Dear: Salt Lake City (Spring 2012),

My good friend Shelley presciently – if somewhat suspiciously – told me when I first moved back here in January that “this time it’s gonna be better than last time.” I considered it dubious because last time I moved here, in 2010, I was in perfect health and had just graduated from college; by contrast, this time I moved here following a long bout with neurological Lyme disease having just spent about nine months barely able to move or remember how to tie my shoelaces. Also my beloved grandmother had just died. How, I wondered, could this possibly be a better experience?

Oddly, strangely, and very unexpectedly, she was right. Last time I lived in Salt Lake City, in “perfect health,” I was here for almost a year and spent most of that time lonely, miserable and bitchy. No friends to speak of, no lovers at all, and a whole series of just downright ridiculous living situations that ended with me living in a hostel for over a month. When I left for Glen Canyon a little over a year ago I considered it a blessed escape from a prolonged nightmare. And then Fate, being the bastard that it is, taught me what a real prolonged nightmare feels like…

And now: despite having moved here with an IV catheter in my arm and an ongoing “where the hell am I” mindset, and in just under five months, this time it really has been cool. I’ve had a great (and successful) time in grad school, a small handful of really awesome romances, made some great new friends and reconnected with some great old ones, and even had a few sweet adventures. Granted, it hasn’t all been roses – I’m pretty sure the infection is dead but I’m still recovering from the damage it wreaked, as well as recovering from sinus surgery – but it has certainly been a lot MORE roses than last time.

So this is my final thought in the last few weeks of school and packing before spending my summer back in what I consider my real homeland: you never know what’s coming. You really, really never know what’s coming.    

"I Recommend Tragedy"

Continuing my “because somebody asked" blog/essay serious, this edition finds me addressing the topic of personal suffering through the viewpoints of a) the ego or identity and b) the interior workings of complex phenomena outside of the human brain. Here is the first one.

After being diagnosed with mesothelioma – way before effective treatments of this rare and especially unpleasant form of cancer spread into the market – Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, responding to assertions that the most effective cure for a statistically incurable disease is a positive attitude, quipped, “From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom” and, less concisely,

We must stand resolutely against an unintended cruelty of the “positive attitude” movement – insidious slippage into a rhetoric of blame for those who cannot overcome their personal despair and call up positivity from some internal depth. We build our personalities laboriously and through many years, and we cannot order fundamental changes just because we might value their utility: no button reading “positive attitude” protrudes from our hearts, and no finger can coerce positivity into immediate action by a single and painless pressing.

It is, in other words, not within our power to dissolve our own egos, wipe the slate clean, and shift gears from curmudgeon to roseate at the drop of a hat for the express purpose of buttressing a psychological defense strategy against something for which there is little other feasible defense.

Or so sayeth the late, great SJG. While I usually agree with practically everything Gould has to say about everything, I have yet to find a single person of any intellectual caliber with whom I don’t disagree at one time or another. In fact the ego can be dissolved, albeit not easily, and we really can wipe the slate clean and start anew. All it takes is to realize that your ego is not you; it is an image in terms of which you present yourself to yourself, and to others, and by which you are measured and regarded. In that sense it is like a mask, and it is pivotal at this point to reiterate a curious piece of linguistic evolution that I’ve mentioned before: the term personality, and its shortened form persona, come from the Greek word for the masks worn by dramatists on-stage (per = through, as in perceive or pervade; son = sound, as in sonic or sonar), the personae – plural for persona, which is still used interchangeably with “personality” – being the masks that told the audience who was talking. This was important because, without the mask, audience members wouldn’t be able to tell if the person onstage was Zeus or Aristophanes or a peasant or even a cloud. By donning the mask, the burden of the actor to *play* so complicated a role as a god or a cloud was relaxed, allowing the actor to simply speak the lines and make the motions. The audience knew at a glance who/what was speaking.

For reasons known best to scholars who have a hell of a lot more free time than me, this term has moved offstage and into our everyday usage, and, moreover, our personalities are now considered one of our most valuable things. Your persona is who you are. Someone devoid of personality is either considered vapid or, on a bad day, a sociopath; it is our personalities, and the trappings and signals attached to them, that define us. “He is a nice guy.” “She is a Christian who likes to play Frisbee.” “Those people are hippies but they also shop at Whole Foods which means their anti-corporate rhetoric is at odds with their behavior…” and so on. Our personalities, our masks, are supposed to be intractable, and people become nervous when someone is or becomes unpredictable. So we act as though our personae were our selves. They aren’t.

One of the things that Zen training advocates is dissolution of the illusion that we, as entities, are discrete and separate from everything else. But you don’t need Zen to hammer this point, and in fact I sometimes feel that I lean on Zen and other so-called Eastern philosophies way too often. Instead, just think about when you were a child: you were one person at home, another person at school, quite another person playing with your friends, and yet an altogether other person when visiting your grandparents or attending church. As time goes on we encourage – if not actually force – children to assume socially recognizable roles, and even if those roles aren’t considered “good” or “moral” they’re still preferable to not having a role at all. Thus there is a place in our society for criminals, and it’s within reason to be a thug, but God forbid you’re a criminal or a thug one day and a charitable philanthropist the next. Unpredictability is anathema in our culture; it is worse than being evil, which is at least immutable. However, strip away all of that – all the favorite foods and music, all the Type A or Type B nonsense, all the experience and preference and taste and whatever all else – and what’s left? A spontaneous being is left, like a shark or a chimpanzee, which sometimes moves in detectable patterns but is by no means constrained by them.

So: how does one go about dissolving the ego? There is a broad array of methods, only a few of which I’ll mention here.

First, there are drugs. Psychedelic, psychotropic, and/or dissociative drugs can pretty well wipe one’s slate, and in fact even alcohol can do it to the extent that alcohol intoxication tends to strip away inhibitions and social mores (in vino, for better or for worse, truly veritas). This was among the earliest and most significant aspects of drugs like LSD and DMT elucidated by researchers: someone in the throes of such chemicals becomes, as it were, primitive in the sense that he or she becomes disconnected with what is best described as “personal reality.” The problems with this method are twofold: first, drugs are dangerous, and even in societies where psychoactive compounds aren’t illegal they are (usually) used exclusively by, or under the direction of, shamans; and second, as easily as people in such states can become disconnected from personal reality, they can also become disconnected from capital-r Reality. As a whole. Permanently.

Second, there is meditation and/or prayer, two seemingly very different practices that, in fact, yield identical results. Among Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu, Yogi, and similar-scoped practitioners, meditation is a practice that rids one of the illusion of separateness of identity and illuminates or “enlightens” our total connection with the universe. Among Christians, Muslims, Jews, and other practitioners of that ilk, intense and rigorous prayer is a practice that decries the transience of human life and connects us to the great and irreducible infinitude of which we are created and to which we inevitably return, a.k.a., God. What’s the difference? But meditation has its own drawbacks, chief among which: it’s hard, at least for a lot of people. It involves lots of sitting and lots of deep breathing and, worse, trying not to let our minds wander indiscriminately, and, worse still, it takes time and effort that could be spent doing something else. All culture is distracting (hell, all of *life* is distracting, and it probably wasn’t a whole lot easier to sit in silent contemplation beside a fire when you had to keep feeding the fire in order to keep the lions away), but our culture in particular has a distinctive talent for distraction, specializes in it, revels in it, positively rejoices in it. If we aren’t entertained for whole seconds we get bored, for whole minutes we get restless, for whole hours we start to claw at the walls, and it’s little wonder that the second-to-worst punishment in our society is solitary confinement. A Buddhist or Franciscan monk would delight in being put in a quiet cell with reliable food service for a couple of days, having nothing to do but sit on the floor and contemplate Existence. Meanwhile the average American starts tapping his or her feet when the elevator is a couple of seconds too slow, and a traffic light that doesn’t change rapidly enough can lead to a multi-car pileup involving blood, pain, mayhem, and – worst of all – lawyers, doctors, and cops. So, for most Americans, meditation is probably not an option. 

But then there’s a third option, although I hesitate to use the word “option” because you can’t really plan for it: horror, catastrophe, tragedy. There’s a term that psychologists use to explain what happens when someone goes through a horrific event, and it is, not coincidentally, the same term psychologists use to describe the state of mind of one who is on a heavy psychedelic drug trip or in a very deep meditative state, and that term is “dissociation.” It is, to use just one of many definitions (because it’s the one that I prefer, and for no other reason than that), a state of mind characterized by manic or intractable distractedness from current goings-on, not just around the subject but also within the subject’s own head. Dissolution of the self, in other words, insofar as the “self” is the sum total both of one’s perceptions and of one’s perceptions of those perceptions. Another word for that would be “zombification,” in popular terminology, and it too can be created by a certain class of drugs, but let us not muddy the waters…

So just how effective is tragedy at dissolving the ego? Dipping back into Buddhism for a moment: before becoming “the Buddha,” young Gautama Siddhartha’s mother died under mysterious circumstances when he was only a week old. In the words of author and psychiatrist Mark Epstein: “Something tragic happened… right at the beginning. That might be what it takes to become a Buddha, is that you have to suffer on such a primitive level.” This by itself sounds kind of dire. St. Paul, having realized that sin and grace are only recognizable in terms of one another – like lightness and darkness, up and down, hot and cold, yin and yang, and all other complimentary dualities – asked in a rhetorical panic, “Shall we continue in sin that grace shall abound?” Not… necessarily, although I can’t imagine a blessedly moral person having even the slightest inkling of his or her goodness without having had at least a taste of what it meant to be otherwise. And I’m not sure I agree that it requires of one to become enlightened that one first suffers some nasty fall. On the other hand, I definitely think it helps.

For my part, my dissociating event was Lyme disease. While I continue to suffer with the aftermath to this day, and probably will right up until I die, the acute and most insufferable part of the disease is behind me – but that part lasted for at least five months and only trailed off toward nine or ten. During that time I effectively had no personality. I would watch a movie or attend a class or, on days when I could muster the energy, do something “fun” like kayak or hike, and afterward someone would ask me my opinion. I never had an answer. I literally could not form any opinions. I would hear a story about some hero who rescued a child from drowning, and my reaction would be, “Huh – so, what you’re saying is, there are now a couple of people who get to live… a bit longer. I don’t see the relevance of that.” Food all tasted like food, no matter what it was. People all looked like people, neither attractive nor ugly nor funny nor smart nor stupid nor anything but bipedal animals that knew how to talk.

And then I woke up. Slowly, with great effort, and to this day my thinking is cloudy and my memory is riddled with holes like a sign on a backcountry road. But wake up I did, and continue to do, and I am more like a baby than like a 32 year-old man. I keep finding myself looking back on my pre-Lyme life in utter astonishment. Was I really that clever? Was I really that self-righteous? Did I really believe all those things, and did I really not believe all those other things? Did I really think solitude and adventurism were of utmost value? Did I really think love was a myth? Was I really so cocky half the time? Was I really so insecure the rest of the time? Just exactly who in fuck was that guy?

So that, in a rambling nutshell, is my answer to the question, “It is possible to rid oneself of one’s own ego?” (It was asked after I made some off-handed comment about how ego is not a real thing but a concept, and can be shed like any other concept, albeit with tremendous difficulty – which comment had been met with assiduous skepticism.) It is possible, but it is not easy, and the most expedient ways are either dangerous or horrifying or both. Then again, speaking of the not-expedient and entirely harmless meditative method, German author Hermann Hesse said, “Though cured of an illusion, I found this disintegration of the personality by no means a pleasant and amusing experience.” 

Preach auf, Kamerad!

Resurrected Diatribe on the Social Role of Law, or "How to rob Peter to pay Paul to rob Peter some more."

Like most of my writings these days, this one comes as a lengthy response to a two-part question posed by a friend of mine: “Why do you hate cops? Also, aren’t you friends with some cops?” The simplest response would be “I don’t” and “I am,” but that doesn’t begin to approach the complexity of my real answer, which is that I don’t hate law-enforcement officers per se but I definitely hate laws, and not just the uniquely American laws that don’t make any logical sense (i.e., helmet laws, jaywalking, drinking and smoking ages, certain drug laws, …) but the very idea of law and of codified legal systems. Codified legal systems are an example of cultural evolution and, further, how “evolution” does not mean the same as “progress” – and can, in fact, mean exactly the opposite. An old Roman proverb asks, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who will guard the guards)? In our own society the answer is as obvious as it is frustrating: nobody. 

All human societies have sanctions against undesirable activities, like murder and rape and theft, going back to the earliest roots of humanity. Sometimes rooted in mysticism, sometimes in material economics, sometimes in inherent psychological abhorrence, these sanctions almost always make some sort of sense upon close scrutiny. Among the early Abrahamic tribes, for instance, it was taboo to eat swine, a mystical paradigm that most likely arose from plain old fear of death by trichinosis. In the pre-Hindu Vedic tradition it was forbidden to kill a cow, again a mystical paradigm that very likely boiled out of simple economic sense: a dead cow can provide meat for maybe a week, but a live cow can provide dairy for years (it’s tough for Americans to get their heads around that sort of logic, but remember we’re talking about a marginal Mesolithic ecology that didn’t offer a whole lot of alternatives). The near-universality of taboos against incest is most likely an adaptation based on myriad generations of “oops”-looking children, although that doesn’t stop some societies from condoning it to this day. And of course sanctions against rape and murder are best explained by the mechanics of simple psychology: anytime something makes somebody scream in horror, you probably shouldn’t do it.

Theft… is a tricky one. In order for theft to even exist, there has to be private ownership. I would say that nobody likes having his or her stuff taken, it just seems so obvious and self-evident, but in fact that may be a reflection of my modern Western upbringing. Ethnographic accounts of so-called primitive societies are rife with examples of people just taking things from each other, although the ideologies that often surround this “taking” appear to be based on a fundamental and important difference between their societies and ours. As one !Kung bushman explained to anthropologist Richard Lee (paraphrased), “We don’t exchange with things, we exchange with people.” In other words it’s the relationship between the individuals that matters most, not the relationship of people to their things.

Meanwhile the punishments for disobeying these sanctions or taboos also speak volumes about their respective societies. In some Native American groups, particularly in the Southwest, the practice of “clowning” – literally making fun of someone’s actions during a public ceremony – was (is?) adequate punishment for minor infractions like cheating on a spouse or being a jerk, while more serious infractions invoked banishment or possibly death. That was for the group to decide. In even simpler societies, like the hunter-gatherer groups of the Kalahari, group fluidity solved many of these problems: someone who brought social ruckus was either asked or forced to leave camp. And even the Biblical law of like for like, summarized in the popular phrase “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,” which also derives from the practices of early Abrahamic tribes, essentially suggests that individuals should mete out punishments that befit infractions. In these and countless other examples the burden of decision falls on the individual or the group, and is not explicitly codified. 

Thus we come to the issue of codification, my favorite example of which comes from China. During the Shang Dynasty (1766-1027 BC, or about 3756-3017 BP) the Chinese created large, beautiful bronze cauldrons and used them for public cooking of sacrifices. Writings often adorned the sides of these cauldrons, and many of these writings referred to laws or judicial ceremonies consistent with local practices. Thus, whenever anyone came to offer his or her sacrifice the laws of the land were right there to see, literally written in bronze. The Confucians considered this an excellent practice, reasoning that explicitly-written laws will eliminate confusion (no pun intended) about exactly what is and is not permissible; but the Taoists thought it was ridiculous, reasoning that explicitly writing laws fails to account for human nature and the tendency of people to enjoy solving puzzles. When sanctions aren’t made explicit in the form of laws they’re simply aspects of society, taboos and no-no’s that you either do or don’t do depending on whether or not you feel like dealing with the social fallout. Codifying those sanctions converts them from tacit traditions into overt obstacles, and boy-oh-boy do people love trying to negotiate obstacles, or so the Shang Dynasty Taoists believed.

This is one of the earliest and most delightful examples I can think of where ancient scholars were already way ahead of modern psychologists. People really do enjoy solving puzzles, it’s an evolutionary trait that helped us survive and become what we are, and among the most fun puzzles you can present for someone is that of getting through a maze. Codifying laws is an abstract form of creating a maze, with solid walls representing forbidden or off-limits or not allowed, and the moment you do that people immediately start trying to figure ways to get around, over, under, or even through those walls. This is known as “litigiousness,” a tendency to attempt to wangle around laws based on the language of their codification. It is the principle – if not sole – occupation of lawyers, the sum of whose careers was best exemplified when Bill Clinton asked, “What do you mean by ‘is’?”

So: taking social sanctions and taboos out of the hands/minds/hearts of individuals or groups of living, breathing people and codifying them as a set of concrete abstractions engenders litigiousness. I can live with that. But it also engenders officiousness. The literal definition of officious is “volunteering one’s services where they are neither asked nor needed; meddlesome.” The common-usage definition is somewhat more concise: self-righteous incursion into others’ affairs. The only difference between this and simple bullying is that bullies don’t believe they’re doing something moral, virtuous, or socially justified; they just think it’s fun. An officious person is one who gets in your way, pushes you down, lectures you and embarrasses you and frightens you, and sometimes even physically restrains and/or beats you – in other words, bullies you – all with the motivating benefit of rationale. That rationale is law.  

Finally, there is the issue of material consideration. Recall the !Kung example and what “taking” means in a society that places principle emphasis on people rather than things. This is an important distinction to bear in mind when considering the fact that because codifying laws and punishments begets litigiousness, and because litigiousness begets lots and lots of people trying to wangle around those laws, it is necessary to erect an entire societal subcomplex in order to enforce those laws and punishments. This creates its own problems, chief among which is that of allocation: you can’t get something from nothing, not in this universe, so who pays for all of that? Why, the people being policed and disciplined of course – who did you think? This is easily justified by the tacit (and sometimes overt) explanation that it’s for our own good, because the taxes and fines that we pay to support the penal system are visited back upon us in the form of protection and a sense of safety in our cities and towns. Right? Don’t you feel safe in modern American cities and towns? Don’t you feel like the amount of money put toward law enforcement – not just salaries, but cars, guns, office buildings, courthouses, and of course prisons, among rather a lot else – is offset by the warm and fuzzy feeling of total security you have, just knowing that nobody will ever hurt or wrong you in America? For those who have been wronged by criminals: didn’t they catch the crook and punish him or her to a degree that you found personally satisfying? Doesn’t that happen like all the time? And for those who have been punished for doing something that is, for either stupid reasons or no reason at all, considered unlawful: don’t you feel like you deserved it because you’re a bad person? Don’t you feel like it’s okay for your tax dollars to finance a mechanism that reaches back around into your wallet again when you park in the wrong place or cross the street outside of a pair of painted lines? Doesn’t that seem totally sensible and not at all like some sort of racket?

If the answer to any of those questions was “no,” then you get my point. Our legal system, like any other codified legal system, exists for the ostensive purpose of maintaining social order but operates primarily as a way to a) protect the interests of our investments rather than our selves – this is why mall cops and retail outlet security guards deserve all the hassle that meth heads and teenagers give them; they don’t even entertain the illusion of serving and protecting people, they serve and protect things and are apparently totally okay with that – and b) generate their own capital. So that they can keep growing. So that they can enforce more laws, hire more policemen and buy more guns and cars and prisons and high-tech gadgetry. So that they can arrest more people and levy more fines. So that they can keep growing…

If this sounds suspiciously like what a cancer cell does, that’s because it is.

So that’s why I hate the legal system, and not just our legal system but all of them. We as a species got by just fine for over a quarter of a million years without scrolls and books and cauldrons telling us what to do, what not to do, and how we can expect to be punished if we disobey the latter. Non-penal social sanctions operated just fine during this entire era, and in fact I – and many sociologists – think those sorts of sanctions are tremendously more effective than what we’ve got now. If you disobey the law of smoking marijuana you’ll lose some money, either directly to the penal system via fines or indirectly via paying for a good lawyer; but if you disobey the social taboo against being an asshole you will be ridiculed, ostracized, and possibly beaten-up by your friends and neighbors. Which form of punishment has a deeper, more lasting, and more meaningful impact? And the threat of which one is more likely to deter an infraction? Our society has raised us to think it’s the former, because money is of such inordinate importance and nobody wants to have his or her money taken away (this applies to “time” and “life” as well, both of which are also inordinately important and useful tools for take-away threats, but I’ll leave that alone for now). But let’s be honest: what’s really more important? Your monetary currency or your social currency? We answer that question all the time when we use our money to buy expensive showoff items; e.g., if money really was of apex importance we wouldn’t so readily transpose it into fancy baubles. So fines against stupid laws are, at best, a toll that you pay to do things that society doesn’t want you to do, and you only have to pay that toll when you get caught. If it wasn’t for the extremely obvious fact that the whole thing is a self-serving racket I would criticize it for being a lousy way to ensure public safety. Which is true – but the more true statement is the one about it being a racket.

On a final and interesting historical note, Thomas Aquinas, aka Saint Thomas Aquinas, wrote in one of his Epistles that the Ten Commandments, those most sacred examples of codified stricture in the history of Christendom, were not passed into the hands of humankind as a set of rules to be followed. They were passed into the hands of humankind precisely to demonstrate that they couldn’t be followed. Thou-shalting us not to murder, steal, worship another God or commit adultery are reasonable enough requests, but *requiring* people to love God and their mothers and fathers (“love” being a thing that’s pretty difficult to achieve under duress) is a tall order, as is not doing any work on Sabbath day. What if the roof is leaking…? And forbidding jealousy is just plain ridiculous; that’s like forbidding people from salivating when they smell pizza. Granted, I’m pretty sure every armchair philosopher who has ever really considered the Ten Commandments came to his or her own conclusion about this stuff, tucked it away and then trotted it out during a “this is why religion is stupid” rant, but again: Saint Thomas Aquinas beat you to the punch. A set of impossible rules means that everyone is a sinner. If everyone is a sinner, then everyone goes through life feeling penitent and humble. If everyone feels penitent and humble, then everyone will constantly be trying to repent and make a better life for him/herself and others through acts of faith and charity. In sum, according to St. Thomas, the most canonical and easily-recognizable set of codified rules in the Western world was specifically designed so that everyone who knew about them was always guilty and would therefore always be trying to do better. Our own laws are very similar, in that pretty much everyone is guilty of something-or-other pretty much all the time, but the state of constant guilt they inspire is not designed to compel us to be better people. It is designed to fuck us over.  

As for why I hate cops: again, I don’t. Most of the law-enforcement personnel that I’ve known had a genuine desire to protect and serve the interests of their fellow citizens. Many of them aren’t cursed by deep thinking the way that I am, and none of them are anthropologists, yet even then I’ve known plenty of cops who had a sense of equity (that is: they know when the “letter of the law” doesn’t apply and are willing to employ independent thoughts rather than just follow orders). The legal system engenders officiousness and state-mandated theft of property via ridiculous punishments for infractions against ridiculous laws, but not intractably, and at the end of the day cops and judges are still people and I’ve known and liked quite a lot of them. If anything I feel bad for them, the way that I feel bad for Wal-Mart employees. I would like to shake them by the shoulders and scream, “Don’t you realize you’re doing awful work for an awful system that cares more about things than people? Don’t you realize your paychecks are consignment dregs from a vat of misanthropic terribleness?!” But of course I would never be so rude. Not in this economy.

First Post Script: this… this whatever-this-is is titled “Resurrected” because I began writing it over a decade ago and only recently decided to finish it – by which I mean I recently stumbled across it and wondered, by typing them out, if my opinions had changed since then. I think the setup to this piece was when I was at a party that got busted by some cops and I said to a friend, “fucking pigs…” So: a belated “sorry” is due to all of my friends in law enforcement. I don’t hate you, I just hate how the legal system has become as much of an insidious racket as the modern medical system and religious and educational institutions. It’s okay; really, it is. Everybody needs a job.

Second Post Script: I am indebted to G. K. Chesterton, Richard B. Lee, Alan Watts, Marvin Harris and Lao Tzu for material relevant to this… for this… for being too dead – except Lee – to prevent me from indiscriminately squishing their ideas together despite (and I’m serious about this) all of their theories being at diametric odds. Research!