The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated. It cannot be proven to exist.

Hallucinating Foucault is an intricate, intellectual novel, a light shining into that dark corner where romantic passion and scholarship meet. It is as deeply flawed as only a first novel can be, but charming. It features a young graduate student, studying the works of famous and wild French author Paul Michel, whose Germanist lover pushes him into tracking down the author. Michel, a paranoid schizophrenic, has been living in an asylum for ten years.

I found myself swept off my feet by this novel, willing to forgive even it most improbable twists and bizarre characters. The narrative has a dreamlike quality, held together by its own internal logic. The first half of the novel is especially captivating, dominated by a love affair and academia: everyday stuff, if a bit surreal. Dunker’s second half is a little shakier, as the schizophrenic Paul Michel takes on a larger role and the narrator leaves his everyday life behind. Michel goes sane a little too quickly under the narrator’s influence, playing too easily into the old trope of mental illness cured by the power of love. The narrator, on the other hand, carries the story forward, with a delicate voice and that captures Duncker’s fine eye for detail. In the end, his cool, almost clinical descriptions of passion pulled me through to the end.

Foucault plays a part in the back story but, disappointingly, completely fails to appear.

This poem ranges between funny and sad, between obvious and breathtaking, with the same kind of strange logic that books cluster and accumulate. A passage:

This chapbook was set in type and printed by hand, by Larry Levis’s then-
    wife, the poet Marcia Southwick, in 1975. It’s 1997 now and Larry’s
    dead — too early, way too early — and this elliptical, heartbreaking poem
    (which is, in part, exactly about too early death) keeps speaking to me
    from its teal-green cover: the way they say the nails and the hair
    continue to grow in the grave.
This book is two wings and a thorax the size of a sunflower seed.

I look at religion as a scientist might, as something to be dissected and studied, rather than experienced.  I grew up in an agnostic household, the kind with a Christmas tree every December.  My father, culturally Jewish and rather agnostic himself, used to quote the New Testament the same way that he quoted Shakespeare.  I’ve spent more time reading St. Augustine than I have in church.  As a child, I thought of of the Bible as literature, and even now I tend to look at sacred texts as stories, heavily influenced by the contexts they were composed in, rather than religious pillars in their own right.  Particularly in cases dealing with womens’ rights and the like, I may be too quick to dismiss religious beliefs that clash with my ideals as ’simply’ products of a particular culture.

In literature, in art, in architecture, I find religious works beautiful and compelling, but I find that I tend to distrust the actual practice of organized religion.  I never did it, after all.  My mother was a member of a Christian cult for several years, and left disillusioned after seeing the way they spent their money.  I don’t recall her ever speaking poorly of religion as a whole, but I can’t imagine that haven’t I completely avoided absorbing that distrust.  The value of religion for me, then, tends to be less in the actual practice in more in the cultural artifacts and traditions that spring up around it.

Religion is a slippery concept, easier to identify than circumscribe; as Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, possibly indefinable, “but I know it when I see it.”  It has certain characteristics, chief among them a belief in some sort of god, higher power, transcendent human spirit, or mythical experience that cannot be touched without religious aid.  It has a narrative, a mythos, and it places the person who participates in it within the scope of that greater story.  It makes people a part of something larger than their ordinary groups.

It is a cultural phenomenon, a belief system than can both embed itself within a culture and transcend cultures.  A religion requires groups of people, even in the sad cases where all but one of them are past, dead, existing only in memory.  Even given all other factors, a religion cannot exist for only one person.  To transcend ’spirituality’, it requires some form of community.  Perhaps because of this, religion often functions as a vessel, carrying cultural information, tradition, or prohibitions through generations and across space.  It has a tendency to pick up the native ritual and belief systems of those who adopt it, and so is dynamic, liable to change and absorb new culture as well as maintain the old.

Religion is a symbol system,  but it’s a symbol system that serves a purpose.  It’s a set of stories, but those stories mean nothing without the storyteller and the listener.  Effectively, religion is a tool that people use to perceive the world, a lens through which they regard the things around them.  This doesn’t imply that God, or gods, or the spiritual experience is nothing but a way of looking at the world.  Gods may or may not exist, but their existence is a question of fact.  Religion exists beyond the factual.  The divine may live in heaven, or shoulder to shoulder with humans, or within the human heart, but although that divinity is often the basis for religion, it is a part of religion only by extension.  Religion is the stories that spring up around it, the way that belief takes hold in everyday practice and changes the way people look at life.

Being bored doesn’t mean that “there’s nothing to do,” as children imprecisely complain to their parents on a rainy day, dragging their feet on the rug and kicking the sofa. It means that something big—whether it’s rain, other people, or our own hot-to-the-touch fears—is keeping us from doing what we want to do, from playing outside, from expressing ourselves, from moving forward.

Patients, Patients: Television: The New Yorker

Recent research by Australian researchers shows that, in the context of strategic video games, neurotic AI may do better than rational ones. From Mind Hacks:

They used the popular strategy game Age of Mythology and created four software ‘bots’ to play the computer which were loosely based on the ‘big five‘ personality traits.

When they compared their successes, the version designed to simulate ‘neurotic’ personality traits came equal first in number of games won, but was the clear winner when the average time to victory was compared.

This AI was programmed to distort the its own perception of resources and flip between aggressive and defensive styles of play unpredictably. In trials, the neurotic AI beat Age of Mythology more often than any AI except the ‘aggressive’ bot, and won faster than even the agressive one did.

This study doesn’t prove much of anything, at this point, except that Age of Mythology favors a slightly uneven playing style, but the implications fascinate me. Against humans, perhaps in a poker game, it’s easy to see how a bit of unpredictability could make for a better game. It’s pretty easy to confuse and blindside a person. However, I don’t think Age of Mythology’s program is intelligent enough to develop complex thoughts about what strategies a player is using. (I could be wrong, of course.) I don’t think machines are susceptible to the cognitive traps that humans might fall into. In light of this, I’m not sure how the neurotic AI managed to win. Reason dictates that a well-informed person will have better strategy than a misinformed person, right?

If mild neuroticism really does allow people to win more often then their purely rational counterparts, it could provide a great deal of support for theories arguing that mental illnesses are more severe forms of adaptive habits.

Courtesy of Virtual China, images from an exhibition of photos from a Chinese asylum. I couldn’t find any sort of date on these, but I assume the Chinese government wouldn’t permit an exhibition in China unless they were reasonably old.

These do remind me of the old photos of American psychiatric wards. The mentally ill have been treated with too little care everywhere.

Shoma Morita founded Morita therapy in 1919 to treat shinkeishitsu, a Japanese culture-specific anxiety disorder characterized by hypochondria and social phobia. Since then, its use has expanded to anxiety, depression, bereavement, shyness, and some inconclusive trials for schizophrenia. In addition to cognitive-behavioral therapy, it is one of the primary therapies used in China.

Morita therapy encourages its patients to accept their feelings as natural, without trying to change them. According to the Morita framework, feelings cannot be controlled. Patients learn to focus their attention away from their emotions and simply act without trying to change how they feel. The focus is on a “reality-oriented attitude”, which is less self-centered and more in touch with the external world. According to the ToDo Institute:

Cure is not defined by the alleviation of discomfort or the attainment of some ideal feeling state (which is impossible) but by taking constructive action in one’s life which helps one to live a full and meaningful existence and not be ruled by one’s emotional state.

Morita is called a “psychology of action”, because it trusts that the actions people take will improve their moods and feelings, while introspection will not.  It greatly resembles modern-day behavioral therapy in this regard - startling for a therapy pioneered when B.F. Skinner was barely fifteen.

Do you know that old question about what might have happened to Van Gogh if he’d had antidepressants available? It’s a stupid question, in a lot of ways. He killed himself, probably as a result of the same mental illness that shows up in his work. If he’d had Prozac, he might he might have lived to see his own work become famous.

And yet, people ask. Didn’t he gain something? Didn’t we?

There’s no glory to a life lost to mental illness, whether through time wasted away in sickness or through suicide. There’s nothing romantic about depression. (I write this a few days after hearing about Heath Ledger’s possible suicide.) We, as humans, have lost too many people to mental illness, to early death, to unbearable pain. We have lost brilliant people to psychotic worlds of their own creation. No amount of creativity will ever justify the raw cost of mental illness. No benefit can justify this degree of human suffering. So, maybe Van Gogh never would have painted The Starry Night, and the world would go on without him. Maybe he would have become a better painter, tempered by age and experience. Maybe he would have prevented World War I. We will never know.

I’m going somewhere with this, actually. There’s an article up on The Guardians’ Joe Public blog asking, Would you vote for an MP with mental health issues? The attached poll, at this moment, is resoundly in favor of doing so, but I’m inclined to wonder if Americans would so easily say the same thing. Americans seem to like strong leaders, and I can imagine the fear that someone with a history of depression might break under stress. But I think of Winston Churchill (depression), and Abraham Lincoln (also depression), and I know that these people made spectacular leaders.

Here’s where Van Gogh comes in. People with mental illnesses are, above all, people; some are full of wisdom and some seem stuck in their own minds. However, I think that people with mental illness must derive some advantage from it. I don’t honestly believe that depression has an evolutionary advantage, but as we see in Van Gogh, it does have some connection to creativity. Various studies have found that people with depression tend to gravitate towards creative professions.

I think, also, that depression makes people more aware of the pain of others. Suffering builds compassion, and the pointless suffering of depression helps us to feel for people who have gone through things without actually enduring them.  On a fundamental level, this means that people who have gone through depression and overcome it are more equipped to help those in trouble, tend to those in pain, and console those living with grief.  Where depressive episodes make people less sociable, depression in life can make people better social animals.

I would never wish Van Gogh’s life on anyone. Whatever benefits depression may offer, they aren’t worth hurting innocent people for. I believe, however, that the people out there with mental illnesses can find some benefit in what they’re experiencing, instead of letting themselves suffer for no reason. What differentiates Van Gogh from so many others is that he used his illness to give something to the world.

Paragraphein has a beautiful post about the new PBS documentary, The Lobotomist:

The common practices, the reactions to anyone “deviant…”, they’ve all evolved over the years. All products of their times.

What tends not to change, though, is the voices of the people who’ve lived through the basic, core experience: losing a child to adoption; suffering from a mental illness.

You’d think, this being the case, that whenever the “experts” have the next great idea, whenever they want to implement a new practice, they might thus stop to consult us–you know, the people who live it, and the people who–across the ages–tend to use the same metaphors for our experiences.

But too often, the “experts” don’t listen. Too often, they don’t even ask. And too often, it doesn’t even occur to them to ask.

I wrote this academic essay of King’s “Letter to Birmingham Jail” this summer. I’m a great admirer of King, and although I don’t have time to write a post on his thoughts today, I don’t want to let today’s celebration of his life pass unmarked. May your message live on, Dr. King.

On April 12, 1963, with Martin Luther King in Birmingham jail and tension mounting in the city, eight white Alabama clergymen issued a statement condemning the “extreme measures” of the Birmingham demonstrations as “unwise and untimely.” Although King responded directly to this statement with his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the clergy’s statement didn’t actually address him at all. Aside from a brief disparaging remark about protests “directed and led in part by outsiders”, in fact, it never mentioned the leaders of the civil rights movement at all. (Carpenter et all) Instead, they addressed the statement towards “our Negro citizens.” King’s choice, then, to address his open letter to them directly, rather than to the black citizenry he depends on, strikes an odd chord at first. Wouldn’t his response be better directed to the same people the Alabama clergymen target? Why does he bother with those white preachers at all?

In their statement, the eight Alabama clergymen assert themselves as a sort of paternalistic moral authority, better able to see what forms of protest the black people of Birmingham ought use than those living under the oppressive weight of segregation. They portray King and the Southern Christian Leadership Council as mere rabble-rousers, without any understanding of the real moral significance of the situation. These men and people like them have such a large influence over the moral politics of the South that King cannot merely preach over their heads and hope that his voice will be heard. To win over the black populace of Alabama and their own white constituents, King must tackle the Alabama clergymen on their own moral and intellectual ground. To this end, his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” reads much differently than his speeches, packed with references to important political and religious figures. King uses these stories and quotes, from Socrates to Jesus to Martin Buber, to assert himself as a moral and intellectual authority equal to any group of white Southern preachers.

According to Wesley Mott, such disregard for the procedures of formal logic and laid-out, step-by-step proofs is typical of “old-time Negro preaching.” (413) In his speeches and sermons, in fact, King often sways listeners to his side with nothing but heartfelt exclamations. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech doesn’t quote the Bible or great moral thinkers even once, despite constant religious language. They are all “God’s children,” (2) he says, although he never makes as much as a sideways reference to stories of creation or Biblical tales of brotherhood. He asks for “righteousness” (2) without the Old Testament God and declares that “unearned suffering is redemptive” (3) without ever touching on the suffering of Christ. The overall impression, however, is not of fast-and-loose morals or lazy Biblical scholarship. King comes across as a man whose convictions are too unshakable to need petty chapter-and-verse citations.

Compare this with the numerous quotes, stories, and religious references King loads into his “Letter”. To speak accurately to such a varied group of individuals, personified in the Catholic Bishops, Methodist Bishops, Pastor, Rabbi, and Presbyterian Moderator that signed the statement of Alabama clergymen, King must speak to them on their own terms, through their own stories and philosophical documents. King doesn’t try to prove the necessity of action or morality of nonviolent civil disobedience in the terms that only a black spiritualist could understand – those that could be swayed by King’s personal tradition already follow him. He turns to Socrates, to Saint Augustine and Martin Buber and Paul Tillich and Jesus Christ. Through his examples, King tailors his “Letter” to the precise leanings and denominations of his audience. In response to accusations of extremism, he responds with a battery of historical extremists: For the rabbi, “Amos, an extremist for justice”. For the Christians, “Jesus, an extremist for love,” and “Paul, an extremist for the Christian gospel.” For the Protestants, Martin Luther. For secular Americans, Abraham Lincoln: and Thomas Jefferson. (Why We Can’t Wait, [WWCW], 77) King attaches to each a snippet of writing or a pithy quote that both proves his point (that they are extremists of a sort) and brings to mind the larger scope of their lives and work. What American could read Jefferson’s “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” without remembering “and endowed by their creator unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”? What minister could hear Jesus tell his disciples to “Love your enemies” without remembering his commitment to stand up for his faith without violence? In 140 words, King tells a half-dozen stories about religious devotion, political conscience, and activism for justice.

In speaking to the leaders of the white church, King hopes to enact change among its constituents. To put it bluntly, he sees the white clergy as the moral mind of white politics, and where he leads the head, the body, the congregations of the white church, will follow. Although his language is always couched in moral terms, he does not disapprove merely of the white church, but of the white moderate as a whole. Despite their shared religious background, they have sided with skin color over justice, and King treats them as almost a kind of failure to the cause. Mimicking the blatantly paternalistic tone they use with him, he is vocal in his disappointment. ” I have been gravely disappointed,” he says. (WWCW, 72) “I had hoped…. I had hoped,” (73) “I had also hoped,” (74) “I was rather disappointed,” (75) “I had hoped…I was too optimistic…I expected too much.” (77) “I have been so greatly disappointed in the white church.” King continues with his hopes, always shattered, and his disappointment, moving gradually from the vagueness of the “white moderate” to a highly specific criticism of the “white churchmen [who] stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies.” (79) King mentions his disappointment numerous times, both as a rhetorical technique and to drive home the reality of his relationship with the white moderate church. Every time he brings up a hope or a smashed expectation, King asserts himself as someone standing to expect concrete things from the religious white, and to express disappointment in them when the fail to live up. In the area of civil rights, King takes on the form of a parent, rendering their unwillingness to support him both childish and disobedient. It falls to the white clergy, the “other parent”, to support him as a united front against immorality.

King’s “Letter,” then, is a study in layers: parables and quotes that would make immediate sense to the average moderate white, but have a deeper meaning clear to those who have studied politics, t\ethics, and morality. This kind of concise, multi-layered storytelling is both a demonstration of Kings intellectual muscle and a symptom of the conditions under which he composed his “Letter”. As he recounts in a footnote in Why We Can’t Wait, King wrote in “under somewhat constricting circumstances” on newspaper margins and scraps of paper. (64) Deprived the opportunity to weave together complicated narratives or draw strength through the kind straightforward repetition he used to such great advantage in his “I Have a Dream” speech. With the space he had available, King needed to do more with every dropped name and adjective than bring to mind a half-forgotten story. His letter, then, must make the greatest possible use of every anecdote and adjective. As opposed to his longer works, such as Why We Can’t Wait, where he explains political realities and detailed history, King must imply a mountain of history with every name. Even if no one reader could immediately grasp every source he used, King left the Catholics with the taste of overcoming Paul’s sin and the Jews with Abednego’s willingness to sacrifice himself for God.

To provide a framework for civil disobedience itself, King cannot spare the time to wander through the complete history of the civil disobedience movement. Rather than dwelling on Thoreau, who pioneered the term but on the whole gave up very little of himself to the betterment of society, King draws on the irreproachable scholar, the martyr to intellectual thought: Socrates. When asked, “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” he responds with the man who may be his original model for nonviolent protest. By framing his attempt to create “tension in society” with Socrates’ attempt to “to create a tension in the mind”, he gives his revolutionary tactics the clout of thousands of years of history. In a few words, “the bondage of myths and half-truths”, he draws parallels between the physical oppression of blacks and the oppressive effects that superiority has on whites. King borrows Socrates’ “gadflies”, the irritants that Socrates says the gadfly are a gift “which God has given the state”. (WWCW, 67)As Socrates says, they ensure that the people don’t “sleep on for the rest of your lives.” (Plato, 460) Without taking up his arrogance, King can absorb the idea that disruption itself, so long as it disrupts a dangerous status quo, is a kind of divine mission. The bite his gadflies deliver to complacent white society is both a small pain and an awakening, enlightenment.

Socrates himself serves as a reminder that nonviolent resistance has a secular history, as well as a religious one. In fact, King brings him up twice more as a model the pitfalls and accomplishments of true civil disobedience. Socrates mocked and irritated the people of Athens in the name of exposing reality, and eventually that same populace executed him. Rather than labeling him as one who merely created unrest, King declares that his “unswerving commitment to the truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock.” (WWCW, 74) In his death, Socrates modeled the same unwillingness to violently resist authority that King espouses. Just as King urged his comrades to submit meekly to arrest, Socrates refused to flee the judgment of Athens. King credits this kind of civil disobedience for the existence of “Academic freedom…today,” (WWCW, 72) a freedom that his more academic critics no doubt appreciated.

He also brings up whole bodies of modern philosophical work with a few well-placed words. Speaking of segregation, he uses Martin Buber’s “I-it” and “I-thou” relationships to conceptualize the way segregation “relegat[es] persons to the status of things.” (WWCW, 71) Buber’s “I-it” and “I-thou” describe more than a difference in relationships between people. With them, King describes twin states of dialogue, the “I-thou” that listens and discusses, and the “I-it” that refuses to negotiate, he gives credit to his earlier assertion that the South is “bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.” (WWCW, 6 Beyond this basic use of Buber’s text, however, King likely found the well-respected Jewish philosopher’s methods of logic similar to his own. Critics attacked Buber as “more affected than honest” (Bloch, 42. Cited by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.), more given to soul-driven, emotional reasoning than to an outpouring of cold textual support. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail” suffers from these supposed faults less than his speeches, but he still drew on Buber as model of affective logic outside of the ghettoized realm of old Negro preachers.

Buber, although tied closely in with the spiritualist traditions of Judaism, is not a religious authority in his own right, any more than Paul Tillich or Socrates deliver some kind of absolute moral conviction on what should and should not be done. To properly argue morality with a group of clergy, who are in their own right expected to know right from wrong, moral from immoral acts, King must turn to a source higher than both he and his opponents: the Bible. More specifically, he must defend the ultimate morality of his methods as well as his cause. The Alabama clergymen, after all, didn’t deny that segregationist laws needed to be overturned, eventually, they objected to King’s methods. They don’t believe that “extreme measures are justified in Birmingham.” (Carpenter) To answer this challenge to civil disobedience, King frames it in a religious light with the stories of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who refused “to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake” and “the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions…rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire.” (WWCW, 72) King cites these, on the surface, as instances of moral resistance to civil law, putting them directly in parallel with his own civil disobedience, while letting the stories themselves speak to higher purposes. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were put to fire for their refusal to worship a graven idol, and the early Christians violated the Roman laws requiring them to worship Roman gods. In both cases, they exemplify King’s principle of opposing the law of the land in favor of a higher law. Furthermore, they personify the possible results of any civil disobedience – God saved Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego for their willingness to sacrifice themselves, but the early Christians willingly died for their faith.

This kind of comparison should function on its own to refute claims that the Birmingham protesters invited and deserved violence, but King dispels that particular claim more directly. “Isn’t this like condemning Jesus because his unique God-consciousness and never-ceasing devotion to God’s will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion?” (WWCW, 74) While one could perhaps criticize the old Jewish heroes for inviting their fate by choosing to live under an evil king, or the early Christians for refusing to run, Jesus’ crucifixion was essential to the birth of Christianity. No religious scholar, regardless of background, would dare blame him for “precipitating violence”, especially given his calls for love and nonviolent action. Jesus embodies the dialectic that King’s protesters try to live by – enacting change by nonviolent means, even if they are met by violence.

Perhaps King’s strongest use of religious figures comes to justify his presence in Birmingham. When challenged about his right to be in Birmingham, King quickly goes to the stories of eighth-century prophets and “the Apostle Paul” leaving their villages to spread their “thus saith the Lord” and “the gospel of Jesus Christ” to the greater world. (WWCW, 65) King tells his opponents that he carries “the gospel of freedom”, raising his cause to the level of a divine command. His presence in Birmingham is not a choice, it is the fulfillment of a duty as sacred as the crusade. King, however, does not come to Birmingham as a white European missionary might come to the poor of Africa. He describes Paul and the prophets as coming from villages, in an earlier draft, “little villages” (Best American Essays, 246) as a way to downplay his experience as a civil rights leader. King does not wish to work as a man with status and political clout. In Why We Can’t Wait, where space is less scarce, King alludes to this more directly. “No Negro anywhere, regardless of his social standing, his financial status, his prestige and position, is an outsider so long as dignity and decency are denied” to black people anywhere. (55) More specifically, even a PhD and national recognition do not make people like King outsiders when there is work to be done in the name of God and freedom.

Works Cited 

Carpenter et all. Statement by Alabama Clergymen [Untitled]. April 12, 1963.

King, Martin Luther. “I Have a Dream” [Speech]. August 28, 1963. Available online courtesy of the Avalon Project at Yale Law School.

King, Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”. The Best American Essays of the Century. Ed. Atwan, Robert, and Joyce Carol Oates. Houghton Mifflin, 2001. 236-279.

King, Jr., Dr. Martin Luther. Why We Can’t Wait. New York, Signet Classics, 2000.

Mott, Wesley. “The Rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Phylon. Vol. 36, No. 4, (1975) 411-421.

Plato. The Republic and Other Works. Trans B. Jowett. New York, Doubleday & Company, 1960.

Zank, Michael, “Martin Buber”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)