Therapy doesn’t only happen in the office.
Here is a brief and inspiring video, just over two minutes long. No essay for today.
I’m going to keep it a surprise, so take a chance. One hint: it is not about a soldier returning home. That is to say, the events in the video don’t contain anything unexpected. What is important is that you might feel better for having seen it and be reminded of something that is therapeutic for your life. I certainly was:
Look carefully at the above photo. How does it relate to the way that so many things in our world have become disposable? I’ll tell you my personal answer at the end. First, though, I’ll give you a few examples of how much has become less permanent in a country that remains affluent compared to most of the world.
Let’s start with employment. In the early days of the USA, large numbers of people worked for themselves. As the industrial revolution came and cities grew, most cottage industries died and many individuals found that they could no longer compete with the larger, machine driven industrialists who could make the same goods more quickly and cheaply. So, the formerly independent man or artisan who worked for himself (with perhaps some family assistance) now had little choice but to find a job working for one of those entities. A phrase was born to describe this: he had become “a wage slave,” an idea that became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century.
For much of the last century, a good worker in that position might expect a long period of employment with one company. Today, on the other hand, that man is likely to work for several different companies over his lifetime, perhaps by his decision, perhaps not. Those that are not given the choice, now find that their skills are no longer needed or that they are more costly to employ because there is a cheaper labor force overseas or maybe even that robots are available to replace them. All of these folks have become disposable.
Now think of the various gadgets and machines you own. Smart phones that were said to have all the latest advantages just yesterday are considered obsolete due to improvements of design and technical capacity in the new and upgraded model that seems to have emerged in almost no time. Cars, too, fit this paradigm. Clothes, although still often mended as they commonly were in the past, seem increasingly to be discarded for reasons of outdated fashion and limited storage in most of our residences, assuming you have the money and time to buy the “new” and dump the “old.” Even a bed was expected to last for most of a lifetime in my parents’ lower middle class home, with the possible exception of replacing the mattress when necessary.
Before the invention of the safety razor by Gillette in 1901, men who wanted a shave had to rely on straight razors, which required the use of a strop and a hone to keep them sharp. Now razor blades are commonly discarded after the blade becomes dull. And in my baby boomer life in a public elementary school, everyone was expected to write with a fountain pen, even though disposable pens soon took over. Styrofoam and bubble wrap are also useful 20th century inventions, which we get rid of almost as soon as we get them.
Those climbing the corporate ladder today get bigger houses with more amenities, selling off the old comfortable ones, often at the expense of disrupting their children’s lives; almost as if trading one style of life to be replaced by another. The same forces even operate on the cities or countries in which we reside, so that the need to find a job or advance one’s career causes moves from place to place, often by thousands of miles; sometimes more than once in a working life. Today one lives in Boston, in a couple of years in Chicago, and eventually maybe Hong Kong.
Even those of us who might wish to dispose of fewer things and make do with those with which we are comfortable are forced to follow the herd, if for no other reason than the fact that the replacement parts needed to fix our old appliances are no longer made or too expensive to install, not to mention those technological advances that our work might require of us, which make the scrap heap (or landfill) the new home of the old devices.
Friends, too, seem more interchangeable. How long does it take to make a really good friendship? If school is an example, it takes a bit of continuous time together and shared experience, not to mention the opportunity to live close enough to interact outside of school with some regularity. But the new mobile man or woman might not stay long enough in one place to create durable and lasting relationships that survive the residential movement for either themselves or their children.
To the good, the divorce rate hasn’t recently increased, although it appears that for many, marriage has been replaced by something that is perhaps more temporary: cohabitation. A Pew Research Center study indicated that 72% of adult Americans were married in 1960 compared to 51% in 2010. There are doubtless many factors that explain this, but we are left with the bottom line that the anticipation of one and only one partner for life isn’t what it was in “the good old days.”
Witness the following commentary. It can be found in the book, Sketches From a Life, published by Pantheon:
I cannot help but regret that I did not live fifty or a hundred years sooner. Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, and our arrivals and departures are no longer matters for emotional debauches — they are too common. Similarly, we have too many friends to have any friendships, too many books to know any of them well; and the quality of our impressions gives way to the quantity, so that life begins to seem like a movie, with hundreds of kaleidoscopic scenes flashing on and off our field of perception — gone before we have time to consider them.
“Gone before we have time to consider them.” These words were written by George Kennan, a Pulitzer Prize winning author, diplomat, and scholar. Yesterday, you ask? No. They were written over 86 years ago in his journal, on December 20, 1927 when he was 23.
Which brings to mind a long time BBC radio program called Desert Island Discs, about which I’ve written before, as I have about Kennan. The idea here is for the moderator to interview some famous person (not just musicians) and ask him which recordings are his favorites. And, if he were marooned on a desert island, which of these would he take along. In a way, I suppose, the question is really about those tunes you could live without and others which you consider indispensable.
That is the real issue here, isn’t it? The tendency to treat so many things as if they are so important to us that we sometimes can’t wait to acquire them, but things that people used to hold on to and now will more readily replace unless living in the middle of nowhere, out of the very long reach of Amazon and companies like it.
If you choose to see the this “getting and spending” phenomenon in person, go out before sunrise to see long lines of people who wish to be among the first to buy a new geeky gadget — who queue up well before the store opens. Admittedly, sometimes we are required to dispose of things for something newer and “better,” but often we aren’t and virtually never are such purchases of the latest device required for our work on the first day that they are available for sale.
What exactly is going on here? Are we in danger of making the wrong choices because we hold incorrect beliefs about what will make us happy? There is actually a good deal of research on this, which briefly summarized concludes that we are not very good at knowing in advance what things or activities will provide happiness — give some lasting satisfaction. In fact, psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Charles Wilson have coined a phrase for this: “miswanting” or wanting things that won’t provide the emotional benefit we are hoping for. There are doubtless more reasons than those I’ve listed for living in a disposable world, but the behavioral result is the same: out with the old and in with the new.
One could go in many directions with this idea, from the effects of globalization that have created jobs in one part of the world at the expense of another part, to the idea of what makes for a satisfying life, to the research that indicates that we often feel better giving something than getting something: Happiness and Giving to Others.
I can’t help but notice, however, that disposing itself has become a major preoccupation and job source. The proof is to be found in the increasing size of garbage cans in posh suburbs containing many things that used to serve us well for years and now go to the recycler or into the diminishing landfill space — the underground version of what we used to call a garbage dump. Or your can take a ride north on the Metra Milwaukee District North Line Train from downtown Chicago and pass a gigantic lot filled with discarded cars as far as the eye can see. Well, at least that gives the lot operators a way to make a living.
I know I’ve focused on the dark side of this. So, to balance things a little, it is worth mentioning that the same technological capacity that fuels our interest in what is fashionable and new, must be said to have produced some pretty wonderful things: cars, medical discoveries that improve the quality and length of our lives; central heating, air conditioning, and indoor plumbing; and air travel, just to name a few. Technology, it appears, is a sword that cuts two ways, especially if you are among the people who believe that man’s use of fossil-fueled energy to do all these wonderful things also means that we are treating planet Earth as if it too were disposable.
So what then is disposable to you? Put another way, what do you consider so precious in the world of people and things that you would take them along if you were a castaway and could manage only a little cargo?
Here is a hint to my way of thinking. The answer is to be found in the top photo I mentioned earlier, so you might scroll up to the picture — the one of goats on a hillside — and wonder what that is doing in an essay called Living in a Disposable World. Well, the photographer calls the photo Goats Kissing. Coupled with the hillside and the gorgeous blue-clouded sky, I find it all quite beautiful.
The photo is recent, but the scene would have been visible at virtually any point in human history to the average person who lived near a hill and a shepherd, or perhaps just naturally occurring in nature. No, I probably wouldn’t think to take goats to the desert island. But if there is beauty and love there, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad at all. I guess what I’m saying is, be careful what you ask for and what you choose to leave behind when you reach the desert island. Some of those new things that won’t be on offer at any store just might have the most value.
—
The Goats Kissing photo comes from Wikimedia.org, furnished by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos.
This post is not about the movie you saw starring Boris Karloff or Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle. Somehow Hollywood made conventional monster movies from something very different and infinitely more touching.
Mary Shelley’s 19th century novel is the story of a man-created creature who is abandoned by his “parent” and is so badly treated by others that he becomes something that he himself hates: a murderer. It is also a tale nearly 200 years old that has a great many contemporary implications, but two in particular that came to my mind: will man and his science be our saviour or our destroyer? Will we manufacture our own death through scientific advances or control the secrets that have thus far led to both medical miracles and misery?
And I’ll add two more which are not a great leap from Shelly’s story: shall we keep destroying or polluting nature by chopping and digging and drilling and fouling the air, simultaneously making it less beautiful by the very act of trying to perfect our lives? Finally, will the increasing abandonment of the impoverished, eventually cause them to rise up in revolution (like Frankenstein’s monster) and create their own wanton destruction? If you wish, you can attach almost any of Shelley’s ideas to war, plastic surgery, the efforts to extend human life, global warming, the growing underclass, etc. All of these are wrapped in a ball of intolerance, ambition, and man’s ability to justify his worst behavior, all themes that are central to this work of art.
The creature is not even given the dignity of a name. His master — the man named Viktor Frankenstein who made him — cannot bear the sight of his own “child” (an eight-feet-tall male) of massive strength, great intellect, and astonishing agility, so the “monster” enters the world by himself, without yet understanding it or knowing how to speak.
He learns the terrible lessons that experience with mankind will teach him: that those who are different or ugly are ridiculed or physically attacked. That he alone in all the world has no playmate, soul mate, parent, or companion. And, without my giving away precisely how it happens, he does learn to read the loftiest books and speak eloquently, not the grunts of the character Karloff created for film in the 1930s (pictured below). Science has gone awry and the scientist Frankenstein has abandoned his creation, hoping he will just go away and be forgotten.
But the monster is touched by the beauty of nature, the song of the birds, and the warmth of the people who inhabit a country home he comes to live nearby; especially moved by the human relationships he has not achieved himself. Further efforts to find a social place in the world fail utterly. The unfairness overwhelms him. The artificial man finally begins to resemble in personality what he looks like in physique and physiognomy. He does some terrible things out of frustration, unfairness, anger and imitating the mistreatment he regularly receives even when he tries to do good, like saving a young girl from drowning.
The man-monster tracks down his creator and attempts to make a bargain: create me a mate, someone as outcast as I am, so that at least the two of us can have a life with each other. If you don’t, I will track you wherever you go and make your life some version of the misery that is mine. Viktor Frankenstein has grave doubts about the wisdom of this arrangement and fears that two such creatures will do more destruction than the one he has already created. For the rest of the story, you will have to do the reading of this brief but compelling book (I read a free download from Amazon).
When does man’s ambition and arrogance take him too far? Human cloning? Weapons of mass and indiscriminate destruction? Intolerance of those who are different, not just in looks but in habits, religion, and values? Why isn’t the beauty of nature enough? Why must we have more and do more and control more of the things that people used to give over to gods and goddesses?
In the end there are two monsters. The nameless one created by the hands and machinery of Viktor Frankenstein whose real malevolence was unleashed by the unkind world that had no place for him. The other, Viktor Frankenstein himself, who becomes appalled by the “thing” and so obsessed with what his creation had done to him and those he loved that he too seeks vengeance. And, in the end, we are sympathetic to both and touched by both. We have witnessed how abuse can produce abusers even among the most sensitive, high-minded, and intelligent among us. The abused are at risk of becoming the thing that they hate.
The monster knows that the evil he performed has not just been to others, but to the best in himself.
No sympathy (shall) I ever find. When I first sought it, it was the love of virtue, the feelings of happiness and affection with which my whole being overflowed, that I wished to (participate in). But now the virtue has become to me a shadow and that happiness and affection are turned into bitter and loathing despair. (Where) should I seek for sympathy? I am content to suffer alone while my (life) shall endure; when I die I am well satisfied that abhorrence and opprobrium should load my memory. Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, or enjoyment. Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding. I was nourished with high thoughts of honor and devotion. But now crime has degraded me beneath the meanest animal. No guilt, no mischief, no malignity, no misery, can be found comparable to mine. When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation (in hell); I am alone.
For those who prefer movies, the National Theatre Live performances by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in the lead roles can still be seen here and there in encore presentations. They are based on a two-hour adaptation of Shelley’s work by Nick Dear. I saw the one with Cumberbatch as the monster. I’m told the other one, where the main players switched roles, is equally good. Here is the site for these films, if you wish to act while they are still being shown: “http://ntlive.nationaltheatre.org.uk/productions/16546-frankenstein/”
We cannot escape the press of worldly events, expectations, and anxieties — the noise, the computers and the pressure to be the best. Indeed, to talk about the drivenness of the world only adds to the inescapable tension. Too many of us feel like a child’s old-style wind-up toy, impelled along a track we did not choose until finally we stop moving at day’s end, awaiting the next morning’s rat-race and another twist of the key to the clockwork motor. The world wins, stress wins, and we lose. And performers lose especially, by the anxiety that precedes and impedes their performance.
Enter Morton Feldman, composer, who has not been with us since 1987, when he died at age 61. A man who worked in the garment industry until he was 44. Feldman was no therapist, but his music just might add something to the much commended and researched antidote to the crazy-making nature of contemporary life: mindfulness meditation. I can offer no scientifically validated proof that his music makes a focus on “being centered in the moment” easier, but offer my anecdotal observations for your consideration.
For too many, mindfulness meditation is an elusive solution, despite its well-documented benefits to overall well-being. As meditation newbies we sit quietly and concentrate on our breathing, nothing more. We are told that it will be hard and that it should be done daily, usually shooting for 30 minutes at a time at the start. Eventually — so the research tells us — our brains will be retrained.
The object of such a practice is to permit us to live in the moment, alert to (but untroubled by) the single instant in which we are immersed. Its practitioners claim that it is a path to seeing the world as it is, accepting it without judgment. By doing that, they indicate, we stop ourselves from adding to the internally generated interpretations and pressures — and the self-consciousness — that can make life unbearable. We are advised that true mindfulness does not look back or forward. Nor is it freighted with worry, regret, or rage. They remind us that the past is gone and cannot be changed and the future is unknowable. The only thing we have with certainty is the present instant of time and our ability to really “live” in it.
Ah, but mindfulness meditation is difficult, more than you might think. The mind wanders from the breath. We are distracted by small noises and random thoughts: How much time has passed? What about today’s doctor appointment? What did my voice teacher or boss really mean when she talked to me yesterday? Anything and everything intrudes, including troubling dead-end ideas. We are instructed to expect this; and then, when we notice that our focus on the breath has been lost, to gently return our attention to that target. Our attention and focus will, with enough practice and dedication, get better — so the experts say. Until then keep practicing.
At this point, many people give up in frustration. Here is the opening through which Morton Feldman enters, this unlikeliest of composers: a man of 6′, approaching 300 pounds; a non-stop, cigarette-smoking talker with a strong New York accent. Alex Ross described his music this way in The New Yorker issue of June 19, 2006:
The often noted paradox is that this immense, verbose man wrote music that seldom rose above a whisper. In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft. Chords arrive one after another, in seemingly haphazard sequence, interspersed with silences… In its ritual stillness, this body of work abandons the syntax of Western music… Legend has it that after one group of players had crept their way as quietly as possible through a score of his, Feldman barked, “It’s too fuckin’ loud, and it’s too fuckin’ fast.”
Feldman requires us to listen to music without the expectation of conventional melody fit into a recognizable musical form and provides a kind of experience that creates that new way of listening. Unlike most Western music, Feldman’s does not seem to be leading us anywhere. We do not come to anticipate the next note or chord, as we do in a popular song or symphony. We have entered an unfamiliar space with nothing ahead of us, nothing guiding us, no forward or backward. Lacking “landmarks” we can be certain only of where we are right now. We are simply “in the moment” with the delicate sound he most often provides us — and the decay of that sound, as can be heard in this example from For Bunita Marcus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-Kl0eOo1VU
The importance of being neither judgmental nor critical, just experiencing what is present, is crucial. It is easier to listen to Feldman’s music with this type of “accepting” attitude than almost any piece of Beethoven, Brahms, or The Beatles. Their music “leads us” to judgment — too loud, too slow, too fast — once we have established even a bit of familiarity with it. For purposes of enhancing mindfulness, however, music like Feldman’s that provides us with no map is actually more beneficial. It does not “progress” and is harder to know than that which presents a formal structure that can be grasped and notes that can be anticipated, leading our thoughts to interfere with our attention and the mind to drift away from the sound.
Much of Feldman’s work can magnetize our focus so that the pull of external or irrelevant thoughts (including self-criticism) is vanquished, but only if we give up the conventional expectations built from years of listening to “tunes” and apply ourselves to the task he requires of our ears and our brains. With this new attitude, judgments about ourselves and about the music no longer gain an easy point of entry to the mind.
The compositions he offers us don’t seem to make headway except by extraordinarily subtle and quiet changes that are riveting. We are drawn in. To give a visual analogue, it is like looking at a kaleidoscopic image that is changing almost imperceptibly (much slower and without the formal structure of the example just below) with the slightest rotation of the tube, barely enough to be noticeable.
As T. S. Elliot put it in Burnt Norton, Feldman finds “the still point” without which “there would be no dance.” But it is a dance in excruciatingly slow motion that can sound boring as described, but is absorbing when experienced and heard; where background silence is as important as foreground, ever-so-careful sound.
With or without Feldman’s music as an alternative to focus on the breath, mindfulness meditation (with sufficient practice) is able to reduce the “chatter” in the brain — all the extraneous and debilitating ideas and judgments inside our head. And to accept life’s inevitable discomforts without so much of the suffering that we seem to add by our anxious anticipation, over thinking, hand wringing, and the belief that things must change in order to create a state of satisfaction.
The regular practice of that discipline attempts to assist us in finding contentment in the terms that life allows, not by virtue of some dramatic achievement or the elimination of all that most of us might wish were different. And, by helping anyone who frets about his own performance to focus on what is being performed (the music or the play or the speech he is giving) rather than the self, the actual execution of that work may reach the state that athletes describe when they are “in the zone” (or in a “flow” state*), fully captured by what they are doing (and achieving the best of which they are capable) rather than observing themselves doing it, or painfully aware that others might be watching critically.
Does Morton Feldman’s music have therapeutic value in the mindfulness enterprise or in dealing with performance anxiety, beyond its shimmering, otherworldly beauty? There is a Ph.D. dissertation or two waiting to be written on the subject, I’m sure. And wouldn’t it be ironic if a man who once said “Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it,” wrote music that might help refocus our troubled souls.
___
*For a further description of the “flow” state, see my response to the first comment below.
Here is a short example of Feldman’s music, the first 15 minutes of “For Bunita Marcus:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-Kl0eOo1VU
Here is a 20-minute talk by a monk and master meditator about the benefits of brain-retraining that can come with meditation: Matthieu Ricard: The habits of happiness
The top image is a photo of Morton Feldman taken at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam on May 31, 1976 during the Holland Festival. It is the work of Rob Bogaerts. The second image is a Digital Teleidoscope Animation by nadjas. Both are sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
“He/she should know what I want.”
Therapists make a fortune from those who believe that everyone in the world is intuitive; that each person is born with the gift of being able to peer into the mind of the other. And, most importantly, that a person who really loves you (or even a very good friend) will know what you want without it having to be put into words.
Such people come to couples therapists expecting that the counselor will be able to train the patient’s spouse to do this. The problem, as they see it, is in the other, not in themselves.
There are a few iffy assumptions here:
Are these assumptions correct?
No, no, no, and no.
Partners, even those who are sensitive and devoted, have only an approximate idea of some of the things that would please the spouse. If they don’t know the items on your list, they certainly can’t get the expected order of importance right.
It would be nice if your friend were telepathic, but his/her lack of capacity to read your mind should not diminish the value of what he tries to do to please you, even if you have to give him directions along the way. Isn’t there something appealing in a person whose affection for you is so great that he is willing to make the effort to understand something — do something that is not intuitive and doesn’t come easily?
And, do remember, your loved one is not always paying attention, as in the following cartoon showing a long-time patient and his therapist:
“Oops! I just deleted all your files. Can you repeat everything you’ve ever told me?”
A few practical suggestions (follow them at your own risk):
One last word. This will require you to change, too. Indeed, it is just possible that the love of your life fails to do some of the things you want because he doesn’t think you are attentive to his own desires. In other words, that the two of you are involved in a kind of tit-for-tat game of withholding and passive-aggressive expressions of anger.
You will also have to recognize that you too have a limited power to read his mind; that it is only fair that you permit him to go through the same kind of 10-point exercise I just described, allowing him to determine whether you are fully aware of his wishes and giving him an opportunity to set you straight.
Being direct but not vicious is an art that must be perfected for relationships to survive in the best possible way. You won’t get back to “the days of wine and roses” by hitting your spouse over the head with a mallet, however tempting that might be. You want him to look at you with stars of love in his eyes, not seeing stars after the blow you just delivered to his noggin.
It is not a subtle point, I know. Still, I had to make it because otherwise you would have had to read my mind!
—
The top image is a Poster of Alexander Seer, sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
