E.C. Walsh Blogsphere

“Data indicate that some characteristic features of REM sleep stage dreaming, resulting to some extent from the neurobiological processes in the brain, resemble some of the symptoms of schizophrenia.” –Dagna Skrzypińska and Barbara Szmigielska, Archives of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, 2013.

Don’t you find it odd that in some, if not most, sleeping dreams that you can remember you don’t realize you are in a dream while in it, only afterwards? What is the purpose of sleep? I find less than three hours a night makes the next day very difficult.  As Hamlet soliloquized, death, like sleep, is ” a consummation/Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,/To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub,/For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give  us pause. There’s the respect/That makes Calamity of so long life:” They say once you achieve REM sleep, you are constantly dreaming; it is just that you only remember a fraction or none of the dreams upon waking.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant described madness as “a waking dream.” The poet Theodore Roethke in one of his most famous poems wrote, “I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.” One of the most famous horror movies of the 1980s, A Nightmare on Elm Street, is about teenagers haunted by a bogeyman who abused them as children and is now haunting them in dreams and blurring the line between dream and reality. Also, is anyone else creeped out that “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” tells children four times that “life is but a dream”? Seems like child abuse to me.

My older brother, who is unlike me in a lot of ways, has no trouble sleeping. I almost envy him for it, but we are not supposed to envy anyone anything. It is one of the seven deadly sins. E.A. Robinson’s “Richard Cory” is one of the best poetic expressions of this moral:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
“Good-morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

My brother isn’t suicidal, as far as I know. Far from it. He is just one of these people who is very calm and doesn’t worry about things that aren’t worth worrying about. We should all be so lucky.

Watched The Outpost last night. One of the best movies I’ve seen in some time. It’s based on a true story about one of the fiercest battles of the U.S.-Taliban war in Afghanistan. Hats off to Jake Tapper of CNN for doing the research, interviews, and writing behind the book the movie is based on.

War movies aren’t my favorite genre of film, but this ensemble piece with no real lead character seems to give a sense of the teamwork, bravery, and sacrifice required of a small unit assigned to a nearly impossible  mission and environment. It makes me glad I never joined the military; I took some initial steps to joining the DC National Guard when I was looking at ways to pay for grad school but suspended my application. Among other things, I don’t really like guns and was probably already too old at the time to do much more than transport or office work.

More importantly, the movie demonstrates the courage, coordination, and choreography needed in the heat of battle. My response to that situation would more likely be cowardice, confusion, and chaos. Well, there are other virtues than valor.

Some use the term “war stories” dismissively, but I heard a military vet say wisely a few years ago of a non-military situation in a metaphorical sense, “when you’re going to war, you should hear war stories.”

You might want to stick around for the credits. The movie includes clips of interviews with the real soldiers dramatized in it.

On a whim I ordered a copy this morning of the new graphic novel adaptation of The Great Gatsby, the original novel being mentioned briefly in the 7/16/2020 blog. I think the novel struck such a chord in people because it showed glamor and wealth with a seedy underbelly and because of its portrayal of two men, Gatsby and Buchanan, who are very materially successful but deeply flawed personally. The moral of the story seems at odds with the Protestant work ethic in the US, that there is a nexus between material success, morality, and religiosity. Fitzgerald was a fallen-away Catholic whose writing talent was “discovered” by a priest in high school.

Graphic novels are interesting. I blogged on 5/1/2020 about the difference between watching and reading. I read comic books a lot and a few graphic novels when I was younger and thought it was cool graphic novels were being taken seriously. I guess the Pulitzer-winning Maus, an allegory of the Holocaust, and a few others like Rep. John Lewis’ (who sadly passed away this week) March, a story of the civil rights movement, are used in college courses. I liked Frank Miller and Alan Moore’s work in this genre.

When I was a teacher, we spoke of some students being more visual learners. I suppose graphic novels are a way to meet them halfway on epistemology.  The problem with straight comic books is not only that they are often frivolous for adults, but also that they can be taken too seriously by Hollywood filmmakers desperate for material and emotionally disturbed people like the 2012 mass murderer in Aurora, Colorado, who claimed he was the Joker from Batman.  My brother observed that the Aurora shooting demonstrated the sometimes destructive power of myth.

“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”, or “I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me.” –2nd century BC Roman African playwright Terence from the play Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor).

Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom wrote a book a few years back called Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. Bloom argues empathy is “a poor moral guide” that can lead to bias, racism, and “weaponization” in the sense that empathizing people may want to punish those they perceive are causing the pain they relate to in others. Bloom has a point. (One of my English students a few years back had a funny malapropism to the effect that great literature should teach the reader apathy, when what he probably meant was empathy.)

My book quotes a line from Samuel Beckett’s More Pricks than Kicks where the main character quotes Dante’s Inferno that “Qui vive la pieta quando e ben morta”/”Here pity (or piety) lives when it is well dead” or “Down here piety lives only when pity is fully dead.” It can come across as a warning against showing pity for the damned, but Beckett’s character calls it “a superb pun” and wonders “why not piety and pity both, even down below?” As one critic of Beckett’s work asks, divine mercy or divine justice?

Another famous quote from Terence’s play The Self-Tormentor is “Aliis si licet, tibi non licet“/“to others it is permitted; to you it is not permitted.” This was updated by a 19th century author as “What is permissible for Jupiter is not permissible for a bull.” As my book shows, Maria Edgeworth in her Essay on Irish Bulls notes a similar double-standard in that many in England accept apparently self-contradictory statements in Shakespeare as figurative language but deride it from the Irish as non-sense.

Not much to say on current events. The economy seems to be creaking back into operation even without a virus vaccine. On the aftermath of the George Floyd killing etc., violent protests are wrong, but I think the anti-racist movement has a point. Many people aren’t racist but are passive about those who are and in a sense complicit in racism. Could someone have stopped Dylan Roof before he murdered?

For some reason, the 2000 movie  Waking the Dead (not the BBC TV show by that name) has been on my mind this week. I haven’t seen it in a long time and don’t usually like romantic tearjerkers, but I thought it was very well done. The plot is very different, but it reminds me of The Great Gatsby in the way it dramatizes the intersection of career and material ambition with personal lives.

The 2000 movie is about an up-and-coming, straight-laced politician (Billy Crudup) who falls for a radical leftist woman (Jennifer Connelly). It’s about haunting, and as with most ghost stories, it’s up to the audience how literally you take it. It’s based on a novel I haven’t read, and the direction and production quality is very good.

Some broad-brush comments on politics/economics. In my opinion, North Korea is the only real communist country today (In college, the professors called it an autarky). It seems to me China and Vietnam are communist in name only. There is a lot of anti-China sentiment under Trump, but I think one-worlders are right that globalization has been a net positive. It has lifted a lot of developing-country people  out of poverty, and made consumer items cheaper in the West. Of course there are trade-offs in auto factories in Michigan, steel plants in the Midwest,  and textile operations in the Carolinas.

I was working for a media/publishing company in the 1990s. One of its main focuses was on the oil and gas sector in the former Soviet Union as that region adjusted to capitalism. Russia and other countries there shifted petroleum and other mineral assets from state control to a few oligarchs. It seemed like they went from Soviet corruption and inefficiency to crony capitalist corruption.  “Meet the new boss…”

I’m old enough that we were still studying the Soviet political system in college, and I read the Communist Manifesto when young. It seems to me that the communists had some noble objectives: eliminating gross wealth/income disparities and “de-biologizing history” as someone put it. But it was impractical. I stayed with relatives of a friend in one of the former Eastern-bloc countries in the early 1990s. The paterfamilias was a medical doctor who said under the communists he had an official job but made most of his living providing black-market treatment.

To me Gorbachev was one of the heroes of the 20th century because he decided it wasn’t worth fighting the West to the death over political and economic ideology. I had a boss who would say sarcastically at the end of a difficult work day: “declare victory and go home.” Gorbachev seemed to accept defeat and then go home.

Update: Got my air con fixed yesterday. Makes a world of difference for sleep.

‘”The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.” –Sigmund Freud

The Freud Museum in London is unsure of the accuracy of this quote, but they say it is consistent with the groundbreaking psychiatrist’s love of literature (after all one of his most famous ideas, the Oedipal complex, is  derived from a play). While many contemporary psychiatrists seem to have discredited Freud, he still exerts enormous influence on literary analysis through scholars like Harold Bloom and Mark Edmundson. I cited Freud in my book regarding comical malapropisms in the work of Frances Sheridan and her son R.B. Sheridan.

Freud said it is probable verbal slips always have unintentional meaning and claimed “it would not be surprising if more were to be learned from poets about slips of the tongue than from philologists and psychiatrists.” Declan  Kiberd adds, “the fact that Ireland had functioned for well over two centuries as a zone of dark unconsciousness to England’s day-lit world may explain [R.B. Sheridan’s] glee in pulling away the social covers.”

Update: “So he’s talking about that guttersnipe Dr. Sigmund Freud. Well, isn’t that special?” –Church Lady from SNL.

Not much to say today. It’s my parents’ 57th wedding anniversary  today. 57 years? I haven’t even made it much past a year in any romantic relationship.

Thinking a bit about speech versus silent, attentive listening. I seem to swing wildly between having nothing to say in an almost anti-social manner and rambling, free-associating, and sometimes peevish speech. A poem:

Here are a few awful jokes on the topic of ugly Americans and things lost in translation (even within American English). You have been warned.

American man in Heidelberg, Germany, approaching a currency exchange desk. Man: “I’d like some D-Marks.” Clerk: “Bitte?” American: “Well, yes, if you must know, I am bitter. What about it? Does it show in my expression? Do you want my life’s story?” Clerk: (drawn aback and quizzical) “Bitte?” American: “Rubbing it in, huh? I bet your life is just a bed of roses. Good for you,  buddy. I’m taking my business elsewhere.”

American man at a Tokyo sushi bar approaches a lone woman. Man: “Konnichiwa lovely lady. May I buy you a drink?” Woman: “Iie.” (Man hears “yeah.”) Man: “Well then, what are you having?” Woman: “Iie. Iie.” Man (hearing “yeah. yeah.”): “Yes, but what type of drink?” Woman: “IIE! IIE! IIE!” Man (hearing “YEAH! YEAH! YEAH!”) : “You’re getting too excited about a bit of booze. There are groups and treatments to help with this. I’m going to go. Have a good evening.”

Man approaches a woman at the grocery store in the US. Man: “Well, hello lovely. Would you mind seeing a movie with me sometime?” Woman: “Wino.” Man (hearing “why no”): “Great. Just name the time and place.” Woman: “Okay, I’ll spell it out: you are a W-I-N-O, wino. You look, smell, and act like it. I wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.” Man: “Shouldn’t that be a 16-foot pole, with social distancing and all?” Woman: “Buzz off.”

Thoughts on gaslighting and R.D. Laing. Gaslighting is a particularly insidious form of lying aimed at making someone think they are crazy.  It is based on a  1944 movie called Gaslight about a man psychologically manipulating his romantic partner. Apparently it happens in many abusive relationships. The plot of the recent psycho-horror film The Lodge (mentioned in my 5/7/2020 blog post) turns on a case of it.

The concept seems in keeping with 20th century Scottish psychiatrist Laing’s radical theories on mental illness. Grossly simplified, he seemed to think mental illnesses like schizophrenia in individuals are often sparked or at least fostered by insane elements in their in their environments, rather than merely biological anomalies in the individuals.

“The paranoiac is the interpretant’s psychotic double” is a line I remember from my literary research (can’t remember the source).  When I was a child, one of the nuns at my school said a lot of mental illness originates with lying, prevarication. “What tangled webs…” In that regard, a reference from a contemporary novelist:

“She said that you–”
“I don’t care what she said.” I stand up. “Everyone lies.”
“Hey,” he says softly. “It’s just a code.”
“No. Everyone lies.” I stub the cigarette out.
“It’s just another language you have to learn.”

–Brett Easton Ellis, Imperial Bedrooms