Sunday, March 11, 2018
TAKING A WEEK OFF
I'm not going to post anything on blogger for a week. Something strange is happening. I have ghosts. Back after St. Patrick's Day.
AGUSTIN FUENTES
Agustin Fuentes (on the right)
When in seminary I realized that I’d moved from Plato (one eternal ideal pattern for a faulty reality) to Heraclitus (all is process and shifting) I didn’t really understand that these two were streams of thought. The faculty was not about to tell me, since they were invested in Plato. But the world was on my side and there has been a steady growth in Heraclitian scholarship.
I have a list of as many thinkers as the names on Rachel Maddow’s roll call of wised-up White House people leaving for the provinces. Mine are in-coming thinkers. The most recent on my list is Agustin Fuentes, best approached on YouTube. Here’s a one-minute intro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmZX9dKMzqI
Another on my list is John Hawks, a fossil chaser who knows hominids. These guys are box-busters who cross disciplines, but they are not just trendy. Here’s a conversation between the two of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upRFk2b2vas
Here are some concepts I picked up from the talk. One is plasticity, which has been applied to the idea that brain connectomes can physically adapt to new thoughts (learning) throughout their human lives — even that new brain cells can form, which is so new that it's still challenged, so there will soon be new research.
The next is winnowing which is the idea that circumstances and the nature of the human individuals both change all the time, which means that inevitably they will lose the fittingness that allows them to survive. OR they will figure out a new way to "be." The ape that is arboreal in a time when drought kills all the trees will either learn to live on grasslands or disappear. (I had not known that besides the 200 or so hominids there were many many kinds of apes, both of which assortments mostly disappeared. There was no one missing link, but rather a stream of life that dried up or changed its flow.)
Fuentes named the great ape categories we know: chimp, bonobo, gorilla, orangatan, gibbon — and notes that they are all a little weird, remnant populations in ancient places like jungle. (I have never seen a list of fossil “pongids” which are what the category of us is technically called, or even a list of where pongids had a long and fortunate existence.)
But there are kinds of monkeys, closely related but not pongids, that are not threatened by the presence of humans, but in fact become part of the larger ecology to the point of challenging humans. Fuentes studied macaques, a large monkey that thrives in Thailand. The difference is that they are social and live in interrelated groups.
The key to survival for humans is not just fittingness to the circumstances, but also the ability to change their environment by creating a niche, which is done socially. Much of it is sex/family based, but possibly defining family in a very broad way so that the animals, plants and even geology are part of that ecosystem. For a rancher, protecting the cattle, the hay crop, the water dynamics, and even a certain level of predation (which includes diseases across species lines) can be part of the mix.
I discovered Fuentes because of a tweet pointing to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpr-4ykX0Xo is a video lecture at the University of Edinburgh sponsored as part of a series called the Gifford Lectures. This is how a diasporic rogue scholar (me) continues to participate in what used to be confined within the boundaries of a university. It is an another example of a shift from a boundary to a central node.
In this lecture Fuentes leads us through history of the long kind — over hundreds of millennia rather than only back as far as written material records -- and also in terms of the evolution of individuals as they go through life from conception to death. His assumption is not Platonic -- that we should all be pressed into some template -- but Heraclitian in our ability to invent, adapt, realize, wonder. I use these two thinkers for markers for the people who believe that learning is always approached through past precedents defined by admired figures.
“Culture” and how individuals fit into them is one of my personal thought precursors from theatre courses and the same is true of Fuentes, though he didn’t linger over theatre very long. The work of inhabiting another person, quite different from oneself, leads one naturally to plasticity and awareness of the environment that make social groups form.
Belief systems, as in religious and patriotic groups, emerge from the semiotic systems that record what behavior is. These things are organic, not planned rationally. This is a main difference between the Euro-origin industrial systems and those that are autochthonous. The first is name-based, what a name defines/confines, and the second is based on the verb, what is done, “the way it rolls.”
If you are focussed on the former, your challenge will be to keep things the same, to build walls, to store resources, to eliminate challenges. If you are focused on the latter, the energy will go into recognize new things, seeing how they can be understand and used, what they can give us as new access to in the world around us.
You’ll need language to keep track of this and to share it with others. It is the skill bringing the group along through persuasion and instruction. Crucial are the theatre-related skills, from imitating a cave bear by a bonfire, to the moral issues of Greek drama, to our present adventure of video narrative and image.
A human is a community of cells within a skin. An interfacing interaction with social community then gives us the ability to construct a human “niche”. This niche then forms the physical brain of people in it, plugging together the connectome. Culture becomes anatomy.
I need to connect this to a specific story. Last night I watched David Hare’s four-part series called “Collateral” (Netflix) which is a consideration of the collateral ecology around human trafficking — how different kinds of people are affected. One character is an Anglican vicar, formerly a role symbolic of parish order and social conformity. But this one has adapted: she is female, lesbian, rebellious, focused on the welfare of individuals. Her lover is Asian, not quite fitting into the same niche. This vicar is very appealing.
Another character is a female soldier who has identified with her father, also a soldier, and who has attracted a senior officer to dominate her sexually, partly because of the vulnerability represented by PTSD. And hierarchy. That is, he rapes her because he can and his identity is based on what he can do. She is destroyed.
The third female breaking stereotypes is a cop who must move among the assorted characters and figure out what happened. She represents what Fuentes identifies as imagination. Not only can she imagine her way into these assorted and displaced peoples, but she understands the underculture well enough to find processes to move the situation in ways that might or might not conform to the written rule of law, which is meant to control and force conformity.
Nicola Walker
Fuentes then moves to transcendence which is beyond the scope of this blog post. I would love it if David Hare continued with his challenged female Anglican vicar into the realm of the transcendent.
This is David Hare's introduction to the series:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/writersroom/entries/91345bbe-b361-4e9b-bebd-4502e79bd4ba
Saturday, March 10, 2018
CIVIL WAR IN OUR TIME
The US is an assembled country.
Until I ran across a reference in a "tweet", I hadn't thought about a new civil war in America, though I had considered whether it might be wise to divide into "eco-territories," esp. to keep the coasts from dominating the mid-continent.
I googled and this is a list of the first "page" I got from them. (You know, of course, that if you google or I google on a different day or from a different computer, I'll get a different list -- which is why I'm posting this. There's a good deal of sameness in these articles, which I'll consider after you've had a chance to read them as I did.)
www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-walker-second-civil-war-20170820-story.html
foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/10/what-a-new-u-s-civil-war-might-look-like/
The first thing I notice is that these writers are all leaving out much of America in their focus on political division. That is, nowhere is there a mention of Native American reservations, which are nations within nations with varying motivation to rebel or diverge. Thinking about rezzes and tribes means going to the heart of the issue of sovereignty, a discussion which is relatively subdued in the States but is on fire in Western and Northern Canada, kindled by energy pipelines that cross borders. The consequences for the people who live close by these resource projects are major, whether they are dramatic oil-spills or the gradual erosion of health by toxins and decimation of animals by interrupting their migrations and birthing grounds.
To bigshot fat cats who live in major cities when they aren’t on their tropical estates, no one lives in those wide seemingly empty spaces and, if they object, they have no power anyway. This is no longer true in a time of video and internet. The power of “seeing,” empowerment by witnessing and testifying, have made Inuit grandmothers more potent than guns.
The other aspect of the internet is that it has disrupted the assumption that governance is a matter of territory and that no governance can be achieved without drawing boundaries. In fact, the autochthonous peoples of the planet have been making common cause, even across oceans. One of the articles above talks about WWIII starting from the secession or capture of Hawaii, which has been quite active with continental language recovery programs among tribes. A network with no single capitol is a new kind of nation.
If governance is defined by boundaries, edges, in another sense it is defined by distribution of resources, esp. food. This is why infrastructure is so crucial but I don’t see it mentioned in these essays. If states were motivated to harden their borders, then what happens to the grain shipments to the planet? How do we get fruits and vegetables in Montana where the growing season is 8-10 weeks?
Interpenetrating loyalties have been disruptions in the past, but their diasporas — if challenged hard — can rise up in unity if the issue is vital enough. One of the most potent (!) is sexual. As a nation we seem to shrug off powerful men who force and attract sex as a demonstration of their entitlement, until suddenly we don’t. Just where the tipping point is seems to be coming closer. We tolerated JFK, we sort of tolerated Bill Clinton, we elected Trump, but . . . now #MeToo draws the line lap-tight.
Worse is being denied sex education, contraception, abortion, and all the family safety nets necessary now that legal marriage has come uncoupled from fertility and sex. In fact, it could be argued that the deadly stigmatization of unwed mothers has dissipated, their children are as entitled as any others, and that sex has been totally redefined as decriminalized, no longer hidden, not confined to a male/female pair or any pair at all. The system of entitlement as proof of power, the fantasy of droit du seigneur that some corporate heads, teaching masters, and celebrated artists seem to assume, is passé.
Actual armed force, such as police, military bodies, citizen militias, and underground organized criminals are fancied by malcontents as a spectacle of rebellion full of explosions and car chases. In a world where a small drone can carry a bomb specifically to your house, or an innocent stroller can pass by, giving you a quick little injection with the tip of their umbrella that leaves you sprawled on a park bench — deadly action is quite different. Far more specific, risk-free, and undetectable.
All accurate targeting needs is a GPS, which is signalled by one’s ever present cell-phone. But the other thing they need is the satellite infrastructure that is orbiting the planet and that is another reason for reliable governance. Because gathering up money and re-deploying it on behalf of everyone is another key reason for government. We need more attention to the criminality of hoarding money. As we challenge boundaries drawn by nations, we should challenge money devised by nations. There must be better systems than IOU’s and gambling on futures.
What some of these essay say is that the whole big picture has changed since the most recent civil wars. Then why civil wars persist in the Middle East or SE Asia? And what is Russia muttering about?
Friday, March 09, 2018
DOES THE UNIVERSE HAVE A SUBCONSCIOUS?
Many have been considering the concept of “consciousness”, encouraged by the expanding scientific consciousness of the mechanisms of human consciousness — how it works, what it's for. In the previous century the awareness was of the UNconscious revealed — or at least implied — in disciplines like psychoanalysis, which have since been exploded by neurology, in much the same way as realization that there was an unconscious exploded the Enlightenment rationality idea that persuaded mostly men (mostly young, “educated”, and white) that they knew their own minds and were entirely in control. But look where that has brought us. What has been consciously been achieved?
We constantly project our own humanness onto what is around us, outside our skins. Can the universe have consciousness? Many — this time include women and autochthonous peoples — want to believe that non-humans, even non-mammals, even non-animals, can have consciousness. When they pick a leaf off a bush, they imagine the bush says “ouch.” That’s a jokey way of talking about it.
I’m going to pick out of that haystack of wondering a little needling question: can the universe have a sub-conscious? I mean, as a whole, as an existence, can there be a subconscious — meaning forces below perception that are therefore out of our control? An “un,” “sub,” “under” consciousness that has nothing to do with human feelings? So?
This is a question along the lines of the boy asking the philosopher whether dogs have souls. The answer he got was that no one knows, but that we should act as though they did.
We should act as though the galaxies have a shared and active subconscious.
I’m not talking about morality or control or systems. I mean something more like a sea-change, shifting, emerging, secret. Nothing like a “soul” or “spirituality” because those are anthro-preoccupations. I’m talking about “standing waves,” harmonics, moving shapes across time, the mottled hide of existence.
Metal cutouts with patterns from "standing waves"
Today I’m pondering the partnership of Deleuze and Guattari who worked together so closely that they are often called “Deleuzeguattari”, one word. In an Aeon essay Edward Thornton, who is a student at the department of philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, wrote about them. https://aeon.co/essays/a-creative-multiplicity-the-philosophy-of-deleuze-and-guattari The premise is that the two, considered as though one, actually were quite different from each other, though fitting together.
First of all, I’m interested in how dialogue, defined and guided by empathy, can bring ideas from sub to "woke" consciousness, perhaps as between a therapist and patient, but reshaped to be between equals. There are examples through time. C.S. Lewis said the key to friendship was loving the same topic but having quite different approaches to it. “The secret to their alliance — was their mutual distrust of identity. Deleuze and Guattari were both resolutely anti-individualist: whether in the realm of politics, psychotherapy or philosophy, they strived to show that the individual was a deception, summoned up to obscure the nature of reality.” Thornton describes this as “progressive, Marxist-inspired, anti-capitalist politics of joy.”
So Thornton is not talking about conscious/subconscious but rather about a parallel tension between individual and group. Can a group have a subconscious? Isn’t that the premise of Erikson’s books about individuals who “embodied” the time in which they lived: Luther and Gandhi? Who “embodies” right now? (Don’t say Trump, though a cynical case could be made.)
“Guattari saw how the collective will of the Russian Revolution had collapsed into the hierarchical power structure of bureaucratic state communism. Now, he saw the same process occurring in miniature in every group he joined. No matter how communal the initial struggle, sooner or later the collective will dissolved into competition between individual desires — with one person eventually emerging as the leader, at the expense of the others.” He worked as a psychoanalyst at an avant garde mental health hospital where his controlling metaphor was combating “alienation” that dehumanizes, divides into compartments that have no relationship among themselves. The infamous “boxes.”
Then came the Sixties/Seventies revolution. Deleuse responded to it, saying “what appears to us in experience as an individual . . . gains its identity only as an effect of diverse forces that are in constant tension with one another.” We blame the Internet with causing so much social turmoil and opposition, but maybe it was the turmoil and opposition that created the Internet, or at least a desire for it strong enough to drive its creation. What name would we give that desire? Communication? Or something less admirable, like control or greed. Instant shopping.
So where is our desire now? What do the long for? What is the universe craving? What are true universal desires that keep being distorted by mercantile goals, something to sell to individuals. Deleuzeguattari spoke of “Oedipalisation” as the strategy of "making a child desire his mother, who is always held away by the power of the father. The goal is a passive individual who will 'turn up to work, obey the boss, compete with the neighbors, and consume an endless stream of commodities.'”
So the new role of this thinker was the schizoanalyst. (And here all the time you were thinking that “schizophrenia” was something bad!) This is the program:
- Find those processes of desire that deviate from capitalism.
- Follow each to their most extreme conclusions, to allow them to escape from the restrictions of capital.
- Align these different processes to create a “molecular revolution.”
When they shoot film in the Oval Office, I’m always conscious of the bronzes, since I was married to a sculptor and we built a bronze foundry. One is the familiar Remington of a bronc breaker, now made passé by horse whisperers, a figure of domination by force. The other one — and I should check to see who made it — is a buffalo being attacked by wolves. Bob Scriver’s version was a moose breaking through ice and therefore vulnerable to wolves. The lesson of both is a natural recurring opposition that Bob called “The Mighty and the Many.”
Maybe the Mighty is the Platonic, Cartesian, “STEM”, white and male mainstream. The Many is the various but patterned force of the group. The capitalism of the buffalo and the moose who live off the resources of the land, versus the desiring hunger of the meat-eating predators who eat the grass second-hand and return the leftovers to the earth. But what is under the ice? Is global warming going to plunge us into the unknown?
Thursday, March 08, 2018
THREE WOMEN WRITING
Lucy Maude Montgomery
Amybeth McNulty, who plays Anne
From Moira Walley Beckett, the producer of the most recent and many claim the most authentic film version of Lucy Maude Montgomery's "Anne of Green Gables," that beloved series of books, comes a glimpse of Anne becoming a writer, and unflinchingly includes Lucy Maude's lifelong struggle with depression.
http://www.cbc.ca/archives/topic/beyond-green-gables-the-life-of-lucy-maud-montgomery
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From The Reverend Kathy Fuson Hurt comes the first in what will be a series of posts offering wisdom learned from her own struggle with depression, all the while functioning as a beloved Unitarian Universalist minister. http://www.kathyhurt.com/spiritual-direction/ She is prepared to speak, to counsel in person, and to use technical means like Skype to converse.
Kathy Hurt
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Kari Linn Dell
from Kari Lynn Dell comes word that her new romance novel based on rodeo folks in Texas is enthusiastically reviewed, earning a star from Publishers Weekly. Kari ranches just north of Valier, almost in Canada, with a clear view of Chief Mountain. She is a barrel racer who is often "in the money" and has personally earned her adventures. http://karilynndell.com/books.html No time for depression. Gotta shovel a path over to the truck. Record snow.
PIANO AND DRUM -- REPOST from "BOTH SIDES NOW" (fiction)
When the Ponca tribe had money -- it was a while ago.
In the morning Felix always got up slowly, nursing coffee for a while. He walked around with no goal or direction. He stood regarding the concert grand piano, in fair shape, that took up the whole center of the main room. Its sonorous rich notes were a little askew. The instrument wasn’t damaged but wasn’t dusted, much less polished, and needed to be tuned.
No more concerts for Felix since he’d broken a knuckle in a fist fight. The scales under his right hand faltered. Still, he’d known this piano since he was a baby himself, crawling around under it as though it were a house, while the music poured out over his head and his mother’s feet moved on the pedals. Once he left small tooth marks on one leg, but when his gums had been sore from teething he had preferred the cold brass pedals. Sometimes while his mother played, he had crawled over and lightly put his little hand on her arch, not enough to interfere, just to connect himself to the music a little more.
Now he sat down on the bench and lifted the keyboard cover, spreading his large smooth hands out like flying birds, but not touching the keys, neither the ivory or the black. His hands wanted the keys. He held them up for a moment, then couldn’t resist any longer and began to try chords, then scales, though he fumbled them in places. It was a while before the pain shut him down. Even then, he went back to scales with his undamaged left hand. Too bad he’d nailed that granitehead’s jaw with his right hook. Normally he was protective of his hands, knowing they were his livelihood, but some things were more important than a meal ticket.
The Indian Health Service doctors had no idea what to do about a concert pianist’s hand. They didn’t really believe he could play that well in the first place -- he was an INDIAN, for God’s sake! -- and they didn’t have either training or experience for much of anything except standard trauma. Secretly they believed he’d get in another fight anyway, so they mostly just gave him pain-killers, which blurred out his playing even more. Not many people remembered when he was a child prodigy. They didn’t remember his mother either. They knew his famously ancient father. Hell, he was getting old himself. Forty. Is forty old?
He stood up to lower the lid and, reaching inside, plucked at the wires idly. Maybe he could learn the guitar, but what for? He ought to just sell the piano. It was a good one. Might bring enough money to pay for surgery on his hand! That made him snort. One of those O.Henry quandaries. The Indian Health Service would pay for hand surgery but not the kind a concert pianist needs.
But there was more to it than that. His hands still reached out for the key board, he still felt the music -- but there was something missing. It was what had brought him and this piano back to the reservation, though the excuse of taking care of his father was persuasive, too. It was a kind of hunger of the heart, a need to be more related to this east-slope-of-the-Rockies Blackfeet world, not just the way it was now but the way it had been for at least half of his ancestors over many centuries. So he could think about what might happen to it long after he was gone.
He walked around the piano several times, studying it as though it had an answer. Then, turning away, he opened the old recycled door that led into a kind of storage shed at the back of the building. He had insulated and lined the log walls of the piano room, but this shed still had log walls with big nails driven into them randomly. Old jackets and hats and other jumble had accumulated there.
Idly, he swung some things to the side to see what was under them. A stiff old bridle. A broom with bristles mostly worn away. A cluster of rusty jaw traps for mink and beaver. Dimly he remembered playing with them as a child, too weak to even get the jaws open. Lifting them off their nail by the chains, he pitched them out onto the floor through the door. Maybe he could do something with them. The beaver were getting awful thick around here. A little money would be welcome.
There was a dirty old muslin bag with a drawstring and something round in it, about a foot across. He didn’t throw that but tucked it under his arm and took it out to the piano bench, dragging the clanking traps along on the ground.
When he took the round, flat object out, it was -- as he sort of remembered -- a hand drum. He ran fingertips over the taut rawhide. It was painted -- well, rubbed -- with red ochre and stained his fingers slightly. There were two green lines across and something that looked like Y’s standing off the inner line. He had no idea what that might mean.
He tapped it with a forefinger. “Tunk.” Wooden. Again, “Tunk.”
The old man called from the front room. “You gotta warm it up. Take it out in the sun.” Strange that an old guy who couldn’t seem to hear half of what was said to him could hear a tap on a drum. All right, a cold drum. He took it out to the morning sun and the old man came after him, leaning on his stick in his three-legged way. They settled in the morning warmth of the abandoned car seat against the front wall of the cabin.
Felix held up the drum and pointed to the y’s of paint.
“Thunderbird tracks,” said the old man. As he often did these days, he began to softly keen an Indian song: the first phrase, then the reprise, and on into the song. Felix listened carefully to the wavering falsetto. “Was that a thunderbird song?” he asked.
“Might be.”
In a while Felix tapped the drum again. “Whuummm!” it said, resonating. He smiled and went back into the cabin to make a second pot of coffee. He left the drum propped up like a face to the sun.
The old man and the drum, long-time friends, sat by side-by-side, basking. Pretty soon the old man said to the drum, “Pretty good, init?”
When Felix had been at his best, maybe in his twenties, he sat down at a keyboard and was immediately taken to a new existence. His hands were capable of speed and precision, reaching an octave plus two notes, striking the keys in such subtly varying ways, sequences, that even his teachers were impressed. Only the best teachers understood what was happening in his mind, for to him the music was the foundation of Being in the same way that the land was the foundation of Blackfeet life. It wasn’t that this set of notes meant bears or that a different tempo meant moose or mountains. It wasn’t that crescendos were thunderstorms or staccato meant hail. Rather it was the process of building a churning potential, then resolving into immaculate order, which slid somehow into a different complexity and then resolved, becoming serene and finished. Well, never really finished.
Though his fingers would no longer do what they should, the forces and patterns were still in his mind. But with no way to express them, he grew impatient, cranky, and finally enraged with frustration. He’d always been a loner. There was no one here in this rural place to understand. Maybe Clare.
Wednesday, March 07, 2018
"ALMIGHTY VOICE," SON OF "SOUNDING SKY"
"Almighty Voice"
“KITCHI-MANITO-WAYA (Kakee-manitou-waya, Kamantowiwew, Almighty Voice, also known as Jean Baptiste), Indian hunter and fugitive, son of Plains Saulteaux Indian Sinnookeesick (Sounding Sky) and Natchookoneck (Spotted Calf, Calf of Many Colours), daughter of Willow Cree chief One Arrow [Kāpeyakwāskonam*]; he had four wives and one child; d. 30 May 1897 in the Minichinas Hills near Batoche (Sask.).
(from The Dictionary of Canadian Biography. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/kitchi_manito_waya_12E.htm)
'"Calf of Many Colors" and "Sounding Sky"
Parents of "Almighty Voice"
A man named “Sounding Sky” with a son called “Almighty Voice” deserves to have a story told about them. But I won’t tell it, at least not now. It is “intellectual property” that has been recorded by whites that needs to be retold by his own people. Right? Or is that too narrow? Is it shutting something out? Is it self-indulgent on the part of contemporary descendants, maybe with diluted genetics and certainly with a changed culture and environment? Or is the value of it universal, deeply human?
“Almighty Voice” was an exceptional autochthonous man, unknown by most people now, who had a short vivid life (1875-1897). He was accused under ambiguous circumstances and trapped in what the Canadians call a “bluff,” which is a grove of trees, where he was killed along with two companions by a squad of 24 men carrying a nine-pound field gun. His mother, watching from a distance, sang his death song for him. If you google, there is much more to learn.
It was a time like this one, when emotion and something much like psychosis seized everyone, cinching their minds down into dark little tunnels of greed, determination, and what they thought was survival. The soldiers believed they were imposing order according to the rule of law. “Almighty Voice” was trying to survive. He ranged far enough that it was rumoured that he’d been captured in Kalispell, but that was false.
Sometimes I joke about what will save us now and I look hopefully towards young people, because this reminds me of the worldwide cultural sea change of the Sixties and Seventies. All those hippies and punk-rockers are old now. But the young pay attention to them. Why else would Adam Rippon show up at the Oscars wearing a Leatherman harness under his tux? And there was Wes Studi, presenting. Could he power a film that somehow interweaves the fates of “Almighty Voice” with a modern tribal Rock and Roller singer? Maybe killed by fentanyl in lieu of a nine pound field gun/assault rifle. Or shot to death on a sidewalk. The problem is too much story material. What can bring order to it?
This is the origin of my swerve, which is about how LSD can help brains teeter on the edge of order and chaos. I’ve never taken LSD but have always been interested. (I am NOT advocating taking it.) But as it happens, while thinking about Almighty Voice I ran across a remarkable article about chaos and order from a subdivision of VICE, online magazine, called "Tonic," meant to give ”real wellness advice for imperfect humans”. It’s not a discussion of whether you should take LSD, but rather a study about how it works, how it makes people suddenly have insight — along with visions.
The anchor of this story is not “Almighty Voice,” but rather Oliver Sacks, who wondered in a biological/medical way why LSD was so potent. He was asking about serotonin — not the Gates of Heaven. But he took the stuff. Why does it relieve depression? Why does it power head trips that can be seen on a fMRI? Looking for answers, a new study at Oxford University doubled back to studies in the late 18th century when Ernst Chladni, researching the vibrations that create music, played a stringed instrument bow against a metal plate with sand sprinkled on it.
The sand, jumping and sliding, formed regular patterns called “standing waves.” They are synchronous, predictable and organic, so that if you cut a plate in the shape of the hide of an animal, the particles will form the same pattern as on a leopard or giraffe skin, depending on the frequency and complexity of the “standing waves,” which are also called “harmonics.” The idea is that LSD somehow makes the brain sing. They call it “connectome harmonics.” These ARE what the fMRI is picking up as data.
Selen Atasoy says, “It’s as if the brain is playing a musical piece . . . the fMRI data gives us the sounds, then what we’re doing is decomposing it into the musical notes; trying to find out which notes combined in that particular time."
“What they found was that under the influence of LSD, more of these harmonics were contributing to brain activity and their strength of activation was also increased. The brain was essentially activating more of its harmonics simultaneously, and in new combinations.”
Here’s another concept: criticality. It is a kind of threshold between states, like between ice and water. “When the temperature starts changing, nothing happens until you reach a critical temperature, and then the ice starts to melt. Ice is a more organized molecular structure, compared to water; criticality is the in-between of ice and water, when both exist together.” Atasoy’s example is contemporary teens dancing, everyone doing their thing to the same rhythm, drawing uniqueness out of the group. Nothing like North Korean synchronized dancing.
I feel sure this is related to the Victor Turner concept of “liminality,” a state of an individual or a group when there is the conventional order on one side and a unique openness to change and creation on the other. Turner was studying ceremonies like rites of passage that brought human identity from one state to another, like coming of age or getting married or entering religious orders or banishing some kind of demonic haunting. Often there is reversal, ordeal, physical alteration, and a change of status recognized by one’s group. These are the forces that get confused — sometimes fatally — when one culture runs in over the other. The harmonics are changed to only be noise.
M. Mitchell Waldrop wrote a book called “Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos.” He said, “The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life.”
It seems clear to me that our governments are stuck on the doorstep of renewal. U.S. legislators sleep on their office couches, eating from dispensing machines, and getting their assistants to run out for the laundry. Evidently they feel they must be there with the mice and the bugs or risk some kind of coup. They are hiding in “bluffs,” with a double meaning. Where’s the glamour? (You know that glamour is an old word for magic.) Where's the reality? They are afraid of the risk of finding out.
In the meantime the kids and the people who are still autochthonous on the land are beginning to find their rhythm well-enough to march together. They are becoming an irresistible tide. The skies sound above them. Their voices are mighty.
(More about Seesequasis' photo project is at: http://thestarphoenix.com/life/bridges/bridges-cover-photo-project-by-paul-seesequasis-offers-powerful-glimpse-of-the-past He is descended from "Almighty Voice.")
(More about Seesequasis' photo project is at: http://thestarphoenix.com/life/bridges/bridges-cover-photo-project-by-paul-seesequasis-offers-powerful-glimpse-of-the-past He is descended from "Almighty Voice.")
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