Beyond Rivalry

"It's so disappointing," Linda Wilmesherr, a local resident, tells the Associated Press. "With all the guns in this county, couldn't we kill a muskrat?"

from Muskrats blamed for levee breach in Missouri, in USA Today 

Five Dials is a new, hot-off-the-non-press British literary magazine from Hamish Hamilton publishers, freely available in PDF format (18 pages for the first issue).

Love the Agony Uncle (advice) column written by Alain de Botton -- topics this issue are public speaking, dining out, and giving and receiving compliments: "In short, we want to be loved for simply existing, not for doing a certain thing or looking a certain way. Then again, the desire is somewhat unrealistic and many people, philosophers among them, have at times judged it wise to continue visiting the gym."

And the excerpt from Gustav Flaubert's letters: In Feb. 1852, while struggling with the writing of Madame Bovary, he writes to a friend:

"Bad week. Work didn't go; I had reached a point where I didn't know what to say. It was all shadings and refinements; I was completely in the dark: it is very difficult to clarify by means of words what is still obscure in your thoughts. I made outlines, spoiled a lot of paper, floundered and fumbled."

There's also poetry, fiction, art, reportage of current-ish events...

I'm moving towards writing about status, from a Girardian perspective, some time soon. Meanwhile, this post of Canadian pastor/not-pastor Scott Williams, is on the same topic; specifically, it's about mega-churches and the underplayed celebrity of some evanglical Christian leaders labelled as 'ordinary radicals.' It's about jealousy, envy, hero-worship, desire, man's search for meaning and purpose, and most of all, status anxiety.

Here are the phrases and sentences that stand out for me:

** "I think I was also experiencing a low-burn jealousy that was to last for many years." 

This is the kind of jealousy we don't admit to others except in jest, clouded in ambiguity and mixed signals, and we may not even be conscious of feeling it. It's the kind where we say, "It's great that he's doing so well" and then give reasons why we don't want that exact situation or position, explain why what we have is good enough, explore what it is -- about us, about those around us, our circumstances, the system, nature and God -- that keeps us from being and getting what we envy. 

** "The emerging church movement wants to let you know that it is made up of little people, regular fallible leaders and friends. We want to be known as ordinary radicals -- regular people who do extraordinary things.

"Some time ago I happened upon the Ordinary Radicals website, a website featuring some of the most highly regarded thinkers in the North American church." Scott lists about 15 names of so-called ordinary radicals (I've heard of 3 of them), then says,

"When I read a list like that ... I am frustrated by the absolute 'un-ordinary-ness' of the people it is about. Several of the people on the list are international superstars in the religious world, have been on The Colbert Report and any number of high profile talk shows and television appearances. ... Though I genuinely laud the intentions for such projects it is simply symptomatic of the problem in North American faith and culture. We cannot seem to get beyond the love affair we have with celebrity culture. Even in a climate of anti-heroes we are easily infatuated with the cult of personality."

My thought is that this is the same motivation we have for watching reality TV shows -- they too are 'ordinary people' we can easily identify with, and yet they're doing something extraordinary (they're on national TV, for one), so we can also model ourselves after them, look to them as ideals and the embodiment of our manifold desires (i.e., one desire: to be valued for who we are).

DALMATIANS

'Hey, look, the truck's stopping.'

'Did they take us to the park this time?'

'No -- it's a fire. Another horrible fire.'

'What the hell is wrong with these people?'

From 'Animal Tales' by Simon Rich in the 30 June 2008 New Yorker.

Some of what moves through us, and how it keeps us moving. 

sunlight, air, water, nutrients, blood, instincts, our neurons' electric spark, sensations, perceptions, information, ideas, conceptions, conversations, emotions, communion...

I like it, and I think I like the colours he uses for the words even more.

--- 

Leroy Sievers (My Cancer) asks how you want people to remember you. My instinctual response is, I don't. Maybe, somehow, in these things Dave Pollard lists, above, that move through us, but without my name attached. Maybe I don't want to be remembered or missed in my absence so much as felt in my presence. Ask me another day and I might respond differently. Sometimes I feel anxious and sad when I think about so much personality and experience (each person's) removed from our midst in an instant, never to be replicated in exactly the same way (or so I believe)  ... Of what use was it all, all this striving, all this becoming, all these relationships, all this unique composition of particles, waves, energy, self? Then I answer myself: of no use. That's a calming thought somehow. 

I like this aspiration, in the comments: "That I went through my bout with cancer with ... a sick sense of humor." Another one says, "Off to get fresh bread for breakfast. Please remember that I did things like that."

--- 

Addicted to grief ... In the journal 10 May 2008 issue of Neurolmage, UCLA scientists report a study of grief that may help explain why some people "grieve and ultimately adapt, while others can't get over the loss of someone held dear." Grief may be an addiction; thinking about the loss may stimulate the reward region of the brain, which provides the griever with a kind of pleasure in the midst of pain. The reveries about the loved one may not be felt as emotionally satisfying, but they may be craved and re-enacted because of the reward response they trigger in the brain.

The lead author of the study, asst. professor of psychiatry Mary-Frances O'Connor, explains:

"'The idea is that when our loved ones are alive, we get a rewarding cue from seeing them or things that remind us of them. ... After the loved one dies, those who adapt to the loss stop getting this neural reward. But those who don't adapt continue to crave it, because each time they do see a cue, they still get that neural reward. Of course, all of this is outside of conscious thought, so there isn't an intention about it.'"

In the study, women whose mothers or sisters had died of breast cancer looked at either a photo of their loved one or a photo of a female stranger while their brains were scanned. They found that while both those with complicated grief (the kind that continues and can be debilitating) and with uncomplicated grief have activity in the pain network of the brain after looking at the photo of the loved one, only those with complicated grief showed significant activation in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain associated with reward.

What this synopsis of the study doesn't say is whether someone is chemically determined to have complicated grief with every loss or only with some losses.

Abstract and link to full report ($) here. 

Love this meditation, "Starbucks Log: To the pretty but stern lady in line," by Stephen Berg at Grow Mercy today. I've re-formatted it to poem form and added some commas for ease of reading and to open it to the slower, shuddering, reverberating voice of poetry.

The existential lack you wake up with is real enough.
The thing you fill it with is not.

The thing, whether object or being, has no substance.
You look and see and desire and look to another to know
what it is you should desire
and it is all helium.
Up it goes, no hanging on or retrieval.
But you tell yourself the romantic lie that, in fact, you did hang on,
and that it is now what is filling you and giving you your bit of buoyancy.

And without knowing what you're doing,
you add to the lie
by convincing yourself that if only you could acquire
a bit more of whatever that was,
you would finally satisfy that deficiency
and come into yourself discovering your trueness.

And without knowing you're doing it,
you cast about to see who it is that is leading the fulfilled life,
and you seize upon your neighbour three doors down.

Your neighbour two doors down you know well enough to conclude he has his own problems.
In fact, one time you caught him giving you the envy-eye,
so you know his environ is a dead end.

But she, of the next-door-to-the-two-doors-down, looks altogether put together.
She had seemed average enough but you caught something else,
something more the day you passed her on the sidewalk outside your office.
What was it, you wonder?

You catch yourself looking for an answer
but not really looking
and not conscious that you're looking,
yet one morning at 3:30 AM you wake up and wonder what kind of salad she eats.
What's her breakfast?

She might as well have her own line of clothes, fragrance, hair products,
so well is she pieced and plaited!
Where did she find her poise, you wonder?
What's her regime? Her program? Her magazines?

Yes, obviously, she lacks the lack you wake up with.
Can't be. Can it? It is!
Has her own line of clothes? Silly! Go back to sleep!

You press all this down far under the threshold of awareness from where it came
and you get on with your day.
Except without knowing it
you allow the play of the romantic lie
and you make little raids on the inarticulate something that tells you of her preeminence.

And now you move beyond her surface
to the substance of things
and consider her friends, her intimacies --
yes, of course hers are the right friends and intimacies and soulish powers
and here lies her secret.

But just how did she acquire them?
No, that's the wrong question…she has them…how do you get them?
Now we're getting someplace.

And then the conclusion comes naturally enough,
almost divine in its revelatory shimmer
with you self-possessed
and in control of your innocent desires,
not trying to evince a solution in any way,
and now you know that in order to be yourself
it's her being you must possess.
And so in every way you must kill her off.
Your existential completeness is just that close.
Three doors down.
This is your awakening that you remain unaware of.

Comedian, political humourist, anti-censorship crusader and thinker George Carlin died yesterday of a heart attack at age 71. He released his first comedy album, Take-Offs and Put-Ons, in 1967, acted in 'That Girl' and the movie 'With Six You Get Egg-Roll,'  and by the end of the 1960s, "he was one of America’s best known comedians." In 1970, feeling he was "living a lie," he ditched his clean-cut, conventional image and material for the long-haired look and seven-words-riddled, edgy patter he's known for. That switch resulted in the cancellation of a 3-year-contract and "he was advised to leave town when an angry mob threatened him at the Lake Geneva Playboy Club"! 

NYT obituary

BBC News obituary 

Time magazine already has "How George Carlin Changed Comedy" on its website.

AP/Chicago Tribune tribute 

Transcript of "The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," from his 1972 album Class Clown. (NSFW)

An editorial cartoon featuring Carlin, printed in today's Chicago Tribune, which went to press before news of Carlin's death.