A Celebration of The Unseen

I LIVE to celebrate! Over the years, I have taken a hard look at each holiday to find what I am really celebrating. It's usually not what the stores/media tell me to celebrate. It took me some time to figure out the Halloween thrill that I absolutely love... but can't describe.

So here's an attempt:

I reject the gore and sexy costumes. I reject any celebration of unresolved fears, even terror.

I instead celebrate the mystery of the unseen and assert our collective triumph over death.

 

I'd like to think that, through costumes, we reveal, for a moment, interesting parts of our personalities that we normally keep from view.

I decorate to make my surroundings like that of an old Victorian scientist's/naturalist's library shrouded in mourning. (shi-i-i-ver)  I put out things that make me think of that time in history when science itself was part alchemy and magic. A time when electricity, radiation, and all sorts of never-before-imagined powers remained unseen.

That magic is real.

With black crepe decorating my windows and covering my mirrors (the first person who looks in a mirror in a house of morning will die next!), black-and-white pictures of long-dead revelers, and a few tombstones out front, I take time tonight to remind Death that I don't fear him. His power is limited. 

What powers are not limited?

Unseen powers, like friendship, family, love, and our collective triumph over death.

That magic is real. Let's celebrate!

Healing for the Soul: Doses and Medicines

Years ago, I read that Jewish parents would put honey on the cover of books and let their small children lick it off, to teach them the sweetness of books and learning. What a beautiful image!

Two millennia ago, Pharaoh Rameses II, had an inscription carved above the portal to his library: “place of healing for the soul.” 

Of all the power that knowledge brings, it is interesting that his focus was on personal healing.

I accidentally began a literary liturgy of healing a few months ago. In response to dramatic changes in my life, my mind had begun to fall into ruts of worry and fear. As I realized that I had less control over my future than I have ever had before, worst-case-scenarios filled my mind. Impatient for closure, my mind incessantly searched for solutions.

And I realized my mind was wrong.

I began to recognize this flow of events as a river that must be rafted—a series of experiences that I must allow, follow, and from which I must learn. I read quotes about replacing negative thoughts with constructive thoughts. If my mind was going to circle paths, on the edge of my consciousness, until it wore deep grooves, I must mark out healthy paths.

I turned the future over to my God, which was a sweet experience in itself. I formed a plan to implement healthy individual and family habits. I was promised that my future would unfold as it should, if I would just keep moving in the direction I was currently headed. With my present and my future secure, it was time to find a place of healing.

And so, I began to read. And read and read. I am still reading.  Especially at night, when I am tempted to brood, I read and I write. Devouring mostly non-fiction, I experience the heights and depths of human experience; this personalized parade of true stories shows me that pain and uncertainty are the price we pay for this thrilling life. My own suffering is put into perspective and now gratitude is my daily companion.

There is name for this miracle in my life: bibliotherapy.

A recent New Yorker article, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” brings up some interesting points:

 “For all readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of “mirror neurons”—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings….

Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers. ‘Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,’ the author Jeanette Winterson has written…

George Eliot, who is rumored to have overcome her grief at losing her life partner through a program of guided reading with a young man who went on to become her husband, believed that:

'art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot'…

After the First World War, traumatized soldiers returning home from the front were often prescribed a course of reading. ‘Librarians in the States were given training on how to give books to WWI vets, and there’s a nice story about Jane Austen’s novels being used for bibliotherapeutic purposes at the same time in the U.K.,’ Elderkin says. Later in the century, bibliotherapy was used in varying ways in hospitals and libraries, and has more recently been taken up by psychologists, social and aged-care workers, and doctors as a viable mode of therapy"

To borrow some lines from Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”:

A good friend of mine shared that, after the loss of her baby son, she read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Its themes of death and loss gave voice to her grief. She also sought out blogs of individuals who had experienced similar loss and felt a sense of understanding and being understood.

I have discovered that we can make deep connections through the written word. We feel deeper empathy for others. We connect with a deeper Self. We vicariously experience with a wide range of emotions. We can even connect to God.

I hold my next book in my hands, savoring its weight. I inhale its new-book smell. Its pages are dripping with the promise of many interesting hours. When I put this book down at its finish, I will be a slightly different person than when I picked it up. In my mind’s eye, I lick the honey off the cover. Then I settle in for a few moments with a blanket and a cup of mint tea.

Delicious.

Extreme Immoderation in All My Passions

A Man One Might Like to Share an Evening With... Reading His Autobiography.....

 When I see this photo of Wolf Sacks, I imagine myself there in Greenwich Village, just to the side of his BMW motorcycle.... perhaps accompanying him on his 1000- mile weekend trips to The Grand Canyon from the California Coast-- at 100 mph, full-throttle-the-whole-way, in the desert moonlight. (He often quoted T. E. Lawrence's "The Road"-- "A skittish motor-bike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess...")

And there I (wish I) am, just out of the frame of the second photo, traipsing around Machu Picchu with Oliver, then sitting in quiet contemplation (we are both introverts), journals in hand. Upon learning that his cancer would kill him shortly, he wrote, " I am a man of vehement disposition, with violent enthusiasms, and extreme immoderation in all my passions. I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have given something in return. I have read and traveled and thought and written…"

 

Of course, these photographs are of the same man: Dr. Oliver Wolf Sacks, (1933-2015). I have enjoyed poring over his recollections and thoughts, perhaps as much as he enjoyed exploring others' minds. One writer described him as an "intrepid psychonaut."

When Oliver Sacks was twelve years old, a perceptive schoolmaster wrote in his report:
“Sacks will go far, if he does not go too far.” 
He went too far his entire life, and I am so glad he did.

Most know him from his experiments with L-Dopa, and the movie "Awakenings" that was based on those experiences. What I must respect him for most, is that when life dealt him an unexpected blow, he researched the topic and wrote another book. He shattered his leg, running off a cliff in Norway to escape a charging bull, and wrote A Leg to Stand On. He began to experience hearing loss and wrote Musicophelia. He was diagnosed with cancer in one eye, and wrote, The Mind's Eye. He wrote:

 "To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment." And it is.

Something enjoyable becomes doubly enjoyable when shared. I am one of those people who loves to read silently, but bursts out intermittently "Oh, listen to this..."

So, I must recommend and share a few wonderful points from Sacks' autobiography, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Reading it was a pleasure. Writing about it doubles my joy. Discussion in comments, or person, would be (sigh) exquisite. So, if you wish to to peruse this strange and marvelous book, prepare to have your chemistry knowledge stretched. And definitely look for these memorable parts:

Rubber smells like human skin (or vice-versa).

Sepia photographs were colored with cuttlefish ink.  Young Oliver once collected nearly 100 cuttlefish and attempted to preserve them in alcohol in a friend's home. The cuttlefish fermented and exploded, rendering the house unlivable for a time. 

He quotes Albert Einstein:"Never lose a holy curiosity."

Chemical names used to be quite romantic: butter of antimony, jovial bezoar, sugar of lead, fuming liquor of Libavious, flowers of zinc

(zinc oxide nanoparticles)

His epiphany upon seeing the Periodic Table.. "the table was a sort of cosmic staircase or a Jacob's ladder, going up to, coming down from, a Pythagorean heaven." He could scarcely sleep that night, thinking of it as a "crytogram without a key, a marvelous secret" "that reflected a deep order in nature."

He speaks of shoe shops in England that had x-ray machines that would let you see your foot bones within the shoes. And how dentists often lost fingers, exposed to radiation from holding the x-ray films in patients' mouths so often, and how his uncle had malignant warts on his hands from experimenting with x-rays. Also, there was a sudden jump in sales of lead lined underwear when x-rays were first publicly announced.

 

Along the same line, there were many "fluorine martyrs." Working with fluorine was so dangerous, that many of the early scientists who tried to isolate the element accidentally burned and  lethally poisoned themselves....

 

The Curies' lab, as they worked with uranium, glowed at night. Marie Curie's notebooks are still too radioactive to be handled.

 

Chlorine can safely be mixed with hydrogen under red light, in a darkroom. It will explode under white light.

 

 His uncles introduced him to a spinthariscope.  Using the the magnifying eyepiece, one can see atoms from a tiny speck of radium decay in bright flashes against a fluorescent screen... like tiny shooting stars.

 

As a child, and again as an older gentleman, walking the streets of New York, he carries a spectroscope in his pocket, looking at the city lights. As shy as he was, he once entered a Gay Bar in New York and shouted, "Stop talking about sex! Look at this!" And everyone did. 
Please clear your mind of any jokes that begin, "Is that a spectroscope in your pocket, or..."

 

He ends the book by talking about the end of his boyhood adventures in chemistry and how in school, his passion died. "Now, at school, I was forced to sit in classes, to take notes and exams, to use textbooks that were flat, impersonal, deadly. What had been fun, delight, when I did it in my own way became an aversion, an ordeal when I had to do it to order. What had been a holy subject to me, full of poetry, was being rendered prosaic, profane."

The Brain is a Monstrous, Beautiful Mess -- William F. Allman

Study of the Brain-- Leonardo Da Vinci, 1490

I studied psychology at CSUSB when I was about 22. I haven’t thought of the details of that life for years, I guess. It was such a painfully exciting time. After marrying, I moved to my husband's hometown; we rented a one-bedroom house from the 1920’s, with a sprawling lawn and haphazardly-planted trees. A huge Live Oak tree spread over most of that quarter acre, and had been dropping its leaves on that yard for at least 100 years. I have never since lived in a house that had better sandy- loamy soil. With the mild southern California climate, it was my garden of Eden. I fell in love with plants and planting. I wasn't alone in my passion. The elderly landlord also loved the yard. He didn’t live anywhere nearby, but in the morning, I would unexpectedly find him, digging up the lawn to plant another tree or fumbling in the flowerbeds. He spent more and more time there. Eventually, he separated from his wife and came to live in the garage, which had no plumbing. He wandered around the yard freely, assuming we were the interlopers there. Every morning, he would drive to McDonald's to use the bathroom, get ready, and get coffee. It was so surreal. 

Newly married, I was more alone than I’d ever been. My husband worked 6 days a week and got up at 3 am, returning home around 4 pm, when he would eat something and go to bed. Growing up the oldest of 7 children, I felt the emptiness of the house almost pressing on me. It seemed I was living with two ghosts: the shadowy specter of my spouse, who wasn’t present even when he was there; and the apparition of my omnipresent, lurking landlord whose face would appear startlingly right outside my bedroom window as he puttered among my flowers.

I was in limbo myself…. wandering in between worlds. I was part of college life, but not. I was married, but alone.  At school, men tried to strike up a conversation, or ask me out, and I hurriedly extricated myself, feeling I was representing myself as something I was not. Women my age invited me to Spring Break in Palm Springs, half an hour from my house, and I felt like I shouldn’t go because I was married. The university cultural life was so invigorating: concerts, films, exhibits. But it was too long of a commute to drive back in the evenings and I felt I should be home, I saw so little of my husband. I loved church events, but I was expected to attend with my spouse, who rarely had the energy to go out. Everyone kept to themselves in our neighborhood; I didn’t meet any of our neighbors except the one next door whose dog chewed my goose’s head off through the fence.  I was in purgatory and thought it very lonely. I felt I shouldn't go out, make outside relationships; yet, I couldn't build anything at home.

My own psychological conundrums seeming unsolvable, I threw myself into studying things that could be revealed, if one tried hard enough. The academics were exhilarating; the biological and medical sides of the brain, in particular. I focused on my studies and did very well. 

David Bainbridge said:  “The modern geography of the brain has a deliciously antiquated feel to it -- rather like a medieval map with the known world encircled by terra incognito where monsters roam.”

How I loved to roam that world: along axons and synapses, to look at how drugs and neurotransmitters fit into receptors and change how we think and feel. I had my own lamb’s brain; I sliced and labeled the anatomical structures. I loved looking at it, so grey and uniform, and imagining the complex magic it had produced when alive. I kept that brain long after I graduated…  a symbol of the wonder.  The paradoxes amazed me: I spent a lot of time researching how a certain chemical calmed the nervous systems of baby mice, but stimulated them as they got older. I was offered the chance to do some meaningful research on rats and wanted to so badly, but my heart was too tender to sacrifice them. My professor told me what I would have to do to harden up and I just morally couldn’t agree with it. Looking back, I know that was a good choice for me.

I respected one professor, Dr. Nelson, more than any other. He agreed to mentor me in a research project I was doing. I took a long time choosing a topic because I wanted to throw myself into something personally meaningful.  I spent hours in the library studying the process of how couples make decisions and the power dynamics at work there. I learned so much. I began to recognize some strange things in my own life. We took winter break and when I went back to report my research to Dr. Nelson, I found out he had had a heart attack and wouldn’t be returning. It was such a blow to lose my wise mentor. Few professors still had openings left to supervise students, so I was assigned to a man I did not know. When I went in to discuss my research, he was angry, defensive, and kept insisting that my topic was politically incorrect and sexist, though dozens of scientists had studied the topic. I left very confused and scrapped plans for my own research. Later, someone told me that this particular professor was in the middle of a bitter divorce and might have been hypersensitive to some of the traits I would be studying.

I graduated with honors, but chose not to "walk" or tell anyone beside my immediate family. When I went to a banquet to receive an award, my date was dismissive and derogatory. I came away feeling that I somehow didn’t belong in the academic world, as much as I loved it. My professors encouraged to continue my studies and get my Master’s Degree, but I couldn’t figure out how to pay for it and realized I would be competing for a limited number of openings at a handful of competitive schools that were near my home. In the end, I didn’t want to take out large loans that would require me to work full-time in a specific field to pay back the money. I wanted to keep my freedom. Looking back, I don’t have any regrets.

During those years, unbeknownst to me, leading neuroscientists from around the world were moving to La Jolla, California, making breakthrough discoveries at Scripps and the University of San Diego… 90 miles from my house. Close enough to touch, but too far to drive. I certainly felt a portion of that excitement of discovery. And so I come back to the paradoxes, of life and of the brain.

"Most of us have spent some time wondering how our brain works. Brain scientists spend their entire lives pondering it, looking for a way to begin asking the question, How does the brain generate mind? The brain, after all, is so complex an organ and can be approached from so many different directions using so many different techniques and experimental animals that studying it is a little like entering a blizzard, the Casbah, a dense forest. It's easy enough to find a way in - an interesting phenomenon to study - but also very easy to get lost."   ---  David Bainbridge      

And for me… it was lovely to be lost.