as teaching the anthropology students about sensory neurophysiology and brain anatomy. They didn't like me very much! Today I realized for the first time that bodies are actually pretty interesting.

I finally finished reading Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain. She links pain and creativity or imagination, albeit rather tenuously, by defining 3 kinds of objects that she names a 'weapon', a 'tool' and an 'artifact'. A weapon has two ends, with power on one end and sentience (pain) on the other end. A tool is similar to a weapon, except that it has power and sentience both on the same end, acting on an inanimate surface. An artifact is a lever or arc that has no obvious ends and is a projection of the body onto an object which is then interjected by other bodies. Examples of artifacts are clothes, languages, and God. Riding on the bus this evening I noticed that we surround ourselves with artifacts, the crust of the earth is cluttered with them. I think we are as much made by them as making them. For instance, Scarry talks a lot about the chair as an artifact, and imagines Adam making the first chair for Eve to ease the pain of her body standing on her feet all day. But Western man (and woman) is shaped by the chair, chairs make our bodies lose the ability to bend in the middle and sit on the ground. The internet makes us lose our memory. We are made out of this stuff as much as we are made out of our genes and the food we eat.

One of the things that interests me, which Scarry barely mentions, is that this stuff we are all made of is co-created. Unlike Adam making the first chair for Eve, our chairs carry within them a whole history of chair design. When I was 6 years old, I used to wonder if my life had really happened, or if it was just a dream that I had dreamt and I was still really only 3. At that age I had to learn a new language because we moved to a different country, and I realized that I couldn't have invented a whole new language myself so therefore at least some part of my life was real. Artifacts can go beyond the creative capacity of a single individual, even a single generation of people that happen to be living on the earth at the same time.

We imbue objects and artifacts with sentient qualities, and can get quite upset with them at times. In some ways, I think this is a good thing. For example, my son was once upset that his surfboard had hit him on the head, so he spent a good few minutes cursing and being angry at the ocean. God can safely be blamed for most mishaps. Without God, we have only ourselves or other people to blame and that can be problematic. A student in my yoga class seemed tired, and I asked her after the class how she was feeling. She seemed a little embarrassed by the question, and said she wasn't doing too well today because she had skipped her cardio workout. I felt so sad for her, feeling that she had to do so much and that I was asking for more. Later I complimented her on listening to her body.

Going back to the theme of yoga as a religion, I realized the other day that when I took my yoga mat to the park I was noticing all the other people carrying yoga mats. I notice them all the time now. The mat is evidently the artifact of the new religion, since yoga can be practiced perfectly well without it. Most reminiscent of a Muslim prayer rug. The mat serves to protect our skin and hands from the surface of the world. I will [unconsciously] enact death by lying on it, but not get too close to the dirt?

Over the years, I came to my yoga teachers for advice on what to do for different aches and pains - asthma, blocked sinuses, backache, pain in the knees and neck. Not only for myself, but also for my ex. I trusted them more than my doctor, whom I thought to be in the pay of drug companies, and I found them more helpful than a massage therapist, because they told me what I could do for myself rather than doing it for me. I never thought about this up until now, perhaps I just regarded them as experts on the body, but I came to them as one would to a priestess or a shaman.

Summary of philosophical conclusions so far:
- Pain reminds me that I'm me, in my body, which is in the world and not in my imagination.
- Yoga has the elements of a religion. It has no god, but it incorporates ritual enactments of death. The central artifact of modern Western yoga is the mat.
- The power of yoga to heal pain may be based as much on faith as exercise.

Also thinking about eating disorders, and the problem of trying to attract clients to a group. If I have an eating disorder, then I am at war with my body. The therapist has to align with me and not with my body, so saying things like 'accept your body' and 'be diet free' would be counterproductive. If I have a pain disorder, then my body is at war with me. The therapist has to align with the part that experiences the pain, because that part feels like the real me.

Is yoga the new godless religion?

Project sleep has not been going too well (I slept for the whole of 4 hours). I've been reading Patanjali's Yoga Sutras online, and looking up the life and works of Wilhelm Reich. Yes, that is Yoga Sutras (not kama sutra) and Wilhelm Reich (not Theodore Reich) although the other ways around might have made more sense, in retrospect.

A friend of mine said, after the yoga prayer for peace at Power to the Peaceful last month, that we [scientists] have blown away the people's religion so they have cobbled one together out of the pieces. Yoga practice has been increasing steadily in the US since the 1990's, to the degree that up to 12% of Americans are now thought to have tried it and with 3% becoming regular yogis. Those who practice yoga regularly do so on average 5 times per week, and are split roughly equally between seeing it as a form of exercise, therapy (mostly for back pain) and a spiritual practice (guesstimated from various online sources). Research shows that yoga is an effective treatment for back pain, migraines, recovery from chemotherapy etc. It both increases wellbeing and reduces the use of pain medications as compared with self-help control groups. I wonder why? Perhaps this has something to do with breathing and relaxation, but I suspect there is also an element of faith. A recent study found that Catholics exposed to pictures of the Virgin Mary experienced less pain when exposed to pain-inducing stimulation, as opposed to atheists exposed to the same pictures or other calming works of art. [There was also a change in the pattern of activation in their brains, but this only matters if you doubt what they reported and either way there is always room for doubt]. The point I'm making is that while yoga is not associated explicitly with faith in any particular object, faith in yoga is part of the health zeitgeist.

My insomniac reading suggests that yoga in its origins is anything but godless. In fact, according to wikipedia, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (around 150 BC) were a branching away from the older Samkhya system of Hindu religion or philsophy, adding the specification of a divine entity and a practice for gaining disentanglement from the bondage of human nature and unification with the divine (possibly the meaning of the word yoga). Hatha yoga, or the practice of asanas (postures) was outlined in the 15th Century in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika by Swatmarama. Why is this so popular now? The focus on the body matches the materialism of our culture, as does the obsessive emphasis on detail - posture, diet and lifestyle made into words. Samkhya philosophy stems from a primary dichotomy of self vs. other (rather than mind vs. body) that suits our individualist society better than the shackles of Judeo-Christian religion, with its baggage of an unpopular creation myth and the pre-requisite faith in the miraculous.

Personal experience of yoga suggests the opposite. My first experience of chanting om at a workshop in the North of England, years after I had started asana practice, was one of surprising loss of self in the community. It made me want to do this (chanting) with my own people, in a synagogue, not here with a random gathering and improperly explained articles of faith. Around the same time, I used yoga while babysitting to help calm my 8-year-old charge who was having an asthma attack. I had her lie in savasana on some cushions and breathe. Later she told me that she used to live with her family above the Quaker meeting place and watch people practicing yoga while her father was working on his PhD. She remembered this pose being described as the corpse pose, and she used to practice it on her own wondering if this was what it was like to be dead. I have to say that death is fascinating, and as a child I used to meditate on what it might be like to join some small animal that seemed to die easily, such as a sparrow, on its mysterious journey into nothingness. One thing I learned from the Yom Kipur sermon this year was that fasting and mourning practices are a symbolic exercise in death. As a yoga teacher and practitioner, I find savasana one of the most beneficial poses and like to do it before and after the other poses to experience them at their fullest.

I mentioned Wilhelm Reich, the psychoanalyst. If you want a good laugh, look up the 'orgone accumulator'. Now I will have to sit straight-faced through a training on Reichian analysis. Yikes! Anyway, he got in trouble with the FDA and the FBI in the 1950's because of the sex taboo (compounded by the fact that he was a socialist and a charlatan among other things). I would argue that money is an even greater taboo in the wider society. In my corner (if I have one) sickness is taboo. I recently heard a psychiatrist say that his patients don't mind having a disorder, but they don't want to know that they're sick. It hasn't always been this way. In the past, people loved their ailments. Read Pepys. Or maybe death is the real taboo, and that's why we can't sleep and need to practice savasana.

Meditation on meaning

"... intellectual arguments if "inconsistent" may cease to be intellectual arguments, but human behavior, if inconsistent, does not cease to be human behavior; and economic systems are closer to being extended and materialized forms of behavior than to being intellectual arguments. Thus to identify them as "contradictory" or "inconsistent" does not announce the alarming character of the dislocation that Marx actually attempts to convey. Similarly, to describe the departure from the model as its "falsification" would be more appropriate if the model were bodying forth the nature of "truth" rather than the nature of "fictions and made things." " (Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain).

These are fragments that I shore against my ruin:
That minutes I spend on the phone with some lonely person, or hours face to face, or the share of an hour doing yoga, help someone get through their days. While I may be a replaceable part of a broader system, somebody has to be in my place. I make no claims to heal anybody only to allow healing to happen. In another culture, perhaps, I would be a priest or a shaman or a family elder. But I like being where I am.

Scarry claims that work is an organized system of pain that promotes the imaginative creation of cultural artifacts. My work is constantly creative and pain free.

Scratch that. Saying goodbye is hard. Therapists are paid in order to suffer the pain of ultimately letting go. Not for the pleasure of holding onto somebody's memories, but for the cost of erasing them.

I work in a bizarre organization where almost nobody is paid, in the midst of a culture that makes Mammon our god and expects from him the kind of truth that Marx expects. The biggest taboo in the broader culture is money. I wonder what is our biggest taboo? Perhaps I'm too close up to see it.

McNears Beach, CA

Where else affords free beaches with hot showers in October? And just as I was running out of dance class credits and wondering what to do tomorrow evening, I get a call to sub for Ashtanga yoga.

Strange hills with lupin

Madrone trees, February

Madrone trees, October

Dead tree at Las Trampas, February

Dead tree at Las Trampas, October

Coyote, Cow

The cows did not seem bothered when a couple of coyotes walked through their field.

Not Waving But Drowning

Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

What if, swimming against the tide

What if I had my bike with me that day, and we had gone just a couple of miles further along 2nd St? We would have come to a little beach park, overlooking the bay. I would have swum, like I did there today, maybe you would have swum too. Things might have been different. You wanted someone to come home to, and we could have been that for one another, perhaps... Except that you didn't even acknowledge this was what you wanted, you only projected it onto me, saying it was what I wanted. And I'm not certain it is. It would have been nice, for sure. But I'm pretty happy coming home to my cat and my dog and my kids, listening to Bach really loud and cooking lentil soup like my grandmother used to make it. Yet I still think of you there now, waiting for me on the beach perhaps, not knowing you're waiting just there for some other reason, as I swim back to the shore against the tide, avoiding a trail of jellyfish. I know that reality doesn't work like that, that all the what ifs spangle out in other dimensions only to peter away and they don't generally loop back into this one. What if the jellyfish had stung me on the way out? They might still sting on the way back in. There are other less pleasant what ifs, spreading from our encounter, measured in millimeters rather than miles. Am I condemned to be haunted forever by all the what ifs?

And all the others. You who remembered that I wanted to swim in the bay at midnight and that's why I would like to be where you are now, near the ocean. If I were there with you we could have played hooky and biked to the beach together instead of waiting for the train that is running late. Why do I feel like I've missed the boat and you're on it?

Why does there always have to be a you? Maybe my present happiness is conditional on the one who is always there, just a phone call away. You will never read this, because you think it's silly, and you're probably right. Probably, you will never be here for me to come home to, but you know that I'm here for you. I hope you know that. Thank goodness we've stopped playing at maybe, forgoing the small pleasures of life for the sake of some future that might never happen to either of us, whether each for ourselves or one for the other.

Sleepless in Berkeley II

Another sleepless night in Berkeley - maybe it's something in the air, the full moon - who knows? At least this time I rode my bike through without having to stop for the busy traffic, and the pedestrians I encountered were on the whole friendly, saying hello as they stuffed guitars and other instruments into their truck. Some were yelling, but only at each other not at me.

Reading about identity and the internet for the next philosophy group brought to mind my readings on pain, and a conversation I had earlier in the day while hiking down from Las Trampas. Pain is what brings us back to the self, establishing the reality of both self and world as in pinching yourself to make sure you're not dreaming. Pain means that the world is real and not all in my imagination, and also that I am really me, in my body, which is in the world. The boundary of the body, the skin, is what binds me to the world. In the world of words, on the internet, there is no real me. I was reading the history of Multi User Dungeons (MUDs) and I looked at some of their websites. Perhaps they need to specify whether killing other characters is allowed, because there is no possibility of causing bodily pain only social pain. I would be curious if players ever experienced bodily pain as a result of their characters' adventures online. I imagine that other sensations such as sexual ones are possible, even likely, but I wonder about pain. Perhaps the imperative 'do not kill' comes from the possibility of inflicting pain on a fellow sentient being, and when we know others are not sentient we just don't care in the same way. I am the intentional, willing I that can create my own identity in a world of words and also the sentient I that experiences unwilled pain.

Mmmm

I feel extremely fortunate to be living here. There was not a cloud in the sky this morning when I walked my dog. My friend in the city was available for a last minute coffee together, at a cafe serving fine oatmeal with fresh fruit, sugar and cream. Another friend joined me for acro-yoga in the park and I tried some new poses as a base, while watching stunt planes flying in the distance. I did some not bad handstands, the first time I've had the courage to do those in about 7 years. On my way back home, the view of the bay from the Bart train was so amazing that I wish I had time to take out my camera. The day ended with Friday night waltz (which is actually on Saturday) and a new friend came over for tea afterwards. I even read, or at least turned the pages, through about half of Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain, which I'm reading for my dissertation. More on that when I finish.

Project sleep is not going so well...

What Really Matters?

Is it the leap of the heart in the moment
before you drop from the Tarzan rope?
The cold thrill of the water,
hearing yourself scream?
Or is it the moment before,
the decision, conquering fear,
holding onto the rope, letting go
of the ground in order to reach it?
Is it the splash, the people watching,
your kids watching, watching your kids
or someone else's kids?
This last adventure of summer
the blackberries drying on the bushes
or the first day of school,
the humdrum of hopes and dreams?

Bicycle Day

When I was a kid growing up in Israel we used to call Yom Kipur (aka the Day of Atonement) Bicycle Day, because there were no cars in the street. Nobody drove. Not that it's a greater sin on the High Holy Days than any regular Sabbath, just a local tradition. One year, I must have been about 8, I cycled all the way to a village the other side of town with my younger cousin riding on the cross bar of my blue Raleigh that we had brought over on a plane from England. We took picnic supplies with us (of course, all the stores were closed) and my parents probably had no idea where we were because there were no cellphones in those days and nobody worried. Only kids were on the streets, the parents were all busy praying or fasting, or privately not doing those things. The traffic lights were still on, even the one my mother had organized a demonstration about before it was finally erected to prevent further traffic accidents on the main road. At first, we played at following the lights, then we just ignored them.

This year, I went to synagogue and my soul was suitably tormented by a lecture on the cultural anthropology of mourning that included the phrase 'macro-feedback-loop'. I did not ask for that, nor did I ask for the phrase 'revives the dead' to be replaced by 'gives life to everything'. I have no need for a God that gives life to everything. Lightning in a pond, some organic chemistry and evolution will suffice. Raises the fallen, heals the sick, frees prisoners and... 'gives life to everything'? It is a non-sequiter. I want a God that makes miracles, thank you. I want something that binds me to my spiritual identity and inspires me. Not 'consoling the bereaved' as a duty whose worth cannot be measured, although I'm sure I could do more of it and that would be a good thing. Not when it is a mistranslation of 'accompanying the dead'. Never mind that I'm an atheist.

Maybe you have to be in the right mood. The best ever Yom Kipur drash I heard was by a woman rabbi in London, when my father was in a coma in hospital a few weeks before he died. She quoted Kant, sadly I have forgotten the context but it caught my attention because unlike Spinoza he never was one of us. She mentioned the dwindling numbers of Jews in Britain, and how a survey in the US had shown that short of thrice weekly religious school the best predictor of kids staying Jewish was keeping some sort of kosher at home. She said people laughed at her keeping kosher when she came over to the US for rabinnical school, but now she felt vindicated. Ever since then we've only eaten ham sandwiches outside the home.

Earlier in the day I played at the swing. It was gorgeously clear over the bay and the view of the Golden Gate Bridge was amazing. For the first time, I stood up on the swing and noticed all the other amusements. Someone must have hung a new trapeze and Tarzan rope on a nearby tree a little further downhill, and there was what appeared to be a yellow tightrope between two trees higher up, but loose and with knots in it. Next time, I'm bringing bicycle gloves.

Lucky we can wear shorts this time of year

Especially when the October wind

 -- Dylan Thomas

Especially when the October wind
With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
My busy heart who shudders as she talks
Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
On the horizon walking like the trees
The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
Of the star-gestured children in the park.
Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
Some let me make you of the water's speeches.

Behind a post of ferns the wagging clock
Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
And tells the windy weather in the cock.
Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
The signal grass that tells me all I know
Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.

Especially when the October wind
(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
With fists of turnips punishes the land,
Some let me make of you the heartless words.
The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

Swinging in the dark

Tonight I went for a walk with my dog to swing on the rope-swing atop Albany Hill. I watched the lights of the Golden Gate Bridge vanish and reappear from behind the Eucalyptus trees, and looked up at the crescent moon and the stars, sensing the cool air on my face, a little dizzy as I spun slowly around. I felt rather lonely after having dinner with a new friend, another conversation cut short by my skepticism.

You are a theoretical physicist who wants to find that everything is made from different arrangements of one or maybe four kinds of stuff, not hundreds. This is the dream of physics that again and again proves either wrong or mired in complexity. I wish I had touched your tattoo, in the design of an atom, binding you to your chosen path. I wish I had let you know how I felt touched by your dream. I wish I was better at making connections than breaking them.

We are perhaps all bound together like the particles in an atom but can never can fully bridge the gap between us because of some stronger force, experiencing at best slippery moments of connection that jostle us against each other like flotsam and jetsam in a stream. Little moments of coming together like stars in a lifetime of darkness, that make us imagine what it would be like to be a stream of light intertwining with another stream, a web of light glowing across the night sky.

Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned that in High School I had a crush on my physics tutor, who was a post-doc theoretical physicist at the time and then ended up going back to his family business, running a sweatshop for cheap clothes. You and he came from the same island. I love islands, the proximity of the sea, the beaches, the sense of being constantly on the edge.

We are the stuff that dreams are made of. We are as clay in the hand of the maker, at his whim to broaden and at his whim to shorten. The best we can do is hold on to each other.

Last summer, I e-mailed a friend about how I had met an old man on the hill. He wanted to talk and tell me his story. I listened for a while, then my phone rang, and he said 'in my day we came up here to be alone. Now you carry your friends in your pocket.' I made my excuses and left, feeling bad afterwards that I could have made a real connection with this man but instead I was drawn back to the humdrum of everyday dreams. The story helped me reconnect with my friend at the time, but now we are losing touch.

Now I feel lost. I am trying to focus on real connections, unmediated by electronics. I was so happy when, walking back from the hill, a friend returned a call on my cellphone. But e-mail was swallowing up too much of my time. Who knows if blogging will be any better? Teaching 6th graders about the Day of Atonement, some kids were bragging about how long they had fasted. I asked why we fast, and they didn't really know. To torture the soul, I explained. Then I said that I plan to have a cellphone fast as well, and their eyes goggled. I couldn't do that, they all said.

Although some had said they believe in the story of creation, only one knew how to retell it and that she learned elsewhere. None of those who believed in evolution could retell that tale. We live in an era of soundbites and tags, all we have to do is remember some key words and we can look it up on the internet. But we are creatures of connection, and we feel lost without our internal narratives. No wonder we reach out all the time for the most tenuous of links.

Oversincerity

I looked up how many other bloggerers shared my interests, favorite movies, etc. To my horror and consternation, the most popular one was Philosophy (at > 40,000)! The least popular was The World According to Garp, only 550 list this as a favorite movie. So I decided to dare and add some more honest interests. Navel-gazing (93 bloggerers), and oversincerity (1 - that would be me).

Bluegrass Festival

Moonlight Frisbee

Walking back from the Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park on Saturday night, I saw these guys playing frisbee in the moonlight, so I took a picture of them and the crescent moon overhead.

Sleepless in Berkeley

Normally I have a clear run, cycling through Berkeley at midnight from my shift on the crisis hotline. Tonight, though, there were two cars traveling in opposite directions up and down one thoroughfare (I had to take a foot off the pedal) and a white limo U-turned on University Avenue just ahead of me. A dog-walker quietly picked up after her large, black dog, someone was walking home from Bart, there was a car filling up at the gas station and a pedestrian with oddly tied hair walked across San Pablo. It reminded me of the night I drove back from the hills and encountered a man clad in only a blue surgeon's gown and a black trash bag, and there was a large deer with fine antlers crossing the road. I was glad to be in a car that night.

My inspiration for this blog was one written by someone I met online, which was disarmingly open and endearingly authentic. That is a hard act to follow. The biggest problem is that many of my thoughts are about other people, and I worry about betraying their trust by writing about them or about our relationships. So I've decided to write as though I were writing to the person in question. You (you know who you are if you're reading this) inspired my blog, with your mix of Leaves of Grass energy, Woody Allen angst and Tristram Shandy quirkiness. Thank you.

I am taking an e-mail diet. I will only be checking my e-mail Monday morning and Wednesday or Thursday. Perhaps this will help me find time for writing my dissertation, strengthen my bonds with the real people in my life, and last but not least promote sleep...

The moment of creation, Thoughts

I just finished reading Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Thought. His premise is that we can learn something from the structure of language about how humans think. He argues that while assuming communicative intent, relevant and veridical content, and so on most speech acts involve an element of politeness with the aim of preserving 'face'. Human interactions are governed, at an emotional level, by three forces - communality, authority (or deference) and reciprocity - and these forces set the context for communication and the scales on which 'face' is to be preserved. According to Pinker, we understand complex, abstract concepts by their metaphorical relation to simple, intuitive ones, that come from our discrete, topological understanding of space and time. Communality is the force for togetherness, authority is the quest to power, and reciprocity is the desire for fair exchanges. Pinker claims that it is only through metaphorically extending the definition of the emotional commons to include knowledge that we are able to advance our scientific theories and have rational discourse, including fair legal and mercantile process. The goal of education, according to Pinker, should be to shed the garb of our emotional baggage, now it has been pointed out, and to go beyond 'face'.

I like Pinker's revision of the Benthamian stance so pervasive in this post-Freudian culture that there is always some 'secondary gain' an imaginary 'bottom line' to all our interactions with others. It seems that linguists have come up with this concept of 'face' through their analysis of dialogue that simply fails to squeeze onto a single dimension.

Much of Pinker's book is anglo-centric, and some distinctions (like the one between 'for' and 'to') simply don't translate. I grew up speaking Hebrew, a langauge that lacks that distinction. Nevertheless, while focusing on the inferences drawn from one language he has come to conclusions that could potentially be supplemented by examining other languages in as much detail. I can remember the experience, during a time in my life when I was switching from speaking mostly in English to speaking mostly in Hebrew, of having a thought in my mind and holding it there before choosing which language to think it in. So my intuition is that thought precedes and shapes language, although not all thoughts are translatable into all languages and the language of a person's thoughts places bounds on the ones they are likely to have.

I believe that the goal of education should be critical thinking. Pinker gives no examples of what moving away from the emotional aspects of language would be like because, I think, that is not actually possible. All metaphor is, in my view, empty without tying it in to some narrative. It's like a dictionary that allows you to translate from one language to another, but where is the story? Critical thinking is not an escape from preserving 'face'. Instead, it is the faculty of following a story or a line of reasoning and holding in memory all the different parts, checking them out not only against a simple, intuitive snapshot frame of the dominant metaphor but also against all the other available stories that have become a part of the culture. We can change the way people talk, in fact politeness like language varies from one culture to another as well as over historical time. We may not be able to sever the links between language, thoughts and feelings, but we can and do rearrange them all the time.

I created this blog to share my thoughts and observations. They probably won't all be as linear and coherent as the above book review. It's interesting to think that there was something I wanted so much to express about that book, it made a big impression on me and I persevered with reading it through some mental resistance to the content and tedium over the more technical parts concerning verbs. There is so little time for reading, and so much time for expressing oneself these days! And I could have just added it to a book review site, but that's not really what I want. I don't want to offer my judgment on the book to others. I want to express how I related to it. There may be no audience, but I don't mind dancing alone on a dark stage to my own music.

Next on my reading list: Feast of Souls, by CS Friedman. Recommended by my son.

Next in life: sleep... Why is this so hard that I am always trying to pay back a debt in catnaps?