George is Getting Upset! (Notes on Illeism)

There are doubtless reasons why some people refer to themselves in the third person. But outside of books, where it's sometimes used as a literary device, I'm not sure there's ever a good reason to do so. For it makes the speaker sound (at best) like an idiot; or, more worryingly, like someone with mental health issues (a sign perhaps of dissociative identity disorder).

Thus, whilst not encouraging anyone to use 'I' other than sparingly and ironically, I would strongly advise those who frequently practise third person self-referral without embarrassment or any comic intent, to reconsider - unless, that is, they don't mind being thought to have a borderline personality (like Donald Trump, for example, who frequently refers to himself in the third person).

Having said that, I'm told by someone who understands more about this subject than I do, that some individuals find speaking in the third person helps improve their self-esteem, better manage their thoughts and feelings, and successfully navigate their way through complex or stressful social situations.

In other words, a little psychological distancing from oneself (and one's anxieties) can be a very positive thing. Stephen didn't know that - but it seems to be common knowledge within certain Eastern religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, where it's viewed as a sign not of madness, but enlightenment. Jnana yoga practitioners, for example, are actively encouraged to refer to themselves in the third person; for wisdom, it is said, results from the mind's transcendence of ego.    

Waxing Philosophical on Insincerity

Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

azquotes.com

As a writer, one lives more in fear of being taken seriously than being thought superficial and fraudulent. Thus, like Wilde, one greatly values insincerity ...

If sincerity is the ideal virtue of speaking clearly in accordance with one's true feelings and genuine beliefs, then insincerity is the demonic gift of speaking in tongues and a method for multiplying our personalities and proliferating perspectives.

Insincerity is, therefore, one of the crucial components of art, which, of necessity, is an impure and unhealthy practice; that is to say, a form of decadence that is the very opposite of sincerus. And yet, there are surprisingly many writers who deny this and defend sincerity in all spheres, including artistic sincerity.

Orwell, for example - whom we might regard as the the anti-Wilde - argued that insincerity gives rise to muddled thinking and that this in turn has pernicious (sometimes fatal) political consequences. He condemns writers who seek to disguise their real thoughts and authentic selves by using complex metaphorical language and long words, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.          

But as Nietzsche pointed out, plain speaking Englishmen are the least philosophical creatures on earth and hardly deserve even to be considered as artists, lacking as they do the imagination to lie and the immoral playfulness of those who delight in wearing masks.  

The problem, ultimately, is that sincerity requires perfect knowledge of self - and that isn't possible; not even for philosophers, who remain (of necessity) strangers to themselves just like the rest of us. It's because - as Nietzsche says - Jeder ist sich selbst der Fernste that we remain beings born of insincerity ...

Notes

The line from Nietzsche that reads in English 'everyone is furthest from himself' is found in the 'Preface' to On the Genealogy of Morality. See p. 3 of the Cambridge University Press edition, 1994, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson and trans. Carol Diethe. 

For a sister post to this one on the ethics of ambiguity, click here.   

On the Ethics of Ambiguity

Jastrow's ambiguous figure of the duck-rabbit made famous by 

Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations (1953), II, §xi

As a writer, one lives more in fear of being understood than misunderstood. Thus, like Nietzsche, one greatly values ambiguity ...

Ambiguity enables one to appear transpositional and to create an open text in which meaning is always subject to interpretation and, ultimately, deferral; i.e., it allows one to have it not only both ways, but all ways and no way.

(I suppose that's why criminal defence lawyers also like ambiguity. Only prosecutors hoping for a conviction or judges looking to pass sentence, worry about certainty and establishing the facts of a case beyond a reasonable doubt.)    

It's naive, of course, to think that meaning can ever be fully determined; for language is never innocent. Not only does it lack transparency, but ambiguity is built into every word. If grammar is the presence of God within language, then ambiguity is the devil hiding behind every sentence.

 

Thus it is that man - a being who dwells within language - is the ambiguous animal par excellence. Even if we faithfully dot our i's and cross our t's, our relationship to the world, to others, and to ourselves is never straightforward.

Sartre famously follows Heidegger here and, interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir attempts to base an entire ethics on ambiguity, arguing that we need to accept the latter and, indeed, learn to love our fate: 

"Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us, therefore, try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting."

Ethics, she goes on to say, cannot be based on the mathematical certainty of science and the attempt to think the world and ourselves in such clear and absolute terms invariably leads to fascism and to genocide. It's not grey uncertainty but black-and-white conviction that should trouble us.

Thus we should learn to love those philosophers who privilege the dangerous perhaps; for it expresses not only vagueness concerning the present, but future possibility - which is why, of course, ambiguity is also the basis of creativity.       

Notes:

Joseph Jastrow's duck-rabbit (or, if you prefer, rabbit-duck) illustration originally appeared in 'The Mind's Eye', Popular Science Monthly, Issue 54, (1899), pp. 299-312.

Simone de Beauvoir's, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (Citadel Press, 1949), can be read online by clicking here.
 
Nietzsche speaks of Philosophen des gefährlichen Vielleicht in Beyond Good and Evil, Pt. 1. 2. 

For a sister post to this one waxing philosophical on insincerity, click here.

Reflections on the Death of Steve Ditko

Steve Ditko: self-portrait (1964)

The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1

steveditko.com

Regarded by many as a thinking man's Jack Kirby, American comic-book artist and co-creator of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko, has just been announced dead, aged 90. 

To be honest, I wasn't a great fan of his work; it was a little too weird for my rather conservative and conventional tastes as a child. But I'm perfectly happy to concede his genius to those who insist upon such and know better than I.

As always when someone dies, I can't help thinking about what happens to the corpse. The immortal soul of man conceived in spiritual-personal terms is of zero interest to me. But, as a thantologist, I'm fascinated by the body's shipwreck into the nauseous and the cosmo-molecular dispersal of atoms and their eventual recycling into all kinds of things, including new life forms.   

Interestingly, it just so happens that Ditko was an Objectivist (i.e., a devotee of Ayn Rand), so he would probably have agreed that there is no supernatural or spooky-mysterious aspect to death. There are physical processes and sub-atomic particles, but no heaven, no angels, and no life-after-death as theists conceive of it.

And to imagine that the mind might somehow transcend the demise and destruction of the body is just a ludicrous fantasy. Once your brain has liquidised and dribbled like snot out of your nose, you'll not be able to worry about it. In death, one does not exist; it's not the end of the world, but it is the end of the world for you ...

And so, after a long life of approximately 780,000 hours, Ditko's atoms are in the process of ending their happy affiliation and he's about to get a whole lot skinnier ...

Hurrah for the Horta! (Notes on the Possibility of Silicon Based Life)

The Horta: 'The Devil in the Dark'
Star Trek: The Original Series (S1/E25, 1967)

Image: startrek.com

I. C (6)

Carbon - as everybody knows - is the key component of terrestrial life and it's commonly assumed that, if there is life elsewhere in the universe, then it too will be carbon-based.

The reason for this, explains astronomer and popular science writer David Darling, "is not only carbon's ability to form a vast range of large, complicated molecules with itself and other elements, especially hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, but also its unique facility for maintaining the right balance of stability and flexibility in molecular transformations that underlie the dynamic complexity of life".

Nevertheless, this is an assumption and Darling concedes that we may - as carbon-based life-forms ourselves - suffer from what Carl Sagan termed carbon chauvinism; i.e., a form of prejudice that prevents us from seriously considering viable alternatives. And so, whilst it's true that scientists have yet to find anything in the chemistry of other elements that suggests they might be able to give rise to organic compounds, we shouldn't dismiss the idea out of hand.

Indeed, it seems to me perfectly legitimate to consider silicon, for example, as a possible basis of alien life. For not only is silicon a similar element to carbon, but it's also an important constituent of many living cells. In fact, silicon is the great white hope of many astrobiologists and science fiction writers who dream of strange and beautiful possibilities of being ...

II. Si (14)

People began speculating on the suitability of silicon as a basis for life at the end of the 19th century and they have continued to do so to the present day. In 1894, and drawing closely on the ideas of his time, H. G. Wells wrote:

"One is startled towards fantastic imaginings by such a suggestion: visions of silicon-aluminium organisms - why not silicon-aluminium men at once? - wandering through an atmosphere of gaseous sulphur, let us say, by the shores of a sea of liquid iron some thousand degrees or so above the temperature of a blast furnace."

Over sixty years later, American screen-writer Gene L. Coon conceived of a silicon-based entity called the Horta in an episode of Star Trek.

Basically a living rock, the Horta was both sentient and sensitive - a bit too touchy-feely for me, as a matter of fact - and moved through rock like a hot knife through butter, shitting bricks as it went, thereby solving one of the main problems that would face siliceous life (one of the flaws in silicon's biological credentials is that the oxidation of silicon yields solid waste material that would be difficult - to say the least - for a creature to excrete). 

Sadly, even if silicon has had a part to play in the origin of life, the astronomical evidence suggests it's unlikely we're going to be encountering any silicon-aluminium organisms, or mind-melding with Horta, in the near future. For as Darling notes:

"Wherever astronomers have looked - in meteorites, in comets, in the atmospheres of the giant planets, in the interstellar medium, and in the outer layers of cool stars - they have found molecules of oxidized silicon (silicon dioxide and silicates) but no substances such as silanes or silicones which might be the precursors of a silicon biochemistry."

See: 

David Darling, entry on carbon in his online encyclopedia of science: click here. 

David Darling, entry on silicone-based life in his online encyclopedia of science: click here. 

H. G. Wells, 'Another Basis for Life', Saturday Review, (December 22, 1894), p. 676.

Hollywood Tales: Notes on the Relationship between Kirk Douglas and John Wayne

John Wayne as Taw Jackson and Kirk Douglas as Lomax in

The War Wagon (dir. Burt Kennedy, 1967)

I.

Commenting on a recent post illustrated with a photo of Kirk Douglas playing Vincent van Gogh in the 1956 movie Lust for Life, someone wrote to ask if I was aware of John Wayne's homophobic - though somewhat touching - reaction to his friend taking on this role.

Well, as a matter of fact, I did know of this comical exchange between Wayne and Douglas, that the latter recounted thirty-odd years later in his memoir The Ragman's Son (1988) ...


II.

According to Douglas, Wayne attended a private screening of the film and was horrified:

"Christ, Kirk! How can you play a part like that? There's so few of us left. We've got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers."

Somewhat taken aback - though more amused than angered or insulted - Douglas explained that, as an actor, he enjoyed taking on challenging roles, before adding: "It's all make-believe, John. It isn't real. You're not really John Wayne, you know."

It's an intriguing response that seems to suggest Douglas's relaxed attitude towards acting and the fact that he didn't take himself or his on-screen persona too seriously - nor that of others, including The Duke.

However, when playing the role of the emotionally intense Dutch painter, Douglas would later admit he came very close to losing his sense of professional detachment. In his autobiography, for example, he confessed:   

"I felt myself going over the line, into the skin of Van Gogh. Not only did I look like him, I was the same age he had been when he committed suicide. Sometimes I had to stop myself from reaching my hand up and touching my ear to find out if it was actually there. It was a frightening experience. That way lies madness . . . The memory makes me wince. I could never play him again.''

It should also be noted that whilst Douglas wasn't fooled by Wayne's hardman image, he nevertheless thought very highly (and very fondly) of him, describing Wayne as the perfect movie star who could get away with any line, no matter how corny, in any script, no matter how poor.

Not because he was an excellent actor, but because he had the courage to play every part in his own inimitable manner: "It wasn't John Wayne who served the roles; the roles served John Wayne."

Further - and slightly dispappointingly - Douglas expresses his preference for a John Wayne action movie, or any good, honest picture with balls, over more sophisticated art-house films. 

III.

At the end of his life, when lying in a hospital bed and dying of cancer, Wayne exchanged several mailgrams with Douglas. In one such, he jokes that he's been admitted to the hospital in order to have a cleft added to his chin so that he might look more like his friend, who replied:

"Dear John, Have you ever noticed that I never call you Duke? If I were going to use a title, it would be no less than King. Please get your ass back here soon. Love, Kirk."

It's not quite Brokeback Mountain, but it does reveal a delightful degree of playful tenderness between these two Hollywood tough guys. 

Note: Kirk Douglas and John Wayne worked together on several movies, including: In Harms Way (1965); Cast a Giant Shadow (1966); and The War Wagon (1967).   

See: Kirk Douglas, The Ragman's Son: An Autobiography, (Simon and Schuster, 1988).

Here's to the Crazy Ones: In Praise of Emotional Intensity

Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh

Lust for Life (1956)

Austrian-American psychoanalyst Ernest Hartmann was famously interested in what he termed boundaries of the mind - particularly those that determine the degree of separateness or connection between mental functions and processes and help shape distinct personality types.

According to Hartmann and his followers, emotionally intense individuals with less robust boundaries between themselves and the world, should be valued by society rather than derided as thin-skinned drama queens who confuse fantasy and reality and obsess over things of little or no interest to most people.

These complex and often uniquely gifted individuals - who are frequently misunderstood even by their family and friends - feel more powerfully, think more poetically, and have uncanny powers of perception rooted in a rich inner life. It's not surprising then, that so many of them become artists, philosophers, religious visionaries, or daydream believers.

If it's difficult for those of us not blessed (or cursed) with their abilities to fully understand or appreciate them, it's often just as difficult for these rare spirits to fully accept themselves and they can be subject to strongly negative emotions of self-doubt and self-loathing as well as positive states of euphoria. 

Sometimes, they can feel disoriented or acutely pained even by everyday experience and their proneness to psychological stress or anxiety can physically manifest itself in the form of migraines, asthma, panic attacks, hallucinations, or seizures. Thus, it isn't easy living in a state of heightened sensitivity or being possessed by dreams, desires, and demons.

Nor is it much fun being reminded on a daily basis that one is odd and needs to calm down, grow up, and get real. Often, even those who say they celebrate neurodiversity still treat emotional intensity as a disorder or form of psychopathology akin to bipolarism and borderline personality.

But, in the end, are we not all defective in some manner and to a greater or lesser degree? Indeed, isn't it our imperfections and failings that not only give rise to creativity and comedy, but make us human?

I wouldn't go so far as to say that sanity is merely a form of disguised madness, but I'd accept that irrational and impulsive behaviour is an important component of who we are and that sickness, perversity and passion often serve to advance culture.      

In sum: we need our décadents, as Nietzsche would say; though, as Paul Gauguin discovered, dealing with friends who are as handy with a razor as they are with a paintbrush, isn't always easy ...

See:

Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries in the Mind: A New Psychology of Personality, (Basic Books, 1991).

Ernest Hartmann, Boundaries: A New Way to Look at the World, (CIRCC EverPress, 2011).

Imi Lo, Emotional Sensitivity and Intensity, (Hodder and Stoughton, 2018).

Note that the author of the above work - who describes herself as a Specialist Psychotherapist and Arts Therapist who has trained in yoga and holistic health and practices in a manner that combines psychology with "other physical and spiritual healing modalities" - has a website devoted to Eggshell Therapy for those who identify as emotionally intense: click here.  

A Clockwork Banana: On the Ultraviolence of Chimpanzees

Despite what idealistic chimp-lovers like to believe, ape society is not some kind of simian utopia or one long tea-party. Indeed, researchers have conceded that chimps are natural born killers who enjoy inflicting cruelty and engaging in acts of savage (often coordinated) violence as much as man. This overturns the belief that their aggression was a consequence of being forced to live in an ever-restricted space due to the destruction of their natural habitat.

Until recently, primatologists would watch on as a group of males patrolling the forest battered the brains out of any outsider unfortunate enough to have strayed on to their patch and insist that it was a sign of human impact and social breakdown. But now they admit that grotesque acts of ultra-violence, including cannibalism, are how chimpanzees actually maintain their brutal social order.

It seems that lethal violence is an evolved tactic or adaptive strategy that improves fitness amongst those animals with no qualms about using any means necessary to ensure their survival and group status by giving them increased access to food and reproductive opportunities.  

Thus, when I read an email sent to me which suggested that humans were uniquely evil animals who would benefit greatly by rediscovering their inner-ape, I had to smile. For some chimps would make even Danny Dyer's deadliest men look like choir boys in comparison.  

See: Michael L. Wilson et al, 'Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts', Nature, 513, (18 Sept 2014), pp. 414-17. Click here to read online. 

On Compassion Fatigue

Compassion Fatigue (2014) by Ashley Reaks

As a full-time carer for an elderly parent, 92, with Alzheimer's, I'm intrigued by - and potentially at risk from - secondary traumatic stress (STS), or, as it's commonly known, compassion fatigue; a condition characterized by a gradual hardening of the heart and increased indifference to suffering.

For the fact is, nothing is limitless - not even love - and, sooner or later, everyone involved in providing care for the sick, the vulnerable, the poor, the feckless, or the otherwise needy and dependent, reaches the limits of their patience and concern (even if they are professionally trained to work with such people and cope with traumatic conditions).

It's little wonder then that the highest idealism often results in the most grotesque forms of abuse; for in the end, caring makes sadists of us all ... As does the endless moral insistence by the liberal elite that we in the West should assume responsibility for the entire world.

Arguably, it's not people like Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini who are inuring ordinary people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty, as some suggest. Rather, ironically, it's the bleeding-heart news media that has caused widespread compassion fatigue by constantly broadcasting graphic images of starving children, drowning migrants, and the victims of catastrophic natural events, making us all feel helpless and hopeless and, ultimately, resentful.
      

Desensitised and depressed by global suffering, it's understandable that many people eventually think fuck 'em and look away, deaf to all further cries for help, or appeals to their charity.

And it's this, I think, that explains the rise of populism; figures on the so-called alt-right understand how tired and fed up and anxious and angry people are already feeling, in a way that those on the self-righteous left refuse to. 


Note: this post was partly written in response to an article by the Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole in The Irish Times (26 June, 2018): click here to read online. Many thanks to Simon Solomon for bringing this piece to my attention.

That Chimp's Alright: In Memory of Koko

Koko (4 July 1971 - 19 Jun 2018)
Photo: The Gorilla Foundation / koko.org

I.

Although Puddy misidentified her species, he was absolutely right to declare that Koko the gorilla - who, sadly, died earlier this week - was alright. And the very fact that this one-time grease monkey could recall the name is evidence of just how far and wide her fame had spread. 

Indeed, by the time of her death, Koko was probably the best-known and most-loved ape on the planet; popular not only with the writers of Seinfeld, but good pals with many celebrities, including Robin Williams, who struck up a particularly close relationship with her.

II.

Koko was an unusually large female western lowland gorilla with a nipple fetish, a love of kittens, and an amazing ability to communicate with her carers using sign language. She also understood 2000 words of spoken English, in addition to more than 1000 signs. 

Born at the San Francisco Zoo, she spent most of her life at the Gorilla Foundation's preserve in Woodside, California, which is certainly not a bad place to live, whatever species one belongs to. Her interesting life has been fully documented by Francine Patterson and others in a number of books, articles and videos.

Some commentators have challenged the extent to which Koko truly understood what she was signing; she didn't use syntax or grammar and the suggestion has been made that her actions were largely the product of operant conditioning. However, she scored well in different IQ tests (between 70-95) and had passed the so-called mirror test, something that most of her kind fail to do. So Koko was clearly not just a typical dumb ape.   
 
Koko died during her sleep, unexpectedly, even though at 46 she had passed the average life expectancy of a gorilla and outlived her original male companion, Michael, by a good few years. The Gorilla Foundation released a statement saying "Her impact has been profound and what she has taught us about the emotional capacity of gorillas and their cognitive abilities will continue to shape the world."

This might be true. But, unfortunately, it doesn't alter the fact that both lowland and mountain gorillas - along with the other great apeas - are in imminent danger of extinction and the only sign they really need to learn is how to wave goodbye ...

See: Seinfeld, Season 9 Episode 11: 'The Dealership', (dir. Andy Ackerman, 1998).