Arsen Darnay's Blog, page 23

Paramedicine

Reading the chapter on Hypnotism in Frederic W.H. Myers’ Human Personality—which describes the state of this art or practice at the end of the nineteenth century, the thought occurred that hypnotism might be classified as a branch of paramedicine. I use that term in a new way. The word, I just discovered, is already in use in connection with emergency medical services—in which the paramedics are highly active. But in that usage, the para prefix (meaning “beyond”) is here derived from parachute, seeing that the earliest use of “paramedic” was to designate medical corpsmen arriving on the scene after jumping from airplanes.
In my usage here, the analogue is parapsychology—thus the extension of psychology into regions where the scientific proof of observations or diagnoses are difficult-to-measure or difficult-to-replicate, neutrally described as alternative medicine (much as acupuncture is), aggressively derided as hokum.
Hypnosis fits this designation because its uses are not as unfailing (or as close to unfailing) as the dominant mechanical or chemical approaches; yet when they work, they are rather spectacular. The main variables in this art are the personalities of the hypnotist and of the patient. Significantly enough the practice has, from its days of inception under Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) tended to be associated with unusually charismatic figures—of which the last I am aware of was Milton H. Erickson (1901-1980). Thus the practice appears to resist “institutionalization” —much as talents in parapsychology effectively decay when put to use in, say, trying to play the stock market, as shown by the parapsychologist, J.E. Kennedy (see papers here ).
It appears to me that hypnosis involves that famously mysterious borderland between mind and body—much as does faith-healing and a very well-known but not-at-all-understood phenomenon, the placebo effect. The “faith” part of the placebo effect is indicated by its name; it derives from the Latin for “I shall please” and comes from doctors giving patients innocuous pills, thought to have no effect at all, just to pleasethe patient. Yet, miraculously, the white flour just worked. Somehow.
Two views of hypnosis divide the field today (Wikipedia tells me). One theory is called the Altered State, thus it is “an altered state of mind or trance, marked by a level of awareness different from the ordinary conscious state” ( link ). The other is called Non-State and viewed as imaginative role-playing. If the first theory is correct, the state of mind can be produced by an individual without the help of a hypnotist: self-hypnosis. The most famous teacher of that technique was Émile Coué (1857-1926), the French psychologist, he of that famous “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” The field’s second and perhaps most influential practitioner, the Scot James Braid (1795-1880) thought that hypnotism was induced by concentration; he also believed, and indeed successfully practiced, self-hypnosis in pain control.
A state of the mind? A certain level of awareness? Reached by concentration when fully relaxed with external stimuli maximally muted? We’re starting to think that meditation has something to do with it. Parameditation perhaps?

God as Metaphor

Back on December 24, the New York Times ran an op-ed piece by Tanya Marie Luhrman, an anthropologist at Stanford. It was titled “Religion Without God.” The article’s general thematic was the rise (how measured was not stated) of what Luhrman calls a “kind of God-neutral” faith which, here and there, is openly and professedly atheist but engages in religious observance with (you might say) all the usual bells and whistles.
Today the Timespublished letters in response to the article. Of the six letters, four are in favor of “religion without God,” one is ambiguous, and only one opposes that view. A good sample of New York Timesreaders perhaps—predominantly wealthy and sophisticated?
Before Brigitte showed me the letters and caused me thereafter to trace the original, I was out trying to shovel masses of slush, what with the Weather undecided whether it wants to rain or to snow. And in the context of repetitive action, what with wondering where I’d put the salt, a phrase came and started repeating. “If the salt hath lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” In turn then I also traced that sentence to the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, in which the profile of those destined for the kingdom of heaven is shown. Among these are the poor in spirit, they that mourn, those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and the persecuted, with emphasis on the last. They are the salt of the earth.
In her own profile, T.M. Luhrman describes her work as follows:
I use my training in anthropology to understand how people know what is real. I don’t pass judgment on whether they are right. Instead, I ask: what leads people to make the judgment that God was present? What do they perceive that makes them more confident or more uncertain? How have they learned to pay attention? I observe what people do, and I listen to what they say, and I search for patterns. I am also interested in what happens when that capacity to judge what is real gets broken, and how we help those who are in pain.
To know Luhrman’s sample is perhaps to know what Luhrman’s conclusions about the “real” will turn out to be. As for what is rising, and what is in process of decaying, for that perhaps a more robust study of culture in its cycles might be more instructive. What lies ahead, seems to me, is growing hardship for humanity. And hardship has a peculiar virtue in enlarging the inner perception of what is real and what is merely on the surface.

Starting Anew

A notable aspect of New Year’s Day is that it has no anchorage in anything traditional—or seasonal. Going by western history, an early Roman calendar was that of Romulus (circa 771 BC). In that calendar the year began on March 1—and the calendar did not even have a January or a February; there were only ten months to a year. January and February make their first appearance under King Numa Pompilius (r. 715-673 BC), with the first day of January starting the year.
Under the calendar reforms of Julius Caesar, carried out in 46 BC, January retained its leading position—and does so to this day. Caesar’s year had 365.25 days; the earlier calendar had between 377 and 378 days, thus causing each month, each year, to “drift” from season to season. Under Pope Gregory XIII, the Gregorian calendar, introduced in 1582, further conformed the year to the actual movements of the sun just a tad more, to 365.2425 days. That has been good enough to last until today. Under the Gregorian calendar, however, Caesar’s January 1 became January 17—as the Gregorian made its correction.
Thus New Year’s Day, as we now find it, came about for (call it) scientific reasons—or the desire to have the months of the year conform to the seasons more or less perfectly, with one extra leap day added to every year divisible by 4. Years divisible by 100 are not leap years, however, unless they are also divisible by 400. Thus the year 2000 was a leap year but 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not.
For more detail on these numbers, see this post here ( link ).
While no tradition clings to New Year’s day, nonetheless it offers something all of us need at least once a year: a formal occasion for starting anew. Yes, for starting anew—with nothing else distracting from that resolution and, for those who overindulged on New Year’s eve, a strong motivation to clear the decks for the new and perfect life which every new year thus offers.
So, happy New Year! May your resolutions bloom!

A Year of Transition

Since the commencement of this blog, one day in each year, December 31, has never failed to have a posting. The thematics have been gates, time and our perception of it, and transition symbolized by a bridge. In this year 2014, the year itself was one of transition from east to west—but that transition took place almost exactly in the middle of the year, on July 9 when the movers came and transported our worldly goods (the things you eventually leave behind—when going West) from our old house on McKinley to our new one on Wolverine Drive.
That change, too, may be pictured as a Gate—although this one has no particular esthetic charm. But since our huge yard is all fenced in—and Katie the Beagle is one of our frequent visitors, the Gate has its entirely utilitarian uses as well.
We are what those who live on the lake refer to us as “backlotters.” But our back lot is close enough to the water so that, from our Gate, we get a glimpse of Lake Wolverine itself. There is a little segment of it dead ahead, the water frozen at the moment. We’ve had very cold weather these past few days. But as it warms again, which is quite likely, we may frequently see swans transiting that gap.
Six months there, six months here. It all happened way too fast—except for the sale of our old house, which happened even faster. Yes, in a week! And for that, particularly in today’s still ailing housing market, we consider the sale of McKinley one of the Miracles of 2014.

Print on Demand

When you buy books on Amazon, the company often presents a list of related works you might also be interested in. A while back one such list showed a work by Frederic W.H. Myers (1843-1903). The book was Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. It appeared in 1906 and represents a collection of Myers’ writing compiled after his passing. The book on Amazon is a 460 page abridgement of a work that originally that came in two volumes and had 700 pages. This particular book cost $9.99. I bought it.
It appeared a few days later. Then I discovered that the book is a literal photocopy of the original abridgement—but that it had been printed on December 15, 2014—no doubt after I had ordered it. To be sure, Myers is a very big name in parapsychology. He was a cofounder of the Society of Psychical Research (with four others) in 1882. His writings about the Unconscious, which he dubbed the “subliminal” mind, influenced many, not least William James and Carl Jung. And the subject of this book is rising (you might say) what with the biggest single American generation now commencing its journey to the Hereafter. Human Personality is filled with the nineteenth century view of science hard, soft, and beyond. Very interesting reading but also very dense. Back then people took the time to read…

The March of Marijuana

Interesting to observe, over time, how various drugs are managed by a large democracy. By drugs I mean tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, morphine, heroin, and the like—thus substances we do not need —but they cause various changes in our physical and mental state we view as desirable. These substances fall into three categories: permitted, marginal, and prohibited. Before the substances became widely used and were therefore “recognized,” they were easily obtainable, witness Sherlock Holmes’ use of cocaine. Cocaine’s progress has been from sold, to marginal (in Dr. Watson’s opinion), to prohibited. Alcohol was prohibited but then, what with the impossibility effectively to control so widely-used a drug, was once more permitted and continues to be a source of state revenues. Nicotine is halfway into the marginal category now. It is officially frowned upon and major propaganda is deployed to reduce its usage. At the same time, in the form of nicotine gum, lozenges, and e-cigarettes, it is trying to recapture its earlier permitted status. And marijuana…?
Marijuana is certainly in transition. It is in transition from an illegal substance to at least a tolerated drug, thus from prohibited to marginal—with the future probably holding full permission to use by all. Where it is permitted, it is becoming a major source of revenues for the states involved. Herewith I show a graphic from Wikipedia’s article titled “Legality of cannabis by U.S. state” ( link ).
Anything that changes human behavior by chemical means, other than through intake of ordinary food and water, produces strange ambiguities. I read somewhere a rather wise statement long ago. It asserted that laws to which the public does not uniformly assent are ultimately unenforceable. Drug regulation introduces this ambiguity—clearly seen in the prohibition of alcohol (1920-1933); what surprises me about alcohol is that it took 13 years to repeal Prohibition. Perhaps that experience taught the collective that a direct prohibition—say of all tobacco products—would just produce a massive (and difficult to tax) black market. Marijuana is teaching us is that legalizing it produces a massive increase in tax revenues—and its decriminalization saves the money necessary to enforce the law.
As for the relative dangers of, say, alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana, such things are very difficult to measure. How many deaths are associated with alcohol use? In that case two sets of data must be meshed somehow: deaths from drunken driving and deaths from liver failure. Tobacco? Inhaling cigarette smoke is definitely a killer, but nicotine is not considered to be a carcinogen and may be ingested in other ways than through smoke. Now as for marijuana, Brigitte I learned this morning from the New York Times that it may be eaten as well as smoked. Indeed, says the Times, “Major New York publishing houses and noted cookbook authors are pondering marijuana projects.” It’s just a short step from pondering to action. Soon, in a store near you, those cannabis cup cakes will be ready for purchase. Meanwhile one can still chew on a cigar…

Concerning War and Watches

In the last post I present a translation from a 1945 diary written in Hungary; the passage features a Russian soldier, stealing a watch.
To this might be added some of our own experiences, also dating to that same era. Brigitte, living in Weissenfels, Germany, witnessed the theft of a watch by an Americansoldier at their apartment. It was a very straightforward “grab,” from a dresser, in the presence of three females who—not surprisingly—said nothing. A short while later the American army withdrew from Weissenfels and yielded that part of Germany to Russian occupation.
My family lived in Bavaria at this same time, occupied by the U.S. Army. There, too, watches played a major role—in the Black Market. My father was quite active in it, trading watches, obtained from several “clients” of his, for valuable food products and the even more valuable nylon stockings obtained from American soldiers.
What my highly literary Hungarian diarist does not mention—it might have interfered with his cultural interpretation of events—was that in a time and place where local currency had zero value, the watch became a kind of useful currency easily turned into cash. They were even round, like big coins….

From One Diary to Another

Herewith a translation of the first page of Sándor Márai’s Diary, 1945-1957, mentioned some days ago here .
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Leányfalu. — The rabbi, who was hiding next door, knocked on my door on the second day of the Russian occupation and, quite pale in the face, had the following to say: A Russian soldier had just visited at his house and had begun to be quite familiar with the rabbi’s wife. Then he began to search the house; he came across the rabbi hiding in a room and started shouting: “Watch, watch!” Then he undid the watch strapped to the rabbi’s wrist and ran off with his booty. “Please! What sort of a magic is that!”—said the rabbi.
*What might explain the passion with which the Red Army’s soldiers throw themselves on watches? Don’t the soviets have enough watch factories? Perhaps something more is also part of the impulse behind this passion: was it the civilization of the machine that forced the Russian masses to bring the experience of time to life? It is quite certain that a hundred, even fifty years ago the Russian peasant had no great interest in the pocket-watch. Eastern man is indifferent to time: an “optimist” as Schubart says. He lives easily with great distances; the second doesn’t interest him. He has no sense of panic, does not divide time into tiny increments. These days, as it happens, I have no other book at my fingertips; therefore, when the lights are on and living conditions allow it, I’m reading Spengler again. Reading the passage in which Spengler wants to prove that the Greek, Latin—and especially the Chinese and the Assyrian—cultures were indifferent to time measurement. Ultimately the sun-dial showed a different time than the later hour-glass or today’s watch with a second hand… The highly structured watch, after all, coincides with the stiffening machine civilization and with its “pessimistic” western culture where humans are soaked in risk perception,  love of records, and general anxiety. It might be that the Russians, that “optimistic” peasant folk, got a taste of the “pessimistic” feeling-mode produced by machine civilization during the last quarter century—the reason why they are so fascinated by watches.
*A young Cossack patrolman canters on the highway. He stops for a moment and asks for the direction to Visegrad, adjusting the straps of his weapon. A Mongolian face, indifferent, tired, with an immeasurably alien look in his eyes: he arrives from that distance where the shapes of eastern myths move and sway. Thus this Mongol horseman has cantered for a millennium through prairies, along rivers. A smile-like flash falls on the dark face, strange, haughty, impersonal: this is the Buddha’s smile.
Two days of heavy snowfall. While shoveling the snow, I rack my brains: where I’ll get some potatoes? I’m also thinking that in liberated Paris a French poet lives, perhaps, who is out of sorts because a literary journal, in its last issue, issued an unfavorable judgement about his book of verse.

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Leányfalu is a district of Pest, and Pest is half of Budapest. The piece was written in December of 1945 and is thus 70 years old.

Gravitas

I have not as yet been able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I do not frame hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction.     [Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1713]
We really know very little about matter, but we’re not quite as continent as Newton was when it comes to framing hypotheses. Descriptions of behavior, however precisely measurable, do not explain what really happens. Two bodies will exert a force on one another based on their masses and distance, but why that force is operating is not thereby explained. Quantum physics offers the notion that the force of gravity is mediated by a mass-less particle called the graviton (a hypothetical particle). In Relativity, Einstein offered as his hypothesis that mass causes time and space, the two combined in a single continuum called spacetime, to bend or to deform in some way thus creating a groove or slope in what (presumably) is an otherwise unchanging “environment.” This deformation is then used to explain gravitational effects. But what exactly are space and time? For Newton they were absolute and entirely unchangeable let’s call them realities; mass could not change either one or the other. For Immanuel Kant they were, at the same time, immaterial and thus insubstantial, in the human mind as a priori organizing principles enabling us to understand sensory experience and therefore ideas. But because they were linked to sensory experience, they were also empirically real. In other words we don’t really have an explanation—hence framing no hypotheses is indicated—at least in “experimental philosophy.”
Space and time are inherently involved in any kind of explanation of gravity, be it by gravitons or spacetime deformations—or invisible, intangible dark matter used by most astronomers to explain gravitational anomalies in star rotations around galaxies far away. That hypothesis, incidentally, has the small problem of increasing the total mass of the universe by huge gob. Visible matter is supposedly 4 and dark matter is 96 percent of the universe. Now supposing we did detect a graviton finally. Where would that leave us? It would leave us wondering what makes gravitons detach from one kind of mass to rush at the speed of light, and presumably no faster, to another essentially same kind of mass. And why then would this exchange become a “force”?
The description of the behavior of bodies must suffice us, I presume, because breakthroughs in the future will not provide any more knowledge than we have at present—only yet other hypotheses. Going down to have lunch now, I wonder if my mass will bend spacetime ever so, ever so faintly. Presumably so, if Einstein is correct.

Book Migration

Back, oh, some five or six years ago, my brother Baldy asked if I could lay my hands on some books in Hungarian. He had met a Hungarian Benedictine monk  at St. Benedict’s Abbey in Atchison, KS who liked to read in his mother tongue. I managed to find two or three and sent them off. Then, later, I chanced across yet more—and once more a recycled Amazon container took them on its way to Brother Peter. And thus, one or two at a time, ever since a intervals.
Little did I realize just how many such books I had in my great forest of volumes. Now what with unpacking still steadily moving forward, I unearthed another dozen or so—but with some twelve or so boxes still unopened, there may be more yet.
The initial books I’d sent were actually some that I had been reading, off and on, either for content or for reference in preparing our family history—our great transition from Europe to America (see this link here). The current batch includes a gardening book, a cookbook (it contains several quite elaborate recipes for preparing snails), a book on traditional weaving and embroidering, the elaborate and highly scholarly yearbook for a Museum, a photographic work titled Storm-beaten Castles, an essay collection by Dezső Szabó (1879-1945) titled Kill! and dated 1922, and two volumes titled Diary by Sándor Márai (1900-1989) extending from 1945 to 1967.
Márai’s life to some extent carries an aura of our own transition. He was a poet, writer, and journalist who was both passionately patriotic but yet, oddly (but this is normal if you live it) also much attached to the greater multi-ethnic unity that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy represented. He much mourned its passing—and hated the communist regime that followed Hungary’s independence so that that country ejected him. He then lived in Italy for a while and ended up in—San Diego. Life for some Hungarians during the twentieth century. Great change, great disruptions, and strange feelings for cultures dying and emergent.
Now these books—which managed somehow to migrate from Hungary to Kansas City, to Washington, Minneapolis, and finally to Detroit—are once more on the verge of another trip across the country, to Atchison, KS. Not a bad place to end their life, in a Benedictine abbey. That may be the genuine future which will emerge from the present turmoil of modernity.