Notes from People Watching

A woman with two young children, one in a sling, one holding her hand, pushes an empty pushchair slowly across the crossing. They pass the bored young man waiting at the bus shelter, who has finished his soft drink and carefully put the empty bottle in the recycling, and finished entertaining himself by talking on his cellphone. Suddenly his bus arrives and he is no longer there. The bus shelter is empty.

A family of three passes, a woman and her two daughters, maybe seven and four, walking alone together in single file.

A man in a big sun hat slowly tends and waters the plants at the nursery across the way. People stop and talk to him about the plants.

People sit in their cars in the traffic, scouting out parking spaces at the grocery store. A dog cowers alone outside the meat market or deli, waiting for his owner to come back out. A man reading a book, perhaps a novel, stares into space looking up toward the sky, caught in his own thoughts or processing something he has read, or maybe a combination of the two.

Someone else is reading a textbook, twiddling a pink highlighter in his hand. Now he is on his cellphone, distracted, seeking distraction.

I email someone I first met here once before about other memories of this place:

"Trying to people watch for an hour as part of the parenting program for my son (did I tell you he is out in the Arizona wilderness for several weeks after struggling with computer addiction, truancy and depression)? I remember our first (maybe only) date here at the cafe in Hopkins, a couple of years ago, when I wanted to fall in love with you and you weren't really interested. And the year before I met an older guy here who wanted to fall in love with me, and fly me with my bike in his private plane to go for a weekend ride, but he reminded me too much of my father.

Difficult to people-watch when bombarded with so many memories.

Wow, I had another date here, maybe third or so, with an alcoholic writer/dj who was too stubborn to let someone else publish the four novels he had supposedly written, and so they were lost when his old computer crashed. I still see him sometimes on the bus.

Hey, he dj's an 80's night every thursday - want to go? It would be a fitting conclusion to my meandering thoughts."

Another young man waits at the bus stop now, less composed, his things in disarray all around, and a soda bottle on the bench seat beside him, so only one of the two young women that join him can sit down. She puts her pack on the empty seat beside his soda bottle, and then another young man joins them and they clear him a space, starting a conversation together. The young woman on the end of the bench is not exactly with the others. She sits forward and close, knees together, balancing a plant pot in her lap, playing on her cellphone and occasionally turning her head to follow their conversation.

The man who was staring into space leafs through his book. Definitely not fiction. A whole lot of art pictures are on the first few pages.

Two different dogs now wait outside the deli, both facing the door where their owners entered. A little impatient, but not despondent.

The stuff in front of the young man at the bus stop turns out to be not only his own, he was watching it and saving a seat for his friends, who now grab their packs as the bus inches forward in the traffic.

A young kid tries to enter his car, testing all the doors to see if one is unlocked, then banging on the windows of the empty car. Perhaps he got tired of grocery shopping with his mom. He experiments with pulling two door latches at once. Nothing works. I look at the bus for a moment, and the kid is gone.

Children sit in the car in the traffic, their mom driving. Each alone clutches a juice bottle or senses it with his mouth, neatly strapped in his seat, looking forward into space. The mom looks forward into space also. Nobody talks or looks out.

In another car a child plays with an empty wrapper, pretending it is a hat, and his dad reaches back trying to take it away from him. At least they were communicating.

Every few minutes somebody touches a car the wrong way and its alarm goes off.

I think that once my ex and I met here too, for a divorce discussion meeting. Not particularly productive.

I like that about 50% of the people at this cafe are engaged in conversation with each other, only 25% on laptops, and the rest reading.

Inside the cafe where I went to use the restroom two men sitting at separate tables are talking. I applaud them and almost wish I could join in. Why is it so hard to meet people at cafes these days? It was easier outside of Wholefoods, where I used to sit at a large table under a sunshade, and that necessitated interaction such as asking if I could join the people there already, and new people asking me. Sometimes this led to real conversations and exchanges of contact information, which I never followed through with, but did remember the people to greet them next time we met in the same place.

A woman carries two heavy bags of groceries, two little girls walking alongside, and I wonder why she doesn't ask them for help. Then she sets the bags down and they each grab one hand. I wonder if they are helping her carry, or if she is now carrying them too, safely back to their car, along this busy street. If I were in her place I would have them hold the other handle of each bag and share the weight.

A woman pushes three girls old enough to walk on a tandem trolley loaded with groceries. She is young and happy, and the girls scream with joy and excitement for the ride.

A couple unlocks their bikes and distributes groceries, the man ending up with a heavy bag in one hand, signaling the traffic with it that he is about to pull out, riding single-handed.

I suddenly think of my son on the trail and check my email for urgent news of his visit with his shadow today. An hour has passed since I first sat down.

The Young Girl and the Ammonite

When she was a young girl, maybe two or three years old, her family used to vacation at Lyme Regis, in Dorset. There were a few photographs in the family album that helped Cynthia remember this time. The crisp, cold feeling of the water as she ran in and out of the waves, the radiant '70's windbreakers where her mother sheltered on the chilly beach, the scary feeling of excitement atop the gigantic green slide on the way back home to their rented cottage, and the smell of coalfires in the evening air. In London there was no more coal burning after the clean air act, but her mother said the smell reminded her of her own childhood. Sometimes Cynthia wondered how many of these memories were true, and how many had been fabricated and embellished by speculation each time she looked again at the old photographs. But the photographs were black and white, so the radiance of the psychedelic windbreakers, and the greenness of the vast slide, were things she must have remembered. And, of course, the smell of coal, and the touch of the water.

And the ammonites. They never took pictures of the ammonites, but she remembered them clearly. Inset in the neighbours' whitewashed garden wall, all around the museum and on the pavement outside. She asked her father about them, calling them snails. Those are ammonites, he said, relics of ancient underwater sea-snails. He explained how a fossil is formed, by the dead creature being pressed into stone, and eventually rotting away, the cavity itself slowly filling with rock. Cynthia thought of the spiral inside the Brighton rock that her grandmother once gave her, and wondered if that too was a fossil. She searched underwater, among the seashells, for ammonites, wanting to prove they were not extinct, staying in the icy English Channel so long that her parents first worried about her feet turning blue and then since she seemed happy enough jokingly said to the concerned onlookers that she must have seal blood in her. On the way home, she drew ammonites in the sand, spreading the sand on the foot of the green slide and digging spirals in it until the last of the late evening sun vanished over the playground wall.

Eventually, her search turned from the sea itself to the rocks and cliffs of the sea wall. She dug at the rocks with her fingernails, trying to unearth fossils. It was tiresome work, and she was just about to turn to collecting seashells instead when she saw a large rock in the shape of a woman bending down and washing her hair. Cynthia felt the form of the rock, looking closely, and found to her surprise a tiny bit of the ridge of an ammonite's shell, with which she had become so familiar by rubbing her fingers on the neibhbours' wall every evening until they had become calloused. In her imagination, she pictured the ammonite sitting inside the rock, coiled in the woman's belly, like the fat ripples her mother called her 'spare tire'. She wanted it. It was her ammonite. But she had no idea how to get it out, and soon their vacation was over and they returned to London with only the black and white pictures in the family album, none of them showing the ammonites.

They never returned to Lyme Regis, for shortly after Cynthia's younger brother was born. Her mother placed Cynthia's hand on her belly, and instead of an ammonite she felt inside her brother kicking. He was born with a murmer in his heart, and a mitral valve prolapse which meant that he could die at any moment. Her father explained that the heart pumps blood through two loops, one to the lungs and one to the rest of the body. The hear squeezes the old blood into a new chamber, and the mitral valve stops it from coming back and mixing with the new blood. Like the valve on the big orange bouncy toy that he let her inflate. In her baby brother's heart, the valve was broken, so some of the blood flowed right back when the heart squeezed, making a murmering sound. She tried to listen to his chest on one of the brief visits he had at home, like listening to her grandmother's conch, hoping to hear the sound of the sea. But she didn't hear anything.

Instead of vacations, Cynthia went to kindergarten and her father picked her up while her mother was in and out of the hospital with the new baby. Her father took her to the Museum of Natural History, where she saw the giant ammonites in the entrance hall, just like her ammonite on the beach. She wanted to buy some little ammonites in the museum shop, but they were too expensive so they bought gemstones for her mother, for when she came home. Her mother put on a polite smile, when they hid the stones around the room for her, like fossils, but Cynthia saw her father's face fall. They both fussed over the baby, and Cynthia bounced around wildly on her orange toy, abusing it to see if the little valve would give way like the one in her brother's heart.

When she was an art student, Cynthia went back to Dorset, on a field trip to learn about stonecarving. She and her fellow students stayed at a caravan park on the cliffs, overlooking a small, dingy beach where they had bonfires every night and smoked. During the day, they drove to the quarry, all eight of them in one student's old Volkswagen Golf, with the windows rolled down, blaring Ziggy Stardust out loud to the rolling hills and craggy old people of this large village or small town. There they were lectured by a sculptor who taught art at the nearby community college, then let loose on the rocks, vaguely supported by a local stone mason. The rocks were not only from the quarry itself. The place was a graveyard for old gravestones. The town had decomissioned two cemeteries to make way for a shopping centre, and dumped the stones in the quarry. A few graves remained, ornamentally sandwiched between the Vodafone shop and a council estate, and it seemed nobody mourned the loss of the largest part. Then other towns began dumping their gravestones here from all over Dorset, adding to the natural resource of rock, undoing centuries of human labour and rebuilding mountains in the derelict quarry, piling up high on the cliffs what had long ago fallen into the sea.

Cynthia wandered among the discarded gravestones and boulders, liking the idea of finding something here to use rather than carving more stone out of the quarry's rockface. She started collecting interesting letters and inscriptions, copying them into her sketchbook. Then she sketched a boulder that looked to her as though there was a tortoise hiding inside. She wanted to find a form already hidden in the rock, so there would be less to carve out. She had no idea what she wanted to make, and so imposing her own will on the quarry was meaningless.

There was a rock that looked to her like a dancer, and another that looked like a woman, washing her hair. Cynthia began sketching this rock from all sides, drawing the form of the woman inside in the style of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth. Henry Moore sculpted woman as a landscape, and Barbara Hepworth made women coming out of the hills. They both drew with contour lines and frames, and so Cynthia proceeded to form her washerwoman from all angles inside of the rock. Then, something made her decide to feel the rock. This rock looked familiar. She did not normally imagine women washing inside of rocks. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and she found it - more by touch than by sight, because the whole thing was now faded and a little grimy. The ammonite ridge. Cynthia was convinced this was the rock from her childhood beach in Lyme Regis. She had found her ammonite again.

All plans to minimize carving by seeking a form close to the surface of the rock vanished from her mind, and she began chipping away with her hammer and chisel, mining for ammonite. The stone mason saw her and started to help, saying she had found a nice, big one. He could understand wanting to take it home. As they worked, he told her about how he became a mason, the years of training and the initiation consisting of carving two linked rings using only hand tools. The rock was hard, and after working all day they had only exposed a few centimetres of the outside curve of the ammonite's shell. It seemed to be intact. He suggested renting a power tool and generator to finish the job the next day, as Cynthia and her group were going back to London at the end of the week.

That night, they went to the local pub and drank apple scrumpy. Then they went back to the beach, and since they were out of dope somebody suggested smoking the wild fennel that grew all along the steep path back to the caravan. The next morning, Cynthia woke up in the bed, which was strange because she normally slept on the couch. The teacher from their art school came early, which was also strange, and told them that they had to go home. Apparently, the neighours complained that someone had been seen dancing around on the top of the caravan, threatening people with a mallet, and they were all making a lot of noise. Cynthia was taken aside and gently blamed for being the cause of this collective punishment. At first she remembered nothing. Then, she dimly recalled climbing up the front of the van. She was sure that she handed her mallet to someone down below, so that she could get a better grip, but perhaps they had passed it up to her later. Why was she holding a mallet?

A few weeks later, she and her brother drove back to Dorset to retrieve the ammonite. As children, they had never been close, since her parents took care to protect Jacob from the trials and tribulations of childhood, worrying about his heart. Cynthia felt left out and not a little jealous. Now Jacob was himself out of the house and going to college, and Cynthia hoped they could get to know one another as adults, beyond the constraints of their close-knit family. Once in the Dorset village, they found the friendly mason and with his help, hired a power tool and a generator. They had until sundown to carve out the ammonite, plenty of time since it was June 21st, the summer solstice and longest day of the year. Jacob was good at finding fossils. As a child, he had asked for an archaeologist's pick-axe for his birthday, and promptly came home with a large rock containing a dinosaur's footprint. His finding was confirmed by several bemused experts among their parents' friends. After extracting the ammonite, Cynthia planned to show Jacob the beach. Maybe they could light a bonfire together, to celebrate Midsummer's Night.

When they got to the quarry things started going awry. First of all, it was hard even for all three of them to carry the generator all the way from the car to the rock. Then, the thing wouldn't start up and they had to carry it all the way back and drive into town for a replacement. With two people chipping away by hand, they had revealed about a quarter way around the ammonite. It was nearly sunset when they finally got the second generator going, and Cynthia realized they would have to risk paying for another day's rental. As the sun was setting over the hills, tinging the white walls of the quarry with its red light, Jacob, who had been chipping away at the rock, suddenly collapsed.

Cynthia went through in her mind the steps of cardiac ressuscitation that she had learned years ago at a first aid class. She wondered if this was even the right thing to do for someone with Jacob's condition, the mitral valve prolapse. In that moment, she remembered a recurrent dream or nightmare she used to have about her brother, when they were younger. She had been left to take care of him while her parents went to get something out from the car. They were at a stately home, in the garden, a place way out in the countryside and larger than life. Jacob was just learning to walk, and he stumbled into a maze. Cynthia saw him enter, and ran after him, surprised he was not right there in the entrance. The passageway bent around in a spiral between the tall, dark green boxtrees. Cynthia kept going, expecting to find Jacob at each next bend, running faster and faster. Finally, she arrived at the centre of the spiral, exhausted, and there was no Jacob. She felt terrible. She felt so ashamed, what would she say to her parents when they came back and discovered she had lost her brother? They must be back by now, she should go out and ask them for help. To her surprise, she noticed there were not one but two exits from the place where she found herself, in her mind the centre of the maze. She looked from one to the other with increasing trepidation, trying to remember which passageway she had come from. Which was the way back out? This was the point when she always woke up.

While Cynthia hesitated, the stone mason, who knew nothing of Jacob's condition, had already applied CPR. Jacob spluttered awake, and asked where he was. Cynthia took him to hospital, while the stone mason returned the power tools. Ah well, she thought, he will get the ammonite himself another day. Small payment for rescuing my brother, while I was shamefully trapped in indecision. They had a long wait in emergency, because by now Jacob seemed to be fine. He told Cynthia how he had felt he was falling, not from the little rock but down a great cliff, as his life flashed before his eyes. He saw the light at the end of it. It was hours before he was seen by a doctor and sent home, and by that time Cynthia was too worried about him to attempt any bonfire on the beach. They stayed at a small, innocuous bed and breakfast which was already on the way back to London.

Cynthia and her brother never got close, and eventually he suffered a cardiac arrest and suddenly died. She held as a comfort the image of the light he saw at the end of his near-death experience in Dorset. A year later, when it was time to set the stone for his grave, she drove back just in case the ammonite was still there. To her surprise, there it was, exactly as they had left it, about a quarter revealed from the belly of the woman bending down to wash her hair. Cynthia found the stone mason again, and he helped her load the entire rock onto her van this time. She went back to her old sketchbook, and thought about simply carving the stone woman in the style of Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth as she had first envisaged, instead of trying to get 'her ammonite' out of the rock. In the end, she did not have the heart to do even that. She simply lumped the whole thing on his grave. Maybe others would see in it the woman washing her hair, maybe not. Maybe they would find something different. The ammonite was there now, for all to see. At the end of the day, she didn't even know him.

Writing stories is a little like stonecarving. Sometimes one comes with a plot fully formed and one hacks away at the quarry, regardless of the shape of the rock. Sometimes one looks at the rocks of life and sees something hiding just beneath the surface, waiting to be told. If you take a moment to look at the rocks, maybe you will see something there. It's not always about finding ammonites.

Apple Planting in America

Inspired by Richard Brautigan's book Trout Fishing in America, I have decided to go Apple Planting in America and write a philosophical travel journal. When I drive across the country with my son, we will bring a box of apples with us and plant the cores as we go along, taking pictures of their locations with the GPS coordinates on a new iPHONE. Amazing what we can do, now! Someone could even go around after us finding them and taking them out, displacing them, or enhancing them by planting an actual appletree seedling.

I've always liked apples, the fruit, not the computers. Perhaps because they hit all the senses at once, sight, smell, touch, flavor - even sound (crunch). I use variants of apple in different languages as usernames and passwords for many things. Once I identified as a quince! In Hebrew, apple is part of the word for many other things. An orange is a golden apple, and a potato an earth apple. The latter is true for French, as well. The reason for using apples in this way is not because I like the fruit, it was simply because the first time I was required to make one I was trying to program an Apple-Mac computer in ThinkC. It quickly did the apple-thing on me. Macs always freeze when I try to use them, and display a timer icon. At the time, it was a little black-and-white clock, but in later years that was replaced by a rainbow-colored bow or hourglass that looked not entirely unlike an apple core.

When I first thought of this idea, I remembered a story about someone planting apple seeds across America. This was confused in my mind with a story about George Washington, or perhaps Lincoln, and an apple or cherry tree. I probably read both stories in an American Grade School reader when I was 6. It came from a used bookstore in Israel, and was one of the few new English books that I owned at the time, which I hadn't brought with me from London, so I kept it fondly even after the corner was chewed off by the dog.

Looking on Wikipedia, I quickly discovered that the story was about Johnny Appleseed, a real historical character and Swedenborgian missionary who traveled around the outposts of Ohio preaching about not harming animals, and planting nurseries with apple seeds supplied by the cider brewers who wanted more apples in America. Johnny Appleseed lived on other people's floors, wore discarded old clothing, and went barefoot in the summer.

It was George Washington who killed a cherry tree with his new hatchet, when he was 6, after being told it was good to use on wood. Then his father, outraged finding the stump, asked who had damaged the tree. Little George confessed to the act, saying he couldn't lie, and his father was so delighted that his son had spoken the truth he was not angry with him for killing the tree.

According to Aristotle, the form of an apple exists within each apple, whereas Plato thought there was a world of universal forms, where ideas exist like 'good' that have no particulars in this world. Aristotle thought there were particulars of everything.

I could have made the story be about Lincoln and an apple tree, and had his father as the itinerant seed planter. Lets try that. Lincoln, Sr. traveled around the West planting apple seeds, and preaching about not harming animals. Finally, he settled in Sinking Spring Farm, in Kentucky, with his young wife. One day his six-year-old son Abraham was given a hatchet, and told it worked well on wood. Trying it out, he accidentally killed one of his father's precious apple trees. Lincoln Sr. was outraged to find the apple tree felled, and asked who had committed this felonous deed. Unable to lie, young Abraham confessed. Although the apple tree was precious to Lincoln Sr. he was happy that his son had told the truth. Lincoln, like his father, avoided killing animals.

The truth, I think, is fleeting, like a trout. Reality is more like an apple. Memories are precious but often false. This meditation was made possible by Wikipedia, the collective efforts of many minds working together to perfect knowledge.

Many years ago, I planted a seed in Wikipedia. I planted the proverb "He who eats alone, dies alone," under Jewish proverbs, because my father used to say that. Curiously, I found out from a friend whom I lunched with that it was actually an Italian proverb. I could not find a biblical or other Hebrew source for the saying, so I surmised that its popularity in Israel could have stemmed from the stories of Holocaust refugees who had spent months or years wandering the shores of Italy before finally gaining passage to Israel. I did not change my entry in Wikipedia, but after a while I found the expression listed under Italian proverbs and removed from Hebrew ones. Interestingly, I now see that it has been reinstated in Wikiquote as a Jewish proverb as well as an Italian one.

The proverb has a number of possible endings. He who eats alone, dies alone. He who eats with others, dies of starvation. He who eats alone, chokes alone. Hey - this one is in Arabic and may account for both Hebrew and Italian interpretations. Spanish preservers 'chokes'. I think I caught a glimpse of the trout.

Some Days Things Work Out

Like when after trying on 6 pairs of jeans

to go with the cream blouse in the sale

I find some khaki shorts that are perfect

Or the server at Starbucks who

gives me a glass of water I never ordered

right before I spill my espresso

I wonder how to say to you that

you are beautiful to me, or if I should, and then

you send me an e-mail. And I don't have to.

Untitled

And what if there is no one there at all

To watch the drama of my life unfold?

I dance alone upon this puppet stage

Creating dreams of laughter, love and light

Images in the mind's eye, beckoning

nobody.

Crazy world!

This is a truly crazy world that we live in! It makes me feel warm inside to think that I have a life in the dreams and fantasies of so many other people, some of them near and some of them far away. Most of them probably don't even know me, or not very well. Some I have met only once or twice, and yet they keep thinking of me, just as I sometimes think about them. I think that this really is a connection, of sorts. We can't help being constructed this way, even at the edge of our capacity, when the mind breaks down from dementia or was never intact in the first place, we have this idea of the other. I have had clients who were developmentally delayed to the degree of being unable to tease out one day from the next, to remember their own age, or consistently hold onto the distinction between reality and fantasy. But even in this liminal state, we all dream of being with another, and wish to share these dreams. Maybe it's all there is left.

At some level I wish there were someone I could be with physically as well as emotionally. But then, that is harder, negotiating an actual relationship in the between of two real people instead of this fuzzy overlap amongst all our dreams.

Dating etiquette

Is it worth waiting for the other person to write first? I know that theoretically this is supposed to be my role. But can I possibly be said to be myself if I do that? Surely I only want to be with someone who can take me the way I am. Maybe I need to change, or at least choose which is more important: personal integrity or finding a partner. [sigh]

Navel-gazing from dissertation

This is my second doctoral dissertation. When I was writing the first, my brother died of leukemia. He died of pneumonia following a complication of his bone marrow transplant, and I sat by his side as he panicked, distressed and unable to breathe. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Eventually we said a brief goodbye and he was intubated. I sat by his side, holding his hand and not knowing what to do, while the ventilator pumped air into his lungs until his heart stopped beating.

In the early stages of working toward my second doctorate, I had a chance to remediate that experience by being at my grandmother’s deathbed. She was always a difficult woman, but she had lost the ability to speak, and in many ways this made things easier for her caregivers. We knew it was serious and came when we heard she had punched the orderly in the face who was trying to feed her. I took turns with my mother, sitting by her bedside, as my grandmother, like my brother, was dying of pneumonia. This time, thankfully, there was no talk of adding a ventilator or heroic measures to keep her alive. After two weeks, it was a Sunday when she was evidently about to pass away. The nurse had ordered morphine, but in the UK a doctor had to be called from another hospital to sign for it (see http://painpersonalitypsychotherapy.blogspot.com/2009/03/worst-of-evils.html for a discussion of the power of doctors over the dispensation of opiates). My grandmother was evidently in a lot of pain, although she was unable to use her voice to communicate it, doubly silenced if Scarry is right about the difficulty of putting pain into language (http://painpersonalitypsychotherapy.blogspot.com/2009/03/body-in-pain.html). Finally, the doctor arrived, and I went to her, holding her hand and making eye-contact to comfort her, and said, “The doctor is here, he can give you something to help with the pain.” I tucked her blanket and went to close the door, so she would not overhear the doctor and my mother talking in the corridor outside. By the time I got back to the bed, my grandmother had lost consciousness and never regained it. The doctor examined her and the morphine was added to her drip while my mother and I continued to sit with her, prayer book ready. But it was the gentleness of that last caring communication with my grandmother which I felt transcended my ordinary experiences, in a way that informs my work with patients in pain.

nebulous anxiety

I am worried that reading about someone with chronic sore-throats and flu has made me feel the same way. Quite possibly swimming in the bay for 20 min when I already had a scratchy throat was not a good idea. But I organized the swim, and two people drove up from the South Bay, so I didn't feel as though I had a choice. And it was glorious, at least swimming out toward the Golden Gate and feeling it get closer was, but then the beach seemed so far away and persisted in remaining so for far too long on the way back in. The water was decidedly crisp, and even with a wetsuit I felt significantly dizzy when I pulled myself out. Hell, I didn't even want to teach my yoga class this morning. I tried to call in sick, but there was no reply.

Now all I want to do is curl up in bed with a book, and it's only 8.30pm. Instead of writing, I've been planning my trip to the East Coast to look at colleges with my son. Somehow I feel that at 16 he should be planning this himself, but since it hasn't happened and we're flying next weekend I just had to step in. At his age, I was planning trips to Israel and all across Europe, without even the benefit of the internet. My ability to cope with travel must have peaked early, it seems to be such hard work now, and I feel anxious about getting maps, getting lost, missing appointments, or spending too much on car rentals and hotels. I should just relax, and consider it a pleasure trip.

I must remember to bring my camera, so that I am not always grabbing other people's pictures from online. Ah well, I can't find one. A picture in words: the dark gray bridge peeping under the dark gray clouds, more real and closeup once you are in the dark gray waves. Dark gray birds bob up and down on the water, in front of dark gray sails. The buildings of San Francisco in many shades of gray rain-stained and unmoving in the distance. I imagine myself splashing dolphin-like through the water in my dark gray wetsuit.

Mindful of loneliness

This evening I feel lonely. Why is it that my feelings vacillate so much? This morning I was feeling happy, hoping to reconnect with a friend tonight, and I know that is going to happen one of these days but not this evening and I feel lonely.

Maybe this is why I always make up a 'you' in my head to talk to, because the world of other people is inconstant and flickering. I am reminded of a poem by Sylvia Plath called Mirror, which I had to recite once for a drama exam. It had the lines: "Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall./It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long /I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers./ Faces and darkness separate us over and over." I wish that other people wouldn't flicker so much in my consciousness.

My loneliness could also be related to the fact I am writing about the pain of torture and war. By the way, if you're interested, I am posting chapters from my Clinical Research Project (literature review) here: http://painpersonalitypsychotherapy.blogspot.com/

My lonely feelings are perfectly reflected in Matt Haimovitz's rendition of the cello suites, which take up 3 cds in his version, whereas this morning I was listening to Yoyo Ma, on 2 cds. Perhaps this too plays a role in my changing mood, but there are only so many times I can listen to Yoyo Ma in succession. And the torture of moodishly elongated notes alternating with dancelike exhuberance sits well with writing about the irrational project of war.

I am also fond of this particular poem by Rilke about loneliness, which reminds us that finding a so-called life partner might not be the answer:
http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~pjk42/rilke_files/einsamkeit.html

Why is it so easy to fall in love?

I did it twice this week. Once as a result of (okay, pretty wonderful) sex and being accepted, and the second time simply from talking with someone who seemed to like me, and looking him in the eyes. Now I'm not sure whether I'm in love with both or if one, which. Being with the two of them concurrently makes no sense. I'll probably just wait and see who calls back, if anybody.

I have a theory about what I call the construction of the soul. Some people's minds, mine included, contain an inner conversation which is more a dialog than a monologue whereas other people each talk alone as 'I' on the empty stage of their mind. I have some friends whose souls are constructed like mine. I imagine the person to whom my thoughts are addressed as a soulmate, and being 'in love' with someone, in my world, means being that person. I think that the people whose soul is constructed differently mean something else by being 'in love'. Unfortunately, both of the men I'm in love with seem to have the other soul construction.

Maybe someday I will fall in love with somebody whose soul is constructed like mine, and we will vanish in a puff of our own imaginations.

But can I really?

If I feel like it, can I really read the whole of Burnt Norton as an intro to my stress management group? And follow it with the 5 stages of healing: rolling around on the floor like an embryo, creeping like a snake, crawling, squatting and reaching, standing and walking. Followed by a traditional walking meditation.

It makes sense to me. The idea of being in the present moment, being one's past and one's future, emptying out and recasting.

Problems: the complexity of the poem (some people might be put off), the difficulty of the movements (creeping and crawling can be rough on the body). I will have to preface it all with some gently-gently instructions. What associations does this bring to you, without thinking too much? Imagine following the movements if it is uncomfortable for you to physically do them.

More problems: tomorrow morning I have to teach a gentle yoga class, and still not sure how much movement my knee will allow me. Hmm - I can practice the sequence of poses in Jon Kabat-Zinn's book. After all, the following week I need to teach them to the stress management group...

catching up with myself

I thoroughly enjoyed teaching my stress management and meditation class tonight. Partly it has to be the feedback from the group. Somebody said she felt at peace in her body, and more freedom than she had ever experienced before. Another part is the preparation. I love preparing the meditations, it puts me in such a peaceful state of mind.

In other areas of life I am learning that a car really saves no time at all. I miss self-propulsion, whether on foot or bike, and use the extra freedom to browse online dating sites instead of writing my dissertation or catching up with work. I think I will try returning the car tomorrow. This is a reversible step, if I get too tired walking with my brace I can always rent another car.

I have been feeling rather argumentative, and wrote this philosophical rant:

TURNING SEARLE’S CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT ON ITS HEAD

The Turing Test is a test of artificial intelligence. According to the test, if a human interlocutor cannot correctly discriminate between the answers of a human respondent and an artificial one, say a robot, computer, or software, then the artificial simulation can be considered intelligent. Searle presents the following argument to counter the Turing Test. Imagine a room with a set of instructions in English. Notes are passed into the room in Chinese, and the inhabitant of the room, who is an English speaker, looks up the answer in the instruction manual and returns another note in Chinese. He could easily pass the Turing Test, and yet does not understand a single word of Chinese. Of course, this is only a refutation of the Turing Test if we equate intelligence with understanding. But let’s move on.

Assuming the Chinese Room Argument is true, does my brain understand English? My brain only deals in nerve impulses and neuro-chemical signals. These are not in English. Therefore one can conclude that no part of my brain, nor the whole, understands English, any more than the inhabitant of Searle’s Chinese Room understands Chinese.

So what exactly understands English? Rejecting some sort of immaterial soul, I would say that I lie at the intersection between my brain, which speaks in impulses and chemicals, and the culture of which I am a part that contains the English language. We could illustrate this using the Chinese Room. The person outside the room, as well as the person who wrote the instruction manual, both understand Chinese. They are communicating via the English-speaking messenger. Similarly, I am communicating with other I’s in English via brains that speak in impulses and chemicals. Where do the I’s come from? We have no evidence that they can come into existence without brains, or some other physical manifestation. And they stop creating new thoughts once their brain dies. And yet, language is something that arguably can only exist between two or more people, so it cannot be tied to a single body. There can be no understanding of Chinese (or English) without being part of a social group. We are social animals, and our brains thirst to communicate with others as soon as or even before we are born, so that when we are born into a language culture we quickly become ‘I’s.

Can a computer have the experience of being an I? Perhaps only if it were designed to be really social.

I noticed this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes on the wall of Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law:
"When I think thus of the law, I see a princess mighter than she who once wrought at Bayeux, eternally weaving into her web dim figures ofthe ever-lengthening past - figures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too symbolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the discerning eye disclosing every painful step and every world-shaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its way from savage isolation to organic social life."

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?