Home is Where your Heart was Broken

My grandfather’s grandfather fought for the Confederacy. This is important because, in ideological terms, the southern rebellion continues to this day. For generations, the south was solidly Democratic because Lincoln freed the slaves. Now the South is almost as solidly Republican because Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My father was a second generation cotton farmer who later turned to peanuts. My mother was office manager\bookkeeper at a cotton gin that later became a fertilizer plant. Her father owned a machine shop that mostly repaired farm equipment. We were not poor by local standards. I attended segregated public schools for eight years and remained for another year while the segregation academy I attended for my last three years of high school was hastily created. Most of my graduating class did not continue their education. Almost all who did attended the near-by community college. I applied to a small liberal arts college and was accepted.

I learned early to use books as a place to stand to read my lived experience from beyond its own horizon. One thing I learned very quickly was that I was living in a cultural ghetto despised either openly or subtly by almost anyone clever enough to get a book published, and that the main thing I knew from personal experience that the clever people did not was how the people around me could possibly think of themselves as decent and their way of life as a culture worth preserving. I learned that what “they” were writing about “us” was often perfectly true as an observation from the outside but, typically, totally clueless as a description that did justice to life as it was immediately experienced by most of the people around me.

I became deeply suspicious of the absolute privileging of any one cultural frame as “objective” and much inclined to see questions of right and wrong as historically contingent and culturally relative. I enjoy working with students who are considered “culturally disadvantaged” because this attitude allows me to meet them where they are. I try to encourage them to use the books that they are reading to look back into their own experience from beyond the horizon of that experience and to notice especially those points where questions they can ask based on their own life-experience can cause the closure and coherence of the text to unravel. I think of this as encouraging them to read in everything they know from personal experience that had to be left out of the story to make the book's pretense to being all that is worth saying about some important aspect of the human condition plausible, to measure the truth of the text by the standard of what their lives have taught them.

This is what it means to read critically. Reading a book critically makes that book a magical apparatus that allows one to be two places at once, both inside one particular life speaking truth to any outside power on the absolute authority of having lived and in living learned not just to know but to be whatever human possibility that book's version of truth must deny to claim status as the whole truth of everything that ultimately matters in this business of being human and, at the same time, outside looking into that very same life from a place that makes it possible to know and notice things that no one trapped inside that life, knowing only what that one life could teach, could ever know or notice.

I’ve always been both insider and outsider in every culture I inhabit, both native and anthropologist writing reports for readers in some second home who may never be at home in the place I describe. Given my own origin in a cultural ghetto that was not recognized as such by most of the people who lived there, I’m especially aware of this duality of perspective when I work with Afro-American students in the inner city. Any ghetto is both a place of quarantine and a place of sanctuary where the life of a marginalized culture unfolds. Terrible things are routinely written about the inner city by people looking at that life-world from the outside. These things are often true but not at all useful from the perspective of someone trying to live the best life they can where they are and, maybe, eventually, either make that place better or move on to some better place.

I always wanted to move on to some better place and never understood good people, black or white, inner-city or down-home, who saw everything that was wrong from both the inside and the outside and said, “this is my home; I’m not going anywhere.” I’m wondering, for the first time, why I’ve never checked out opportunities at community colleges like the one most of my former high-school class-mates probably never made it through if they even tried. I’ve spent years meeting students where they are hoping to help them see beyond the horizon of what they have known of life so far. But, I’ve never considered that I might be the perfect person to do exactly that in the place where I first discovered the transforming power of reading books as a way of reading the world of immediate experience more deeply than common sense goes.

Trauma

Trauma

I remember an episode when I was about ten. I was telling my friend, Ben Shelley, about watching the building of the big house out in the country where my maternal grandparents lived. The image of my grandfather using a disk drawn by mules to dig out what would become a basement so big that it was more like a third story buried underground below the two stories visible above ground; this was burned into my memory as something unforgettable. I was as sure that I had witnessed that important moment as I was of anything.

This is why I was crying hysterically ten minutes later after my mom, having overheard our conversation, spent those intervening minutes insisting that I could not possibly remember seeing my grandfather dig that basement out in 1935. The math of my claim just did not work out given that I was born 19 years later in 1954. Specifically, I was born to a mom who had been a cute little red-headed girl back in 1935. This little girl actually had stood enraptured on more than one occasion in the summer of that year watching her father dig out a basement that looked to her at the time to be as vast and miraculous as the Grand Canyon.

This was one of the cherished memories of my mom’s childhood and she told the story often. There was a framed picture of the event hanging on the wall of the parlor of the house that my grandfather built as a spacious and comfy nest for his growing brood. I had seen it often and my mom showed it to me once again when next we made our usual Sunday visit to the home-place. The picture agreed perfectly with my own vivid memory of the occurrence down to last detail. I even remembered correctly that my bald-on-top grandfather had a full head of impressive steel gray hair back then. My eyewitness account and my mom’s agreed perfectly except for one detail; I remembered being there but my mom was certain that I was not present.

False memories are not rare and mysterious. They are so common that it would be fair to say that any person selected at random from the general population and told to write a memoir of his or her life so far would put down a great deal in perfect good faith as gospel truth that a detailed and extensive investigation would reveal as demonstrably not possible based on documents and other forms of hard evidence generated during the periods of time being recalled. Elizabeth Loftus, among others, has established that the profound faith juries put in eyewitness testimony is not even remotely justified by what research has now established about the accuracy of eyewitness accounts (Loftus, 1996). It has been a joke among lawyers for many years that four eyewitnesses to the same event will give five different versions of the event. Loftus and others have now been able to generate solid research findings verifying the suspicions experienced trial attorneys have always, but only in private or when taking an eyewitness account at face value would convict their client, felt about the truth value of eyewitness testimony. One thing that almost all of the persons exonerated by DNA evidence have in common is the strong role played by eyewitness testimony in their original convictions (The Innocence Project).

“We are memories which act” as Henri Laborit says playing himself as a kind of Greek chorus in Alan Resnais’ Mon Oncle D'amérique (1980), a film whose characters’ lives provide three interwoven plots which, all together, illustrate Laborit’s conception of the self as a memory that acts. Laborit and the late Australian narrative therapist, Michael White, have provided me with the materials out of which I have built my own conception of the self as a memory which acts (White, 1990). Findings from neuroscience about the mechanism of storage and retrieval of memories also provided not so much inspiration as cross-validation from another very different disciplinary perspective of what I thought I already knew. This conception is the frame within which I interpret any question concerning the truth or falsity of memories or the authenticity of the self which acts the remembrance of things past.

Henri Laborit was a behaviorist with a difference. He felt that what we each carry into the next present moment from the past was a trace left by the schedules of reinforcement that we had experienced in the past. This trace was memory and a memory is true if it is part of what is being performed as self in the present. Laborit is claiming that what is remembered is true whether the memory is factual or not; a memory contrary to fact will still be the past that is carried forward into the present by that memory when it acts (Laborit, 1977). The level of neurosis suffered by any given performative self can, however, be measured as the distance between what is factual and what is remembered. When that gap becomes so wide that memory performed in the present is not coupled to the present facts at all, the result is a full psychotic break. However, Laborit always emphasized that what is factual and what is true does not agree perfectly for any of us. The past that is remembered and performed in the present is always a revisionist history that leaves out the facts that will not fit into the story of how the memory-self performing in the present came to be.

Michael White’s approach to therapy was based on editing and re-visioning (seeing again) the revisionist past that created a performative self which was problematic or painful to live out in the present (White, 1990). This was done by searching for episodes from the past that had been edited out of the revisionist history of this problematic self to re-vision back in as a way to undermine the problematic aspects of that memory which acts in the present. To the extent that this re-visioning is both possible and therapeutically useful, the past can be changed to make the memory that performs in the present less dysfunctional.

I was fascinated to discover that the current view of the molecular mechanisms of memory acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval is compatible with the vision of how memory works that I had formed, taking ideas mostly from Laborit and White (Abel & Lattal, 2001). My knowledge of neuroscience is sketchy and superficial, but to the extent that I understand what is currently believed to be the case by psychologists who specialize in this area, their micro-level description of the processes of memory dovetails with the macro-level account I offered above. At the most crudely simplistic level, what is stored when an episode is stored in long-term memory is a protein. When the episode is recalled, the protein is broken down by an enzyme. The result of this is a firing of neurons in a pattern that creates the conscious recall of the episode as a subjective experience. My understanding is that the protein that stores the memory is destroyed at each moment of recall and then re-synthesized immediately after recall for storage in long-term memory. This would make each instance of recall a re-visioning (seeing again) of the episode different from the original subjective experience of the episode in ways determined by changes in attitude since that time or the acquisition of new information that might change the way the episode was interpreted.

Each re-synthesis of the protein stored for later recall would then also be a re-vision that changed aspects of the original subjective experience. The first time a wife meets her future husband will be re-visioned differently one year later if the marriage is happy than it was one day, one week or one month after that initial encounter and will be re-visioned again five years later in the midst of an ugly divorce. All of these variations are visions of the past that were true memories of that initial encounter at one moment of recall. The past changes each time our revisionist history of who we are and how we got that way is re-visioned yet again.

The McNally article took an approach to looking at a controversial topic, recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, which appealed to me. If P then Q,: ~Q then ~P has been the standard logic of scientific discovery since Popper (2002). In this case, if a sample of people are repressing memories of childhood sexual abuse (P) then this repression should make them take longer to notice the color of ink a word such as incest or abuse is printed in than it normally would to perform this cognitive task if the word involved were emotionally neutral (Q). Trying to falsify/fail to falsify a controversial P by testing to see if a trivial Q that would follow if P were true is a good way to examine that controversial P without entering into the main controversy over P in any direct way.

As Richard McNally states, “Although cognitive psychology methods cannot distinguish true memories from false ones, these methods can illuminate mechanisms for remembering and forgetting among people reporting histories of trauma” (McNally, 2003, p. 32). It can then be asked if the pattern found in the mechanism for remembering and forgetting observed in this sample matches what one would expect if the memories were true or more the pattern one would expect if the memories where false and perhaps constructed with the inadvertent assistance of a well-meaning mental health professional.

McNally looked at the differences among a control sample who reported no childhood sexual abuse (CSA), a sample who reported continuous memories of CSA, a sample who reported recovered memories of CSA, and a sample who believed on the basis of various forms of current psychological distress that they had repressed memories of CSA. The control groups and the continuous memory sample did not differ on measures of negative affect. The repressed memory sample scored highest on negative affect with the recovered memory sample scoring between the repressed memory sample and the control and continuous memory groups.

McNally also looked at the tendency to forget trauma-related material using a directed forgetting methodology to test the hypothesis that CSA survivors who are most severely distressed are much better able to disengage attention from trauma-related material. McNally used three samples: CSA survivors with PTSD, psychiatrically healthy CSA survivors, and non-abused control subjects to test this hypothesis. The results showed the exact opposite pattern from what one would expect if the hypothesis were true; the most distressed CSA survivors had much greater trouble forgetting trauma-related material even when instructed to do so than either of the other two groups. Taken at face value, these results would seem to indicate that the more traumatic a memory, the less likely that memory is to be repressed. This makes a great deal of sense If PTSD is defined as the emotional state of being highly prone to slip back into the state of mind experienced in response to an overwhelming trauma. PTSD is normally described in this way, not as a forgetting of traumatic memories but as an inability to forget so profound that it amounts to an endless cycle of iterations of the original trauma in flashbacks which carry the full negative affect of the original trauma.

If, as I argued above, false memories are a common and routine part of just about everyone’s subjective experience, then there is no reason to believe that all memories of abuse, even those that carry a charge of negative affect powerful enough to generate symptoms sufficient to satisfy all four DSM criteria for mental illness, are factual. Taking seriously Laborit’s insistence that memories can be true which are not factual is necessary to making sense of this situation. The memory which performs the self in the present moment is acting out of childhood sexual abuse all the same whether this abuse was factual or not. The question of whether recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse which are true therapeutically were factual was present at the creation of the talking cure as a major problem not just theoretical but political faced by Freud; the problem was political because Freud was intensely aware that coming forward with the claim that a clear majority of his patients, a group made up mostly of women drawn from the upper crust of Viennese society, factually had been incested before puberty, mostly by their fathers, would cause a backlash of scandal that would kill psychoanalysis in its cradle. Freud was pragmatic enough to know that, even if this were true, the result of saying so would bring shame and disrepute upon the outsider, the Jewish doctor, who dared to make the accusation and not upon the pillars of society being accused.

Freud also knew that his patients made their best progress if he conducted therapy as if it were true that they had been incested by their fathers. Freud’s solution was the creation of the Electra complex, a way of defining memories of CSA as true for proposes of therapy but not factual. The debate has gone on ever since and still continues today about whether Freud really believed in his own theory of the Electra complex or merely used it as a way to continue doing the most successful kind of therapy he knew how to do with women who had suffered CSA without being obliged to destroy himself and his new science in a head-on confrontation with the ruling patriarchs of Viennese society in the Victoria Era.

Some critics think Freud actually believed in the Electra complex but was wrong to do so and right before, at first when he believed the stories of CSA he was hearing so often and thought of them as being simply factual. Others accuse Freud of outright complicity after the fact with the abusers, seeing the Electra complex as a cover-up that Freud consciously fabricated to be just that and nothing more (Masson, 1984; Masson, 2003). If Judith Herman’s (2000) rough estimate that one in three women in the general population is a victim of CSA is accurate, CSA is not the rare grizzly horror we have conspired since at least the time of Freud to pretend it to be but a common event in the life of many young girls. This debate is intensely political on both sides and is being carried out between one side that sees a centuries-long conspiracy to deny what so often happens to young girls and another side that refuses to believe that the grizzly horror is so terribly common-place.

My habitual way of looking at the self which performs in each consecutive present moment as a memory which acts also informs my response to the issues raised in the Bonanno article on resiliency. At each such moment, we respond not out of what factually happened but out of what is true for the acting memory in that present moment. Resiliency in face of a truly awful loss has a very obvious explanation when considered in light of this point of view. Resiliency will prove possible if the factual loss is being performed as a true memory that is close enough to the factual to maintain the structural coupling of the memory which acts to the actual while, at the same time, being a true memory which can perform as a going on into each consecutive present moment as a continuation of what one has been and done before continued in light of and in spite of the loss as remembered and acted out as a going on from that continues performing the same self and living the same life as before.

Resiliency is not possible if the memory which acts feels stuck or cannot perform the present moment as a going on from the loss as the same person living the same life as before. Resiliency acts the memory of a loss as something that one goes on after. Lack of resiliency acts the memory of loss as a break, a being stuck, a not being able to go on as the same person living the same life as before. Interventions with people who are going on from the loss as memories which act the loss but can still go on can only do more harm than good. Such interventions are worse than examples of intervening to fix something that is not broken. They are examples of interventions which can only serve to undermine and bring into question the coping strategies whereby the brokenness of a major loss has been fixed so that going on in light of and in spite of is possible. Intervention is needed when the memory of loss which is acting in the present moment is stuck and cannot perform as a going on from as the same person living the same life. This break in the continuity of the self one has been and the life one has lived is the thing broken that needs fixing. The brokenness of this self and the stuckness of this life will be fixed when a way is found to remember the loss in a way that can be performed as a going on in light of and in spite of.

References:

Abel, T., & Lattal, M. (2001). Molecular mechanisms of memory acquisition, consolidation and retrieval. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 11,180–187.

Bonanno, G. (2008). Resilience in the face of potential trauma. Bonanno, George A. Lilienfeld, Scott O. (Ed.); Ruscio, John (Ed.); Lynn, Steven Jay (Ed.); Amherst, NY, US: Prometheus Books, 2008. pp. 239–248.

Dussart, P. (Producer), & Resnais, A. (Director). (1980). My American uncle. [Motion Picture]. France: Andrea Decoding the Human Message Films.

Herman, J. L. (2000). Father-daughter incest. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Laborit, H. (1977). Decoding the human message. London: Allison & Busby.

Loftus, E. The formation of false memories. Retrieved June 10, 2013, from http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Py104/loftus.mem.html

Loftus, E. (1996). Eyewitness testimony. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Masson, J. M. (1984). Freud and the seduction theory: A challenge to the foundations of psychoanalysis. The Atlantic Monthly, February 1984.

Masson, J. M. (2003). Assault on truth: Freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. New York: Ballantine Books.

McNally, R. (2003). Recovering memories of trauma: A view from the laboratory. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(1), 32–35.

Popper, K. (2002). The logic of scientific discovery. New York: Routledge.

The Innocence Project. Eyewitness misidentification. Retrieved from http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Eyewitness-Misidentification.php

White, M. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Guns

I've become an insurrectionist on 2^nd amendment issues in just the past few months for a reason that will probably surprise you. I spend a lot of time on Skype and Second Life doing ESL – Conversational English with Russians. One of the great things about conversational English is that someone else is providing formal instruction in the language. All I have to do is provide opportunities to practice and a kind of quality control.

The quality control comes in because I work with Russians, some working adults and some still in school, who have been failed horribly by the Russian educational system k-20; a much lower percentage of Russians can converse in English well enough to, say, feel comfortable and confident negotiating a contact, than you would find in any EU country. This is a problem because English has become the de facto second language of the world. One big reason for this was the disappearance of a huge economic bloc, isolated from the rest of the world, where ambitious people learned Russian whether they were Russian or not because Russian was the de facto language of power and prestige there. Very few people in the old Soviet Union could speak English, though many more could read and translate.

Anyway”””. I provide practice and an opportunity to prove to themselves that they really are learning spoken English better and better as evidenced by the fact that they are finding causal conversation with a native speaker easier and easier as time goes on. We can talk about anything we want as long as we keep the conversation at least a little above the level of: ”Is there a book on the table. Is that John's book on the table”. My students are most interested in questions about how exactly life in America is different from life in Russia. The two things that most of them know about America is that all Americans eat out constantly and never cook at home and are armed to the teeth. It is definitely the part about being armed to the teeth that they envy greatly.

I've been asked many times if I own a gun and a few times how many guns I own. When I ask in response why this is so important to them, the ones who bring up guns, which is well more than half of them in the long run, immediately start giving me the insurrectionist argument for making and keeping the right of the people to bear arms absolute with genuine passion. If I keep asking questions so that they will tell me rather than waiting for me to tell them, this gets articulated into a very well worked-out and quite consistent theory of general principle privileging the right to own guns as one right that people must have in order to have any rights at all,. I love having this conversation because it causes the Russians involved to focus on stating clearly something they are trying to persuade me to accept as an important truth rather than on how they are saying things. This also helps me slide over into American politics, which really helps keep the conversation going given that I am a news junkie and they are fascinated by any description of what really goes on in American and why. This is the one hot-button issue in American politics where hearing what Russians have to say has changed my own stance.

Samael

Many people have wondered if they might be a character in a novel or if every author creates a world. There is a wrinkle here that makes this insight even more interesting. It involves embracing both actualities at once to create an infinite regress. I am the author; I mean in your particular case. This posting and the moment when you sit reading this posting is detailed on page 37 of a meta-novel about creative writing considered as a use of narrative means to achieve therapeutic ends. I wrote this back in 1973, during my Barthelme Period or, as some unkind critics have dubbed it, my “Soused Period”. That's right friends and neighbors; I invented blogs even before Al Gore invented the Internet. Being young and foolish at the time, I did not realize that I also was a character in a novel written by someone else, making you a dream within a dream and my author a God in a higher heaven. The real secret about the one true secret name of God is that no one knows it. If you think you do, you are denying the unknown and unnamed God in a higher heaven, which makes you not God but Samael, the blind angel whose blindness is the madness of thinking that “Samael” is the one true name of God and that what he sees when he looks in the mirror is just divine, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help him God.

The argument being made here is that, being omniscient, Samael can be neither mistaken, deluded or deceived. Imagine some lunatic who thinks he is Napoleon pointing at his reflection in a mirror and inviting you to accept the obvious and you've got the problem here. What pisses Samael off more than anything is when someone starts asking rude questions about the creation myth that proves that Samael hung the moon, shit the stars and turned out all of our souls like Aunt Julie baking Gingerbread Men. We have enjoyed the many benefits of AIDS, Ebola and two terms worth of George W. Bush only because some people arrogantly refused to take Samael's version of who we are, how we got here and of why there is a “here” for us to be at face-value. This is not the typical reaction, which is very important to Samael's state of emotional well-being, precarious as that might be. These cookie-monsters much more often sit up, look around, see the world, see Samael standing there doing his trade-mark infinite beard in a long white spirit shtick and spontaneous speak the first prayer, which goes, “Damn Dude, you have one hell of a genius imagination! What were you thinking when you came up with bobbies?” When girls sit up and look around, they almost never ask about the penis first thing. Some people just don't feel the magic of a true miracle even when you put one right inside them.

Samael is the most jealous of Gods by virtue of being the most insecure; think of him as a high maintenance girl-friend who can cause plagues and you are plenty close enough to predict the tortured past and bleak future of any dumb-ass clueless enough to worship this turkey. Those types typically call themselves Baptists but we all know who they really worship and what they do to their kids to make sure they grow up Baptist all the way down and not still half-human in a broken sort of way, but ashamed enough of being even vaguely human or humane to stay in the closet about it even with their kids, who typically get the full treatment because their parents are afraid word will get around if they do anything less. In a “culture” where sadistic pedophile incest is a core aspect of persona and an essential part of what being a respectable person who can be trusted to raise children right means, the shadow contains the slightest twinge of guilt evoked by the bloody underpants of one's spawn, each of them destined at birth to be sacrificed to Samael in a secret ritual that dares not speak its name or call on anything holy except by the name and in the name of Samael. Issac grows up to be Abraham and the autocatalytic cycle of shame and abuse continues like nothing new under the son. Will the circle go unbroken? Well, it has up until now. See The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich or a dinner table anywhere down south on Thanksgiving Day for further details.

A Guide to the Perplexed

Dear Pius XII,

I need your advice on something weird. For the last 12 months random things have being disappearing from my house, toilet paper, toothpaste, laundry liquid, chicken fillets and even money. There have been no break ins, no one has a spare key and yet these things are vanishing from one day to the next. Do I have a Demon or a poltergeist and if so how do I get rid of it.”

Yours Truly,

Uncle Joe Stalin

Uncle Joe,

I have your stuff. It has been appearing without rhyme or reason on the big screened porch on the back of my house for the last year. I'm sorry about the raccoon. A critter with an electric blue strip running down his back and continuing in the same shade in a barber pole configuration around the tail is certainly distinctive. But, this gave me no idea who to call when the distressed yawls of my cat signaled me that something unusual, which turned out to be your critter's mysterious and unexpected arrival, was occurring out in the sun-room.

I don't think Kristoff would be alive today if I had not realized instantly that what he was complaining bitterly about was the unreasonable way your guy defined him as prey at first glance without even asking where he went to church or how he voted. That is considered at best rude and ,at worst, cop-like behavior where we come from. You don't just decide to kill a fellow creature just for shits and giggles without, at very least, making sure you do not have friends in common first. For all your guy knew, Kristoff could have been a Mason. We were both fine with letting him set up shop out in the back yard. There was even a dog or two that comes around that we were hoping he would take care of for us in response to our kind-hearted hospitality.

Your guy hung around for a week or so living high on the hog in our spacious and well-provisioned suburban garbage can. According to the Brookfield Zoo, there are, at present, several times as many raccoon {as with “moose” singular and plural are the same} in North America as there were when Columbus opened up a lively trade in infectious diseases that made life more exciting on both sides of the water. Also according to BZ, The preferred contemporary habitat of a race grown more cosmopolitan and civilized as they have grown more numerous is the suburban garbage can, so your guy was treated as he deserved until he decided, with absolutely no encouragement from us, to take himself elsewhere, without, I might add, doing anything about those dogs. I hope for your sake that he got bored and came home but I really would not know. Anyway”””””. Send me your address, $300 for shipping and handling and another $300 for one year's storage and I will get your stuff back to you. This is a message from God but you will need to decoder ring to get much benefit from it. I'll slip that in for free just so you will not spend your life wandering around all troubled and perplexed by life's mysteries.

Sure Hope this Cheers You Up,

Pius XII

The Stranger God

God is the concept by which we measure our pain. The Shadow of God, in exactly Jung's sense, is love. Love flows like blood from any wound deep enough to kill the idea of justice, which is finally the idea that this world makes a human kind of sense, was made for us by the same voice that spoke our souls into being. In the beginning was the word, and a dead soulless world that made the word a lie, that made what we could not go on being what we were without believing a denial of the reality of the dead world around us. Either that world or our souls could be real and true but not both. When justice dies, love begins as the ghost of something departed, becoming the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, in so doing, turning a nevermore into a not yet, a thing lost into a thing not yet found. Love is the hidden heart of a heartless world. No one crawling on this blighted star has even seen love, nor any evidence of love. It is what we must believe in order to keep moving in any direction after any reasonable hope of prospering or finding anything in this world which satisfies has been killed by experience. We call this hope innocence. It is what we lose when we realize where we are, and that where we are is what happens when the forces that favor us are driven from the field, quarantined outside of time and space, and reduced to nothing more than a voice trapped inside our thickness of skulls and tongues, silenced and powerless outside the solitary confinement of those skulls; we are souls who believe in water because we are parched with thirst in a world as dry as the dust in some grave so ancient and forgotten that no one can name what was in that grave before dry dust.

Chekhov

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC6W8J0j8Co

I just finished doing a conversational English session via Skype with a student in Moscow. He did not say a lot. I had to prompt him with questions. When he did speak his accent was not a problem for me in understanding him. He plays video games in English and likes American music but does not watch American Movies or TV shows. I would be tempted, next time, to send him a YouTube Video to watch before the conversation so that we can have something more definite to talk about. He was fun for me to talk to because he sounds exactly like the character “Chekhov” in the original “Star Trek” TV show that I watched as a teenager. It was a running joke on Star Trek that, according to Chekhov, everything of any significance was invented in Russia.

Rape

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/03/the-math-that-keeps-helping-college-rapists.html

“A relatively small proportion of men are responsible for a large number of rapes,” the 2002 study notes. “ I have never raped anyone or even had to resist the temptation. But I have lived my life in a rape culture, a culture where men so often get away with it that any women is a potential victim with every reason to be suspicious of a male stranger who is a little too friendly. I have lived my life in the culture that these few men and the ideas and institutions that let them get away with it have created. It is not a good place to be female. It is also not a good place to be male. Unless, of course, you are the kind of man who would rather get away with it than to live in a world where women do not have to fear men in general because the ones who want to get away with it and can look just like the ones who don't.

Rape Poem
by Marge Piercy

“There is no difference between being raped
and being pushed down a flight of cement steps
except that the wounds also bleed inside.

There is no difference between being raped
and being run over by a truck
except that afterward men ask if you enjoyed it.

There is no difference between being raped
and being bit on the ankle by a rattlesnake
except that people ask if your skirt was short
and why you were out alone anyhow.

There is no difference between being raped
and going head first through a windshield
except that afterward you are afraid
not of cars
but half the human race.

The rapist is your boyfriend’s brother.
He sits beside you in the movies eating popcorn.
Rape fattens on the fantasies of the normal male
like a maggot in garbage.

Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing
all of the time on a woman’s hunched back.
Never to stroll alone on a sand road through pine woods,
never to climb a trail across a bald
without that aluminum in the mouth
when I see a man climbing toward me.

Never to open the door to a knock
without that razor just grazing the throat.
The fear of the dark side of hedges,
the back seat of the car, the empty house
rattling keys like a snake’s warning.
The fear of the smiling man
in whose pocket is a knife.
The fear of the serious man
in whose fist is locked hatred.

All it takes to cast a rapist to be able to see your body
as jackhammer, as blowtorch, as adding-machine-gun.
All it takes is hating that body
your own, your self, your muscle softens to flab.

All it takes is to push what you hate,
what you fear onto the soft alien flesh.
To bucket out invincible as a tank
armored with treads without senses
to possess and punish in one act,
to rip up pleasure, to murder those who dare
live in the left flesh open to love.”

(Source: neverapologizeforstrength)