Jason Dias's Blog - Posts Tagged "existentialism"

As Jacqueline Simon Gunn says, in her interesting and provocative book Bare: Psychotherapy stripped:
"My running coach, Chantal, had me performing innumerable track workouts in preparation for my long-distance road races. They were painful; and the pain was different than what I experienced during endurance training and longer races."
And:
"The ability to stay relaxed and focused in the face of pain and exhaustion is essential to being a successful long-distance runner. This may not seem like much fun, but the sense of strength and power that comes from running is like nothing else I have ever experienced. For me, this is the psychological component of the "runner's high." When the pain seems most intense and you really want to stop, somewhere you find the strength to keep going. Continuing in the face of such a rigorous effort endows you with all the power you'll need to push on. This, then, for me at least, supplies an inner strength that is needed to move past the pain into a sort of spiritual transcendence."
This is overcoming pain as a discipline. The runner knows something the rest of us are busy forgetting: to get stronger, you have to go on until you are uncomfortable, and then go on a while longer. It is in that place where discomfort happens but activity is still possible that growth and development happen.
Whatever exercise you choose this is true. If you stop because you are tired or a little bit uncomfortable, the exercise is wasted. You never get better at the exercise you are doing. You must slightly exceed your limits each time, and this is an act of will, of discipline. This requires knowing about pain and pushing through it. Without the knowledge of pain this exercise becomes dangerous, enabling the runner or cyclist or swimmer to exceed their limits to the point of serious injury or death. Thus the distance runner has to know they have pain or discomfort, measure whether it is serious enough to attend to, and table the awareness of such pain for the good of the activity.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
5/15/2018


Finding Life on Mars by Colorado Springs psychologist Jason Dias hits the atmosphere!
A neurodivergent novel written by a neurodivergent author.

Finding Life on Mars invites us into the world of Jaye, a young woman born to a failing colony on Mars. This story takes us through her mission of survival, the ongoing existential crisis born of the external and internal threats propelling Jaye’s self-discovery. Survival may depend on solving technical problems, however through Jaye’s struggle to be human we are shown how the gravity of life is dependent on something else entirely.
Finding Life on Mars is the seventh novel written by Jason Dias of Colorado Springs, CO. A clinical psychologist and professor with autism, he welcomes us into science fiction story telling through the neurodivergent lens of cognitive differences such as dyslexia, ADHD and autism.
Jason Dias, PsyD says, “I’m an autistic psychologist. Temple Grandin has thought of herself as an anthropologist on Mars: a perpetual outsider, studying humans less out of interest than out of the need to survive here. Some of us are gifted strange, narrow interests. One young man I worked with designed and built models of drains to watch the water go through. Another was obsessed with tires. Me? I’m fascinated by humans and am constantly stuck in the outsider perspective while seeking the inside view.”


Other promotional material:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uie3x...
https://www.amazon.com/Jason-Dias/e/B...

"Father, I think I am ill," I said, in my tiny, piping voice.
"Oh?" Merlin said. He set aside the solenoid he was working on and turned his full attention to me. We were in the kitchen and my memory informed me it was identical then and now. "Why do you say so?"
"Look," I said, and extended one hand, palm up. In the center of my palm lay a milk tooth. It had fallen bloodlessly out while I slept. When I awoke, my tongue found a gap in my gums, and I found the tooth on the floor under my sling.
"Oh, you have lost a tooth. How wonderful."
"Then I am not sick?"
"No, baby, the farthest thing from it."
"I am not a baby," I said. "Please explain."
"Well," Merlin said, "it is normal for a child of your age to lose her teeth, slowly, over the course of a few years. New ones are growing in, beneath your gum-line where you cannot see them, and eroding the roots of the old ones. The old ones fall out, new ones grow in. Perfectly natural."
"Why?"
"Well, because if you were born with a full set of adult teeth, your head would be too big to fit through the birth canal. And if your teeth were not replaced with larger ones, your adult jaw would be full of gaps."
"Oh."
If he had left it at that, it would have been better. Maybe a lot would have been different. But he did not.
"Now, where should we put the tooth? On Earth, we used pillows. You would leave a lost tooth under your pillow and the Tooth Fairy would find it, replace it with a few coins. Here we not only have no pillows but no beds. So where should we leave it?"
"What is a fairy?" I asked.
"My goodness, but we need some books to read to you. We never planned for children, you know. Let me see. Fairies are magical creatures that live in the woods and sometimes at the end of nice gardens. Mostly they are there for young girls to find beautiful, but sometimes they are mischievous. They steal or play tricks or cast naughty spells."
"There is no magic," I said.
"Can you be sure?" And Merlin reached behind my head, touched my ear, produced a solenoid. "If so, then how did this get behind your ear?"
"That's a trick," I said. "Not magic. There is no magic."
"You mustn't be so upset over it, baby girl. Magic is just something we talk about to have fun, to explain things we cannot otherwise explain, to wonder at the nature of the universe."
"I'm not a baby and there is no magic."
"Please, just calm down."
But it was too late for that. I started to shout. "You're a liar and there isn't such a thing as magic. You shouldn't lie to your children. Father Christmas is a lie and the Easter Bunny is a lie and God is a lie and the Tooth Fairy is a damned lie."
Merlin sat back, narrowed his eyes, crossed his arms. I knew I had crossed some kind of invisible line and I didn't know what it was, why it was. He didn't say anything, though, and I couldn't stop.
"If there is a God and if there is magic, then bring back my mother. Give her back to me!"

The next day she had left his apartment early, before sunrise, before he was awake. Gone down to the main street to find a spot on a rooftop. People were already starting to stake out their spots to view the running. They smiled at each other, waved. She got a position on a flat rooftop with a guardrail, stood there and watched the sun rise orange and dusty, felt the sweat intensify on her neck again. Her hair stuck there, uncomfortable, until she tied it into a bun.
An hour later she was hip-to-hip and shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred other people on a rooftop with room for twenty, wondering if it could support their weight - but of course this rooftop had seen a hundred such runnings and it was just her first. And what did it matter? It had been a good life, because she had taken chances and seen everything she could while she could.
A mile away, men gathered - and some women, too - nervously stretching and laughing and pretending not to be nervous. Raffael would be among them, but Madelaine could not tell one person from another at this range. She could feel their tension, could almost taste it with the dust on her tongue, see it building up around them like a brown haze.
She told herself she would not look for him, would just feel the spectacle without intention, but when the men came charging through the street below she could not help herself. She never saw him, though. She saw so many men, all of them just the same. They wore different clothes, had different hair, different faces, different eyes and hands and watches, but they were all the same that day: runners looking for life in a dusty street, steps ahead of death.
The bulls thundered along behind them, boulder-sized mounds of flesh and hair and bone, juggernauts of thunder, rolling drums of force. There was the maned beast that had eyeballed her the night before. There was a huge black bull with white flashes on his hooves. They didn't catch any of the runners that year. One young woman tripped and fell and skinned her hands but they just ran by and she picked herself up and chased them, fifty-five kilos of woman after ten thousand kilos of bull, running with her head back and laughter streaming from her throat as her hair streamed back from her head.
Madelaine had seen everything Earth could offer in those five years. Snorkeled off a hundred coasts, touched groupers and sharks and rays, hiked under Kilimanjaro, carried water in the Masai Mara, ran with wild horses in Montana. Climbed through towers and dungeons in European castles a thousand years old, eaten rice in a New Delhi slum even older. Thrown paint and been painted in Bangladesh. Painted coffins in Chengdu before eating scorpions off skewers from a Chinese street vendor.
Later, she had held a daughter in her arms, Olivia. Seen the dusty Martian sky, the ground so much like the Montana badlands. Seen Earth from space, seen alien moons, the tiny white Sun in the sky.
What good were eyes, what could they show her now that her memory could not? And what she remembered best was that young woman running after the bulls, chasing them with no mind for the consequences should she catch them, just the joy of life, doing, being.

Couple redirects on this one.

Is Finding Life on Mars an optimistic book? Absolutely not. Is it hopeful? I hope so. But you have to know the difference, and that's hard to explain to humans. Here's a couple of attempts I made in my column-writing days.

http://anewdomain.net/jason-dias-opti...

https://www.saybrook.edu/blog/2012/02...

In short, if you're looking for optimistic outlooks in your fiction, I respect that, but it isn't what I'm selling. If you're looking for hope, well, me too - and I'm willing to dig deep to find it.

J

Why Won’t the Zombie Obsession Die?
A Review of Savages (Bergling)
https://youtu.be/cp71TYHpWnU




I just finished reading Savages, by Christina Bergling.
This is a courageous book on a number of levels. Bergling’s treatment of the main protagonist, the last woman on Earth (Parker), cracks open tropes. At the opening of the story, she and her partner (Marcus) lay exhausted in a field of dismembered corpses. A whole town of savages, bestial ex-humans that may or may not be zombies. The protagonists pic themselves up and raid the town for supplies. They find more than they expected: both a survivalist’s horde of food, and a living infant.
Rather than being a slave to her womb, Parker’s reaction to the infant is far from motherly. She’s a skillfully painted three-dimensional portrait. Marcus is the one to insist on trying to save the child. We get some wonderful character growth from both characters over the child.
This is a horror story. Horrible things happen. Bergling seems to have read the formula guidebook “Save the cat” and thrown it out. Don’t expect any pulled punches. Horror, like comedy, is all about going too far and she does so skillfully.
At the same time, she mixes scenes of disgust and terror with beautiful, elegant prose. Not purple by any measure, the writing is nevertheless someone poetic, and definitely moody. This writing adds to the atmosphere expertly.
Additionally, the work takes on existential themes as I think only horror really can. Bergling poses to the readers a number of important questions. The biggest ones – what does it mean to be human? and How can we live with sure knowledge of death? both remain unanswered, as they should. But she does hazard some guesses about smaller questions, like, how are we to love when existence is impermanent? and what is the value of painful emotions and experiences?
This isn’t a huge novel. You could read it in one sitting if you’re a fast reader (it took me a day but I read about as fast as the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice). I think, though, that it will stick with you.
Now, I’ve been waiting for some time to get into the topic of zombies: why does the genre persist so strongly? Other fads come and go. Vampires were big for a while. Then werewolves. Ghost stories. But the zombie phenomenon, like zombies themselves, is relentless. It goes on and on and on.
Savages may or may not be a zombie story. You decide. Bergling explicitly notes that it hardly matters; whether her “savages” are undead or merely have shed the last of their moral restraint, the effect is identical.
I think that’s at the heart of the persistence of this genre.
Old people have always hated young people. Like half the Socratic dialogues were Socrates bitching about young people losing their moral compass. In the 20’s, we thought flappers would destroy America with their bobbed haircuts and beaded purses. The so-called “greatest generation,” which is what happens when you let generations name themselves, thought the Baby Boomers were useless lay-abouts of dubious moral character. Free-love hippies and eco-terrorists, the lot of them. And we like nothing better in this modern age than to hate on Millennials, the largest bloc of voters, parents and workers. My generation, Gen X, seem to have faded to invisibility in the generation wars, skipped over like Prince Charles, and maybe that’s for the best.
In an increasingly frustrating political landscape, it’s easy to paint both Baby Boomers and Millennials as having lost their way, as being brainwashed by political advertising and social media. It’s easy to cast social media itself as sucking the life out of everyone, turning them into mindless machine servitors.
Tastes in manners change. Young people don’t show respect the same way their elders do. Elders tend to have ritualized forms of respect – calling people by their gendered marriage status, last names and honorifics, sir and ma’am; we treat people the way we were trained to treat them. Younger people don’t just know the rules, they know what underlies the rules. Respect has deeper connotations than special language. We call people by the names they ask us to use, disregarding honorifics and gendered marriage status. We treat people the way they want to be treated.
From both sides of this equation, we see shambling, even monstrous subhumans, all banding together, threatening to overwhelm democracy based on inadequate moral reasoning. We’ve been brainwashed into social justice motives or we’ve been brainwashed into accepting capitalism, but we’ve all be been brainwashed.
During the 2016 elections, there was a spate of clown sightings. Do you remember them? Menacing clowns by the roadside, gathered around campfires in the woods, caught on security cameras trying doors at night? I don’t think that’s an accident. We had clearly insincere political candidates vying for our attention, and we had so much hypocrisy from potential voters as they rationalized their choices. Clowns are fundamentally human beings made up to be unrecognizable, with insincere smiles on their faces. That’s why they trouble us.
I don’t think the undying zombie craze is a coincidence, either. The shuffling, rotting corpses, disgusting and relentless, symbolize so much about American society at almost every time in history that I think the craze is likely to continue into an indefinite future.
George A. Romero famously described zombies as innocents. Being mindless, they have no choice about feeding. It’s just what they do. His stories, and all good horror, aren’t about rambling, mindless monsters. They’re about us, and how we react. In the face of threats, do we accept authoritarian leadership? Do we degrade into mindless murderers ourselves? Or do we manage to retain some spark of humanity, somehow, against all odds?

Would you surrender the ability to weep if you could? What would that cost you?

Part four of my ongoing webseries on existential psychology for people who don't want to go to school for eight years.

https://youtu.be/pnYujwOV354

A life of weeping
"I can't just cry my whole life," she said.
She was a therapy client during my internship year. But she wasn't the only one to say so. A student said it later - I failed this important test, but I had to get over it or else cry my whole life over it. A friend said it - "I almost cried." So why didn't you? Some resistance to it, some instinct that crying is painful, to be avoided.
I wondered.
If you were offered a life of weeping, would you take it? Or would you find a handgun, abort
such a life before it could get rolling?
When my father died, I couldn't cry. At the funeral I couldn't; with my family I couldn't; with my mother I couldn't cry. The capacity for weeping had been beaten out of my through two decades of a mobile life, too many goodbyes, too many losses, too much violence. So much scorn for feelings in those years, so much pain buried.
These days I can cry at the drop of a hat, and I like to. Yeah, it hurts, it sucks in many ways - but it also points me towards things that are true, and it affirms I've regained or simply gained some measure of humanity.
The turning point was therapy. I would never have gone except my graduate school required it. But since I was there I made the most of it.
We were talking about the funeral, even then fourteen years in the past, about soldiers folding a flag and handing it to my sister while I choked on my grief. Every time the tears came up, they would recede again as if shoved back down - but nothing conscious in me was doing the shoving. And while I described this scene, the doctor started to cry.
A few little tears in red eyes, a bit of nasal congestion, and that easily he pushed through three decades of learned repression.
I said, "why are you crying?" I wasn't totally certain he didn't just have allergies.
But he said back, "I'm crying for you, because you can't cry for yourself."
And I still couldn't, not then, but I learned how. He opened me up, let me become soft, tender-hearted. Open. The more I learned to wonder at the world, to comprehend ambiguity, to chase things of meaning, the more I did those things the more that tears have come into my life.
If you were offered a life of tears, would you turn away from it? Or would you accept them as your guide to humanity, to truth and beauty, your proof of life? Would you turn away from your tears into a living death, towards empty pleasures, days of sunshine you could not see, of warmth that never touched your face? Would you give up all that weeping entails to escape it?
Love, I mean.
Would you choose never to love anyone so you would never have to mourn them?
I write to destroy myself. My fiction is a labor of annihilation. If I'm not covered in tears and snot by the time a chapter is done, I toss it out and start over. This is life: finding what is true and worthy, finding what is authentic, and putting it into words or pictures or gestures. The crying is what lets me know I have been honest with myself, true to the labor. Tender-hearted.
I remember the years of being unable to do this, unable to see love or truth or beauty because they were hidden behind whatever veil was holding back the tears. If my choices were either a life of weeping or a life of never being able, I know what I would choose. It's easy. No contest.
It hurts to cry, at least a little, but I am not distressed by it. I am fulfilled by it, enriched, informed. Created.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken things using gold to highlight the fractures. The breaks are beautiful, the repairs beautiful. A broken vessel, once repaired, is more beautiful than before it was broken. That's why I do it. That's why I smash myself to pieces, over and over, in pursuit of something genuine.
It doesn't matter to me whether it makes you cry, too. I mean, I like to hear about it when it does - it is my privilege to help people weep over the important things - but I am not disturbed or insulted if my work doesn't push your buttons. I know I've told truth as I see it, given away what is inside me, and that has to be good enough.
So... would you? Give up every future tear knowing the cost - truth, beauty and love?
Hemingway knew. He said, "The world breaks everyone and afterward, some are strong at the broken places." "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed." "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." "All things truly wicked start from innocence." "A man can be destroyed, but not defeated." "All good books have one thing in common: they are truer than if they had actually happened."
+++
My first novel to be published has much to do with all of this. The first pages describe the death of my father, couched in metaphors, fictionalized. I'd like to share them with you because, while they are fiction, they say something true.
“Goodbye, Ernest. I love you and I’ll see you in Heaven.”
“I don’t want you to die,” he said, knowing he couldn’t change it and that she was most likely right. Tonight was the night, her last night. She had been a big lady in life, big in body, big in spirit, always loving and giving and letting the looks and comments about her and about him just slide right off, though they secretly hurt very much.
“It’s all right, dear, I’m ready now. I’ve plenty of morphine. It won’t hurt. Once you’re away, I’ll just press the button and drift off to sleep for the last time. I won’t even know. I’m not afraid. Jesus is waiting for me in Heaven.”
He knew Jesus was not waiting for her in Heaven and he did not know if she was teasing him. Ernest had never been a believer, but she loved him anyway.
“Just tell me you love me and kiss me once more and then I’ll be off,” she said, as though getting ready to go to the shops for tea and milk. “I’m ready now.”
But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say it. He didn’t love her, not as she understood the word. He couldn’t, didn’t know how.
He let himself be choked up, absently brushed away a tear, and kissed her gently on the cheek. Her skin was parchment-thin, dry, her lush body now sunken in and skeletal. He’d never carried her over the threshold when they had married but he had carried her into this hospital bed in this sterile hospice room with the television in the corner with the broken volume control. Now it was whispering about how to cook pasta in a microwave container.
He held her hand for a few minutes, then reached over for her other hand, the one holding the controller for her morphine. He looked at her eyes, she looked back at his and nodded. And he helped her push in the plunger, the one that would make all the pain stop – her pain, not his. She had said she would do it but she was really too weak now to do anything. He did this last thing for her because he could not do the other, could not give her the pretty lie she wanted, that he loved her and always had.
When her eyes closed for the last time, when he was sure she was sleeping peacefully, he said softly, “No, love, I never did. I couldn’t. I don’t love you, but I’ve done my best all this time.”
And then it was time to go. The heart rate monitor in the corner, so familiar now it was unnoticed, let out its high-pitched alarm and the nurses came. The doctor double checked the do-not-resuscitate order and went off to do the paperwork. And Ernest, more lost than ever before, went home to make breakfast.