Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 317

Life After A Stroke

Geoff Dyer comes to terms with suffering an ischemic stroke at age 55:

There had certainly been some cognitive impairment, but my wife insisted that this had occurred before the stroke. I used to pride myself on my sense of direction but that had long gone south, or maybe north or east. I had trouble concentrating but that too had been going on for ages; I put it down to the internet, not to my brain blowing a fuse or springing a leak. So no, nothing had gone permanently wrong in my head, or at least nothing had gone wrong that had not been in the process of going wrong for a while, but I now regarded my head and the brain snuggled warmly inside it in a new and vulnerable way.

I’d been looking forward to signing up for a medical marijuana card in LA, but the prospect of smoking pot now seemed quite dreadful. While marijuana might meliorate the symptoms of some conditions it seemed guaranteed to send the stroke victim spinning into an epic bummer in which you either fixated on the stroke you’d just had or the one that could blow your brain apart at any moment, the one that might be brought on by worrying about it. That was the thing about all this: it was a brain thing, and I loved my brain and the way it had been going about its business so gamely for more than half a century.

Let’s say you have something wrong with your liver or heart. Terrible news. But if you’re lucky, if you get another one and take the right medication you’ll be back to your old self again. But with the brain, the one you were born with either works or it goes wrong and you start sliding away from yourself.

When Fish Go Peopling

Dan Piepenbring marvels at the 1980 short seen above, Fisheye, by the Croatian animator Joško Marušić:

Fisheye is an inspired blend of the macabre and the mundane. Its premise is simple: instead of people going fishing, fish go peopling. At night, these jowly blue creatures of the deep take to the land, a murderous glint in their eyes—they feast on the residents of a sleepy coastal hamlet. While they’re well-bred enough to use forks, they seem to have forgotten that forks are intended for use with food that has already been killed. And they spareth not the rod: children are maimed, old ladies clubbed. If this doesn’t sound like your cuppa, give it sixty seconds; you may find yourself, as I did, transfixed. Is the film best paired with a psychotropic substance? That’s not my place to say. (Yes.)

A few years ago, Ian Lumsden described the experience of watching the film as “a chilling one”:

Josko’s whole design from sound by Tomica Simovic, colour scheme, images and violence is disquieting. Take the colour. Each variation on green or blue has a tinge that is unpleasant. No blue fish of this intimidating shade would be selected from the fishmonger’s slab. The beasts may waddle on land in ludicrous fashion but there is no laughter as they club old women to death or spear them with their forks. No mercy is shown by fish or fishermen; and note the absence of warmth amongst the humans, except perhaps for the small children who, let me emphasise, are not spared the net and thrown back for a later date. There are some remarkable scenes but perhaps nothing matches the net of humans being dragged to the sea by malevolent predators whose menace matches the nonchalance of the fishermen killing by torchlight unaware that their families are suffering a similar fate on land.

Mental Health Break

Coral comes to life:

Slow Life from Daniel Stoupin on Vimeo.

Productive Paranoia

Katie Roiphe wonders whether we “thrive on anxiety”:

Take Joan Didion, the patron saint of the stylishly anxious. She writes in a tone of near-constant neurotic jitteriness, and yet the world she so gorgeously, sensitively apprehends has its own incomparable charisma. She writes, “It will perhaps suggest the mood of those years if I tell you that during them, I could not visit my mother-in-law without averting my eyes from a framed verse, the ‘house blessing’ which hung on the walls of her home in West Hartford, Connecticut. ‘God Bless this house, and be the lintels blessed/And bless the hearth, and bless the board/And bless each place of rest…’ This verse had on me the effect of a physical chill, so insistently did it seem the kind of ‘ironic’ detail the reporters would seize upon, the morning the bodies were found.”

A little twisted, yes. A little over-aware of fate’s dark possibilities. But imagine a slightly chubby, contented, becalmed Didion. The White Album would be a recipe book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem a yoga guide. All the intensely creative, elegantly expressed, culturally evocative paranoia would be lost.

Getting A Bad Rap?

This week, Lorne Manly reported (NYT) on the case of Antwain Steward, a Virginia man being tried for a double homicide. The twist? He raps under the name Twan Gotti, and the above video of his song, “Ride Out,” was used as evidence against him:

“But nobody saw when I [expletive] smoked him,” Mr. Steward sang on the video. “Roped him, sharpened up the shank, then I poked him, 357 Smith & Wesson beam scoped him.”

Mr. Steward denies any role in the killings, but the authorities took the lyrics to be a boast that he was responsible and, based largely on the song,charged him last July with the crimes.

Manly notes that “the lyrics don’t neatly correspond to the crime: No knife was involved, the song mentions only one murder, and shell casings found at the scene were of different calibers from the gun cited in the song.” Simon Waxman responds:

I imagine prosecutors have more to go on than rap lyrics alone, but it’s easy to see how, in these cases, rap is the new hoodie—a symbol of black male aggression.

Rap is frequently viewed as threatening; listening to it is taken as a form of misbehavior to be corrected. Witness the case of Michael Dunn, the Florida man who murdered seventeen-year-old Jordan Davis and shot at Davis’s friends after they refused to turn down the “rap crap” they were blasting in their car. Dunn believed the teens were a danger to him. Would he have felt the same way had they been listening to the Beach Boys?

Pointing to a double-standard, he goes on to pose a question – “what are we to make of murder ballads, those mainstays of folk and country music,” such as “Down in the Willow Garden,” performed by the very non-threatening Everly Brothers, among others? Nathan S. at Refined Hype addressed Steward’s case last year:

I feel the need to pause here and make it clear that it’s unclear just how much police considered [Steward's] lyrics when considered him a suspect for Horton and Dean’s murders. The media essentially makes it sound like the cops conducted their investigation on Rap Genius, stopped when they found lyrics that seemed to describe the murders, and then arrested the corresponding rapper.

In reality, I’m willing to bet the truth is far more complicated and that “Ride Out” was only one piece of evidence among many, and almost definitely the most important piece.

Nevertheless, he thinks that “using rap lyrics as evidence in court feels shaky at best, and a violation of the 1st Amendment at worst.”

The Bard’s Unscripted Beliefs

Reviewing David Scott Kastan’s A Will to Believe: Shakespeare and Religion, Andrew Hadfield points to why the great playwright’s religious beliefs can be hard to pin down:

Shakespeare wrote mainly plays, works of literature that are particularly removed from being the personal testimony of the author. (Poetry is a better hunting ground.) Plays were communal works. Far more were jointly written than has often been realised; there is a great deal of evidence that particular parts were written for specific actors; companies staged distinctive types of plays tailored to their audience’s expectations; and Shakespeare, a shareholder in the Globe, was a company man.

We should expect to be able to read in the plays not religious belief but a discussion of issues relevant to audiences. The plays are saturated in biblical imagery, but this tells us very little beyond the central role of the Bible. … When Richard II compares his sufferings to those of Christ it shows that he is a deluded man with a weak understanding of his own religious identity, not that Shakespeare thought that kings were gods.

His conclusion:

Kastan has surveyed the evidence with scrupulous care and so has earned the right to speculate. He suggests, following Christopher Haigh, that Shakespeare was probably a “Parish Anglican”, a tolerant, largely habitual Christian, who recognised the “communal values of village harmony and worship and objected to the divisiveness of the godly”.

Peter J. Smith calls Kastan’s book “refreshingly agnostic”:

[A]ttempts to identify Shakespeare’s religion are as unnecessary as they are impossible. Indeed, as its title implies, A Will to Believe suggests a consummation devoutly to be wished rather than a realisable possibility. But this is a limitation of which Kastan is cognisant and, paradoxically, it is this indeterminacy that underlines some of his most assured pronouncements: “I don’t know what or even if he believed”; “Shakespeare declines to tell us what to believe, or to tell us what he believed”; “I don’t know what he believed and I am convinced we can’t know.”

Old Hamlet is the personification (if ghosts can personify) of this quandary: “it is always an ambiguous ghost, whose nature is not confirmed nor is it confirmable by any theology the play has to offer”. Kastan’s reading of the Prince’s bereavement is human(e) rather than revelatory, but it is no less significant for that: “Hamlet’s grief is merely grief – not evidence of religious commitments, however doctrinally imagined, but of emotional ones.” Kastan thus judiciously avoids the theological (and biographical) dead end of identifying Shakespeare’s personal faith and reading his plays as dogmatically determined. In the case of Hamlet, for instance, the presence of religious ideas throughout “neither exhausts nor explains the play’s mysteries”.

A Poem For Sunday

“The Life of Man” by G.G.Belli (1791-1863):

Nine months in the stench: and then in swaddling bound.

Among the kisses, the milksops, and the bawling;

Then strapped into a basket, hauled around

With a stiff neck brace to keep the head from falling.

Then there begin the torments of the school,

The ABCs, the cold, the cane’s hard knocks,

Measles, the potty seat, the squeezed-out stool,

A touch of scarlet fever, chickenpox.

Then hunger comes, and weariness, a trade,

The rent, the jailhouse, and the government,

The hospitals, the debts, the getting laid;

The scorching summer and the winter’s snow . . .

Then, blessed be God’s name, when life is spent,

Comes death to finish it with hell below.

(Translated, from the Romanesco dialect, by Charles Martin. From Poets Translate Poets: A Hudson Review Anthology, edited by Paula Dietz, with an introduction by Mark Jarman. © 2013 by Syracuse University. Reprinted by permission of Syracuse University Press. Image: Still-Life with a Skull by Philippe de Champaigne, 1671, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Evolution Of Street Art

Ayun Halliday spotlights the above short film:

There’s a rapacious, run-amok energy to Italian street artist Blu’s stop motion animation, “BIG BANG BIG BOOM.” However long it took him, assisted by a slew of local artists, to render a host of painted large-scale characters across a primarily industrial landscape in Argentina and Uruguay, it takes less than ten, gloriously gritty minutes for his just-dawned world to destroy itself.

This is evolution at its most apocryphal (and least scientific). Crustaceans and giant lizards who mere decades ago would have terrorized the streets of Tokyo are here no match for man. In fact, man is no match for man, rapidly engineering his own demise as he chases about an appropriately circular, abandoned-looking silo. The necessary demise of his murals—animation frames, if you like—serves as a nifty reminder of the evolutionary fate of most street art.

A Journey, Not An Escape, Ctd

NYU psychiatrists have been experimenting with using psilocybin to treat cancer patients. For Nick Fernandez, a study participant who was diagnosed with leukemia in high school, the experience was transformative:

[A]s the drug began to take effect, the blackness inside his head turned into an onrushing cascade of white dots that swiftly morphed into a kaleidoscope of geometric patterns – gears, stars, triangles, trapezoids – in all the colours of the rainbow. He started to hear an insistent voice in his head, telling him over and over: ‘I’m going to show you what I can do.’ Fernandez slowly suspended his skepticism and reluctantly surrendered to the experience. What he perceived to be his spirit guide took him on a Marley’s ghost-style journey, with stops at his own funeral, a hellish place littered with skulls that smelled of death where he was in excruciating pain. Once his agony reached an almost unbearable crescendo, his spirit guide catapulted him through hundreds of light years of space, allowing him to escape the pain. ‘I went into this mystical state, and this intense visual palate took over my mind,’ Fernandez said.

He suddenly found himself in Grand Central Terminal, which was filled with hundreds of people he knew dressed in tuxedos and ball gowns, dancing happily to symphonic music. He spied his girlfriend, Claire, across the dance floor.

They walked towards each other and embraced, which filled him with intense feelings of bliss and joy. Soon he was again catapulted, down into the sewers of the city, and then to the top of the Empire State Building where he serenely surveyed the city just as dawn broke its rosy glow over the skyscrapers. The spirit guide took him from there to a cave in the forest where he went shopping for another body, but the only body to be had was his own.

This realisation gave Fernandez a new appreciation of his body, and all it had been through: the workouts, the swims, the bike rides, the sickness when the cancer cells had taken over, and the chemotherapy drugs that had destroyed them. ‘For the first time in my life, I felt like there was a creator of the universe, a force greater than myself, and that I should be kind and loving,’ he said. ‘Something inside me snapped and I experienced a profound psychic shift that made me realise all my anxieties, defences and insecurities weren’t something to worry about.’

Previous Dish on psychedelics here.

Putting Your Right Knee Forward

Researchers investigated what attracts straight women to guys on the dance floor:

[W]omen rated dancers higher when they showed larger and more variable movements of the head, neck and torso. Speed of leg movements mattered too, particularly bending and twisting of the right knee. In what might be bad news for the 20% of the population who is left-footed, left knee movement didn’t seem to matter. In fact, certain left-legged movements had a small negative correlation with dancing ability, meaning that dancers who favored left leg motion were rated more poorly. While not statistically significant, these findings suggest that there might be something to that old adage about “two left feet” after all. One final surprise – arm movement didn’t correlate with perceived dancing ability in any significant way.

Going beyond the dance floor, these findings could demonstrate that mens’ dance moves could carry “honest signals of traits such as health, fitness, genetic quality and developmental history,” although the authors stress that more research is needed to be sure. It would be particularly instructive to see whether similar findings hold true for mens’ assessments of womens’ dancing ability.