PSYCHOSCAPES

Saturday, February 15, 2025

Meeting at the Edge

“Most live as though life was something yet to come. But as John Lennon pointed out,

“Life is what happens while we are busy making other plans^⁠1”–Steven Levine

Remnant of ancient oak surrendering to Winter
CC Jean Stimmell

In an age when a relentless stream of catastrophic news threatens to engulf us, it is not uncommon for older individuals like myself to take solace in the belief that we are the fortunate ones destined to depart this world before the worst arrives. This sentiment reflects a cultural narrative that equates the inevitability of death with a diminishing concern for the events that shape our lives.

Fortunately, this notion is wrong.

Stephen Levine, the author of one of my favorite inspirational books, “A Gradual Awakening,”^⁠2 brought this cultural fiction to my attention. Contrary to the belief that old age diminishes our engagement with the world, Levine argues that being close to death paradoxically does the opposite: it heightens the significance of each moment we inhabit.

Levine’s Buddhist insights on the transient nature of life resonate with elderly persons like me because new ailments are piling up, repetitively reminding us our time is near. In my case, I have an assortment of afflictions, including three kinds of cancer. While none are life-threatening or terminal at this point, one will surely do me in.

Yet, in the face of that, a funny thing has happened.

Rather than tuning out—as I feign when making small talk with my friends—these increasingly stark reminders of my mortality are waking me up. They make me ever more passionately alive to the present, savoring everything, including a spat with a loved one, the expressive shadows on the virgin snow blocking my driveway, or the slapstick comedy acts that I regularly perform, prompted by my rickety body and sieve-like mind.

Levine suggests that this is nature’s way of preparing me for what’s to come: to “penetrate the illusion of solidity which potentiates the fear of death, the fear of dissolution upon the extinction of the physical body.^⁠3

He emphasizes that accepting my mortality can serve as a catalyst for surrendering to life’s fleeting nature. As I recently wrote in this space, we think we control our destiny, but in reality, our lives are a fluke, unfolding according to their own rhyme and rhythm.

As I learn to surrender to life, I find it an invitation to engage more authentically and fully with life – not less. But that wasn’t always so.

When I was young and macho, I considered surrendering worse than death: I pictured myself never standing down, like Davy Crockett fighting to the end at the Battle of the Alamo. The worst thing I’ve ever experienced was not in Vietnam but that one time I took LSD, a massive dose at that:

I totally lost grip on who I was or where I was. I felt myself flailing uncontrollably into an abyss, a bottomless void. I was beyond terrified. My friends told me I kept repeating this mantra as my only lifeline to reality: "I am insane...I am insane."

Now, in old age, I understand surrender better. But surrender does not mean shutting down, averting my eyes from the constant drumbeat of atrocities taking place around the world, like the thousands of children dying daily from bullets and famine.

Surrendering to what is beyond my control does not excuse me from bearing witness to the suffering all around me – and grieving it.

Margaret Renkl, the NYT columnist, asked the children’s author, Kate DiCamillo, how she “keeps letting herself be heartbroken without becoming broken forever.” She answered, “I fall into the mineshaft of despair over and over again,” but something always pulls her out: “a stranger who looks me in the eye and smiles, a grandparent who tells me about reading aloud to their grandchild…

DiCamillo concludes, “I’ve learned to let the beauty of the world and the bravery of other people pull me up and out of the despair.” I think that’s the key.

By surrendering to the present moment, we bear witness to the whole ball of wax: the traumatic moments as well as the awesome ones of beauty, bravery, and devotion.

To my way of thinking, that’s what it means to be fully human.

xxx

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¹“Meeting at the Edge” by Steven Levine. 1984. This book is about the growth that occurs as we come to the mind’s edge.

²A Gradual Awakening by Stephen Levine. Anchor Books. New York: 1979.

³Ibid. Page 141.

Saturday, February 8, 2025

I’ve become Rip Van Winkle

The world has changed so much that I feel like I’m living on a different planet from the rural Yankee town where I grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s.

To gauge how the U.S. Has changed, I watched a documentary on PBS examining those exact years that featured Walt Disney, who was then building Disneyland to show “America's future.”^⁠1

In terms of predicting new inventions, Walt got a lot of things right: “Disneyland, made up of four "lands," opened in July 1955. One of the four, Tomorrowland, featured rocket rides "to the moon"; the Monsanto House of the Future, made entirely of plastic and displaying cutting-edge kitchen appliances; and a futuristic replica of Los Angeles' emerging freeway system. Tomorrowland was imbued with optimism for the future and confidence in American superiority.”^⁠2

Indeed, we accomplished most of those things: We rocketed to the moon but now find ourselves submerged in plastic and choked by highways, cloverleafs, and high-tech gadgets. Paradoxically, despite achieving the future we thought we wanted, we’ve lost our spunk and optimism: in fact, a majority of us now believe our country is heading in the wrong direction.

What the show missed were the cataclysmic changes that erupted between then and now, totally upending our societal norms and former way of life. Growing up in the early 1950s, I lived in radically different circumstances before the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Woodstock, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and all the other major historical shifts that transpired – all the way up to this week when we swore in our new president who spurns the constitution and pretends he is our king.

Thinking back on it now, I feel like a modern-day Rip Van Wrinkle who fell asleep in third grade and woke up nearly 80 years later living in this strange new land. The last thing I remember was sitting at my desk practicing cursive penmanship at my old Northwood Narrows school, which had two classrooms downstairs and a meeting room upstairs.

My only reference material was an old set of encyclopedias housed in the local library. The town contracted with a neighborhood farmer to transport us kids who lived on Jenness Pond to school in his old Jeep station wagon that smelled of hay and manure. We didn’t get our first TV until I was in the fourth grade.

Jenness Pond Road was dirt and often impassible during mud season. When that happened, we had to leave the family car half a mile away from home and walk in. During those times, our ancient neighbor, who we called Tib, would save time by cutting across the ice rather than taking the longer route by land. We were a little afraid of him, thinking he might have magical powers because he never fell through the crumbling, rotten ice and drowned.

After growing up in the sparse simplicity of rural New Hampshire, a significant chunk of what has happened since seems like a bad dream. While we had to practice ridiculous ‘duck and cover’ drills designed to protect us from an imminent Russian nuclear attack that never came, today, we are facing existential dangers on multiple fronts, many of them unimaginable in the 1950s.

The original Rip Van Wrinkle, written by Washington Irving, was a fable about how America was founded. I’m afraid that I am presiding over its unraveling – along with the Earth itself.

xxx

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¹https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/tupperware-future/

²Ibid.

Can fairytales have Sinister motives?

The election of President Trump made me want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head. Instead, I decided to do something utterly unpolitical by turning to fairytales, in particular, the work of Marie-Louise von Franz. She was a Swiss psychologist and a leading collaborator of Carl Jung, who specialized in the psychological interpretation of fairy tales. She argued that these stories are parables about how the unconscious mind interprets reality.

Of course, I understood the danger of immersing myself in the enigmatic world of fairy tales because one never knows what will happen. I might get the opposite of what I expected, and that’s precisely what happened after I read a chilling piece about fairytales by Scott Harshbarger.

He critiqued the fairytale Hansel and Gretel^⁠1 in the journal “Narrative, Social Neuroscience,”^⁠2 pointing out that the original story had a long history in German folklore before it was written down and published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812. He then gave his take on the plot.

The story takes place during a great famine. A woodcutter and his abusive wife banish their two children, abandoning them in the deep woods because they couldn’t afford to feed them. Without the children to care for, the parents selfishly think they will now have a better chance of survival. The wicked witch comes across Hansel and Gretel and lures the starving children into her gingerbread hut with a candy roof. However, instead of being a good Samaritan, she is salivating over the prospect of eating them.

The point of Grimm’s fairytale is to portray the witch as the enemy. Thus, when she burns in horrible agony after Gretel pushes her into the oven, "everyone lives happily forever after."

According to Harshbarger, Grimm's fairytales like Hansel and Gretel acted to promote German nationalism by switching attention from the Kaiser's ruthless treatment of his people to a more fundamental evil.

That evil, in the eyes of that patriarchy, were women they couldn’t control. The men were afraid of their mysterious powers rooted in nature, including, they claimed, their secret ability to turn into witches.

This scapegoating of women quickly escalated to deadly violence, resulting in the execution of thousands of women. Modern scholars estimate that between 35,000 and 60,000 women were burned at the stake between the 15th and 17th centuries, the most being in Germany. The typical witch was the wife of an agricultural laborer "well known for a quarrelsome and aggressive nature."⁠^⁠3 (Note: Don’t forget we burned witches in America, too. Remember the Salem witch trials?)

In a particular type of fairytale, there must be a villain, and that’s the kind Trump has propagated his whole career. The only question is, who will be the scapegoat in his new administration?

It’s unlikely Trump will launch witch-trial persecutions against women because that would likely backfire. In spite of that, he has waged a long-standing vendetta against women who dare challenge him, like belittling debate moderator Megyn Kelly with this unbelievable misogynistic slur: “You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”^⁠4

But the ultimate villain in Trump’s nationalistic fairytale will most likely be immigrants, who he calls an invading army of illegal aliens: rapists and murderers from "shithole" countries.

He will make immigrants his scapegoat to divert our attention from his authoritarian push for total power. If he pulls this off, he will destroy our democracy while ripping away the safety net from regular folks everywhere. The only beneficiaries will be Trump and his autocratic buddies.

America has to be careful about blaming innocent groups for the sins of others.: Look at what happened when a German Nationalist named Hitler started scapegoating the Jews.

xxx

Illustration from Showbiz CheatSheet: https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/gretel-hansel-why-isnt-there-a-gingerbread-house-in-the-movie.html/

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¹https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.47.4.490

²Vol. 47, No. 4, Narrative, Social Neuroscience, Plus Essays on Hecht's Poetry, Hardy's Fiction, and Kathy Acker (Winter 2013), pp. 490-508

³https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt#:~:text=Modern%20scholarly%20estimates%20place%20the,in%20European%20society%2C%20although%20in

⁴https://time.com/3989652/donald-trump-megyn-kelly-blood-wherever/

Sunday, January 19, 2025

We can't give up now!

John A Powell

We hear it whispered that our cherished American experiment in democracy – which we used to be so proud of – will soon go belly up. Neersaysers say that either our rapidly rising national debt will bankrupt us or that newly powerful nations like China will crush us.

But, to me, the biggest danger to our survival is our raging cultural wars, which are destroying us from within – the same way an autoimmune disorder destroys the human body from the inside out.

I’m acutely aware of how important the human body is right now after recently returning home from Concord Hospital, where they magically replaced a faulty valve in my heart through a catheter, sending me home the very next day. My recuperation is a powerful reminder that a person is pretty useless without a healthy body, just as a country can’t fight itself out of a paper bag if it is divided against itself.

Thirty years ago, the sociologist James Hunter came up with the term “cultural war” to describe this widening societal divide that is turning neighbors into enemies. Since then, the situation has worsened so much that he has written a new book warning us how “culture wars have so thoroughly poisoned American politics that they’ve made authoritarianism dangerously attractive to too many.”^⁠1

Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, NH was already starting to divide into camps, but I was still able to talk to acquaintances on the other side of the divide, engaging in amiable conversations about politics as if we were talking about which is better, a Chevy or a Ford. My arguments didn’t gain any converts, but I didn’t hate my opponents, and they didn’t hate me.

Hunter notes that such exchanges, even though they didn’t change minds, were valuable in enabling each side to view each other as fellow citizens, not the enemy. Now that has changed: Nothing is a laughing matter; everything has taken on life or death importance, as Hunter notes:

“America's culture wars have metastasized so that many groups believe they are in a maximalist battle against their own extinction. Whether it's far-right [white nationalists] panicking over the declining white birth rate, or academic theorists popularizing the belief that words are violence...”

We are increasingly viewing each other no longer as neighbors but as enemies. The gap is becoming unbridgeable. In this new cult of the individual, old community guidelines and aspirations have been trampled in the dirt.

We are exhausted from the continuing rancor and distrust while bracing ourselves, after the results of the election, for more hard times ahead. Enough is enough. Under the circumstances, it would be tempting to roll over and give up. But we can’t. There is more at stake than we realize.

What our founding fathers held dear was the Latin phrase embedded in our national motto, E pluribus unum, which translates to “out of many, one.” According to Hunter, this was the “founding aspiration and glue that holds our country together.” A crucial part of this agreement that makes Democracy work is “that we will not kill each other over our differences, but instead, we’ll talk through those differences.”^⁠2

The key phrase is “we will talk through our differences.”

Throughout history around the world, there has never been a civil war that didn’t start as a culture war. To forestall that possibility, we have to regain the fortitude and discipline to work through difficult issues in a responsible manner without flagrant lies and grandstanding.

Throughout our history, we have a decent track record in bridging our differences democratically, except, of course, for our Civil War. That exception led to the unimaginable slaughter of 620,000 of our fellow Americans, our own flesh and blood.

Tragically, we are approaching that danger zone once again as politicians like Trump delight in dividing us one against the other, paralyzing our democratic way of life, and replacing it with a transactional society where the person in power always wins; you know that person: the one, screaming in your ear, ‘What have you done for me lately?’

It’s time for calmer heads to prevail.

I recommend “The Power of Bridging” by John A. Powell, a law professor and civil rights advocate. It is “an insightful and moving exploration of belonging, bridging, and interconnectedness, challenging readers to embrace empathy and understanding in a world where everyone deserves to feel valued and accepted.”^⁠3

Powell makes one feel as if you are in the presence of Ganghi, as you can appreciate listening to this interview: https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101907966/john-a-powell-on-polarization-and-the-power-of-bridging.

xxx

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