It's all in your head (stupid)

Dring... the experiment is beginning.

After at least two years on my loony forum of desperately trying to break through to my loonies, in missionary fashion, as to WHY their ideas about the mind/body relationship are tainted by the eternal prejudices of our time, I have decided to see if... YOU GUYS, the cream of the crop, the medical elite, the A+ students of top American colleges will... GET it better than "my" loonies do.

Here goes :

A little background. A week ago I got pounded into the ground following a news post about a chiantific experiment highlighting the... nocebo effect. You know, the... nocebo, which has the opposite effect of a placebo.

I found that.... really really interesting, and proceeded to tie this reaction in to my all favorite anecdote about the power of.... NEGATIVE thinking, to be found in Dale Carnegie's little treasure, "The Power of Positive Thinking", book number one in the endless series of management books that has since hit the racks.

You know, the story about the guy who gets locked into a refrigerator wagon, and, after scribbling on the wall that he is expiring from the cold, promptly proceeds to freeze to death in a... disconnected wagon.

I presume that my readership here is already acquainted with this rather... remarkable incident which has no... RATIONAL explanation.

Freezing to death in a disconnected refrigerator wagon throws a loop in our carefully constructed prejudices about just HOW our thoughts manage to translate themselves into our bodies.

When Freud began opening his mouth about psychoanalysis, he had been working with hysterical patients. Mostly women. And along with Charcot, he had made some rather interesting observations.

Observation one : (this one is for the ophthalmo...) Hysterical blindness exists.

Hysterical blindness is blindness for which the doc can find no LESION. (Not finding lesions didn't stop Freud from finding other things. He found : thoughts, memories which the person had translated into corporeal language.)

Blindness exists also which is the result of organic lesions.

Now we get to the clincher...

If YOU'RE BLIND, and there is no lesion, YOU CAN'T SEE.

THE SAME WAY that

someone who has an organic lesion can't see.

So... if BOTH people can't see, then.... why the fuss about the lesion ?

Could it possibly be because... if there is NO LESION, then we say... "it's all in your head (stupid) ? (We also say this when we can find no EXPLANATION for a phenomenon.)

Freud and Charcot both discovered that people suffering from hysterical complaints had their suffering discredited/ignored/belittled by the medical caste. And they discovered this at a time when docs were doing autopsies at record paces in the attempt to LOCALIZE psychic disease in the body and brain. And... when the docs did those little autopsies on their hysterical patients.... AW SHUCKS, they just couldn't manage to find them littl' ole lesions. (Some people are still looking, by the way, or they are trying to localize in other manners...)

As it turns out, as I mentioned over here a while ago, the current DSM has totally bottomed out the diagnosis of hysteria, which is really not surprising, considering that... the epistemological position of the people who came up with the DSM leaves them with a MAJOR blind spot (hé hé...) concerning hysteria, since the PURPOSE of hysteria is to... challenge an all-knowing, all-powerful (generally masculine) MASTER, and... this is precisely the position of the DSM.

So... since there is NO lesion in your body that means that... it's all in your head (stupid).

You might think that since we came to the realization that the brain was commanding most of what is going on in our bodies, we could admit that, to a certain extent EVERYTHING is in your head, but...

This would be too easy. The logic behind this illogic goes like this : if you have a lesion which can be localized, then, you are on the side of truth. But, if you don't have a lesion you are telling a lie, you're a fake, you're a simulator, etc etc.

(And docs know just how exasperating hysterical patients can be, they are just not GOOD, REWARDING patients that you can tinker with in erector set fashion, do a little bit of manual fiddling, chop off a this, extract a that, and illico presto, magic, the person is CURED !! Good doc, good boy, you've done your job, thank you, a million thanks)

Now... since I KNOW that every advantage has its disadvantage, and every disadvantage has its advantage, I cannot say in honesty that I think that it is MAJOR PROGRESS that we have now decided that for every corporal problem there has to be an EXPLANATION of the lesion type. No. I don't think that minutely scrutinizing everybody in hopes of finding the elusive (illusive ?) lesion (or the "faulty" genome, while we're at it...) is necessarily the answer to our problems.

And... as Thai would say... it costs a HELL OF A LOT OF MONEY TO STICK EVERYBODY UNDER THE MICROSCOPE.

Can you believe it ? In the good old days, before we had all this modern medicine, Freud was such a savvy clinician that he could do an excellent clinical exam and determine whether the patient was suffering from a hysterical complaint, or not.

Don't you wish we had clinicians like that these days ? I sure do... It would save us all a lot of filthy lucre.

Thought of the day

Being angry at a central bank is like being angry at your spinal cord while you cliff dive.

"How dare you be so presumptuous as to allow me freedom of motion" laments the diver as (s)he hurtles towards the rocks below.

Free for all

HA !!!

It was not initially my intention to use this expression, but the "free" in free for all is very appropriate to my observations about the pressing social need for gratuity in our filthy lucre obsessed society. But, I'm not going into that now ; that will be the subject of another post that I MAY or may not eventually get around to doing.

As promised to Street Dog, my latest poem (sorry you guys, you're going to have to do a crash course in French, as I hate translating myself...)

EUCHARISTIE

Etranger !

Halte-là

Reste où tu es

Ne bouge pas

Laisse-moi approcher

De toi

Whoah, n'aies pas peur mais

Tiens-toi bien en laisse

Ne bouge toujours pas

Je dois te flairer

Renifler ton être.

Si tu es bon

Je tendrai ma langue

Je romprai ton pain

Avec mes dents délicates

Essaie de pas bouger

Et ta douleur te sera

Douce

Quand j'aurai mangé ton pain

(MAIS ATTENTION TU NE DOIS TOUJOURS PAS BOUGER)

Alors...

Viens me flairer et

Manger le mien et

Nous pourrons parler ensemble.

I am very happy with this poem. It is very very audacious...

Thai, while I applaud your extreme self restraint in refraining from giving in to Marcus's provocations, I definitely enjoy unsheathing my claws from time to time in an agreeably mindless fashion. Call it my... man eating tiger act (although I personally think that my provocations are rather sophisticated next to the trolling that I have seen in cyberspace for several years now). Man-eating tigers treat their human prey the way that unman-eating tigers treat their prey, and the way that Tabby, your cat, treats HER prey too, if you have ever bothered to watch...

And NOW, it's free for all (as if anybody on this blog ever needed reminding that the comments are.. free for all...)

Neural Remodeling

So here's the dream I was just having.

I was is a bathtub. Something dropped in the water (a bottle of shampoo or something) and I fished it out. But there was still an identical bottle of shampoo of shampoo in the tub. So I got it out too. This blip in physics intrigued me, of course. And then human greed instinct took over and I took off my wedding ring and dropped it in. Two rings. I dropped both back in and took out four rings. I paused to think and plan. Somehow I instinctually understood that there were rules (as oftened happens in dreams, the surreal seems "obvious"). 1) this would only work while the water was warm, 2) I couldn't add more hot water, 3)I had to be in the bathtub and the new matter couldn't cause the water to overflow 4) at some point the "magic" time would end and unless I was clever all my gains would disappear. I hollered to <1/2 to grab something valuable. My explanation only illicited boredom with a mild disdain for my childish greed; time would be better spent out of the bathtub doing real work around the house. So I am alone again making handfuls of rings trying to think of a way to keep them in the real world once the time is up. It seems I may have come up with a way to keep about 4 or 5 rings around, but compared to the potential value of gold piled up outside the tub it didn't seem impressive. Certainly not worth getting into a panic so I worked at a fairly leisurely pace dropping and harvesting rings. 1,2,4,8,16 *yawn* better start finding them all....

And upon waking I knew that this was Thai's fault. Not because of the recent bat porn link, but because of the ongoing quest to get me to see that the laws of conservation apply to human perception. I may not be all the way there, but it makes sense that an idea that challenges the mind's current and long-term concept of "The Way Things Are" would take some time to build.

I think the warm water was "focus" or "attention" or "awareness". Which we can only sustain for limited amounts of time (the NPR Virginia Wolf thing...). While we have our awareness focused we can imagine and "play" quite a bit, but we have to have a secondary awareness observing the imagination play to act as "scribe" or what-have-you so that when the magic time is over you have some recollection of the event stored in memory that you can access again. And perhaps act upon to bring into the "real world" (example: an artist imaging a new painting has to remember their "play" to later actually put on a physical canvas).

Honesty, I don't see why people feel the need to take drugs when the natural mind is capable of such weirdness on its own.

Monkey Business

Listen to this

Our "civilization" is... flushing itself down the toilet

Cute title, huh ?

Over there on my loony blog, there is a link to an animal site (this takes place in the States, I can tell from the accent...) where you can watch a cat play for at least five minutes with a flush toilet. You can see the little wheels turning in its brain along these lines.... : WHAT is going on here ??? WHY does the water churn and swirl that way (we'll leave the answer to our favorite fractal expert...) ? WHERE does it disappear to ? And, cool, you can do it again and again...

Actually that cat is pretty smart to display its perplexity the way it does. If WE were a little smarter, and LESS denatured by the HABIT of living with flush toilets (there is a book out somewhere about the history of how we dispose of our... FIRST PRODUCT (Freudian lesson NUMBER 1, that's kind of cute, I didn't intend to make that pun, but since it works, let's go for it...)), we COULD ask ourselves lots and lots of questions about just WHAT they MEAN.

In the midst of my BIG existential crisis three years ago (my, how time flies...) it smacked me in the face just how... OBSCENE the idea of magically washing away our shit with drinking quality water is.

I NEVER use the word "obscene" lightly. It is an important word that packs lots and lots of judgment in it, and making judgments, while necessary, is fraught with peril.

Freud was mystified in the 19th century by our relation to our shit. He did NOT take into account the already pathological evolution that that relation had undergone in Victorian society. (Yeah, Thai, I'm saying pathological here. I'm not sure that there are REAL advantages to THIS alienation, and I see tons of disadvantages. We may not have a zero sum issue here, in the long run..)

The problem of shit is one that separates out... the COUNTRY rats from the... CITY rats. And this is very important. My grandmother (1888-1973) used an outhouse for a good part of her life, my mother (1920-1995), too. It was part of rural living. And when I came to France, I STILL saw people in the country using outhouses in.. 1985 or so.

No more outhouses, even in the country now.

So, what's the big deal ?

When you have an outhouse, your not so sweet smelling shit is CONSTANTLY there, reminding you that... there is a RELATION between you and your shit, and your body produces that shit, JUST THE SAME WAY THAT WHEN YOU DIE YOUR BODY IS GOING TO DISINTEGRATE INTO SOMETHING THAT SMELLS EVEN WORSE THAN SHIT BUT...

THAT REGENERATES THE EARTH, and ensures that future generations can continue to produce with/from the earth WITHOUT exhausting it, (and without having to whore oneself to that mega whore, Montsanto while buying lots of toxic products).

And... this takes place IN YOUR BACKYARD, not in some far away place (like a prison for the "evil doers" of this earth...) that you can conveniently NOT THINK ABOUT because, as we all know... out of sight is out of mind, and that's an incredibly NORMAL way for human beings to react.

So... in my book, as you can tell, flush toilets are a symptom of our incredibly twisted, neurotic relations to our bodies. And... while neurosis is NORMAL for us, and lots of shrinks spend time congratulating themselves that they are ONLY neurotic and not spychotic (not me, I've given up on that little consensual game) it wreaks havoc on our relationship to our bodies, and as a result, our relationship to nature. Neurosis is a sign of our incredible DIVORCE from our bodies, and higher up the line, from nature itself.

And you know me, (right Thai ?). It ALL hangs together.

Just a little example : I have been composting for more than three years now.

I collect my "shit" (vegetable decay...) for a period of about 1-2 weeks under the sink before mixing it into my big compost collector outside. It decomposes BEAUTIFULLY under the sink. (I keep the lid on, of course...)

When I did a little presentation to people to show people about composting, the reactions were... "Ew, yuccky". But.. it smells awful. (Actually, a well tended compost heap smells... better than your flush toilet when you've finished depositing your number 1.) That was their IDEA, their... PREJUDICE if you like. They were unbelievably surprised to realize that compost did NOT smell the way they thought it would (like THEIR number 1...) And these prejudices are keeping us from renewing the Earth the way that we USED to do before the industrial revolution society took over.

When you think about it... even the IDEA of shitting is on a par with.. ORIGINAL SIN for us. And we COULD be using the idea of shitting as a convenient ideological equivalent for original sin because now, y'all remember every disadvantage has its advantage, and although the idea of original sin humiliates the more rational of us, it was meant to keep us together, in line, and with a necessary dose of HUMILITY in our lives. Now, we no longer make the distinction between humility, and humiliation, and are little atoms which are light years away from being able to cooperate in meaningful ways...

This is not good for us, collectively. Believe you me.

By the way, I am (almost) the only one posting over here again, you lazy louts.

I know you're working and I'm not, BUT...

P.S. LOOK, yet another example of what I'm talking about. BLOGGER censured my title...

What is your College English lit major good for ?

My regular readers perhaps have in mind that scene that I think I reported here where I was staying in an Albuquerque REAL youth hostel (you know, the kind of place where you can find real drifters, marginal people, some crazies, in addition to the hordes of scrubbed, fresh faced, sweet smelling, identical looking youth from all continents now that youth hostels (hotels ?) are SUPPOSED to attract...) two summers ago, to the despair of my younger bro who seemed to think that over 50 year old me could either get raped or have my head sawed off by a pen- knife-wielding, Greyhound-bus-traveling schizo.

Whew, that was a long sentence. Are y'all still with me ?

Anyways, I spent an evening rocking on the porch with a 40 year old unemployed man with a chip on his shoulder and a "why me" whine in his voice who kept telling little ole serene me that he just couldn't possibly understand how ANYONE could consider an English major, and subsequent unemployment, to be GOOD for anything. (But.. what's it GOOD for, he kept saying stubbornly..) And I obligingly repeated that an English major in the humanities was, in my book, the entrance to that select club of.. civilization.

You just can't EXPLAIN to some people why it's better to be civilized than it is to be... a barbarian. (Note : Do NOT presume that my definition of "barbarian" follows any predictable configuration... I had this discussion the other night with some bourgeois colleagues who seemed to think that cannibalism was that fine line that separated the barbarians from the civilized, and they did not seem particularly fazed when I pointed out that it was OUR "civilization" that had come up with industrialized death camps...)(Note 2 : Do NOT presume either that the syllogism English major= civilization morphs into.. -English major = -civilization...)

So... today I have been messing around on the Internet, and fell into the black hole of Amazon.com's literary criticism section. (Actually that's a euphemism for "client appreciation". Everybody knows that literary criticism died years ago.)

And discovered WHERE all of us English majors are hanging out these days...

WE are doing literary criticism (online reviews..) for FREE, for amazon.com !!!!

(Gratuity is the future for mankind, trust me on this one.)

I could spend hours reading some of those reviews which are really really excellent.

Sigh. As irony would have it, the most intelligent reviews, the ones REALLY written by all of us unemployed intellectuals often get one or two stars because "WE'RE" so intellectual, so passionate about what we're doing that the average reader gets bored and zaps.

Back to the drawing board, and my next Amazon review.

(Incidentally, the FRENCH are so much less generous on this subject. NO online reviews, or almost none, and don't hold your breath thinking that there are fewer unemployed lit majors over here, because that's a lie. They're just... less generous, that's all.)