How to speak of climate chaos brewing??

Posted on November 4, 2022 by Steve Benson

The more people are led to anticipate getting through the climate emergency all right, the more likely they are, I think, to turn their focus on other concerns, of which there are all too many these days, locally, nationally, and internationally. Broadly stated categorical statements predictive of the end of times will be largely dismissed or will in some folks validate their inaction. They will lead others to get active one way or another, locally or on a larger scale. Reductive oversimplification of the positions of scientists or commentators will also lead to inaction, for the most part, for instance when Deep Adaptation’s activists are inaccurately represented as hopeless doom-sayers. Publicity from advocates for terrific technological engineering of solutions to the climate crisis will likely reduce activism and problem-solving on a local scale or retard the challenging projects iunvolved in fundamentally different systems of economic, commercial, and political processes.

I firmly believe that all predictions are off, including predictions of just how collapses, unravelings, and catastrophes will occur and when, and how people will respond and when. The whole situation is truly unprecedented. We can only predict that it will get more severe. Will that lead to more citizen activism? I presume so.

Meanwhile, large scale national and international systems and customs seem to show little to no sign of transformation at this point. We don’t really need to decide whether humanity will go extinct or whether Wallace-Wells’ upbeat enthusiasm is justified. There are many fronts on which radical and urgent action is desperately needed and not happening, particularly to address the recent, current, and coming harms coming to the ecosystems and safe survival of people of color and the “global south” as climate chaos advances its mercurial designs. To focus on helping people in the NYTimes readership feel optimism and acceptance of our demographic’s hopes for less disruption and more safety in the coming era feels to me like a willing extension of the betrayal of our sisters and brothers around this home planet, a continuing exploitation we can’t easily fight our way out of.

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How do I deal with climate change anxiety?

Posted on January 16, 2022 by Steve Benson

I call our situation climate emergency, rather than climate change. The word and idea of change makes me anxious, emergency makes me want to swing into action and see others do so too, while looking out for one another as backup and protectors to one another. I understand that the emergency is already underway and getting more severe by the week; there’s no reason therefore to worry about whether it will happen or not. I also understand that I can’t stop it, and in fact that no one can stop it now. The scientific consensus has been clear on all this.

As a result of all this, I believe I feel much more grief than I feel anxiety, while I can admit also to feeling psychologically traumatized.

Grief may include fear, sorrow, guilt, shame, blame, fury, numbness, confusion, disorientation, and other sensitive and often intense feelings. Grief is a complex and instable discombobulation of feelings seeking acceptance and resolution, which is bound to be difficult to stabilize as long as the emergency is in its radically mutable unraveling, which I am obliged to assume will take far longer than I can stay alive to witness it. So I accept my grief reactions as realistic and acceptable, without anticipating their resolution or end. My emotions may or may not get more intense; I assume they will vary and take on different forms and characteristics in the years to come.

There isn’t a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) effect involved in my experience of trauma over the climate emergency, since we are not “post-traumatic” but within a developing trauma; also I feel it’s a common trauma for our entire ecosphere, including all humans, all feeling and overwhelmed, and all life forms and including Gaia as a whole. There’s a lot of suffering to consider in all this,. The climate emergency and the suffering and grieving that are entailed have the status of a hyperobject for me, in that it all happens in more dimensions and interrelated consequences than I can expect to be consciously aware of and it’s much much bigger than me and those people I happen to know.

I don’t read a lot of news of environmental changes, mitigation proposals, species extinction, or supply chain problems. I know I will not remember details on such news and hypotheses but will be likely to stoke up anxiety and stress by trying to stay focused on the constantly amassing news and fixers. I just try to have a significant general impression, which is gradually and increasingly that we are in for it, bigtime, on a global scale.

I acknowledge my good fortune and gratitude at living where I do, at being thrifty over the years, at my community’s manifest resilience and cultural sensitivity. I acknowledge my privilege as a white cisgender male born into the middle class in the most affluent nation on the planet, leading me to prepare mentally to allow my own precarity to emerge and my own standard of living to decline, hoping I will not freeze or starve in old age — unlikely, as some family members would likely seek to support me if danger accrues.

I encourage and permit myself to indulge in distractions, to walk in the woods, to swim in a cove, to listen to an historical novel, to see films that I feel will matter to me as films, as well as some that have sociopolitical or documentary analyses of issues that matter to me.

I show up for demonstrations and some online meetings. I don’t try to serve the movement(s) in ways I feel uncomfortable or inept at, knowing these are likely to lead me subjectively to increased stress, frustration, depression, and hopelessness. I am grateful to those who can work in those ways effectively without becoming debilitated.

Deep breath, long deep sigh. (This helps settle the central nervous system.)
Mindfulness practices: breath meditation, sensory attention to the present moment.
Walks outdoors, especially within view of sky, trees, waters. Noticing little things.
Physical exercise that’s a pleasure, finding definite ways to schedule this.

(I talk to myself, usually these days in an internal dialogue, silent to others. This allows me to calm myself at times, as a sensibly steady voice can counter an hysterical, frightened, or grievously overwhelmed voice, to calm it and reassure it in some ways.)

At my age I don’t worry about impacts on me personally, and not too much about my local community, since I think that direct effects on us in Downeast Maine will be minor until major supply chains and federal agencies fall apart, aside from the growing problematic effects on our local fisheries. (I don’t anticipate become a qualified analyst of the fishing industry’s entanglement with changing climate effects on the fisheries and laws, so I agree with myself to let others think this out.)

Personally, I worry about the terrible suffering of great numbers of current and future refugees and populations around the world without safe water or at the mercy of autocratic regimes, civil wars, and governmental collapses. I read and try to keep learning, but I don’t perpetually research all of these. I also feel a terrible deep concern for all the children and young adults of our time who contemplate their uncertain prospects and will face impacts of the climate emergency far worse than we have seen so far. I recognize that it may be helpful to voice support for some of these peoples or crises where I can and to donate the modest amounts of money I feel I can afford responsibly, to assist them in a focused way. So I sometimes do that.

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The Poetics of Extinction Rebellion

Posted on April 10, 2021 by Steve Benson

Our global physical environment is increasingly altered by the consequences of human conflict and economic growth, as a global consumer market drives short-term profits and prioritizes technologies of degradation throughout the ecological inheritance of living species. Generally, people have great difficulty accepting and responding to climate change and large-scale pollution (including plastics, antibiotics, airborne industrial wastes, mining, and insecticides, as well as radioactive materials scattered by military violence). Many potentially toxic materials now infest our bodies from the time of conception, as well as our entire global atmosphere and all aquatic environments. It seems so terribly out of control. Is anyone in even marginal control?

Does humanity control climate?
Does climate control humanity?
Does climate control itself?
Does humanity control itself?

The omnipresent global climate emergency, like its feisty little sister, coronavirus-19, is comprehensible as the outcome of innumerable impulsively pursued means of generating economic and military advantage among humankind. A response that might preserve intelligent life forms on the planet will require a displacement of human intentionality from primarily human-centered purposes and goals, into the field of mutual co-creation between human and non-human forms of life and other agencies of our ecological given on which all living beings depend.

Realizing a flexibly integrated and self-adjusting mutuality among this range of agents and circumstances calls for a shift in identification from the human individual and also from the tribe or nation to what Donna Haraway calls sympoesis. Sympoesis involves a making and becoming cooperatively between unlike species that may lead to radically different outcomes than would one species acting alone. Sympoiesis means “making-with” and can be applied to the functioning of specific instances of the natural world as well as “to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems.” Haraway states as an underlying principle that “Perhaps as sensual molecular curiosity and definitely as insatiable hunger, irresistible attraction toward enfolding each other is the vital motor of living and dying on earth.” A paradigm inclusive of such a factor as universal co-creation and perpetual mutual adaptation of all features and facets of existence will have to be ascendant, if humanity is to adapt constructively to the conditions we are precipitating.

Given the magnitude, the velocity, the tipping points, the snowballing, and misunderstandings of the climate emergency as we hear of it, we may struggle to understand what it is or would be to understand it, beyond an assembly of continually evolving and revised findings of the latest from applied sciences. Kish and Quilley, of the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Resources, and Sustainability, believe that the “profound transformation required of material conditions of life and corresponding social characteristics . . . would increasingly engender paradigmatic changes at the level of ideas, linguistic and perceptual categories, average personality structures and socially sanctioned patterns of behavior.” In other words, don’t expect to know your ass from anyone else’s elbow.

The mind doesn’t know what to try to wrap itself around, beyond this encroaching and actualizing flood of overwhelming crises and disruptions. Is social collapse within the range of what we may formulate as real, and thus within the range of humanity’s potential to encounter and affect, or is it, more brutally, simply beyond reckoning? Is the reality of our situation beyond our capacity to frame its truth?

We humans are familiar with splitting in our apprehension of natural forces and resources – what we are used to calling “nature” is an idealized, bountiful, generous source of life and freedom and inspiration, and on the other hand sometimes it is an impervious danger and an obstacle to be defended against when it cannot be eliminated or exploited as an instrument toward human goals. This splitting in our views on nature tends to obfuscate any means of appreciating how non-human factors may exercise agency and sustainability in cooperation with one another and even with human beings.

In a paper in 1919, Sigmund Freud viewed the uncanny as one feature of an aesthetics of anxiety. The uncanny may appear when what formerly seemed natural, familiar, even a comfort, is recognized afresh as dreadful, imminently dangerous, or terrifying. He writes that “this uncanny is in reality nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression.”

To awaken to the uncanny involves seeing, or seeming to see, that which was perfectly present and possibly evident but unseen, occluded or avoided in apprehension, until this time. The eerie alarm at this sort of acute ambivalence may result in a virtual paralysis of inactivity, reminiscent of “that sense of helplessness sometimes experienced in dreams.” Freud writes that the uncanny’s “factor of involuntary repetition. . . forces upon us the idea of something fateful and inescapable.” He then postulates “the principle of a repetition-compulsion in the unconscious mind, . . . a principle powerful enough to overrule the pleasure-principle, lending to certain aspects of mind their daemonic character . . . [W]hatever reminds us of this inner repetition-compulsion is perceived as uncanny.”

Along with anyone’s awe and admiration for the constructions and applications made possible by advanced technology, there may persist, under repression, the primordial infantile ferocity of anyone’s will to dominate, to destroy, to ravage any given space or relationship. Winnicott found it “necessary to describe a theoretical stage of unconcern or ruthlessness in which the child can be said to exist as a person and to have purpose, yet to be unconcerned as to results. He does not yet appreciate the fact that what he destroys when excited is the same as that which he values in quiet intervals between excitements.” Once this psychic appetite becomes abhorrent and unacceptable, it may be denied and projected onto the non-human world in a variety of ways.
I suspect such a will to power and violence may underlie our acquiescence to the global climate emergency, the extinction of countless other species, the horrors of war, and the persistent degradation of our environment. To come to terms with our share in and collusion with death and destruction on a global ecological scale may entail first our adjustment to “a feeling of the uncanny,” before we can surrender our habituated premises and identities enough to join in formulating well grounded paradigms for a livable future.
This road through and beyond the burgeoning calamities and catastrophes of climate change throws into radical uncertainty any premise of ‘control’ based in human agency alone. In a recent paper in response to the current pandemic, Jill Gentile offers an ambivalent acknowledgement that “the weird had been training us for [. . .] a break in the conventional ordering of knowledge, conditioning us to bear and possibly even acquire a taste for the uncertainty, precarity, and tumult of being alive. [. . . I]n this altering space-time, we must listen between orders of the familiar and dis/orders of the strange. [. . .] We can also inscribe into our theory such a new imaginary, a new (dis)order [. . .] a democratic, contradictory, uncanny Strange. This novel conceptual space would be a ‘position’ beyond the depressive position, that reliable old ‘final outpost’ of healing and ‘postoedipal’ living.” Haraway’s model of sympoesis may offer a template for this new position.
The activist movement Extinction Rebellion, from its choice of a name for itself to its worldwide simultaneous street happenings, has for nearly two years been applying principles of an innovative, improvisatory poetics to the contemporary conundrums, contradictions, and compromise-formations that keep our society stuck barreling down the track for eventual exhaustion of the conditions of life. Extinction Rebellion attempts to face the emergence of our uncanny predicament head on, disrupting the face and alliances of conventional contemporary continuities and the seeming reliability of an everyday model of business as usual.

Extinction Rebellion advocates and stages mass urban demonstrations that facilitate and structure episodes of civil disobedience, in order to disrupt the steady flow of commerce and rationalization, utilizing imaginative forms and props to draw attention to and encourage interest in the devastating climatic and social disturbances that are coming to alter everything. Roger Hallam, a co-founder, writes that “Direct-action design has to create desirable symbolic interruption – the meaning structures through which people interpret whether the disruption is justified.” Primary examples of such design are large-scale gatherings of young and old in public parks, in which creative and expressive activities can be generated, and in major thoroughfares and intersections, blocking the transit on which a “manic society” may depend.

Freud notes that under the conditions of fiction that normalize the supernatural and unpredictable, as do legends and fairy tales, fantastic occurrences do not appear uncanny to either characters or the reader. They are taken instead as magical, illusory, surreal, dreamlike, or otherwise accounted for within the logic of the story’s development. Extinction Rebellion’s major interventions are radical, showy, disconcerting. Their pageantry and spectacle may shift the frame of interpretation toward privileging the art within a non-violent confrontation to recontextualize what might have felt stultifyingly uncanny, so that it might be acknowledged and integrated instead as part of a fantastic, prophetic, and scientifically sound account of our impending future.

Legislative reforms addressing the climate emergency have been largely rhetorical and unenforceable, lacking decisive measures and programs to realize their goals. A series of strategic symbolic disruptions, evocative of a potentially graver and cumulative disorganization, may call ever greater attention to the need for radical adaptive adjustments that would otherwise seem impossible.

To allow truth an adequate time-and-space to realize itself in our attention, Extinction Rebellion displaces the grief and terror associated with our global climate emergency into celebratory drama and dream revelry. A polymorphous perversity of human wildness conjoins in Extinction Rebellion with a disciplined concentration on each action’s strategic goals to displace the climate emergency from its conventional conceptual frameworks. Extinction Rebellion theatrics and nonviolent aggression rewires competitiveness and domination into a polemic as play, as fussing, as goofing, as breakdown. Extinction Rebellion orchestrates metaphor, metonymy, magic, and disruption, surrendering as called for to its members’ potential arrest, as it derails prosaic patterns of linear stabilization.

Paul Hoggett affirms the need for the public to join in “forms of conversation which engage the imagination, make use of imagery and metaphor, elicit stories and narratives, and give recognition and respect to the inconsistencies, paradoxes, and contradictions of our efforts to engage with the ethical challenges posed by climate change.” Arousing such a conversation is the primary project of Extinction Rebellion, eventuating in civic assemblies that could be mandated by our governments to deliver enforceable programs, to be implemented immediately by each government, utilizing every resource available. Such conversations, small and large, can assist us in grounding and integrating the reality of changes to our planet and to our paradigms, dissolving their disorienting and thought-stopping qualities, which otherwise feel so nebulous, enigmatic, and uncanny.

[Steve Benson delivered this paper on 10/25/2020 at the annual conference of the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society, on line.]

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Listening and Disruption

Posted on March 18, 2021 by Steve Benson

I read this aloud as part of a “round table” at the zoomed annual spring meeting of the society for psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy (division 39 of the american psychological association), scheduled for march 2020 and finally delivered in march 2021:

I was growing up in suburbia with white college-educated Goyish parents, and the perpetual “Arab-Israeli conflict” seemed to me an inscrutable hyperobject, stressful, threatening, hurtful, and far away. Why wasn’t this conflict sorted out and stabilized into the tranquility I presumed of the world, with or without mediation? A half-century later, the diabolical onset of the Iraq war had led to me toward more active initiative in sociopolitical analysis. I began to realize how much I didn’t know of either current affairs or their contradictory histories. Learning with others and on my own, I could retain enough details to begin to connect some dots, linking problems and phenomena with systems of diverse kinds, such as capitalism, colonialism, militarism, patriarchy, white supremacy, abusive resource extraction, degradation of the planet’s ecology, and other complex forms of domination.

I still couldn’t understand what motivated the increasingly oppressive, violent, expansionist occupation. I also wondered how Palestinians cope with its challenges to their daily lives and psyches, as well as family and community security. How do they deal with having lost their homes and living more than half a century in refugee camps, within what had once been their undisputed territory? How do they maintain sanity through the humiliations, arrests, home demolitions, tortures, and fatalities meted out by the Israeli Defense Forces? How do they support one another through ongoing trauma, re-traumatization, pulls toward depression, mistrust, paranoia, and rage?

Three years ago I saw in the Division 39 Section IX list serve an invitation to join in an affordable educational tour of the West Bank for mental health providers. I made this my vacation travel plan for 2018, to see for myself, as well as I could, some of life on the ground there and how at least a handful of Palestinians and Israelis articulate their circumstances and responses.

To listen attentively was the crux of this learning. Visiting several cities over ten days, we heard from a wide variety of speakers, respected professionals and working people. I took in diverse experiences and points of view, along with conceptions I might synthesize as to how this human crisis is kept in deadlock even as it continuously escalates. Acknowledging my own fears and sympathies, I did not have to demonize anyone in particular. I tried to question with compassion and interest, how various parties’ needs were recognized and addressed across perspectives. Despite a mind unsuited to scholarship, my learning persists. Biases and assumptions persist as well, which I must question and keep in mind while learning.

When we share in dialogue and thinking-together, breakdowns are discouraging, sparked by misunderstandings, triggerings, and instances of naivetee. Erupting conflicts often lead to self-righteous and competitive dynamics. Mistrust and splitting ensue. Defensiveness spurs counter-aggressions and fight-or-flight reactions that shut down our prefrontal lobes, foreclosing our reflective, sympathetic capacities.

Ideally, listening deeply, attentively, could foster among us a psychoanalytically-informed receptive processing, empathic, intuitive, relational, informed by reverie, sensitive to one’s countertransferential entanglement in any encounter, no matter the medium. One might observe closely one’s own reactions, projections, biases, distractions, and assumptions, as well as those of the writer or speaker in dialogue, without presuming to know all of their motives, background, vulnerabilities, or needs.

The sustained, mounting terror, damage, and precarity within Palestinian lives and the conflicted defenses rampant in Israeli culture against acknowledging such existential anguish burden any conversation on this crisis. Along with implicit intergenerational traumatic legacies of both Palestinians and Israelis, these emotional stresses will continue to result in dissociative enactments such as we have struggled to acknowledge and reconcile on listserves and in discussions with our familiars.

In the culture of clinical psychology in contemporary Palestine, a virtual diagnosis of “perpetual traumatic stress disorder” is often considered normative, rather than pathological, in its legitimate reaction to unrelieved systemic and situational stressors so difficult to cope with. Treatment for perpetual traumatic stress disorder (which is not to be “healed”) is most effectively pursued there through community-based group interventions, wherein discussions and psychoeducation lead to mutual recognition and solidarity in programs and activities to address community-wide crisis conditions and political realities.

If dialogue and shared attention among psychotherapists in this country and internationally are to develop toward a conjoint potential for reconciliation across conflicted identifications, sympathies and alliances, I believe we must devote mutual attention to enactments as opportunities for acknowledgement, witnessing, and repair. Disruptions and stalemates will have to be identified as openings to shift gears, breathe deeply, and discover possibility, wherever a standoff or radical misrecognition occurs. Taking anything for granted will be fatal to such a project of shared understanding. Assuming the authority or good intentions of our ostensible leaders will undermine our resourcefulness in making common cause. This project requires commitment and imagination, as well as sacrifices by those empowered by the status quo. A stable reconciliation may or may not be possible.

I question whether such dialogue can take place on the ground either within Israel or within the United States, which overwhelmingly serves and partially shapes Israel’s military and political dynamics. Both these settler-colonial states depend on arguably continuous state policies of genocide and racial supremacy throughout their respective histories into the present. Both nation-states pursue abruptly shifting prejudicial policies on visas and immigration that can endanger or exclude clinicians from many predominantly Muslim or Arab states, jeopardizing their access to international conferences held in person. Protest against locating an IARPP conference in Israel without likewise protesting locating them in the United States now appears ethically untenable and defeatist. What is to be done?

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Notes for 02/10/2018 reading in Amherst revised

Posted on February 28, 2021 by Steve Benson

NOTES :

new year

short for triumph? truncation of triumph? realization of the deficient, ingrown, self-cancelling nature of triumph?

time stops, backslides, craps out, resorts at random
we do need to learn to live with it while also wondering whether and how we can

‘make time’ do its more practical thing of orienting us to steps and process toward goals we sincerely and energetically choose, hope to pursue, doubt, recast . . .

once he became known as the President, the scale of time became of paramount significance

The meaning of a year’s time got redefined again and again

whereas time has traditionally been useful for regulating services, including labor, oppression, rationing, limiting, coercing – time has not been designed, when standardized, in order to adjust and correct the status quo but rather to secure it

hence listing, leaning, listening to myself speak today, I must wonder how I can accept and admit both development, as possible, and recursiveness, as inevitable.
recursiveness a word I never used before.
• self repeating
o repeating itself, either indefinitely or until a specific point is reached
• repeatedly applying function to itself
o involving the repeated application of a function to its own values

I can’t go on I go on.
The impossible indicates the direction of possibility by negating it.

I thought about not shaving for this poetry reading. I thought about shaving only one side of my face, so I could demonstrate my split personality, as a Gemini. I forgot about these ideas until now, reading it aloud. I thought about rehearsing and practicing this mélange of gestures and attitudes and improvisations and readalouds. I wondered if I would sound better, look better, become more appreciated or celebrated, if I rehearsed assiduously. If I used bigger words. If I hired a director, to work out more of the tone, pacing, choreography, mannerisms, timing, persona, presentation. A director might contribute to a better coordinated, more harmonicaly alive and complex and compelling poetry reading. I wondered whether that would improve the reading in relation to my own aesthetics, compared to what I might presume and expect the aesthetics of most poetry reading audiences might be. I wondered whether I would be asked to read at the New York City YMCA if my director is good enough. I wondered whether if I had a good director I would be invited to international arts festivals as a poet or as a performance artist and paid by the festivals for my airfare and expenses for the trip as well as an honorarium to take home with me, and I wondered whether my director’s airfare, expenses and bonus pay would be included. I wondered how long the director could make do on a salary composed of my retirement funds before they are exhausted. I couldn’t quite think of whom to ask to takevolunteer to direct my performances so I continued shaving and splashed aftershave across my neck and chin and cheeks and upper lip and went into the other room to type.

read the lines backwards from bottom to top of the page,
one at a time.
alternate this with pages where I read the lines in order from top to bottom
but I read the words in reverse order from right to left.

Uncertainty on the Move
The Instability of Knowing
The Mutability of Being
What I think I don’t know
What I don’t know I think

Explaining is not Poetry – . . . Right?

I do not insist that I will not speak without reading

If I read more
I would have a bigger
vocabulary

Documentation
(isn’t?)
the work itself

Does its being on the website make it questionable?

It’s come to be that it’s painful to have an idea

When I am all
alone
I am my own best
company

Is the way it sounds at an author’s poetry reading the way it is supposed to sound in you when you read it?

hypnotically induced boredom

You’re sitting
I’m standing
Making faces and
striking poses
adds a degree of
difficulty that
arrests your attention
to how deficient
the poetry may be

Poetry reading :
I have never been to one I have no preconceptions

We compulsively answer our own Questions, once we speak them,
thus turning them from genuine questions into rhetorical quesitons
that we already pretend to know answers to

Name your feelings is a
truism of contepmorary psychotherapy
I feel like
a word

In effect, I invite you into my zone state
my would-be zone state
trance
as would a movie
Is this
self-absorption?
Collective agency?
Co-optation?
pause to reflect –
to reflect

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The Doctrine of Discovery

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Steve Benson

The Doctrine of Discovery, based in a Papal bull of 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, was used throughout the colonial imperialist period to justify the ownership of lands by whatever Christian government’s representatives first set foot on them to claim them, so long as they were previously not occupied by any people subject to a European Christian monarch. The doctrine’s utility does not appear to have required that such a government be specifically pledged to Christianity nor to have a monarchical governing power, as it was extended. In 1792, as Secretary of State for the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson declared the Doctrine would apply to his newly founded nation as it had to European powers. The United States Supreme Court of 1823 agreed that the doctrine justified USAmerican settler colonialist taking of land from indigenous peoples, who were recognized as occupants rather than holders of the land, if and when they were recognized as human. Typically, indigenous occupants of lands subject to such European or settler discovery were regarded as subhuman, savage, or barbarian. Chief Justice John Marshall wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court in Johnson vs. M’Intosh to the effect that land titles obtained from Native Americans should not be recognized by U.S. courts. Marshall himself had considerable real estate holdings that would have been affected if the case at hand had been decided otherwise. In other cases, the Court also used the Doctrine to justify “the concept that tribes were not independent states but ‘domestic dependent nations’” and to prohibit any tribe from legally prosecuting anyone not a member of that specific tribe. Despite recent decisions to repudiate the Doctrine by the United Nations Economic and Social Council Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues’ and several prominent U.S. churches, it remains foundational in the establishment and continuity of legal and property rights in the U.S. and has never been disavowed or overturned by the U.S. government. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the state of Israel appears to re-enact this principle in its relations with the Palestinian peoples (including Christian Palestinians), compounding its methodology with the principle of the right of return of the Jewish peoples, stemming primarily from Europe and the United States. The lack of a formal Palestinian state formation prior to the development of Zionist settlement following the break-up of the Ottoman empire in the first World War has been drawn on to suppport the premise that there never was a Palestine, nor a Palestinian people. Those native to lands intended for settlement or appropriation, whether still now subject to military occupation or actively colonized by Jewish communities with state support, are typically regarded by high officers of the Jewish state as, without exception, nothing but terrorists, non-existent, or less than fully human. Palestinians employed as workers in cities and towns in Israel are subject to strict conditions that disempower the labor force and contribute to instability and vulnerability of working Palestinians. Human rights as recognized by Israel and other democratic states as essential to the protection of citizens are not acknowledged as pertinent to Palestinians in Israel or its occupied territories. The Israeli state’s methods of dislodging, degrading, terrorizing, evacuating, and restricting a great many diverse rights of the Palestinian population sustain a process of gradual genocide. This process closely resembles the management of relations with the indigenous peoples of territories the United States has chosen to colonize, settle, and lay claim to and govern, often in violation of treaties previously established with various tribal authorities. The imperialist conquests and the violent and oppressive impositions of colonial power they reputedly validated continue to be enacted in Palestine and elsewhere, despite consequences easily identified as catastrophic and profoundly inhumane, except by those who do not regard the indigenous in fellowship as sentient, intelligent human beings. To this day, religion is in many cases cited as authority for one power’s or people’s superiority of authority and rights over another. (The secular faith in an “invisible hand” of commercial markets, wiser than any state or person, appears to have evolved into playing such a role on demand in some instances, in support of state or corporate powers over the indigeous people of a region.)

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Writing Through Raw Materials 7

Posted on August 1, 2020 by Steve Benson

[viz. https://soundcloud.com/user-663669178/raw-materials-7]

[It occurs to me to wonder as I sit down to listen again to RW7 and keyboard my responses to it as it goes along that I wonder whether there will ever be a transcript of this or other RM posts. It certainly doesn’t seem desirable or interesting to try to enjoy or learn from a transcript of an RM post, as they are so deliberately concerned with speaking and with writing as that which can be read aloud, as if verbatim (compared to a painting or some other material that can’t literally be read aloud without supplying words that do not appear in the original).]

It begins in the middle of a sentence that doesn’t seem to be important.

I didn’t know about diet coke and gay men. I have been out of the loop. I don’t like the taste of coke so

I don’t like being born on the same day as other people. It actually seems like it hurts. But if only I were born on Benjamin’s birthday.

I love this quotation from Benjamin, and I immediately want to emulate his alleged practice as much as possible, just to hurry just about everything into print. Did he keep track of these himself, where and when what was published?

Did he leave it with someone or have it with him when he died? Did he disappear in death or is his body somewhere?

Displace your own thinking? What does that mean? Did you then do this?

Why should there be a distinction between experimental or avant garde poetry and the rest of poetry? Does it help aside from in academic learned credentialing and pedagogy?

The discipline of encoding, of composing, of amassing material. Let us consider what the discipline consists of and how to practice it. How can we consider this, together, or separately but leaving a record of it.

I am friend and comrade. Yes. Likewise are you to me.

Just trying to keep going was one thing he was able or ready to write just then but he may have been trying to do other things in Biotherm as well.

Do we have recordings of Zukofsky reading his own work? I felt your reading of it sounded like reading your own work, which wasn’t so notable to me when you were reading Benjamin. But and I like how you read this Zukofsky material too. It’s fast enough I don’t know what I am hearing but every word and phrase is clear, and there’s a powerful sense of trajectory and of my difficulty imagining any sort of graphic representation for it.

Orchards and horses. Airs, no birds.

In your reading I feel an urgency I might not sense in reading the original in “A”.

Barry had a big thing always about Zukofsky, and many thoughts and passions, critiques and values for Zuk. So I can hardly think of Zukofsky without thinking of Barry, even more than thinking of A-24 although I rehearsed and performed that repeatedly with Carla and Bob and Lyn and Kit and Barry. It was thrilling and silly and fine to work hard on it and still present it a couple times and not know just how good or bad this result might be.

Horses, manes, words, yeah, fuck that shit. I love the momentum. Would I feel that momentum without this reading? It is a different momentum in A-7 than when you read from your own work, although in the lectures you get up a lot of steam like this too.

Now good Friday, he employed are we back in Zukofsky or on to something else. The goat, what are you saying. Goat, I’m not going to stop the recording to look it up. Goat.

An interesting person to think about in O’Hara brain spasms. Structural similarities? I’m not sure you say a thing about these similarities here. But they both look at the relation between speech and poetry as a problem of interest. Is that structural? Should I question such word use at all? The improvisational then you say is not much in Zukofsky. But a play with words and time that feels very akin to improvisation and may be based in it I suggest, I mean anyone might just start writing or typing and come up with something as good as that individual can write and it might be

DWP self publishing I like this. Does it mean you make a pdf file and let people know that they can download it if they want?

Are you saying the poetry magazines want the lyric so much that your and my own gets harder to publish? Do they admit this? Is it a closeted passion?

Bob Gluck indicates how versatile the term ‘lyric’ can be in its accurate uses as a word rather than just as a genre. He doesn’t seem to hold it down to ‘style,’ does he? You don’t need to answer any of these questions.

Who is maligned within the poetry world, there are so many ways, aside from being torpedoes by the milquetoasters. People avoid gossip blame each other poet to poet to poet among poets.

There are careers though, people have academic careers that keep their poetry careers going and vice versa, interdependently, I think. And there is a wiling continuing to be writing and using and accessing poetry in one’s life which is a career in a meaningful sense whether it’s at all professional or not.

I don’t know what Poetry Foundation publishes. On its website? It doesn’t occur to me that it might be interesting so I don’t find out.

I tend to think the ‘good lyric poetry’ would be a way of understanding and notice something sort of songlike in some respect within any writing that one finds to be really good.

Written on July 4 Independence F+Day but we don’t call it that becaUSE we don’t think of anything as independent or an independence day. And not the whole day anyway but just a part, from midmorning to the time one says Fuck it.

I like it that you read titles. and who wrote it. The epigraph is so hard to hear and think about aside from as every word is perfectly clear and resonant and frastinating. Monarchy. Louis. Hegel’s philosophy in defense. I guess I was.

You don’t have a reading voice, when reading aloud or silently?

Your mind is permanently stuck in busy networkings of transition, on the move, linking, relinking, changing course. This may relate to throwing out legal tender, which seems to establish linkages only according to the principles of exchange of capital.

Desire to throw it out. A passion. Not getting around due to fear to exchanging actual things through the postal services. Not if you know what to expect from me, did you know then what you were writing, did you mean to write something in particular or only to frame a shift, a transition in the thought being framed at the moment. Money. Debt. To make the mind transform the world.

Maybe mind transforms the world to realize how the world actually is rather than to turn it into some magical thing that we think we want.

Coy and self-reflective also predates postmodern, viz. Sterne. Even Catullus.

[At this point I turn off the recording and pause and run spellcheck and decide which typos to leave in and reflect on how demanding and difficult this is after all compared to the fun and easy prospect of my doing this, it’s hard on my fingers, hands, neck, head, and patience with myself. I can’t decide if I missed enough on the recording to make myself back it up again a little, and that sort of difficulty was never something I wanted to entertain in this project, so mostly I just don’t stop the recording or back it up. I sometimes correct typos as I’m going along if I don’t have something I want to respond to at the moment on the recording. The first half hour of it prompted the previous two full pages of reactive and reflective commentary, presumably of no use whatsoever, which thus renders it available for any use one might happen to decide on, including eliminating it permanently in some way but I’m not likely to do that, at least not today. But I don’t know if I can bear to go on, even on another day. There are so many things to do, generally.]

Posted in Uncategorized

Sharing Relational Space with Earth

Posted on January 9, 2020 by Steve Benson

Our key definer of adulthood may have been our dedication to staying responsible (enough) to others and to ourselves to foresee and protect ourselves and others from dangers in the immediate and more distant future. But our greatest challenge is not even learning from our mistakes, which we often do if we identify their patterns. It is to retain somehow the sensitivity, vitality, imagination, versatility, and ready wakefulness of a child.

Anyone grows up someplace, but first in a unique mother’s womb, beginning to sense whatever, without names for it, without knowing anyparticular way what one is doing. This may be the basic “natural” state for any of us human beings, in a perpetual immediate present, before we live in relation to a self and distinctions. If we could hit reset on our brain-computer, we might discover this again. As we grow week by week into our external environment, meeting it on whatever terms we are given there, we find ourselves defined by other humans and their language. They treat us in certain increasingly familiar ways, and they give us names for ourselves and our actions and attitudes. We encounter and gradually stabilize relationships to time and space and feelings and needs. We set up terms for these relationships that we have to cope with to survive in this world. All this is certainly socialization. Isn’t there something else we are also constituted by as selves, as conscious respondents to our world, perhaps unnamable in our Western discourses?

In a panel on climate change at IARPP in June, Susan Bodnar told about an intervention she has tried in workshops and psychotherapy. She asked people to recall their earliest memories of spaces and places in their natural world. What smells and sounds do they recall from the world around them? What colors? What sounds and motion? How did it feel against the skin – that breeze, that humidity, that grass, that clay? What sense experiences were known there, and what did they remember of it? She found that people tended to have deep, lasting impressions they often had forgotten about and were relieved, often deeply moved, to recall. They found words for what they felt they had experienced there – ease, freedom, belonging, joy, wildness, comfort, danger, security, trust.

Our sense of what’s natural may change across our lifetimes. So may that which we find around us to call nature. In rural Downeast Maine, where I’ve lived the past 21 years, I’m learning that the local forests were different, even a couple decades ago when I got here. Conifers are gradually disappearing, resulting in far fewer sorts of butterflies and more sugar maples, owing to changes in the climate. The woods, as we know them, now, are not as natural as when the Wabanaki tribes governed these territories, even though that human culture must somehow have impacted nature too.

We were brought up – I was brought up – many of us were brought up to be tctful and reserved about our feelings and appetites, to observe discretion in the pursuit of our passions, to opt for security, conformity with the known world, and autonomous achievement, to avoid indulging in risk, weirdness, and idleness. One result was to accept a distancing, a quiet alienation, as the favored ground of surviving manageably and proving ourselves acceptable to others.

As a boy, around ten or twelve, living in a suburban New Jersey township, before the years I would bicycle far enough long afternoons to get lost in the farmlands outside of town, I used to walk into a small woods of just a few acres across the street from our home to find my way into what I took for the heart of unspoiled wilderness. Or I allowed myself to think of it that way. There, beside an old tree along the bank of a shallow stream, as though to embrace a possibility of freedom from civilized norms, sometimes I would remove my clothes, lie in the warm sun freckled by the leaves, dip my toes into the slow-running water, defecate into a glass jar I’d brought there, and twist the lid closed to save my feces in a hidden place rather than despoil the environment or carry them home.

I believe this was a sort of erotic experience, sensual, even amatory, but not specifically sexual. It was an idyll, a respite, not an obsession. I didn’t know anything about masturbating. I hadn’t known a lust for anyone. This hideaway was a place of peace, and of an undemonstrative power, but also threatened – threatened by my own idea that just being there, naked, was transgressive, making me vulnerable to observation, judgment, and attack. My behavior was abnormal, un-called-for, and obviously pointless.

Still I can wonder, as I may have then, what all was I seeking there, and how much of that did I find?

I’m sure I’d seen photographs at home in National Geographic magazine of primitive people, scarcely dressed, in tropical places, almost as naked as I made myself. I may have wanted to be them or commune with them. What did they know that I didn’t? Or that I didn’t want to forget? Or to have already forgotten?

I think my aim was to access and preserve something unnamable, unspecifiable, a possibly universal quality of living that might be and feel simple and essential. My intuition suggests that, within the erotic pulse of prepubescent self-observation, bathing in the terpenes exuded by all the vegetal growth around me, I was seeking to enact or know my own true self and confirm an identity within the context of a non-verbal ecology, independent of human distinctions and judgments, of societal implications and expectations, of language and structure as I had learned it.

We haven’t found terms to analyze how our early emergence into a uniquely grounded and responsive selfhood are affected by vital relationships with the non-human world around us, including pets, prey, pests, and errant critters, including life forms without a heartbeat, and other unliving stuff they all live in relation to as well – rocks, walls, watercourses, boxes, pollens, UV rays, 4G broadband, stars. The non-human doesn’t relate to us through words, and it seems rarely to express expectations of us. For all we know, these animals, things, elements, all composed of energy, all love us unconditionally in some underlying sense. But we tend to take them for granted as we mature. We forget how vital and intimate, how dynamically alive, our relationships with them still always are.

Without our noticing it much, the non-human environment still responds to us, even as it is now impacted by the human in most every respect. In any given moment, I sense and know myself in part through junctions of connectivity with the non-human environment. This wooden table, this flat-screened laptop, this swiveling wooden owl stool I rest my bottom on – these function as prostheses, extensions. They coordinate my body and mind, facilitating certain functions, whether I notice them consciously or not. They affect and qualify how I am feeling and thinking. How can I describe what changes when I hear the sound of a propane heater’s fan coming on and off? How am I made, or unmade, differently by the ticking of the wall clock? Or the sunshine on the periphery of my vision? A cloudy day would find me different.

I know that my sense of self is adjusted by internal physiological changes and states, too, many of them enigmatic to me, undiscovered territories and unexplained events. My nonverbal human body makes every other aspect of attention and action and sensitivity possible, while my understanding of all that is still pretty sketchy. Like my car, if it works, I needn’t pay much mind to how it works. Our frequent obliviousness to the states and constitution of the body contributes to a disregard for our relationships with everything around us.

We can work on bringing our intimate, caring relationships with animals, plants, and other forms and forces into focused attention through here-and-now mindfulness exercises, through journaling and conversation, through slowing momentarily to take stock of the sensation or perception of a moment. This may support and strengthen our wilingness to ally with the earthly, interdependent environment on which we and other living forms of sensate energy depend. If I stop to observe and notice and feel, I can better ask: What matters to me here? What supports me? How do I support it?

We humans have an intimate, interactive, reciprocal relationship with the nonhuman world, including its underlying natural laws and energies. The nonhuman world affects our functioning, and we affect its functioning, constantly, asleep or awake. Any one moment’s attention may affect our nonhuman world, if only by delaying some other action that might affect it differently. These active, changing relationships occur within an irreducible dynamic network of innumerable other relationships between all nonhuman entities on this planet, as well as all the other humans, nearly all of whom we will never know in name or circumstance.

As humans, perhaps uniquely, we can shape and frame conceptions of relationship. Our sympathetic intelligence can appreciate the liberating power of responding with care to an other. Symbolic language supports our remarkable powers to do so, as well as compromising their intimate realization.

Exploring our capacity for a warmer, more tender, affirmative quality of occasional or continuous attention to these relationships may reframe our despair and anxiety over climate change into loving care and curiosity as to what is present, changing or threatened, and what we may do, individually or collectively, to support our world’s wellness and survival, and our own. I am not speaking of pity or charity but of realizing more viscerally and immediately our actual, mutually contextualized relationships with environmental particulars as integral to our survival and wellness along with that of other life forms and their contexts on this earth. Can I look into the eyes of the fern, the cloud, the gulley, and say sincerely, “I see you”? We are all in this together.

These reciprocal relationships function whether remarked on or not, without words or naming, and largely unconsciously, for us, and perhaps also for the life forms and materials around us. These unconscious relations may to a great degree be explored as unfamiliar territories and welcomed into our personal acknowledgement. Do they flourish already in a collective unconscious?

We are and have been nurtured always by the unimaginably complex interconnected dynamic functioning of all aspects of material existence that we can identify.

Human circumstances are not routinely prioritized in the workings of nature, nor of natural catastrophes. A wildfire might support a forest’s long-term growth and the planet’s life forms without benefiting people living or holding property or planning to harvest in the area affected. In effect, the nurturing of which we can speak here happens indifferently to humans as a particular species or life form. But the planet’s ecology and development, prior to any human influence, made our development as a species possible and our tribal and individual lives capable of their peculiarly refinements of development. 

We have been given, in effect, the grounds of our existence as homo sapiens through our relationships with the nonhuman. Without our reciprocal relationships with the nonhuman we certainly cannot continue to survive, individually or as a species. Contemplating contemporary climate change along with its natural and humanly inflected consequences, including its genocidal function with respect to many species of living organisms, we humans have occasion collectively to feel remorse and guilt, along with our grieving. 

Meanwhile, we continue to coexist with everything else that currently exists, and we continue to experience its interactions with us, however little we notice. We are due to wonder how other forms of life and other entities of the natural world may experience our actions, in their own diverse means of sensitive responsivity. 

We may notice smog, for instance, changing the air in major cities. Although we have technical devices to measure air pollution in detailed ways, we primarily notice it when we sense that it changes our own condition for the worse. We are not often likely to reflect on how air pollution renders the sunsets more colorful, deep and vibrant; we are more likely to notice how visibility is reduced, the sunlit skies get hazier, and our breathing becomes compromised. The degree to which diverse humanly engineered changes in air quality contribute to autism, Alzheimers, and cancers are rarely discussed and disgracefully under-researched. We are even more unlikely to assess the effects of variable air quality on the health and habits of other animals. As humans, we learn how to empower ourselves to choose what to know — to our peril, and that of our co-residents on earth.

Significant, worrisome increases in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide are appearing in regions marked by severe increases in heat levels. This stqte of Maine sees relatively modest effects of global warming. I may resent erratic weather, damn the invasive plants, fear a flooded basement, curse bothersome insects, frost heaves breaking through my country road and deer jumping to a stop just short of my car. I can observe that every way I feel any selfish antipathy is uncomfortable, in me. Yet I can get used to it. Such attitudes condition us to accept as normal many aggressive interventions and deliberate neglect toward the health of our nonhuman environment that are, cumulatively, deeply destructive and deregulating. Acculturation has led us to prioritize our opportunities to do what we think we want.

Negative emotional reactivity between people often urges on consequences as dangerous to oneself or one’s own tribe as to the other. A fight-or-flight moment disables us from cooperative problem-solving and mindful care for a relationship, provoking instead a patterning of reciprocally destructive harm. If the nonhuman does not fight back, we can feel our aggression is harmless, even justified. Ignoring such relational dynamics reinforces our careless, oblivious complicity in an accumulating and reactive annihilation of the networking of shared needs within which we can live. Our legacy of self-aggrandizing, colonialist, genocidal relations toward the indigenous peoples of this American continent conditions us unconsciously toward the subjugation, exploitation, and destruction of the life forms around us and of the conditions that foster their survival.

We could do worse than deliberately admit them into our attention. We have done worse. We can do better. With pleasure.

October / November 2018

Posted in Uncategorized

Poetry is where you find it

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Steve Benson

As usual

not knowing

I don’t know how to

deal with

accept, embrace, relax, let go

so much pleasure

so much awareness

so much joy, so much sorrow, so much hurt

in myself and others, in us

in myself

and others

in us

I don’t know

I don’t

know how to

stay with, to integrate, I don’t know how

anymore, to stop, to go back, to stop

I don’t want to stop

I don’t need to stop

and I think I can’t stop

so

I’m here moving

on my feet

The novel I am listening to

when I drive

as absorbed in the novel as I can be

without losing authority

for conducting the car safely through

highways, roads, lanes, traffic

other drivers’ choices

behaviors of the roadway and the other drivers

and walkers and bicyclers and motorcyclists

is

+

about or concerned with

the deepening of spiritual awareness

the spiritual in some big sense

that includes the uncanny and unknown

the bigger than me, the bigger than us

and mystery, and power, a bigger power

that itself is full of surrendering

letting go

letting be

and

change

+

the age 70 transition

even planning ahead

involves more letting go

and

allowing

things to not happen

than it does

what can or might happen

+

the child in me

or the dog in me

makes frequent stops

to pee, to check the map, to take a little drink, to

wonder whether this or this is a trail I would rather go on

and even to just stop and notice something

a little more

+

roots

boulders

mosses

trees, young and old

plants, underbrush

needles

bark

air

rocks

twigs

branches, fallen trees

decay

nourishing one another

through the soil

and the atmosphere

+

Age 70 Transition

                                                                 (09 01 2019)

Posted in Uncategorized

excerpts from summer 2019 emails to a psychoanalyst-globalclimateemergency activist:

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Steve Benson

8 22 2018

 the basic idea that totalitarian, exclusivist, and authoritarian societies tend to demonize or expel or ‘cleanse’ away some demographics in favor of others, thus depleting the synthetic dynamics of how civilizations actually develop and thrive, seems sensible to me and the hypothetical parallel between that premise and the concern over species extinctions (and the rationales for their occurrence today) seems loaded with meaning and significance. 

  in a relational psychoanalytic light, i think this is an important potential for construing positions toward and possibly approaches to change what is happening in, for instance, the usa, australia (viz. the NYTimes today), and elsewhere regarding climate change. i believe the current tendency across many nations toward exclusivity, privilege-reinforcement, and insularity is an express route to doom for their cultures, politics, and economies, and it mirrors (and i believe is in a reciprocal relationship with) the exploitation of the earth’s resources for human gain with disregard (and careless exclusion and termination) of non-human living beings on our planet, and the result will be the demise of humanity as it tries to survive on artificial food substitutes while droughts and fires, floods and viruses sweep across the overheated surfaces of our world. so it goes, as vonnegut wrote repeatedly in, i think, cat’s cradle. 

4 25

I had a related thought now while reading other things relating to trauma and world politics. There seems to me to be a similar dead zone, blind spot, or lack of interest in developing awareness, whether it’s dissociative or not in the terms of your definition, in what I can only presume is the vast majority of the USAmerican public, in relation to some other topics that don’t necessarily lead to extinction (but could): with respect to the risk of nuclear bombs going off (2 minutes to midnight, is the current, lowest-ever assessment by the scientists); with respect to our national policy of rising militarism, maximizing arms sales, and making wars abroad while tightening our alliances with autocratic state leaders around the world; and with respect to the nation’s and culture’s dependency on pesticides, antibiotics, and other profitable chemicals that increasingly undermine our health and that of our future generations. I find it perpetually alarming, but at least part of what I believe is responsible for this obliviousness is the steady hyper-focus on materialist, consumerist, careerist concerns and just plain entertainment in USAmerican culture. Stories, typically with high emotional and visceral impact, seem to supersede facts and information, not to mention reflection, while deterioration of our entire population’s security and health proceeds with little notice. Somehow, in this country we have been in continual training along these lines at least since the decade following WW2. From the Korean War on, our wars have occurred at great distance and generally without much understanding of how horribly aggressive, violent and destructive they have been. Madison Avenue’s (and psychology’s) undermining of science in the days of lung cancer’s linkage with smoking seems a good example of this awful phenomenon. The APA remains steadfast in its affirmative alliance with the US military, to score the bucks, despite its vague stance of distancing since the Hoffman Report was released. (Roy Eidelson published a strong article on this within the past week or so on Common Dreams website: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/dangerous-ideas/201904/war-militarism-and-the-apa. Well written and organized, and demoralizing indeed.) My impression is that such comprehensive training of the USAmerican electorate is partly responsible for the lack of responsibility to the nation’s and the world’s people among those at the top of industry and government, and for the people’s lack of will to demand it. It’s terribly worrisome. 

It seems to rhyme with the brain-dead/reluctant/avoidant/oblivious response to the GCE.

4 26

the point of my lengthy paragraph in that email was to contemplate how this process of dissociating or foreclosing reflection on and remediation of devastatingly big dangers or harms has been going on, at least in the US, for at least a few generations. 

When we consider how thoroughly most USAmericans appear to believe in the righteous virtue and manifest destiny of the settler colonialist development of a European population on this continent, simply unable to connect with the massive processes of genocide and betrayals that underlay our occupation of this land, we see another instance of not-knowing or not-taking-it-seriously that, for the generations of indigenous peoples that otherwise would have lived here in a culture congruent with their history, has indeed meant a terrible, disabling, decimating kind of harm – dissociated by the great majority of the caucasian population. I would say it’s been a piecemeal holocaust, from which a very very few survivors continue to pull together a history and a will to protest. . . .

The circumstances, work, decisions, and solvency of small farmers involves many difficulties. It’s wondrous when things go well, but it’s very devoted and labor intensive work. An organic farm undertakes stewardship in a far more comprehensive and sensitive way than industrial factory farming, and the vulnerability of USAmerican farmers is enormous and troubling. What do the Congressional farm bills do for them? I suspect they rather favor the big interests behind monocultures and massive pesticide use.

4 28

I think anyone will likely have to oscillate, between hope, despair, fear, numbness, and other states, whether in the course of grieving or in other responses of abject foreboding and incipient or ongoing loss. I wouldn’t want people to feel guilty about feeling hope, but I don’t want to urge it on people either. 

Doppelt’s work seems to propose something to be both actively invested in and hopeful about, a transformative resilient community/way of life; I find this both reasonable and disturbingly individualist and localist. But one has to focus sometimes on what one can actually make a difference on, and that is going to be almost always the personal and the local. And his thoughts do point toward reasonably sound ways to coping – with grief as well as with tension and hardships – in the course of the GCE.

I find this thoughtful writer, Mr. McPherson, sometimes hard to follow, logically, especially at the point when he’s talking about the aerosol layer and he follows one sentence I don’t understand with another linked to it by “In other words,…” This drives me up the wall because it’s part of his argument that our planet’s life systems are doomed, it sounds like a really important part, but I can’t tell if he’s even making sense consistently with any scientific findings. So maybe I will try to look that stuff up. [Now I looked it up, at the 2019 article cited https://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6427/eaav0566  in Science magazine, and I can’t understand it either.]

I am alarmed that he is so certain that humankind will die. He doesn’t say whether he understands this will happen within 20 years or 300. It’s not a shocking thoughts, but his certainty does not conform to most of the clearer science-based discussions I have read. He might say they are papering over the realities of what will surely come. His more radical stance on this contributes to my doubting him. But I have no quarrel with what he says about working through grief to become more pragmatic and imaginative in response to a crisis that isn’t ending anytime soon.

The Palestinians offer a very useful example of a lot of people who are undergoing perpetual conditions that are psychologically traumatic, without relief, for generations, along with and partly because of unpredictable physical violence and rapid arbitrary displacement. Although there is widespread depression and there are other heightened psychopathologies in the population, there is a commonly held acknowledgement of why and how the traumatic conditions are being imposed and perpetuated, and there are shared understandings of how steadfastness and focusing on shared values matters to everyone concerned there. Mental health providers in these territories don’t expect to heal anyone’s PTSD; they don’t conceptualize these problems as PTSD but as continuous traumatic stress conditions, for which group treatment, social and political engagement and involvement of family and community in systems of conjoint care make a much bigger difference to help contextualize psychological and behavioral problems and remediate them.

4 29

I don’t think it’s ever good to assume an audience will have the same point of view, ideological mindset, or primary concerns as oneself, especially when it’s a multicultural, multiracial, and/or international or multi-class group or one of diverse sexual orientations. Who knows how many think Greta should be in school on Fridays? The thing is, you can’t tailor your presentation closely to people you don’t know, and as the org is international, my own suggestion would be that you aim it at a huge wide diversity of people, all of whom know that there is some issue in the air these days about the climate and humans’ responsibility for its seeming peril. In other words, at least minimally informed, but one can’t say by whom or how much. Analysts in IARPP are likely to be a fairly liberal group, all the same, so if you’re looking for the center of your focus, I suggest it might be something like a poorly trained psychoanalytic version of Hilary Clinton. 

I feel everyone sees the GCE or climate change their own way, anyhow. It becomes sort of a Rorschach, as it’s so wildly chaotic, mutable, upsetting, and complex as a topic. And everyone comes from a differently constituted familial and cultural matrix.

5 5

The USA and its various peoples are not about to be over racism in the course of our lifetimes, or our children’s. It’s so deep and it continues to mutate, like bacteria that lives within us and mutate to evade extinction. Therefore, it’s vital to learn and reflect on and question racism and its presence and history whenever we have the mindful attention and courage to do so, which is hopefully going to be often. 

This is to say, I don’t think problems of inclusion and solidarity can be expected to get resolved and to go away, but I feel strongly that they can be addressed and worked on, in effect to be worked with like koans and relationship issues, as opportunities for healing and growth. 

5 14

I don’t know what the British people in general knew or cared about the establishment of an Israeli state in what had formerly been the British mandate, at the time it occurred. I can send you a copy of something about that piece of history if you like. My recollection of it is that Britain realized it had better get out or it would be patrolling and enforcing order in an increasingly polarized society, with no particular benefit to the British state or economy, and that without a designated, seemingly remote and ignorable space to create a nation of their own, a lot of Jews would try to immigrate to Britain, which preferred (as did the US and many other Western nations) only so much, just a little, charitably, but not too much. It served as a means to contain the massive flow of Jews from the most venomously persecutory and hateful areas of Europe. How well contemporary Brits share this impression of that history, I appear to have no way of knowing.

I think you are right that Jews of a particularly Zionist stripe (nothing close to all Jews of the time or of the present) felt in the 40s at liberty to follow whatever vision of a possible Jewish state and law they might collectively envision and comprise, once given the green light by a deserting British imperialist authority. Rather than feel abandoned and less-than, it is sensible that many may have preferred to focus on their “chosen people” role as inheritors of their righteous path and place. This must, I think, have accentuated and even necessitated their impression that Palestine as a state or as a people had never existed and did not need recognition, although various people who identified with the place as Palestinians were indeed in the way. Since Palestinians were considered virtually non-existent (this seeming to the conquerors a far more benign attitude than seeing them as a legitimate people struggling for their own homeland), Israel could take over their land in the course of defending itself from reputedly conspiratorial enemies beyond their territories and then maintain overall authority in defense against the Arab states surrounding them. It worked. The West saw Israel as its baby and its military outpost, holding the Arab, Muslim states at bay and asserting a contained and containing military dominance in the region. 

5 16

The main thing that interested me in the article about flooding in Davenport – which I myself only skimmed – was the ways that reference to and discussion of the personal and civic costs of carbon concentrations in the atmosphere was foreclosed by the impression that this would inevitably precipitate a “political” reframing of the challenges for recovery and future security within the city. 

    To me, this indicates that the right has maneuvered effectively to intimidate civic leaders (who are sometimes supposed to be themselves effective “politicians”) from addressing global warming in any way, including with reference to scientific consensus. I thought it would interest you as an example of how recognition of climate change is forestalled. 

  When such foreclosure of reference becomes widespread, it affects all pathways in society, and so we find now that to recognize the GCE as an actuality requires acts of rebellion, even when most of the USAmerican public agrees it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

Overwhelm is coming to be a norm, I think, for people in advanced Western and other societies. Certainly to read and study things with an expectation of fully understanding and formulating a constructive response to them all is bound to lead us to overwhelm. 

  I see and feel and take myself to be a world citizen, a healthcare provider, an artist, a Buddhist, and an activist. All these self-empowering frames are also compromising in a variety of ways, within any social context I know of. I certainly cannot assume I will master my functions and potential in any of them. Nor do I assume I would do better at any of them if I had fewer such identities and pursuits. I can’t even keep abreast of what’s new and important to know in any of them. So it goes.

5 26

The afternoon training I went to on May 1 was set up by a Bar Harbor group called Climate to Thrive. They arranged for Tyler Kidder, the lead trainer for Maine Climate Table, to present to whoever would come. There were a lot there from Acadia Nat’l Park and from Mount Desert Island hospital. Only one person from Climate to Thrive wasn’t too busy to show up – I commented to him, as well picked up chairs at the end, that this was rather odd, and he said well, everyone’s very busy. The training focused on how to communicate effectively if trying to address decision-making leaders and other people to address the GCE seriously. She didn’t focus on the science of climate and carbon but on the science of communication in this field and with a Maine population – pretty sophisticated, then, in its focus. Key ideas I came away with is 

• tell stories, use narrative, to engage interest and empathy

• don’t refer to “believing” at all

• address the conflict underlying resistance, whether internal or social or both

• consider the mental templates people already have ingrained, which people use to develop a reasoning chain

• “message frames” are terms that reflect attitudes and moral templates, etc. “carbon pollution” is such a frame, which has gone over better than “climate change” or others, in the Maine population

• approach discussion through “adjacent possibilities” which can be entry points of interest or value, and then can precipitate recognition and discussion of global climate problems

• one good starting point: “It can be hard for people to talk or think about climate change, and folks have a lot of questions” and then ask where they are at with it, if they have any questions

The primary handouts at that training were a Communications 101 booklet and a tool kit for communicating with Mainers on Climate Change. I will attach pdfs that she sent us after the training. It all adds up to be a lot to read and I don’t have any expectation that you will or should – but you may like to browse around in it. I wonder whether many other states have this sort of an organization actively developing such guidance. 

The day-long “4th climate action conference” from Sierra Club Maine was called Building Thriving Communities. It had short talks in rounds for the assembled, as well as simultaneous panels off and on to choose from. Chloe Maxmin was spirited and inspiring, a young activist politician fired up on the issues of GCE. The psychologist Richard Thomas said he was going to contact everyone who left their email on his yellow pad but hasn’t seemed to write to me yet – he wanted to start a climate action team within the profession – of healthcare providers or something. I didn’t feel very confident he would get much headway or even get started seriously. He cited Joanna Macy as his primary influence and led a guided meditation that I would gladly have skipped, as I usually feel about them. But he also advocated for speaking more vulnerably to one another (in groups, most helpfully) about these issues and accepting the emotional intensity of the grieving process involved in solastalgia. I liked better a psychiatrist focused on neurological trauma and resilience  named Janis Petzel. She cited a PSR Maine report called Death by Degrees (available at their website, it focuses on health risks and then on what one can do, personal lifestyle and investment planning and sociopolitical advocacy) and referred to various ways GCE contributes to ill health. Other speakers dealt with various sectors or siloes, on both negative impacts of GCE and various initiatives to counteract the symptoms and effects of it. Generally these were intelligent and interesting presentations on matters I personally feel no particular need to know, but can feel an active interest in at the moment. I left an hour or two before it all finished, as I felt full up, with nothing else on the agenda I particularly wanted to check out.  https://freepressonline.com/Content/Home/Homepage-Rotator/Article/Deep-State-The-ecosystem-defends-itself-The-Sierra-Club-s-Climate-Conference/78/720/64193 is the only article I can find on line covering it as an event. I haven’t read it in full yet, but so far I give it my seal of approval as affirmative, interested, detailed reporting. Go, Maine!!!

6 6 2019

I really think that all refugees now, from now on, are climate refugees, even if that isn’t the primary presenting problem. Because our climate crisis exacerbates all the CNS and interpersonal tensions and violence that promote all other injustices, it is predictable that all sorts of aspects of the world order and of its peoples’ loss and harm will be effectively enhanced by climate emergency effects.

6 14

Personally, and as a psychologist too, I just don’t believe in trying to motivate change through blaming, shaming, or angering. (You know this from one or two of the slides in my talks in Surry.) XR’s events haven’t struck me that way. I see them more as trying to awaken and broaden awareness and interest. If they sometimes blame or shame elected representatives of the people or major corporate chieftains, they are calling them out on their willing betrayal of their promises, pledges, and responsibilities. If this is a XR tactic, I don’t think it will specifically work — treating anyone as an antagonist, getting them uptight and defensive, only escalates the combative and heels-dug-in stance and CNS functions. This shuts down empathy, compassion, and rational thought. Not a good plan for solving profound systemic problems.

If we are in an emergency (or, although we are in an emergency), psychotherapists in general are not the key to addressing it effectively. Psychoanalysts in particular are perhaps by temperament generally unlikely to rally to activism and vigorous, intensive advocacy. Some are, but most perhaps are not. 

How strong and active do you think psychoanalysts have been in their efforts to end the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the risk of nuclear war, which are a constant glaring and rising emergency (this year the famous nuclear clock has advanced as close to nuclear midnight as it’s ever been) that could end our civilization far faster and with far greater immediate death, injury, and disability than the climate crisis? Nuclear war, whether regional or worldwide, could begin at any minute, given the degree of global tension, nationalist and autocratic leaderships on the rise, and potential for technical and diplomatic errors. What good does it do us to maintain these weapons and engage in escalating competitions to develop and produce them?

6 7

My sincere impression, based on speaking with Palestinians, based on reading a variety of sources, based on my observations, is that Palestinians are afraid for good reason of the Israeli Defense Forces as well as the Palestinian Authority Police and other officials who coordinate with the IDF. 

If you read some recent statements for Israeli administration top dogs, you can find that all Palestinians are considered terrorists, without exception, when they are regarded as human at all. They can be quickly imprisoned, beaten forced into false confessions, locked up for many months, as well as abruptly shot dead, without having committed any crime. Children are as vulnerable to this as adults, if not more so, in the West Bank. 

However, Palestinians do not appear to have such one-sided reductive ideas about Israelis or USAmericans. Many Israelis, I believe, are afraid of Palestinian terrorists, and some are likely agree with Bibi and others that all Palestinians are terrorists, barbarians, inhuman, or that any might become or surprise them with terrorism. Many Israelis have never met a Palestinian and are protected from knowing anything about their culture and concerns, and Palestinians are generally treated within Israeli mainstream culture as non-existent. The ways that state media and information and commentary have profiled the conflict is that Israelis are perpetually at risk of violent subjugation by the Palestinian people. However, Israelis have not been evicted from their homes, their libraries seized and stolen, submitted to humiliating laws and repression, denied freedom of movement, and reduced to poverty and inability to utilize their native traditional resources, as have the Palestinians. 

Israelis are not subject to military occupation forces since 1967. Palestinians are. Can you imagine what that’s like to live with? Israelis are not limited by a system of checkpoints and cages, interrogations at gunpoint, when they try to drive from one city or town to another. They do not find new settlers destroying their farms, chopping down their generations-old olive trees, bulldozing their homes. The fears of Israelis are well-fanned to keep this system in place. 

6 13

Us-them, ingroup-outgroup thinking has been common among homo sapiens for a long time. A basic factor in group psychology, which you probably studied for a licensing exam. The emotions drive cognitions and are easily conditioned and exploited by social context and programming, of which we like other groups have had a lot, enough to saturate people who are more prone to react than to question. A very interesting interview reflecting on this sort of thing is at https://theduran.com/how-psychological-vulnerabilities-are-exploited-to-control-us/

 I read tonight the article “What would it mean to deeply accept that we’re in planetary crisis?” I thought it was really good. The alternation between the two writers helped open it up well. I think you saw this, but in case you lost or never read it, it’s at https://truthout.org/articles/what-would-it-mean-to-deeply-accept-that-were-in-planetary-crisis/

If time permits among so many other things, I may read more by these people.

6 14

To engage in a more loving, affirmative relationship to the lives we lead and share as we continue in skedillions of ways to encounter everyone’s GCE seems to me really important. 

The challenge is, in part, to deliberately practice a kind of deep self-realization and become the people we want to know and meet, as well as helping to base our living on earth day by day on a new, more progressive, inclusive, kind and generous sort of ideological orientation that we can encourage in others by modeling and acting on, in innumerable ways. 

This is part of how I understand transformational resilience and why I think it’s worthy of engagement and development, even though in the ways that ITRC does this it may appear very dry and programmatic. A formula is not a living being in development. There is a quest involved, no matter how many answers people feel they already have, life will present more questions, dilemmas, and frustrations to encounter with our most vital, caring nature.

7 4

I got disgusted early in the day hearing it referred to on NPR as ‘Independence Day’ and thinking about what an outrageously stupid idea it is to celebrate ‘independence’ that is nothing but myth and chimera…  

7 7

I also read what I found a very engaging and meaningful article by Paul Hoggett, “Climate change and the apocalyptic imagination,” which I urge you to sit down with if you haven’t before. It seems to offer responses to some of the issues raised in your IARPP paper and in our dialogues on line. Sensibly enough, if offers more warnings of emotional, rhetorical, and political traps any of us may succumb to than clear-headed definitive advice on how to proceed, but I feel one can use it to sort of clear the chakras as one does one’s best to address the emergency. I can’t find or figure out how I found a copy to read. Foolishly I didn’t download and save it.

I decided to send my APCS essay to ROOM, after I got a very warm belated response from Jill Gentile, whom I’d sent it to incorrectly thinking she’d asked to see it, after she rather said at the APCS last day that she’d been sorry to miss hearing it. 

I sent this message to Division 39 Section IX on 6 20:

Last night about 16 of us in Section IX had a caring, meaningful, sensitive, and dynamic set of conversations revolving around questions about reparations for all the kinds of injuries stemming from the history of slavery in our nation and from its legacies, aftermaths, and resistances to becoming forgettable history. It felt to me like the first of innumerable conversations that may go on for generations, if humans are to respond to this horrific moral and political violence responsibly.

This evening I read a paper, published March 2019 in Ecopsychology, devoted to reckoning with the Global Climate Emergency as not only a material roiling and devastation but also an ongoing, gathering, and perhaps perpetual global experience of psychological trauma. Basing her thinking on psychoanalytically informed trauma theory, Zhiwa Woodbury argues clearly and brilliantly for our coming to terms with the specific and unprecedented nature of Climate Trauma and its relationship with other phenomena of epigenetic, personal, and cultural trauma in ourselves, our clients, our communities, our media, and world populations. 

The best papers and articles I’ve read in recent months on why we don’t respond more proactively to the general crisis (which this work analyzes tellingly and afresh) tend to draw a blank on just what is needed from us to move into it and to survive as well as we can, collectively and individually. This article does powerful, stimulating work on both. The kind of conversation we initiated last night, concerned with a shared legacy and perpetuation of a terrible and alarming injustice and dehumanization over many generations, is an example of the kind of cooperative, integrative sharing of awareness toward solidarity and reconciliation that is vital in this period, during which many repressed, unresolved collective traumas of relational violence and dehumanization are in various, vital ways erupting and demanding healing through acknowledgement, learning, and a democratically embodied empowerment through solidarity.

This article may be accessed for $51.00 at liebertpub.com or in a free pdf from Academia.edu, which is easy to join and can lead to happy surprises, as well as offering you an easy way to make your own papers more widely accessible. Or ask the author for a reprint, at zhiwa.woodbury@gmail.com. 

I recommend this article particularly strongly to Section IXers.

7 11

I am pretty squarely on the side of anticipating extinctions increasingly widespread, non-linear programming, and generalized chaotic unpredictability, even if things go as best they may from now on – but of course the USA, Brazil, and many other nations and conglomerates will not help and will hinder things going well. 

I wish I could trust talking to anyone frankly about it, but it’s so overwhelming to address and so amorphously impossible to time events and their sequencing that I hesitate to broach the topic very directly, aside from just to say not infrequently that it’s something I’m thinking about myself, with my kids and most other people. The time when we all speak of it more directly is fast approaching, and perhaps it’s best, with most folks I come into contact with, just to offer an open door to discussion by letting them know it’s on my mind as a concern and investigation – so that later they can bring up feelings or broach questions.

7 11

This evening I read the article attached (from the Mondoweiss website) on the challenges for people who’ve grown up in Gaza coming to the US or France and considering psychotherapy for help to their OTSD (explained in article). I send it on to you not only because it’s interesting and meaningful on its own terms, but also because you are committed to considering roles for psychotherapists in relating to people suffering through the OTSD that is likely to develop more and more deeply and widely in response to ongoing GCE phenomena and their relentless and uncertain future course. It seems to me there are similarities or overlaps between what Gazans deal with – living in Gaza or as temporary or permanent emigrants – and what we increasingly face as world citizens living through this overwhelming, unstoppable, and unthinkable development in our environments, societies, identities, and loved ones. 

7 12

To the degree, significant but relatively minor, that my mother shared her grievances and private matters with me growing up, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I ought to be able or even permitted to solve or fix them. I felt that at most I was recruited as a “good listener,” and a bit of a love substitute for my dad, and I think really she then hoped I would forget whatever I had listened to. She used my next younger brother more intensely and less cautiously in this regard, and I believe it has been an abiding injury that he has felt gravely through his adulthood. This is very different than the challenges you faced as an only child with your mother’s severe disability and your father’s dismay and troubles in supporting her. That they even allowed you to carry a hope or belief that you might solve their problems seems terrible and deeply harmful, as I understand such matters. 

I would just further state that I don’t believe I can ever comprehend or learn, emotionally or cognitively, about all the pain, distress, and sufferings in this world. I know that I have my convenient and privileged means of buffering and compartmentalizing, as well as of channeling into use sometimes, the horror, anger, and grief that can get stimulated by reading or hearing about some of them. Thus, I don’t actually feel it all, intimately and effectively. I am generally able to feel some and then respond – even to respond by turning the page to a different article, or opening an art book or watching some film to relax my mind – without obsessing and making unmanageable demands on myself. I can easily accuse myself of not doing enough or not taking things seriously enough, as a result, but over time I manage to accept that I am not about to quit work to move someplace I can get arrested for blocking a pipeline or otherwise change my life course and security in a radical way – but that I am still willing to join in solidarity and be some part of an awakening to the need to address injustices and catastrophes, especially ongoing and accumulative ones. 

7 14

It was a warm lovely day with a late afternoon thunderstorm. I went to the zendo for a sitting and an annual business meeting, which was interesting. I don’t remember attending one before – though I likely did at least once. Then I went to a place called The SEED Barn in Blue Hill, on a gorgeous isthmus, where the daughter of the man who bought it (I think) is working with schoolchildren, local organizations, and other organizations in Haiti, to restore native botanical life, to develop renewed access to medicinal plants, and to express artistically the spirits of nature, ancestors, dignity, and strength. I thought to go upon hearing about a small collection of Haitian sculptures she has arranged in her garden – they are wonderful, powerful, evocative bricolages of materials found wherever, easily lost among the bounteous plants in her gardens in Maine, as they might have been before they were pulled off the street or out of trash heaps in Port au Prince. It was an inspiring visit, with her offering a tour of her gardens – plants and sculptures – and answering questions, primarily about her botanical projects. Dinner with my daughter tonight was very good and warm and calm, too.

7 19

Major cities are extremely dependent on reliable transportation systems, efficient construction projects, continuous energy and communications flows, so it’s an extremely uncommon thing that major disruptions on these would be tolerated without regular law enforcement and without advance agreement on permits. 

XR will do what it will do, with many persons willing to accept arrest, but huge masses of people are unlikely to risk facing toxic sprays, police aggression, and worse, whether on a work day or a day off or a day of deliberate defiance of corporate powers. The governing authorities have their own priorities. Strategies are key in developing activist plans. I doubt that XR is surprised at this news story.

7 28

Our GCE not something I seem to formulate clinical questions about, but I do think about it and how it may relate to clinical processes. 

I mention it when I mention it, and the emphasis varies a lot (like everything else does) depending on who I’m talking with (in clinical work and outside of it). I even suggested it as a significant contributor to a vague uneasy sense of anxiety that  a returning client told me about – as an aspect of vulnerability, which I feel has been growing as a developmental achievement in him (in his 70s), also I think due to a new terrific love relationship that now involves co-domesticity, as well as his reflecting more on his age and mortality. 

Your accounts of 3 cases with this issue embedded in them are interesting. I feel that sometimes just a little mention is enough. If and when the patient is ready, it will come up again, maybe front and center. I wouldn’t want to focus a patient on making definite short-term decisions in relation to it, but I am more likely to comment in passing on the big unknowable state of things to come, if we’re thinking about grandchildren, about legacy, about long-term planning. So far, there haven’t been any episodes in which I sense a major conflict or overwhelm emerging as a result. But I don’t yet share the collapse of society idea with my clients. I want to be respectfully sensitive specially with those who have children.

The whole thing is a whopper. I try not to get the discussion going, so far, so much as acknowledge it seems likely to be an issue, over years to come, as well as now already.

7 28

Lately I want the world to know one of the ways in toward the realization of how we are becoming subject to the global climate emergency is through listening to 46-year-old British organizational analyst Jem Bendell, whom I first heard conversing at length with psychoanalyst/activist Ro Randall in a two part video. I find it helpful, though some may find it just desperately depressing. Bendell published a year ago a calmly, abruptly thrilling 20-page paper titled “Deep Adaptation” (at http://lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf) that stepped just outside conventional academic norms and unexpectedly blew up all over the internet, sparking affinities and controversy over its discussion of the coming societal collapse. He maintains a website blog (at https://jembendell.com/) and also works with an on-line forum for those highly active on these questions (at https://deepadaptation.ning.com/) and a facebook page one may join to participate in more broadly democratic discussions (at https://www.facebook.com/groups/deepadaptation/). In a new paper (at https://iflas.blogspot.com/2019/07/compendium-of-research-reports-on.html), he summarizes a number of the past year’s peer-reviewed scientific papers that reinforce his convictions that we’re on the accelerating pathway to radical disconnection with systems and expectations we have come to rely on, (which he then comments on at https://jembendell.com/2019/07/07/a-year-of-deep-adaptation/). I encourage starting with a recent podcast interview that allows breadth and time to a conversation touching on personal as well as scientific and social facets of his emerging and morphing thoughts and experiences (at http://www.thefutureisbeautiful.co/2018/12/27/e45-jem-bendell-on-deep-adaptation-climate-change-and-societal-collapse-acceptance-and-evolution-in-the-face-of-global-meltdown/) .

To me it’s not painful reading. It’s honest reportage, from him as a person and on the planet as it’s changing. We don’t get enough of that, although occasionally a leak occurs in the wall of information management, giving us a flooded sensation. 

7 29

This isn’t the end of the world, just of the world as we’ve known it. It seems to have been predictable, but I don’t know whether this particular phenomenon was predicted or by whom. I don’t keep track of that, as my memory would make a hash of it, but I do expect diverse alarming trends, extreme weather events, fires, and floods, releases of methane and stored carbons, and a developing planetary alterations of everything short of geographic structures, and I think these alterations will be faster and less manageable than anyone has a capacity to compute, due to combinatory effects. 

We will be grieving from here on out, especially those of us who’ve been able to appreciate any degree of security, affluence, comfort, and routines over the years. So, for my mind, the “deep adaptation” agenda, always under development, is crucial to finding my bearings as things unravel and become less recognizable and tolerable, while also pressing the powerful to address strategic planning with scientifically informed foresight and to exercise compassion for the world’s growing number of homeless, hungry, thirsty, and under-informed. 

7 29

My supervisor when I was first doing therapy at the Wright Institute clinic later wrote an outstanding paper on the manic society. I was thinking of it earlier today as well. Mania would put us on route to hype up our psychotic decision-making increasingly to the point of exhaustion of all means to execute them; it seems a more worrisome analogy or paradigm than addiction, which we might manage to recover something from after hitting bottom. But these are all analogies and stories, anyway. 

7 29

I totally agree that male childhood development deserves attention in our recognition and understanding of patriarchy, which can include some compassion for the oppressor and traumatizer. Anyone inflicting trauma on others is experiencing trauma himself, as I see it. What a horrible experience of one’s life and love capacity. 

I think it was Juliet Mitchell who also write some powerfully suggestive theory about early male development. Not remembering the course of it too well, it did involve something about early divorce from identification with the maternal caregiver, promoting the boy’s experience of existential isolation, alienation, false-self machismo or self-sufficiency (consider how the neoliberal and USAmerican stereotypes are typified). The male child, per Mitchell, would be obliged to discount the power of natural life and of the planetary interdependencies, in order to preserve and develop a sense of  personal survival and integrity. Grim, isn’t it?

Some of us pansies didn’t really grow up that way, but it wasn’t easy being so different as all that, no matter how safe or toxic our mothers were. 

I will read this article. The British “public school” system, through which the affluent and distinguished process their children, is notorious for bullying, hazing, class prejudices, etcetera. I can hope it’s watered down better nowadays, but I wouldn’t wish anyone to go through it. I had enough of that sort of thing, in a less severe form, through attending, as a day student, a renowned prep school that had long been a feeder program for Princeton University. I was fortunate enough to discover a few other boys who were odd enough, creatively independent enough, and/or unconventional and easy-going enough to become friends to me. I miss them!

I’m in touch with some of those friends. Another for mysterious reasons won’t speak to me or communicate at all since I last saw him 30+ years ago. Another died with his wife, murdered in their small home on the Meher Baba commune in coastal India years ago, after we had renewed contact and had a marvelous correspondence for a couple years. He was a very kind, resourceful, unique fellow.

7 21

I read two blogposts by Bikkhu Bodhi intended to rally Buddhists to engage in some form of activism when they can, and I appreciated his resolute and clear thinking and expression. I didn’t really enjoy them, perhaps because the ideas were second nature to me and because the style was rather impersonal and starchy, but basically I felt that they were good and they certainly deserve to be read. I imagine listening to him in person would be very different, and I still hope I make time to listen to a talk or two of his on line. There is so much I hope to make time for!

I read a few short blogposts by Ro Randall this morning, and I plan to read her “Loss and climate change: the cost of parallel narratives” from about a decade ago, after reading a two paragraph summary of it in her blog.

The local small group that met to discuss an article reflecting on the GCE from a myth-oriented frame of mind elicited a very active, dynamic, moving, and meaningful discussion from the 8 of us there. 

Today two board members at the zendo took about a half hour each in place of sitting and walking meditation to talk and elicit comments on the GCE, hope, despair, and deep ecology. These were two people I have trouble listening to, although their intentions are okay, and it was a struggle to tolerate these presentations, which to me seemed vague, simplistic, short-sighted, academic, and self-important. Life goes on.

The one-day climate convergence conference transpired yesterday from 9 to 330 at the local high school, which lacks air conditioning and as usual sitting in the gym was weird and oppressive. There were some good speakers, including some college and high school students and one 8th grader. I went to breakout ‘workshops’ on the emotional processing of GCE, on teaching undergraduates about this in a cross-disciplinary course (a philosophy and a physics professor), and about the latest summary of global changes and what to expect (good but very limited in fact as a composite account of all aspects and challenges entailed). 

My reading and the small group that meets on Thursday evenings are my primary resources for coping and learning how to accept and reflect on GCE as well as to learn about what to expect. 

After reading his essay from 7/1/19, Don’t police our emotions, I signed up for communications with Jem Bendell’s various on-line stations, a quarterly report from a Forum and a Facebook page and his blog and maybe another group. To the essay I mentioned, he linked to a 7/26/18 List of emotional support resources, which I also read. I hope to read and listen to some of the things he refers to there. Then I also read just now his rather devastating but clearly reasoned Compendium of research reports on climate chaos and impacts, 7/7/19. I feel he is both reinforcing his own committed belief in the strong likelihood of societal collapse and also manifesting enough peer-reviewed scientific analyses to fully justify it.

As he typically notes, we have become very used to the dire, injurious effects of government, military, and corporate policies being minimized, soft-pedaled, and diverted from discussion. It makes complete sense to me that the chickens are coming home to roost, and the future of life on this planet will need to accommodate very different structural and adaptive qualities than we have become used to. 

On interlibrary loan I borrowed a copy of a coffee table book called Genesis, made of photographs by Sebastio Salgado, which are beautiful and deep. He made these in the previous decade all over the world, focusing on the natural world as he anticipates the loss of many current qualities to be found there. I’m just looking through it a few pages at a time, fascinated.

I wanted to give you some account of what I’ve been up to. I’m not obsessing, I believe, but I am thinking about all this, a lot lately. Meanwhile, grateful to be alive and to have many benefits of good fortune at hand. 

7 28

various THINGS have somehow come up that seemed to require immediate attention, including deciding in a rush saturday morning to send off an application for a residency of a month or less in alabama as a poet person. which i will probably not get.

and reading bruno latour’s recent book down to earth, which my old friend jonathan lethem (somewhat notorious as a novelist who actually sells books) had just ordered and read and wanted to loan me so we could talk together about it. it was a real page turner and helpful, to my mind, in contemplating a political framework for understanding how politics has been working, particularly in europe and the usa, and how the GCE may stimulate a very different and more compellingly adaptive sort of political struggle and alignment. it is only 100 pages though i often had to stop and think about a sentence or reread it, as i do also with arendt, which has all been very worthwhile to me. you may find it interesting too. i read the first half on wednesday while sitting in shade and sun at schoodic head, a favorite place of power a bit over an hour’s drive from here. 

our thursday reading group is going to shift into discussion of race/racism this week and the reading is interesting and brief but i will be at a contemporary music concert in an old mill that a bassoonist (who is also a water surveyor and a restorative justice leader, since she moved here from the nyc avant garde scene 3 years ago) lives in and turns into a space for electronic and improvised musics, so I will skip the reading group this time. 

7 29

Yes, the burden is going to be enormous, on young old and in between, in the years to come. Greta Thunberg is starting in on it early, and at least can see (and model a sense of) making some difference, although not yet on the persons who are still bent on destroying the planet’s life forms or trying to retard rather than accelerate methods of reviving and stabilizing them. 

I feel you are fortunate to have been to Alaska. I want to travel more outside the 48 but wonder increasingly whether I ever will again. It feels increasingly difficult to conscience air travel without a strong and specific socially redemptive purpose.

I’m on a kick of idolizing GT, rather wantonly. So thanks for sending these links, most of which are new to me. She is, to my mind, a sort of genius – her ability to speak purposefully, meaningfully, in a compelling and strategic way, to great emotional effect (enhanced no doubt by her history of mental health challenges, including years of mutism), as well as to make clear cut distinctions and choices. It helps me to collect experiences of her appearance and speaking voice, to help keep my inner gyroscope in some degree of balance day to day. (I could say the same of Arendt, whom I read rather religiously once a week, or Bendell, whose speaking voice I find really comfortable, although I don’t feel any of these people are trying to comfort or please any of us.) Like others put maxims on their bathroom mirror, I put photos of younger persons I admire and feel encouraged by (to keep my pluck, energy, and spirits up) here and there on my walls at home. 

I also find good fiction, set in times before an acknowledged onset of the GCE, in audio recordings, a big help. 

Buddhist is all inclusive, as I understand it. And you write with various elements of sympathy and compassion here. I can understand wondering about Bendell’s personality, male privilege, potential follow-through. He does seem to have taken great risks with his life course in order to experience himself sharing what he sees as honest truth and connect with others with such integrity as he can, and that can’t be accomplished perhaps with some (hopefully healthy) narcissistic investment. 

Our air, our waters, everything is full of strange chemicals by 2019, and so our bodies and our fetus’s bodies are to some degree permeated by alien toxins and chemistry. I have a hard time doubting this problem increases incidence of autistic disorders and dementias too. So there could be any one of a thousand reasons that a lung cancer gradually began to develop.

8 9

You ask whether I think that climate action needs to be larger than, say, the U.S. mobilization for World War II? I don’t feel I’m a person to know about such things, and maybe no one does, but all in all, I expect the adjustments that accommodation and adaptation will require and/or that preventative measures must require will be at least as great as that. I don’t really know what people went through in the late 30s early 40s, but the situation was entirely different – the danger and enemy were palpable, and the USA waited quite a while before getting involved (aside from our national commerce getting pretty damn involved in transactions with the Third Reich to its advantage). 

USAmerican powerhouse finance and industries are well oriented to taking advantage of disasters and social collapses in order to take over and turn a profit and extend their empires, but this is a different situation from that too. They are perhaps pathetically resistant and under-prepared for a growing overwhelm that hasn’t changed their own life styles or supply chains too much yet. 

8 9

I am already among the overcommitted, by my own reckoning. I didn’t mean to give up reading poetry or psychoanalysis to wrestle with climate change, and I’d like to correct the balance in how deeply that’s happening. It’s very hard to do. It seems to me that the inessential reading, doing, seeing occupies very little of my weekly life at this point. And but I do try to keep active in ways that matter to my soul and nature.

8 10

The best way to discuss it is to meet with people who are also recognizing their doubts or despair about a habitable planet. They generally do not need convincing, and they are capable of empathizing and sometimes of reflecting with us. Other people we can alert to the fact that we’re continuing to learn and worry and even stay active on this front, and they can ask more or share more when they are ready. To try to get them to listen or talk about it, if they haven’t asked to or begun the conversation as a real exchange seems a frustrating and futile use of energy. So it seems to me. 

The “community healing discussion group” that Benjamin and Lori started in East Blue Hill is of the former kind. It has now refocused on white fragility in the context of USAmerican racism, but the group members are now knowable as people who get it about potentials for massive disaster, shortages, societal collapse, and possible extinction. And the linkage between white male supremacy and global climate emergency is so tight as to make them pretty much the same thing, it seems to me. 

The other day on the way to this group I was thinking about the expectations of societal collapse and the world and national news I receive, realizing that such collapse is already well underway. In the USA and elsewhere we have a rise in authoritarian political leaders and formations, divisiveness and intensive conflict between elements of the general population, exercise of violence to address differences and misunderstandings, disrepair, damage and decay of outmoded infrastructures, gridlocked governmental decision-making about vital social issues, severe separations between science and policy, and mistrust of those traditionally expected to keep the status quo manageable. The authoritarian may be chosen by a voting majority as the strong man leader who will take care of all this chaos, and he then typically incites more of the same. Whether the 2020 election in the USA will simply heighten this tendencies or lean effectively into resolving them (somehow!!) inspires gathering suspense to the point of near breathlessness . . . Holding our breaths for another 14 months seems dangerous, however. 

8 12

 There are many rising outrages, including those against injustice and those against dark-skinned people. 

I’m not sure I would care to invoke rising tides of outrage so much as awakenings of interdependency consciousness and love of life and its home.

8 12

Human life on planet earth is not going to survive in a post-industrial period based on hunting and gathering, or not until the population is radically diminished and wildlife has miraculously flourished across populated zones, so farming is going to be necessary in one form or another for the indefinite future. Some farms do enrich the soil and its ability to not only support healthy organically grown edibles but also to sequester carbon and generally serve a healthier atmosphere with less carbons getting released. All farms occupy land that might otherwise be taken up with deciduous or other trees and forests, and perhaps other sorts of effective carbon-management vegetal life. But there’s not point in proposing that all farms be destroyed and outlawed. Farms that practice intelligent management of the soil and produce foods not troubled by chemical fertilizers and pesticides are perhaps the most worth preserving. And I believe that they can increase in share of the planet’s farmland while the farms that ruin and abandon the soil in various ways can become fewer and disappear over time. (Over a lot of time, probably. I don’t think we’re talking about saving the spectrum of life forms on the planet fast in this discussion about farms.) If some of the ruined or badly exploited farmland were to return to wilderness or forest, that might help, eventually, with our carbon climate issues. If it were all lost, I think there would be tremendous increases in social disruption due to starvations. Empty lots and parking lots and dead malls, etc., are especially great candidates for new forests and wild plants, in my estimation. 

Meanwhile, with Greta Thunberg, I see the virtues and values of a vegan diet, in its refusal to depend on sentient animals as food source, as an intelligent plan for as many as will embrace it, or to whatever expect people will lean that way, with respect to conserving the best in our atmosphere’s capacity to support life. I understand that both the depletion of trees and other natural growth to allow for grazing, etc., and the radical proliferation of methane gasses resulting from animal husbandry on a vast factory-farming scale contribute very significantly to global heating. 

9 2 2019

I have the sense that the more people are engaged, even if only in the struggle to recognize the imposing impending reality of the GCE and to respond with some degree of love for themselves, for one another, for the providence of our ecosystem, a great deal is accomplished. Most people may take a long time to move from getting it as an unparalleled dilemma to getting active and pursuing activist methodologies. But the more our social worlds resonate with love and compassion, actual thought and curiosity, the better our outcomes as a set of communities will be. 

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Sharing Relational Space with Earth

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Steve Benson

(Fall 2018)

Our key definer of adulthood may have been our dedication to staying responsible (enough) to others and to ourselves to foresee and protect ourselves and others from dangers in the immediate and more distant future. But our greatest challenge is not even learning from our mistakes, which we often do if we identify their patterns. It is to retain somehow the sensitivity, vitality, imagination, versatility, and ready wakefulness of a child.

Anyone grows up someplace, but first in a unique mother’s womb, beginning to sense whatever, without names for it, without knowing anyparticular way what one is doing. This may be the basic “natural” state for any of us human beings, in a perpetual immediate present, before we live in relation to a self and distinctions. If we could hit reset on our brain-computer, we might discover this again. As we grow week by week into our external environment, meeting it on whatever terms we are given there, we find ourselves defined by other humans and their language. They treat us in certain increasingly familiar ways, and they give us names for ourselves and our actions and attitudes. We encounter and gradually stabilize relationships to time and space and feelings and needs. We set up terms for these relationships that we have to cope with to survive in this world. All this is certainly socialization. Isn’t there something else we are also constituted by as selves, as conscious respondents to our world, perhaps unnamable in our Western discourses?

In a panel on climate change at IARPP in June, Susan Bodnar told about an intervention she has tried in workshops and psychotherapy. She asked people to recall their earliest memories of spaces and places in their natural world. What smells and sounds do they recall from the world around them? What colors? What sounds and motion? How did it feel against the skin – that breeze, that humidity, that grass, that clay? What sense experiences were known there, and what did they remember of it? She found that people tended to have deep, lasting impressions they often had forgotten about and were relieved, often deeply moved, to recall. They found words for what they felt they had experienced there – ease, freedom, belonging, joy, wildness, comfort, danger, security, trust.

Our sense of what’s natural may change across our lifetimes. So may that which we find around us to call nature. In rural Downeast Maine, where I’ve lived the past 21 years, I’m learning that the local forests were different, even a couple decades ago when I got here. Conifers are gradually disappearing, resulting in far fewer sorts of butterflies and more sugar maples, owing to changes in the climate. The woods, as we know them, now, are not as natural as when the Wabanaki tribes governed these territories, even though that human culture must somehow have impacted nature too.

We were brought up – I was brought up – many of us were brought up to be tctful and reserved about our feelings and appetites, to observe discretion in the pursuit of our passions, to opt for security, conformity with the known world, and autonomous achievement, to avoid indulging in risk, weirdness, and idleness. One result was to accept a distancing, a quiet alienation, as the favored ground of surviving manageably and proving ourselves acceptable to others.

As a boy, around ten or twelve, living in a suburban New Jersey township, before the years I would bicycle far enough long afternoons to get lost in the farmlands outside of town, I used to walk into a small woods of just a few acres across the street from our home to find my way into what I took for the heart of unspoiled wilderness. Or I allowed myself to think of it that way. There, beside an old tree along the bank of a shallow stream, as though to embrace a possibility of freedom from civilized norms, sometimes I would remove my clothes, lie in the warm sun freckled by the leaves, dip my toes into the slow-running water, defecate into a glass jar I’d brought there, and twist the lid closed to save my feces in a hidden place rather than despoil the environment or carry them home.

I believe this was a sort of erotic experience, sensual, even amatory, but not specifically sexual. It was an idyll, a respite, not an obsession. I didn’t know anything about masturbating. I hadn’t known a lust for anyone. This hideaway was a place of peace, and of an undemonstrative power, but also threatened – threatened by my own idea that just being there, naked, was transgressive, making me vulnerable to observation, judgment, and attack. My behavior was abnormal, un-called-for, and obviously pointless.

Still I can wonder, as I may have then, what all was I seeking there, and how much of that did I find?

I’m sure I’d seen photographs at home in National Geographic magazine of primitive people, scarcely dressed, in tropical places, almost as naked as I made myself. I may have wanted to be them or commune with them. What did they know that I didn’t? Or that I didn’t want to forget? Or to have already forgotten?

I think my aim was to access and preserve something unnamable, unspecifiable, a possibly universal quality of living that might be and feel simple and essential. My intuition suggests that, within the erotic pulse of prepubescent self-observation, bathing in the terpenes exuded by all the vegetal growth around me, I was seeking to enact or know my own true self and confirm an identity within the context of a non-verbal ecology, independent of human distinctions and judgments, of societal implications and expectations, of language and structure as I had learned it.

We haven’t found terms to analyze how our early emergence into a uniquely grounded and responsive selfhood are affected by vital relationships with the non-human world around us, including pets, prey, pests, and errant critters, including life forms without a heartbeat, and other unliving stuff they all live in relation to as well – rocks, walls, watercourses, boxes, pollens, UV rays, 4G broadband, stars. The non-human doesn’t relate to us through words, and it seems rarely to express expectations of us. For all we know, these animals, things, elements, all composed of energy, all love us unconditionally in some underlying sense. But we tend to take them for granted as we mature. We forget how vital and intimate, how dynamically alive, our relationships with them still always are.

Without our noticing it much, the non-human environment still responds to us, even as it is now impacted by the human in most every respect. In any given moment, I sense and know myself in part through junctions of connectivity with the non-human environment. This wooden table, this flat-screened laptop, this swiveling wooden owl stool I rest my bottom on – these function as prostheses, extensions. They coordinate my body and mind, facilitating certain functions, whether I notice them consciously or not. They affect and qualify how I am feeling and thinking. How can I describe what changes when I hear the sound of a propane heater’s fan coming on and off? How am I made, or unmade, differently by the ticking of the wall clock? Or the sunshine on the periphery of my vision? A cloudy day would find me different.

I know that my sense of self is adjusted by internal physiological changes and states, too, many of them enigmatic to me, undiscovered territories and unexplained events. My nonverbal human body makes every other aspect of attention and action and sensitivity possible, while my understanding of all that is still pretty sketchy. Like my car, if it works, I needn’t pay much mind to how it works. Our frequent obliviousness to the states and constitution of the body contributes to a disregard for our relationships with everything around us.

We can work on bringing our intimate, caring relationships with animals, plants, and other forms and forces into focused attention through here-and-now mindfulness exercises, through journaling and conversation, through slowing momentarily to take stock of the sensation or perception of a moment. This may support and strengthen our wilingness to ally with the earthly, interdependent environment on which we and other living forms of sensate energy depend. If I stop to observe and notice and feel, I can better ask: What matters to me here? What supports me? How do I support it?

We humans have an intimate, interactive, reciprocal relationship with the nonhuman world, including its underlying natural laws and energies. The nonhuman world affects our functioning, and we affect its functioning, constantly, asleep or awake. Any one moment’s attention may affect our nonhuman world, if only by delaying some other action that might affect it differently. These active, changing relationships occur within an irreducible dynamic network of innumerable other relationships between all nonhuman entities on this planet, as well as all the other humans, nearly all of whom we will never know in name or circumstance.

As humans, perhaps uniquely, we can shape and frame conceptions of relationship. Our sympathetic intelligence can appreciate the liberating power of responding with care to an other. Symbolic language supports our remarkable powers to do so, as well as compromising their intimate realization.

Exploring our capacity for a warmer, more tender, affirmative quality of occasional or continuous attention to these relationships may reframe our despair and anxiety over climate change into loving care and curiosity as to what is present, changing or threatened, and what we may do, individually or collectively, to support our world’s wellness and survival, and our own. I am not speaking of pity or charity but of realizing more viscerally and immediately our actual, mutually contextualized relationships with environmental particulars as integral to our survival and wellness along with that of other life forms and their contexts on this earth. Can I look into the eyes of the fern, the cloud, the gulley, and say sincerely, “I see you”? We are all in this together.

These reciprocal relationships function whether remarked on or not, without words or naming, and largely unconsciously, for us, and perhaps also for the life forms and materials around us. These unconscious relations may to a great degree be explored as unfamiliar territories and welcomed into our personal acknowledgement. Do they flourish already in a collective unconscious?

We are and have been nurtured always by the unimaginably complex interconnected dynamic functioning of all aspects of material existence that we can identify.

Human circumstances are not routinely prioritized in the workings of nature, nor of natural catastrophes. A wildfire might support a forest’s long-term growth and the planet’s life forms without benefiting people living or holding property or planning to harvest in the area affected. In effect, the nurturing of which we can speak here happens indifferently to humans as a particular species or life form. But the planet’s ecology and development, prior to any human influence, made our development as a species possible and our tribal and individual lives capable of their peculiarly refinements of development. 

We have been given, in effect, the grounds of our existence as homo sapiens through our relationships with the nonhuman. Without our reciprocal relationships with the nonhuman we certainly cannot continue to survive, individually or as a species. Contemplating contemporary climate change along with its natural and humanly inflected consequences, including its genocidal function with respect to many species of living organisms, we humans have occasion collectively to feel remorse and guilt, along with our grieving. 

Meanwhile, we continue to coexist with everything else that currently exists, and we continue to experience its interactions with us, however little we notice. We are due to wonder how other forms of life and other entities of the natural world may experience our actions, in their own diverse means of sensitive responsivity. 

We may notice smog, for instance, changing the air in major cities. Although we have technical devices to measure air pollution in detailed ways, we primarily notice it when we sense that it changes our own condition for the worse. We are not often likely to reflect on how air pollution renders the sunsets more colorful, deep and vibrant; we are more likely to notice how visibility is reduced, the sunlit skies get hazier, and our breathing becomes compromised. The degree to which diverse humanly engineered changes in air quality contribute to autism, Alzheimers, and cancers are rarely discussed and disgracefully under-researched. We are even more unlikely to assess the effects of variable air quality on the health and habits of other animals. As humans, we learn how to empower ourselves to choose what to know — to our peril, and that of our co-residents on earth.

Significant, worrisome increases in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide are appearing in regions marked by severe increases in heat levels. This stqte of Maine sees relatively modest effects of global warming. I may resent erratic weather, damn the invasive plants, fear a flooded basement, curse bothersome insects, frost heaves breaking through my country road and deer jumping to a stop just short of my car. I can observe that every way I feel any selfish antipathy is uncomfortable, in me. Yet I can get used to it. Such attitudes condition us to accept as normal many aggressive interventions and deliberate neglect toward the health of our nonhuman environment that are, cumulatively, deeply destructive and deregulating. Acculturation has led us to prioritize our opportunities to do what we think we want.

Negative emotional reactivity between people often urges on consequences as dangerous to oneself or one’s own tribe as to the other. A fight-or-flight moment disables us from cooperative problem-solving and mindful care for a relationship, provoking instead a patterning of reciprocally destructive harm. If the nonhuman does not fight back, we can feel our aggression is harmless, even justified. Ignoring such relational dynamics reinforces our careless, oblivious complicity in an accumulating and reactive annihilation of the networking of shared needs within which we can live. Our legacy of self-aggrandizing, colonialist, genocidal relations toward the indigenous peoples of this American continent conditions us unconsciously toward the subjugation, exploitation, and destruction of the life forms around us and of the conditions that foster their survival.

We could do worse than deliberately admit them into our attention. We have done worse. We can do better. With pleasure.

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The Concertgoer

Posted on October 12, 2019 by Steve Benson

An authentic active radical music that seems to revel in its audacity, its dry oblique wit, its divagations and unanticipated contrasts and reframes, all with a moody melancholy sense of loss and impending loss. I have a sense of “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” on the part of myself and of the composer – and of the music.

The performance however is a bit louche.

5 Duo Canons from JSBach’s Art of the Fugue & Kodaly Duo in Dminor Op. 7

We are reminded of the inevitability of the other, its inner laws interacting with our own, in surprises that seem imperative.

I feel like I’ve heard a faithful rendition of everything that’s in the music, but I haven’t heard the music.

Like a like liking its like

Even in a workmanlike rendition

Total Recall??

Expressive of experiences no one can understand who hasn’t been there, and which are extraordinary in their depths and dynamics.

                                                         10 11 2019

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2018 travel notes from West Bank & Israel

Posted on April 28, 2019 by Steve Benson

I had thought how meaningful and useful it might be to write about all that was said by people I met and trusted in the Occupied Territories of Palestine but then and now I have learned that it is not safe to name and quote them since anyone’s criticisms of Israel are likely to be identified as anti-Semitic (even if spoken by Semite-loving Semites), terrorist, and criminal in the eyes of an Israeli legal, military, and governmental administration. I am still trying to figure out if I can, perhaps laboriously, find a way to present such notes without leading to any person’s or organization’s being identified as subject to increased sanctions. I don’t see any of the persons  met as terrorist, violent, or anti-Semitic, but I am not Israeli and I have no specific legal, familial, or legacy stake in the matter. You may write to me at the address below to ask for more detailed notes.

My photos from the trip are posted at

https://www.flickr.com/photos/21151148@N04/albums/7215766  5765723327.

My own list of films and resources available to see at home follows here.

Some recommended resources

8 films recommended for study on the interactions and relations involved in Palestine / Israel / Occupation / Zionism :

Colliding Dreams

Rabin, the Last Day

Censored Voices

The Inner Tour

5 Broken Cameras

Arna’s Children

Jenin, Jenin

The Lab                     

[Note: These films have been available to date as discs from

Netflix; you may discover access in other ways as well.]

Two recent nonfiction literary books devoted to addressing Palestine and the Occupation:

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation, edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, 2017

Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense, by Marcello Di Cintio, 2018

Some valuable on-line resources:

To read:

The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict, Third Edition, at http://ifamericaknew.org/history/origin.html. 40 readable pages of material quoted from identified sources document issues and events from 3000 BC to 2001.

The past didn’t go anywhere : making resistance to antisemitism part
of all of our movements, at https://archive.org/details/ThePastDidntGoAnywhere. In 34 pages, a booklet on questioning and overcoming antisemitism in thoughts and speech.

Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A primer, at https://www.merip.org/sites/default/files/Primer_on_Palestine-Israel(MERIP_February2014)final.pdf. A fact-based 16-page basic history.

Obstacles to Peace: A reframing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, by Jeff Halper, 2016, at https://icahd.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/2017/07/Obstacles-to-Peace-May-2016.pdf. An 84-page historical analysis of how things came to this point.

To watch:

We Have a Dream to Live Safe لدينا حلم العيش بأمان is a 12 minute video, completed in 2016, created by youth at Lajee Cultural Center in Bethlehem, characterizing life in Aida Refugee Camp. (Find more videos from the Center at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU74X1lVjSKxjHU05ghvQYA.)

The Great Book Robbery, at https://vimeo.com/48141495 , is a one-hour film made 6 years ago, vividly explains and documents the looting of Palestinian’s libraries in 1948 and their subsequent archiving under Israeli institutions.

Mohammad Alazzah’s videos at https://vimeo.com/user8484839: Five vivid and thoughtful short films from within the Palestinian community.

Please excuse any errors or omissions.

These recommendations stem from my own limited recent experiences.

— Steve Benson

(Send any correspondence to sbenson58@gmail.com)

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The Doctrine of Discovery

Posted on April 28, 2019 by Steve Benson

The Doctrine of Discovery, based in a Papal bull of 1493 and the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, was used throughout the colonial imperialist period to justify the ownership of lands by whatever Christian government’s representatives first set foot on them to claim them, so long as they were previously not occupied by any people subject to a European Christian monarch.

The doctrine’s utility does not appear to have required that such a government be specifically pledged to Christianity nor to have a monarchical governing power, as it was extended. In 1792, as Secretary of State for the United States of America, Thomas Jefferson declared the Doctrine would apply to his newly founded nation as it had to European powers.

The United States Supreme Court agreed that the doctrine justified USAmerican settler colonialist taking of land from indigenous peoples, who were recognized as occupants rather than holders of the land, if and when they were recognized as human. Typically, indigenous occupants of lands subject to such European or settler discovery were regarded as subhuman, savage, or barbarian.

Chief Justice John Marshall wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court in Johnson vs. M’Intosh to the effect that land titles obtained from Native Americans should not be recognized by U.S. courts. Marshall himself had considerable real estate holdings that would have been affected if the case at hand had been decided otherwise. In other cases, the Court also used the Doctrine to justify “the concept that tribes were not independent states but ‘domestic dependent nations’” and to prohibit any tribe from legally prosecuting anyone not a member of that specific tribe.

Despite recent decisions to repudiate the Doctrine by the United Nations Economic and Social Council Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues’ and several prominent U.S. churches, it remains foundational in the establishment and continuity of legal and property rights in the U.S. and has never been disavowed or overturned by the U.S. government.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the state of Israel appears to re-enact this principle in its relations with the Palestinian peoples (including Christian Palestinians), compounding its methodology with the principle of the right of return of the Jewish peoples, stemming primarily from Europe and the United States. The lack of a formal Palestinian state formation prior to the development of Zionist settlement following the break-up of the Ottoman empire in the first World War has been drawn on to support the premise that there never was a Palestine, nor a Palestinian people.

Those native to lands intended for settlement or appropriation, whether still now subject to military occupation or actively colonized by Jewish communities with state support, are typically regarded by high officers of the Jewish state as, without exception, nothing but terrorists, non-existent, or less than fully human. Palestinians employed as workers in cities and towns in Israel are subject to strict conditions that disempower the labor force and contribute to instability and vulnerability of working Palestinians. Human rights as recognized by Israel and other democratic states as essential to the protection of citizens are not acknowledged as pertinent to Palestinians in Israel or its occupied territories.

The Israeli state’s methods of dislodging, degrading, terrorizing, evacuating, and restricting a great many diverse rights of the Palestinian population sustain a process of gradual genocide. This process closely resembles the management of relations with the indigenous peoples of territories the United States has chosen to colonize, settle, and lay claim to and govern, often in violation of treaties previously established with various tribal authorities.

The imperialist conquests and the violent and oppressive impositions of colonial power they reputedly validated continue to be enacted in Palestine and elsewhere, despite consequences easily identified as catastrophic and profoundly inhumane, except by those who do not regard the indigenous in fellowship as sentient, intelligent human beings.

To this day, religion is in many cases cited as authority for one power’s or people’s superiority of authority and rights over another. (The secular faith in an “invisible hand” of commercial markets, wiser than any state or person, appears to have evolved into playing such a role on demand in some instances, in support of state or corporate powers over the indigenous people of a region.)

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a note, more like an aside, on the poetry community

Posted on June 20, 2018 by Steve Benson

I had another thought about the poetry community thing and it’s far-fetched or simple-minded or right on, I’m not sure. It’s my suspicion that much of the time it’s not only the diminished hope of returns in ongoing timespace of human relating that feels like it’s in scarcity and that risk of missing the boat threatens connectivity but also the diminished hope of ongoing interpersonal timespace itself in the face of global economic insecurity, climate change, nuclear proliferation, diminishing h20 resources, increasing expectation of imminent terrorist deracination and infrastructural collapse — all the things I myself think of when I decide maybe I prefer not to live forever. (I can’t think of any other reason not to I’ve forever, but those can, on increasing realization of what we can for the moment call fears, add up not only to my personal suffering but my being one more uneasy burden on whoever is young and bright enough to negotiate the radically catastrophic and revamped future we may be up against to ever accelerating degrees). I know this is kind of a grim thought, and it doesn’t occur to me while I am dialoguing with you but later, in a subway car, after listening to people talk (for the most part, very compellingly and well and intelligently, even brilliantly) about the schizophrenogenic circumstances of life in Israel and Palestine (these being two names for the same thing, of course, at least in more than one way). I wonder if what I’ve just referred to, which is I believe more an intrinsic internalized cross-population un-ease than a litany or inventory of risk and worry, also underlies the rising tide of typographical errors in all writing, on line or published in print, across recent years. This morning, reading two Poetry Foundation website articles on Laura Elrick’s book Propagation, I find in each one patently inadvertent but unmarked typo, each time in a lengthy quotation from a review published (on line, presumably) elsewhere. Was the error (e.g., ‘and’ for ‘an’) not noticed in the original, then again not noticed in the essay quoting it? Who’s minding the store? Probably, as we were saying, the person so delegated, if they exist, is overworked, not sleeping enough, has digestive track (tract? why can’t I tell which word is right?) trouble, and is distracted by terror of a sort they can’t focus on, focusing instead on sort of doing the right thing, even if that’s a suspect project and in any case it can’t be done entirely right.

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On the occasion of the unthinkable

Posted on March 19, 2017 by Steve Benson

From a letter to Thom Donovan, 03 16 2017: I am grateful for your sustained discussion with me of the unclear and yet also lucid topic of ‘going crazy’ in the name of integrity and socially realistic and fluid realization of the power of discourse to make more sense than logic or ‘common sense’ will allow. (That, anyhow, is how I can momentarily phrase the topic we have shunted back and forth, or caroomed on through in this dialogue.)

The final words of the paragraph you offer resonate for me, now as I read them again, months after I first read them and had to let them wait a while before finding psychic elbow room to respond in good faith.

I guess this is what matters in going crazy–stepping far enough outside of common sense that one would appear crazy (and/or dangerous) to those for whom the world is structured. Or, that by assuming the common sense of those whose lives have never had value or power–whose common sense has in other words never constituted the commons–you risk the sensual certainties of the world as it has been given to you. Perhaps this is all the craziness of which I speak entails: these structures of hate becoming clear and the instability psychically and otherwise which results from this…

The concept of ‘common sense,’ like that of ‘normal,’ has become increasingly infuriating and impatience-provoking to me, such that I rail against them regularly in psychotherapy sessions and elsewhere. Either is what it says it is merely in the eyes of a beholder, and different to each when actually articulated, and those of any supposed authority who assume and reassure others of consensus on such matters are virtually (or would-be) brainwashing, if perhaps more inept in reaching their goals. Thus, I am glad for each opportunity I encounter to turn a position against common sense or the seeming positive or negative value attributed to ostensible normality, in whatever assumption or projection it appears, and whether my position is articulated formally, logically, flamboyantly, or manneristically, I can see it as rather wild, though not close to insane from my point of view.

Others who don’t identify ‘common sense’ and allegations of normality in some trait, achievement, or ideation as conceptually and linguistically insane might well see my own positions as insane. Such indeed seems to be the nature of our social discourse, among the body politic, to a greater extent than ever, in the age of Drumpf. It seems to be now supremely difficult for homo sapiens americanus to dialogue and perform active listening exercises with one another across the enormous divide between belief systems as identified by George Lakoff and others. I have hopes of diverse individuated crossings over from right to left as the nation itself goes down the drain and millions are sacrificed to the god of Mammon. I fear now as ludicrous my personal wishes that such conversions occur soon enough, nonviolently, and effectively to a degree that may allow subsequent generations in this and other regions of the planet to live with adequate water, food, energy, peaceable intertribal relations, and felicitous climatic conditions for survival and perhaps even exercises of imagination and reflection. At this point, it seems presumptuous and absurd to anticipate such supposedly ‘normal’ conditions half a century from now.

Given the US government’s and populace’s functionally ‘insane’ two-step of acceptance and avoidance around the patent evidence and awareness of climate change over the past 30 years since folks like you and me began to take it quite seriously, as well as how the same ambivalent but seemingly effortless dance step has played out in relation to nuclear proliferation and class and race relations in this country, it is hard not to presume that the erratic and clumsy strategies and tactics with which Drumpf plainly hopes to collapse his nation and his planet into a disaster capitalism windfall will be largely taken by the routinized public as embarrassing but tolerable foibles along the path toward some city on some hill, while imagining his hidden better nature soon or somehow emerging to reconcile the balance between catastrophe and supremacy in some unformulatable constellation of adroit adjustments — of a sort neither he nor others in our government have demonstrated competency in devising, beyond the rhetoric of promises. “Believe me” has become the bottom line of our minority president’s appeal to his electorate’s judgment and reason.

*

written in Facebook, 03 19 2017, after linking to Steven Reisner’s 03 15 2017 article in Slate on whether Drumpf has a mental illness:

The minority president tends to bait and provoke fights with others of any standing, authority, or power, whenever he is not idealizing and fawning over them. He is restless and competitive and not done twisting truth and seeking power and contesting all challenges to his integrity and reality. He has filled key cabinet and advisory posts that are usually taken by civilians with former combat generals, when not with corporate bosses and financial sharks. As he gradually antagonizes and argues down his own chosen crew, turns all but the diehards in the electorate against him, and wrecks or sacrifices all but the most venal international alliances on principle, won’t he decide the enemy is us (the US)? I anticipate his deliberate and triumphant turn against the people (except whoever continues to pile glory on him)?Will he begin to feel out his team’s readiness to stage a military coup? Might his military advisors and their cronies react to all that too-muchness by launching one against him (and us)? If not, why not?

Posted in Uncategorized

Coordination was the Nazi-era term for normalization

Posted on January 8, 2017 by Steve Benson

I have less and less confidence in our national checks and balances’ capability to cope with disturbances in our political system’s functions that are deeply prepared, procedurally, ideologically, and unconsciously. Climate change could be a simple test case for our system: has the interaction of the 3 branches of government, with their typical swaying from L to R to L between two parties (which we may see as radical right and centrist-enabling) managed to do its share to ward off global warming responsibly to its own citizens and to the peoples of the world whose basic rights it vows to protect? I find there is little grounds for trust or confidence, and much for shock and awe.

Coordination, within our consumer culture, is easily done by passively standing by, noting the authorities’ current statements, behaviors, and undertakings, and commenting with more or less vehemence than one might show while watching NFL play-offs. Shock, disdain, worrying, and lamentation among diverse fragments of the population are readily enfolded within the capacities of large-scale national coordination in service to a centralized regime supported by large corporate sponsors.

The alternative, as I understand it, is not just to criticize but to actively and visibly participate in alternatively oriented statements, behaviors, and undertakings. Food distribution nonprofits. Nonviolence direct action trainings. Public documentary film screenings concerned with peace, justice, and deepening awareness of interpersonal challenges. Petitions and donations on line.

Commentary is not enough. Conjoint participation in a meaningful activity with others is vital. This working group on the study of authoritarianism is, however, an active agency of contesting misuses of power and of allegiance, which requires concerted energy to sustain its function and may result in increased strength in a community’s will to resist radical disempowerment and to envision realistic and inspiring options for the near and distant future.

Posted in Uncategorized

TRAVELBLOG OF CAPE BRETON

Posted on September 29, 2016 by Steve Benson

24 hours, 09 10-11 2016

There exists, there remains, some possibility of rain, incipient, pregnant, pausing,
about to be realized.
As it said in the guidebook, if the road is muddy,
you may not like it.
I’m surprised, given ostensibly extraordinary lack of rainfall,
that the road is wet and muddy in places.
Even though I don’t like it, it’s not bad,
it’s still walkable, and my feet are not sinking into anything, though it’s slippery,
a little slippery.
It’s wet in the atmosphere too, as I have been told is characteristic
of Nova Scotia and of Cape Breton.
I walk along the River Denys Mountain Road.
I did not expect to come across it so soon, nor to walk down it so soon.
I found it
because the sign pointed it out.
I was looking more for signs for the roads across the street preceding it,
which I did not notice, but maybe I was distracted,
thinking about your text to me, thinking about what the environment meant to me,
thinking about the present.
My idea was, whatever is present is what I can comment on.
I can’t say much else. There’s a sign by the side of this mountain road,
this dirty mountain road,
something about KEEP CLEAR SNOW MOBILE CLUB TRAILS.
This reminds me of the guidebook again, a guidebook I do not have, did not bring,
looked at only yesterday and not for long, choosing this road
as a trail for a relaxing and convenient walk on my way into Cape Breton today,
and maybe it will be, so. I want to stay attentive to the present
because I don’t trust my knowledge of anything else.
I don’t trust my anticipation of theft, mugging, conspiracy, surveillance.
I do believe that I see puddles of water, reflecting, in brown, the sky,
as seen between tree limbs and branches and tree trunks. I do believe
that I parked my car, back there, on a piece of earth recently moved so as to create
a place to park or turn one’s car around.
It serves, though unfortunately to my mind
it appears to have resulted in some breakage and movement of some tree limbs and trunks towards the slope down to the river, which is not visible from here.
I don’t even know if I can hear it.
I only suppose that I am walking parallel to it
and may soon, at some time, catch sight of it again and hear it more clearly.
When Bob and I walked through the ovens we recorded the sound of water
sluicing up the channel between severely sharp tilts of rockage into the caverns, tubular, lengthy at times, and grotesquely dangerous to any potential swimmer or boat that might be washed in as the waves thundered proudly and indignantly triumphantly demanding and confirming their domain temporarily as they hit the air inside and the rocks and the water and whatever flotsam and muck they had stirred up and pushed toward the back end of the cavern, the oven, the tube, to where rock creates or sustains a limit, and rushed faster and faster back to crash against another oncoming wave, from the ocean.

+

As a travelogue this may be the best I can do. I present a travelogue concerning a transit of Cape Breton. I’m not sure how to pronounce it. I’m walking uphill. Rocks are embedded in the road, or the road was created out of dirt that existed and was put down and around among many rocks, some of which were pushed away, no doubt, and many of which remain, barely visible, at the surface. As the roadway curves, it goes up. On the drive here, I listened, from the area of Lunenberg, to the area of Agrichamonte, no, that’s not the name of it, but it’s a city that starts with A-g-r-i in which a Catholic university exists. Most of that duration I listened to the first disc recorded as a reading of The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, whose fiction I am not personally familiar with, aside from reading Ethan Fromm in high school. I know that her other books are not much like that, or so I think. Anyway, I observed, through the English accent of the man reading the novel, that there exists or is sustained, evidently, quite a bit of complacency among the key characters and their associates, despite change taking place. Not only will a new opera house be built that will alter the census and divisions of their milieu, but they realize that getting engaged to be married changes things, at least a little, and maybe a lot, despite well-worn passages of expectations awaiting any newly engaged couple, and furthermore, that the return of an errant cousin, fetchingly beautiful and ostensibly more than available for intimacy and inquisition, will disrupt many expectations and perhaps derail life plans for her and others, if they have any. Some have plans primarily to keep things pretty well the same, but she, being a woman who has absconded from a marriage that appears to have been contrary to her needs, in another country, to return home under the shadow of an unfortunately scandalous reputation, may have no plans for normalcy other than perhaps that which she recalls from her childhood and adolescence, when her expectations, however barren, appeared in the context of an ostensible normalcy for her class and its local customs. The voice I heard there affects my speaking voice in this travelogue, as does a different male voice I listened to in the previous hour or so, reading aloud another novel, this one by Alan Furst, another one of whose World War Two espionage novels I have read on the page, perhaps ten years ago. And the traveler at the moment at the crux of this tale, moving alone between holiday, work, and home, work, appears increasingly anxious, and I suspect realistically so, that he will be arrested and stalled, detained and questioned, and, whereas he expects this will lead to beatings, torture, and death by firing squad or other mode of secretive state execution, I suspect he will be flipped or turned, as the expression may be, to become an agent for the opposing forces, namely, in this instance, the Third Reich. Therefore, his status and what people understand of it will be brutally different, even though no one may realize that he has indeed flipped, turned, been so recruited. Looking down the embankment, which now is very steep, as I have been walking uphill since the point at which I mentioned the roadway turning and curving, I see a very large blue can on its side in the woods, which mostly are pristine new growth, where what they were like a year or ten years or fifty years ago, I cannot say. The can might be a can used to hold paint that such as house paint or car paint that awaits sale from its manufacturer or a retail outlet. None of those is available for questioning here, but I do spot another piece of trash at my feet. This seems to be the top end of a Budweiser can, or, no maybe it’s Coca-Cola, I’m not sure. The script on one side reminds me of Budweiser, and they talk about the wood aging produces, and on the other side I see red with some blank angled lines in it, which reminds me of Coke, but then again it could be that funny logo at the top of a beer can that might be Budweiser. It’s a long time since I’ve looked at a Budweiser can, and so it is almost facetious, no, I think it is facetious for me to attempt to attribute this fragment of a can, flattened by many vehicle tires passing over it, heavy with the weight of vehicles and their contents— I’m not sure what it is, other than feeling sure that it is the ripped-apart top end of a can in which some sort of a drink, probably beer—and how can one be sure of a probably?—was once held, sustained, kept under some pressure, readied for sale at a retail outlet, to persons visiting or residing in these parts of lower Cape Breton.

+

Twenty or thirty paces further, I see a box
left over from a double six-pack of Budweiser in trees which are on their sides
broken off close to the road, downhill,
beneath them many elements of garbage including other
six-pack or twelve-pack containers
and metal cabinets and something I would think of
as a homeless person’s tent shelter if I weren’t so sure that
no homeless person would want to live amid quite such a mess as that
in quite such a distance from other resources of transportation
or assistance when needed. More sky
appears available soon, around a bend.
I’m developing a coating of perspiration around my trunk, as I continue to walk uphill without much difficulty, aside from the difficulty of speaking, while doing so without inordinate panting registering, probably again, without my knowing for sure, in the recording.
If the road had gone straight, I would soon, I suspect, be at a clearing,
with much sky available overhead to consider
the cloudy overcast gloom of,
but the road’s bend seems to be intent upon maintaining its trajectory through woods, and now, further, and further, from the river,
from which it draws its name. And more, and more
in favor of achieving some heights on the surface of the mountain
from which it draws its name.

+

Time holds many mysteries it does not disclose or explain here in the mountains, at least along my trajectory upward along some side of some mountain here. I can see
by my trusty reliable wristwatch that I have walked about half an hour already
since leaving the car behind me, and yet it feels much shorter.
I’ve perhaps been in a transcendent flight of fancy as a creative agent.
I’ve been enchanted, not by the sound of my own voice, which I barely care to listen to at all, but by the actions of producing it, which in fact are fully astonishing to me.
How can I possibly, how can I possibly produce a voice, with sounds emanating from my body, toward the pick-up, if you’ll pardon the expression, of an electronic device, which later, perhaps coupled with another such as earbuds or my personal computer, may reward my ears with a moderately accurate and reliable re-presentation of the sound, without my needing then to move my mouth or even comprehend the words at all. It will not translate them into Russian. It will not twist them around so that they are presented backwards. It will not undermine their integrity as human utterances to present to me the sound of a barking dog. I will instead hear them about the same time and rate and speed and emphasis and tone of voice and syntactical arrangement as I deliver them right now. How to understand this I cannot say except to accept that it is customary to do so, or to accept that the unthinkable is happening even now, right now, as usual, for me, as it can and has and will, for many others.

+

To speak, as I have been doing, off and on, much of the time I have been walking here, on the River Denys Mountain Road, has a salubratory—salubrious?—effect, namely, as I speak I am extremely unlikely to clench or grind my teeth. Therefore, my teeth are less likely to become increasingly loose and wobbly in my mouth or rubbed awkwardly against each other, destroying parts of the enamel thereon. Otherwise, I’m not sure of the point of walking further on this trail and therefore am turning around, in full recognition that I have no reason to suspect it will create a loop and little reason to imagine I will attain a viewpoint of anything beyond the foliage immediately adjoining the pathway or dirt road I’m on at any particular moment in the near future. It might take another hour or two, which I could spare, and yet I find that I’m exercising my legs and sweat glands more than adequately on the basis of this walk up and back. So I allow myself this relatively easeful and gentle downhill walk, which I hope will terminate in my discovery of my locked vehicle, my ability to enter it, and my success in driving it out of this dirt roadway onto a highway leading to my hostel of the evening, where I might set up my bedding and assess the options for supper and an evening’s quiet, complacent recreation.

+

I drove into Baddeck and parked, so that I could go into Tom’s Pizza. It’s called Tom’s Pizza, quote, The Best Pizza Anyway You Slice It, enquote. And, I don’t know, it seems like a cheap place to eat something good. I wonder if they have a liquor license. I might need to go to a bar before or after. I don’t know. I’m outdoors, but I’m in the car. There’s a lot of people around here. The eaters, the walkers. I’m going to go for a walk. Talk to you later.

+

Cape Breton. Tenth September, eleven fifty-five a.m., Cape Breton time.
In Cape Breton, all that which is ordinary is increasingly ordinary as I continue to explore further and deeper, farther and wider, and all that is extraordinary, special, unusual, remarkable, and amazing, becomes more amazing as I proceed. At times these are one and the same, for example, a young woman walking down the highway, into Ingersoll something, between Ingersoll Beach and Ingersoll proper, at a point where there are cottages, and no place to stop for photography that is not awkward. I do not photograph her but what she may see as she walks.

+

Back a little further, chasing this siren to the other side of Swamp Road, I come to the Periwinkle Café, another quarry of the last half hour having been café latte or at least a coffee, I stop there and photograph her across the dashboard, as she walks further past down toward Ingersoll Beach. Inside, I find a jewel-maker’s station, followed by, in the middle of the building, a café counter, with fresh-baked goods of diverse sorts, hearty, strengthening, and sweet, and attractive, with a man with a long beard and thin hair and body, and two young women—all three young, actually—serving espresso drinks and lemonade, and whatever else you might wish, next to a precise oil reproduction of a Wayne Thiebaud painting of slices of chocolate cake, their frosting almost shining, despite indirect lighting.

+

Today is wonderful for being here, because it’s cool, breezy, sunny, and cloudy. A bad day for a swim at the inland lake, but marvelous for standing and staring into space, towards whatever’s on the other side, since it’s constantly changing. The same landscape sustains viewing for as long as one has the patience to continue to discover new things in it, small things, sensitive things. The air is magnificently clear, and easy to look through.

+

Green Gove, thick with striated red rocks. Pink, white, granite, nice, with crystals glinting. Waves crashing. Rocks tumbled and coalesced into platforms surfaces mounds. Encounters of landscape.

+

It was said of Ellen, when she was a child, she was so beautiful that she really ought to be painted. Her parents were wanderers. They died. She took up with her aunt, for the rest of her childhood, who also was a wonderer and tried to settle down in New York, the setting of this novel. To paint a painting of the landscape is to settle it down, to fix it, to keep it, to take it and put it inside, inside one’s home, or the bank, the museum, the restaurant. Without that, it is a flux of memory, it is uncertain, it is unfocused, and out of focus it stays transmutative. But once fixed in a painting or a photograph, it becomes a thing that may be held in propriety, owned upon a wall, kept in sight, and under the protection of those who would have it always.

+

Like that of the coast of Maine, as it proceeds further north, the geology of Cape Breton must be something amazing, unusual, remarkable to study. Adjectives well up inside me, based on my enthusiasm. I don’t know what to think. Driving further toward Meat Cove, I don’t know how far I will get. I can only say every mile is more valuable than the last, so there is no mistake in coming this way.

+

Meat Cove is the northern-most community in Cape Breton, and here I don’t drive down to the beach, because that road looks too rugged. Instead, I pull over on a narrow shoulder, alongside the entrance to what is posted as Mountain Trail, in order to hoist myself above the crevasse that opens into becoming the community, However, what I find is, the trail doesn’t really go anywhere and is quite overgrown. If anything it’s a matter of a small loop from one edge of the road to the next. Or just walking over a rise. Perhaps all the trails posted in Meat Cove are a sort of prank or hoax to intrigue the visitors with the quaint and curious manners of its entrepreneurial initiative.

+

Between St. Margaret and Capstick I eat my lunch at the foot of a river, I believe it’s the Salmon River, and under a bridge, fighting down over pink granite mixed with all sorts of rock, to the edge of the water and back up the other side of the bridge. Anyway, I head back now, through St. Margaret, and the Bay Road Valley, Sugarloaf, Espe Bay, to Cape North, and then down through Sunrise and Big Intervale, until I reach a trail called Lone Shieling, where I might say, be able to see some three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old sugar maple trees. I think I’d like that.

+

The woods at North Shieling are beautiful, fresh, refreshing, relaxing. Remarkable. Birches, maples, old, deep, near the creek. But why am I taking so many pictures? Okay, I don’t see another woods like this, anywhere else. Here I see it.
Why do I take so many pictures? Someone else will surely have taken these pictures, or ones about like it, I could find on line, through my electronic devices.
Instead I take my own, with my own handheld electronic device, the cell,
which makes it seem like one in a skedillion of cells that together comprise an organism of intelligence. Anyway, if I take the pictures, I am holding the experience, and if I take the pictures, I am mitigating some of the passion, the awe, the longing, the loneliness, the overwhelm, the ecstasy, and the loss that are involved in witnessing, beholding, such a place, such an experience of my own.
It’s a way of holding it at a distance, keeping myself halfway here and halfway in the memory of being here and halfway in the futurity of regarding it again to share, to show, to tell about, to remember, in another incarnation, as I will have changed and become somebody else or someplace else.

+

If one were to record the sound of water moving against earth, especially I think of stones and rocks and other water, as I did today. I recorded water breaking against rocks at the edge of the ocean, I recorded water coursing down under a bridge in the brook, and I recorded water beneath and of a waterfall at Macintosh Brook. To do this supports my attention to listening to the sound of the water, appreciating their distinct qualities, rhythms, differences, tonalities, prosody. I am only partly listening to them. Would I listen to them more if I were not recording? More openly, more fully, as when, if I take off my sunglasses and walk through the woods, I see more fully, I am more fully within and a part of the world that is in my field of vision, than when I find frames around it, between the in focus and the out of focus, between the filtered and the unfiltered light, reflecting from it. Good question. I think that I might actually listen more when I am recording even though still my listening will be quite partial. That is to say, I partially listen, but I fix my attention to the idea of listening, now and in the future, so that I may be listening for what I might listen for in the future, or listen to, or be surprised to hear in the future, or be complacent and matter of fact about hearing in the future, but I’m not thinking a lot about such future attitudes and perceptions. I’m mostly thinking about what I would want to preserve, and how much of it, and what it sounds like now, and I hope it will sound like that in the recording, later, but I know it might not. And, meanwhile, I think that later I will hear it again, also partially, with many distractions, reframes, other ideas coming and going, ideas about what I’m listening to, and the fact that I’m listening to it, as well as other ideas, that are in the way, crowding around and into my consciousness at that time. I’ve been thinking about what it might mean to cease use of alcohol for a person whose use is chronic and dependent, who finds it difficult or impossible presently to stop using alcohol, who finds the need or the expectation, the hope and anticipation of use of alcohol is a pregnant and persistent and typical theme of the day, again and again and again, rather than feeling, “Okay, well, I’ll wait and do it later. Oh, I know when I’ll do it, I’ll have one, that’ll be good, that’ll be fine,” which to me seems preferable. However, for some people, that may not be do-able, especially if a more intensive and chronic use of alcohol across the day has been established as a practice and custom and a presumptive need. Then, I thought one would feel happier, I believe, if one didn’t have that difficulty with a need that one knows is debilitating one’s wellness, precipitating depression and inflammation and therefore many other illnesses, psychological and physiological. So a person might prefer not to have that chronic use and need of alcohol, and instead, a person might be more willing and happy to consume more fruits and vegetables and grains and nuts, if not so dependent on alcohol. A person might be more capable of willing and enjoying exercise of a moderate and even intensive quality, if not so chronically dependent on alcohol. What occurred to me was that to choose some inspirational readings, including primarily those that have nothing to do with alcohol, that do not remind one of one’s interest in alcohol or one’s habits of having used alcohol, but that simply are encouraging, inspirational or philosophically inspiring texts, such that one might, again and again, read a paragraph or two at a time, when one feels that strong urge to drink, and instead of taking a drink, one might feel that that’s good enough, that that’s satisfactory, that that’s comfortable, and read another paragraph after that later, when one feels that urge or need or the frustration and aggravation, the annoyance and ill temper that might come in the first weeks of not drinking. So it would help to always have a volume or two handy to be able to read a fragment of again. I thought that might well succeed. It would depend also on no alcohol being available. If one
in such a situation were around others who were drinking alcohol or talking about their interest in soon drinking alcohol or making alcohol available to sight, that would be a difficult provocation to resist, and preferably no experiences like that would be present for the first month or three of someone’s trying to give up alcohol. It might even be permanently required, but I would think usually not.

=

Posted in Uncategorized

Thinking, or responding, as a psychologist, to hate crimes/mass killings, like in Orlando

Posted on June 16, 2016 by Steve Benson

How do we distinguish a phobia (such as homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia) from hatred, given that they are bound to overlap among many? We can theorize, e.g., that such phobias underlie hatred, often. However, sometimes such phobias have taken the form of wanting not to know, not to associate with, or not to understand a given population. I don’t know that we can assume that hatred is at the root of such phobias or identical with them.

Some political and religious groups and individuals have encouraged a fear-based demonization or dehumanization of large demographics like LGBTQI, alien, Afro-American, immigrant, Islamic, Armenian, Roma, and Jewish, among others. I suspect that a homophobia that may have been wide-spread already has often been encouraged and augmented by such ambitious powers and, in so doing, leveraged to increase blame-throwing, hostilities, disempowerment, persecution, diminishment of rights, and massacres.

I believe we cannot be certain which of these guided this Orlando killer’s behaviors, or whether it was even more primarily sheer self-hatred or misplaced zealotry (e.g., seeking a magically luxurious afterlife).

Even his background in domestic violence may not be clearly explained as based in fear or rage or hatred, as I am given to the general theory (but not quite the blanket assumption) that domestic violence and efforts to control partners’ behaviors are borne of deep insecurity and consequent anxiety.

I don’t mean to question or undermine our grief, outrage, concern, and compassionate struggle to reduce or stop such emotionally reactive and terribly catastrophic violence. I only mean to express concern and hope for our clarity in using our skills as psychologists to address it.

Posted in Uncategorized

Psychosocial trauma and militarization, an invitation

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Steve Benson

With interest, in Ken Pope’s listserv, which notifies subscribers of all sorts of articles he thinks might somehow matter to psychologists and related persons, I came across the announcement of a new article on psycho-social traumatization getting published now in the APA journal, American Psychologist, vol. 71, no.3. I will reproduce Pope’s notice, in full (as he requests this always be done), below my message here.

Not being an APA member anymore, having quit a decade ago over the enhanced interrogation illegal detention ethical and intellectual arrest of the organization, I do not have a subscription, so I wrote to Dr. Blanco at the address indicated in Pope’s notice, and quickly received a full copy of the article, as formatted for publication in the journal.

I was unfamiliar with Martin-Baro’s work, which constitutes the basis and underpinning of its arguments, even while it cites numerous other studies, data and ideas to develop its arguments. Clearly, this martyred visionary has much to share about how militarism develops within a society and a culture and with its effects, seen by himself primarily through an embedded practice of service in his adopted country of El Salvador. He was committed to a bottom-up practice of psychotherapeutic research and development, from the oppressed rather than for the oppressed, as well as research based in knowing the people of his culture. He was committed to working for a de-ideologicalized reality and psychology, rather than an individually-based and supposedly neutral, objective science. In this article, he is identified with the idea that militarization of a culture can set the conditions for psychosocial trauma to unfold, can result from the fraying and destruction of the social order due to psychosocial trauma, and can become embedded in everyday life as well as social structures and lead to “a progressive militarization of the mind,” a terrifying if fascinating concept. As you might suppose, he was killed, along with his teenage daughter, his housekeeper, and five other Jesuits, by a Salvadoran death squad one night in 1969.

I gather that the primary means to read his work in English may be a 1996 anthology of his writings from Harvard, described at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=  9780674962477. The Madrid-based authors of the paper published now by the APA journal will have utilized his writings in Spanish.

I sought to read this paper partly in order to test out in my own apprehension an immediate supposition that the APA’s seduction into collusion with the Department of Defense in torture and illegal detention of foreign citizens may have been partly predicated on its membership’s and leadership’s processing of the collective violent social trauma within the USA of the 9/11 attacks, precipitating as they did not just trauma, depression, and fear, but also high levels of emotional reactivity, bias, negative stereotyping, militarized mentality, mistrust, and division within US cultures and society. These of course led not only to anxiety about further terrorist attacks “at home” but to our launching first one and then another dubious but allegedly necessary war of prevailment in oil-rich nations of the Middle East. (Both Bushes and Obama have announced that “prevailing” is the goal of our incursions in the Middle East. Don’t ask me what they mean by that.)

Although the authors do not make this point, they do remark more than once on the 9/11 attacks as a powerful incidence in one nation of the sorts of “interpersonal and collective intentional violence” they are referring to as generative of complex social disorder (as well as re-ordering, which they note often includes a strengthening of in-group bonds that is coordinated with an empowering and enforcement of out-group demonization).

As a useful support on considering how and why militarization develops within a culture and developing our own applications of such knowledge and theoretical understandings, I recommend reading this article,
which you too can readily acquire by writing to the primary author or through the American Psychologist itself.

– – – –

full quotation of list serve post by Ken Pope, in better days, well before 9/11, chief of the APA’s ethics office:

Ken Pope

Apr 9 (1 day ago)

to Ken

The new issue of *American Psychologist* includes an article: “Social (dis)order and psychosocial trauma: Look earlier, look outside, and look beyond the persons.”

PLEASE NOTE: As usual, I’ll include both the author’s email address (for requesting electronic reprints) and a link to the complete article at the end below.

The authors are Amalio Blanco, Ruben Blanco, & Dario Diaz.

Here’s how it opens: “A recent paper reported the earliest evidence of injuries to human skulls (cranial depression traumas in frontal region) in the Middle Pleistocene (between 700,000 and 130,000 years ago) due to an act of interpersonal violence clearly intended to kill (Sala et al., 2015, p. 8). No wonder, then, that the outstanding political scientist, Hannah Arendt, underlined the ‘enormous role’ violence has always played in human affairs and in social and political undertakings (Arendt, 1969). These acts of extreme interpersonal violence become collective when they are intentionally driven by hostility against people in terms of a salient group or categorical boundary (e.g., Gould, 1999; Tilly, 2003) in which, by identifying themselves as members of a group, individuals fight against each other in order to achieve political, economic, or social objectives (World Health Organization [WHO], 2002, p. 215). These authors, and many others, agree that the collective expression of violence is much more rooted in the macro (even international) or micro social atmospheres (social order) in which the intergroup relationships take place than in personal traits. Civil war in El Salvador, for instance, was the result of a social (dis)order based on extreme poverty, political repression, social polarization, and institutionalized lying, shaping the “enabling context” of violence. This context used to be ideologically grounded in a framework of cultural values, beliefs, and formal and informal norms that rely on violence as a preferential means to deal with interpersonal and intergroup conflicts (Martin-Baro, 2003, pp 87-93) and to justify the system and his supporting sociocultural power structure (see Jost, Banaji & Nosek, 2004, for a review).”

Here’s the abstract: “The most common and extreme suffering humankind has ever experienced comes from interpersonal and collective intentional violence. In dealing with traumatic outcomes psychology must overcome the mutually constitutive interaction between the (dis)order of a given macro or microsocial context and the mental health of the persons living in it. Social psychologist Ignacio Martin-Baro addressed in a preferential way the study of civil war in El Salvador in terms of intergroup hostility and polarization. He also approached the aftereffects of war by means of a theoretical core assumption: that traumatic experience rooted in collective violence (a human-made stressor) should be understood bearing in mind its social roots (pretraumatic situation), its personal and collective harm (collective injury), and the destruction of the social fabric. These are the arguments for his conceptualization of psychosocial trauma. Twenty-six years after the violent murder of Martin-Baro, along with 5 Jesuit priests, a housekeeper, and his teenage daughter, the current authors have adopted his general framework. Based on new theoretical insights and supporting data, the authors propose an expanded 4-dimension theoretical argument on psychosocial trauma: (a) pretrauma conditions based on social distress, (b) shared network of fear leading to breakdown of core social assumptions, (c) the outgroup as a target of negative emotions, and (d) destruction of family ties and community networks.”

Here’s how it concludes: “The theoretical argument of psychosocial trauma goes back to a core psychological assumption that has a Lewinian taste: As any human action, collective violence can only be rightly understood by taking into account the surrounding social (dis)order. As such, collective violence is a distressing shared experience that besides its widely documented personal impact has also a psychosocial side damaging the primary support and protective networks of victims, their social and cultural identity, their cognitive and emotional patterns of interpersonal and intergroup relationships, and so on. Martin-Baro, a socially engaged social psychologist, suggested a close relationship between the socially “ordered disorder” leading to collective violence (pretrauma conditions), the aftermath of collective suffering, and the wrecking of the social fabric. Nowadays, the psychosocial trauma argument has gained enough empirical and theoretical support in the four dimensions previously described. However, when dealing with trauma, it is still too obvious that the DSM-5 dispenses with the more structural roots of violence, and therefore of trauma when (a) putting together, for instance, motor vehicle accidents and terrorism (American Psychiatric Association, 2013, p. 276) or low intelligence and ethnic status (p. 277); (b) reducing the social distress in the definition of mental disorder to social activities (person’s behavior; p. 20); (c) narrowly conceiving gender differences (a group boundary) as the mere result of biological sex and individual self-presentation (p. 16), and thus neglecting the power structure, the ideologically rooted differences, and the cultural role played by men and women; (d) neglecting the group boundaries (religious and political affiliation, for instance) as a pretraumatic risk and prognostic factor; and (e) avoiding any reference to social suffering or human rights and providing a very sparse one to the breakdown of the primary support networks. Therefore, DSM-5 does not purport to understand that some intense and severe traumatic experiences are normal reactions to abnormal contexts or circumstances and for theoretically unresolved reasons seems to throw into oblivion the vast majority of victims. In our view, it is imperative to change this state of affairs if psychology really aims to ameliorate the suffering all human beings, regardless of their gender, race, religion, socioeconomic status, nationality, or birthplace. This will be one of its coming challenges.”

REPRINTS: Amalio Blanco, Department of Social Psychology and Methodology, Faculty of Psychology, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, C/Ivan Paulov, 6, 28049 Madrid, Spain. E-mail: amalio.blanco@uam.es

The article is online at:

Ken Pope

IN 1992, THE LARGEST NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF PSYCHOLOGISTS REPLACED ITS CODE OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS WITH A CODE OF GUILD ETHICS.
Professional ethics protect the public against abuse of professional power, expertise, and practice, and hold members accountable to values beyond self-interest. Guild ethics place members’ interests above public interest, edge away from accountability, and tend to masquerade as professional ethics. A decade later, in 2002, APA revised the code again, reflecting an even more extreme commitment to guild ethics. It has disseminated, taught, and enforced that code of guild ethics for the last quarter of a century.
FULL-TEXT OF PUBLISHED ARTICLE FREE ONLINE AT:

“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”
–C. Wright Mills (1916-1962)

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02282016 Cuba blog #1

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Steve Benson

With twenty other USAmericans I had never met or heard of, I went to Havana and Pinales, Cuba, on a Witness for Peace delegation in early February, 2016. We stayed nights in the clean, rough dormitory setting of the Martin Luther King Junior Center in the working-class neighborhood of Marianao, except two nights in the Pinar del Rio region of western Cuba, where we stayed in a handful of homes set up like airB&Bs to provide guest accommodations. We met with artists, educators, farmers, a journalist, a Parliament member, an historian, and other speakers, sometimes at the Center and often in locations that reflected their vigorous commitments. Every such event was a surprise as it turned out, as even a book fair or a terrace tavern turned out to afford a capacious new corner of Cuban cultural and civic life and spirit.

Since returning from my ten-day delegation in Cuba, about ten days ago, I have noticed relative lapses in remembering to take my most essential orienting equipment (cell phone, appointment book) to work in the mornings. I have noticed myself more resistant to and strategically avoidant of multi-tasking. And I have noticed how a cyber-friendly cultural environment can be demanding of multi-tasking, even in rural Maine, where most of my workplace communications are in person or by telephone. Waiting for a slow-thinking laptop is difficult. I stop watching the spinning rainbow and walk away. I have noticed myself more willing to take a walk, to allow flowers into my home and office, to realize I’m pushing too hard or moving too fast and change that almost immediately.

In Havana’s various neighborhoods, occasionally I saw a fading stenciled or painted image of Jose Marti, of Che Guevera, or of the Cuban flag, on concrete or plaster walls of homes and other buildings. Never Fidel or Raul. I almost never saw a poster advertising anything. Do people learn where to buy something, what special events are happening, all by word of mouth? Perhaps they listen to the radio. I never noticed any posters or posted notices even for the Havana International Book Fair, which I saw was clearly attractive to a great many citizens of every age, few of them carrying any purchases around. To see merchandise may have been part of the charm, as well as a warm sunny afternoon in a 350-year-old fort on a peninsula reaching out from the city into the sea.

In a society and culture with free universal health care, there seems to be no need to purchase health insurance or negotiate claims for repayment, saving its citizens many hours a year to relax and enjoy one another as time passes. To me, the appearance of physical, behavioral and psychological wellness among Cubans was remarkable for its absence of scarcity. For instance, I hardly ever observed obesity, worrisome behaviors, tacit threats of aggression, or looks suggestive of anger, numbness or despair.

I didn’t notice any attitudes of servility or assumptions of pressure among Cubans. Self-acceptance and patient attention to circumstances as they are seemed to be common, perhaps universal. I might say, now, with hindsight, nearly two weeks later, that I spent ten days among a people with a steady commitment to survival and community, which they manage in daily life with a unstudied, unstated and resilient sense of equanimity.

I am sure I missed a lot, and I didn’t initiate many conversations with Cubans I passed or paused near on the street. When my Spanish is more fluent and my ear better adapted to Cuban usage, I may learn more from this and that person whether my observations are accurate from their points of view and how they feel about things themselves. My learning, outside the meetings and conversations of our delegation’s copiously and wisely scheduled activities, was primarily nonverbal, as I preferred it, allowing me time to observe, daydream, explore, snap photographs, and wonder at whatever I noticed without drawing any particular conclusions.

On a before-breakfast walk very near the end of my stray at the Martin Luther King Junior Center, I went behind a building I’d passed with curiosity walking back to the Center on the exhaust-filled 51st Street at night a few days earlier. Combinado Deportivo Jesus Menendez was signed across its block-wide blue-and-white-striped facade. I peered through dirty ceiling high windows into huge rooms nearly empty inside, walls coated with painted murals, some formally abstract, others casually anecdotal. Out back, I saw basketball courts missing a net and backboard, an empty swimming pool whose diving board looked unlikely to get replaced, the metal walls screening it tangled on the ground, and unsecured, undisturbed, rumpled and rusting steel screens covering concrete steps leading underground. A few men were playing racquetball in an open court with tall concrete walls, paint peeling amid the graffiti, and a boy parked his bicycle at a bench to change into his soccer team outfit before teammates and coach arrived. Other people ran or walked around a large track. A woman walked into a small set of stable steel installations to do stretches and chin-ups. It was Sunday morning, and people were using their local exercise park to start a sunny day well.

The building at Jose Marti International Airport that we used for our charter flights in and out of the island was remarkable for its calm. There were no TV screens. No loudspeakers played us music or barked announcements about security and boarding orders. There were more than enough molded plastic chairs for five times the occupants of the room to sit on, facing one another in comfortably spaced rows. The only café was tucked into a corner such that I scarcely noticed it. In another corner a bookstand was set up for government publications clearly aimed at the tourist market, featuring romanticized accounts of famous women of the Revolution and wildly overpriced maps – the kind I’d expected to see offered for free at the unoccupied information stand near the parking lot. Anyone who’s been through a major US airport in recent years can imagine the contrast with Miami International.

There was nothing I needed to buy throughout my ten days on the island, my meals being well-provided for at the center, my backpack of snacks an ample supplement. I didn’t need to see goods advertised. I knew markets were likely to have much narrower choices than back in the States. I didn’t mind, for myself. I didn’t much think about my not having to think about such things, alternatives and opportunities to indulge in luxuries not immediately present. I didn’t much think about my general impression that the people of the city knew what to expect and how to take advantage of the unexpected without doing one another harm. To be just me walking in the city, or in the country, was to be anyone, so long as he was plainly a foreigner here, as anyone could see.

I cannot but think that these observations are related to the Revolution and to the US-imposed blockade on Cuban commerce. What will change as the embargo is, somehow, gradually reduced or suddenly expires, I don’t pretend to know. Some who may know how to read the government’s will and strategy told us enough to lead me to think no corporation will be allowed to outweigh the government in any key decisions or stakeholding. So it will be interesting, not necessarily just more of the same. Meanwhile, change is universal, constant, inevitable. What will remain about the same, I am particularly curious about.

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From correspondence regarding the potential efficacy of going crazy to promote social and ideological reorganization

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Steve Benson

01 01 2016

Rather than diagnose or label Hannah Weiner’s writing or person as schizophrenic, it seems more useful to take a both/and approach, particularly since as I remember her personally and as I read her writings, I see her as both demonstrably and symptomatically schizophrenic and also as sane and rational, connective and compassionate. This fullness of resources and her use of them was part of the powerful nature of Hannah’s personality and of her written work.

I do not question the aptness of such a diagnosis, but like a lot of analytically oriented psychotherapists today, I question the overriding definitive authority of any diagnosis to delimit our attention to and appreciation for the life and processes of another person. (Meanwhile, we should remember that all diagnoses are culturally determined constructions of categories into which folks deemed reasonably subject to behavioral pathologies are lumped together, hopefully in competent conformity with consistent critera, and largely for purposes of managing the economy of healthcare. Meanwhile, many clinicians and researchers question various diagnostic categories’ meaningfulness and utility, while some of them and others may also question diagnosis more generally.)

We might consider that any of us may have buried, denied, or latent paranoid-schizophrenic and psychotic pockets or elements of cognition and perception and processing, which typically appear and disappear easily enough to be occluded and cause us and others no apparently lasting harm or acute suffering. They may, of course, also offer us an opening, as might an acid trip or a near-death experience, to acknowledging and living through truths that we might otherwise be or have been oblivious to or discounting of.

Not only might Hannah as writer “become” others for whom she feels compassion or with whom she feels common cause, but so may the reader who brings any identificatory attention (rather than only a clinically distancing one) to reading her work. The neuropsychology of identification and involuntary sympathetic imitation is increasingly well researched and documented. When we read, hear, or see emotionally or proprioceptively informed expressiveness, our nervous system replicates it within ourselves. I am the hunter throwing the spear. I am the antelope dropping from the penetrating wound.

As we read The Fast, for instance, we to some degree intuitively and involuntarily share in her experience; we don’t remain only voyeurs and analysts, though parts of us (or our synthetic, creatively reading processes) will likely be doing those things too. Dissociative processes (i.e., occlusion of the here-and-now) are inherent in reading any written document, while synthetic, associative and sympathetic processes are also deeply engaged.

My preference almost always for both/and (rather than either/or) reflections on how things are may be seen not only as a protest against dualistic processing and forced choices, but also as a means of staying (partly) sane while experiencing (partial) madness. I think as humans we need to do this, and we do do this, more or less willingly and consciously.

I agree that Hannah in her writing “produces a radical relational field in which she might embody the conflicts and antagonisms of marginalized social groups.” I feel that actually everyone does this, but typically we are not noticing or trying to figure out how to account for such experiences or to turn them usefully to account (e.g., to make ourselves rich, or to support the human rights of others whom we feel such an inherent human sympathetic identification with). We embody them both as sharing in oppression and in subjection to oppression. I would explain this as follows: Male privilege embodies the subjection of women; heterosexual normalizing enacts the marginalization and oppression of sexual minorities and differences; et cetera – most any of us unreflectingly enacts, embodies, or assumes such stances frequently, even if we wish not to. That we feel implicitly and tacitly the identifications with what we may be used to thinking of as “other” will be hard for many people to accept; I would suggest that our culturally reinforced racism, patriarchal mindsets, and so on are primarily defensive against the dilemma of facing the problem of how to include and value those whom we haven’t yet learned how to accept and negotiate with or reconcile to. If a bunch of Syrians are trying to escape with their lives from the wars of terrors that we unleashed 14 years ago in their part of the world, but we don’t speak their language or share their religions or know how to integrate them into our contemporary and rather insecure social and economic models, we quickly learn that we can simply refer to them as dangerous and as potential terrorists or collateral damage, and so keep them and our sympathy for them at arms’ length while we prepare for retaliation to a hypothetical assault – a retaliation that we know from history (if we notice history) has often been premature and preemptive in its actual occasions.

I agree with and like your thought that through a kind of ‘going crazy’ “we might come into contact with more of the “unthought thoughts” of our culture’s history,” and that we might achieve this by staging or reenacting trauma, however this is done, but presumably with some transparency to indicate the references within the metaphorical, so that an intolerable or nearly unbearable truth may become apparent to the readers, viewers, audiences. This seems to me an activist role, whether it’s artistic or not, though it is not the only kind of activism. Ai Weiwei’s instagram interpersonal selfies on Lesbos seem to me more like a ‘going sane’ than manifesting ‘craziness,’ but of course they also represent a choice with which most world citizens would find themselves feeling they were going crazy, were they to enact it as he does, embedded even for a few days with the reception of exhausted, starving, grieving, traumatized refugees from the boats there. Discovering and exploring and developing ways to stage or enact historical (past or present) trauma that engages those who have not yet been able to come to terms with its reality is a valuable and difficult challenge.

I think among other things of the Holocaust museum my kids and I went to in DC this fall, of Laura Poitras’s film on Edward Snowden, of Reznikoff’s Testimony, yet these are not evidently performed by someone feeling or acting crazy, and their form or style doesn’t appear to enact craziness. How this enactment of ‘crazy’ can/might happen and yield results in conscious reorganization of ideological or situational assessments of reality by persons as yet not strongly motivated to act on their evidence or information, I’m not so sure. Hannah’s work may make some poets more attentive to Native American concerns and our government’s betrayal of them, but I don’t know that we will see any consequent disruption or reorganization of business as usual. Maybe you have noticed other examples of a kind of efficacy here. I tend to think that imaginative and decisive citizen activism, prominently including civil disobedience by those brave and willing enough to combine such ‘crazy’ but nonviolent decisions with ideological values based on questioning as well as understanding, may be the most powerful course for such development, independently of whether artistic significance is apparently involved or not.

I think some kind of sensation of going crazy must come with learning and acknowledging horrific truths about our heritage, our legacy, and our current affairs. Suspending a presumptive requirement that we make sure that everything we know “fits” together may be essential to our capability to learn ‘the news’ and also to reconsider received opinions and reassuring attitudes that we have been brought up on and felt reinforced through our cultural connections over time. To witness anyone sticking her neck out for others she doesn’t (for her own family’s survival) need to risk her privileges over, may often lead well-intentioned people to think she is a bit nuts – rather than just brave and sensible – perhaps because her behavior takes demonstrative and potentially frightening risks at the same time as it violates accepted norms of behavior, framing, authority, and so on.

I agree that art may be “at best a regulation of this craziness, an acceptable way of acting crazy.” The line between ‘regulation’ and ‘containment’ is porous and indefinite. The artist’s attention, judgment and choices are always ‘policing’ her own processes and products-in-the-making. We are always both sane and crazy, both implicated and observing, both connecting and disconnecting, or so it seems to me. If we push the angle of acting out as crazy, suggesting a focus on our personal derangement and/or behavioral exceptionalism, we are allowing ourselves to become acceptable as the artist (a romanticized or extraordinary self-status), somewhat as the “village idiot” may have been acceptable within the community, prior to the enforcement and containment of policing psychiatric authorities over interpersonally unmanageable and eonomically non-utilitarian differences within cultures. The village idiot may not typically have been accepted in the community even as a teacher of some sort of wisdom or consciousness. Even the Fool in King Lear appears to teach to little effect until his royal pupil is at least half-mad, and the King’s deracination as a qualifying effect is one that the Fool doesn’t seem in any way responsible for.

Black Lives Matter has recently enacted, as did Occupy Wall Street, an interruption or disruption of business as usual, both symbolically and effectively, as its constituents grabbed microphones and shouted pointedly while taking up otherwise organized public spaces. Such crazy-not-crazy behaviors have made a difference, as did white people sitting at black lunch counters in the 50s and college kids burning draft cards in the 70s. How much difference is hard to assess reliably. That difficulty contributes, I think, to most ‘sane’ people’s reluctance to go out of their way to look ‘crazy’ or ‘impulsive’ through similarly demonstrative actions, even while we can easily know that the more such actions are taken by more people, the more difference they will make in how powers deploy themselves (whether they remain nominally and functionally in the same hands or not – the effort to affect established powers and power structures to react is in itself something of a reorganization of power, if only very temporarily).

So I guess, at the moment, to answer your question, I think that actions that facilitate the largest possible involvement, especially of ‘boots on the [locally frozen winter, globally melting and softening] ground,’ will most effectively generate meaning and impact to inspire social change of significant magnitude, both on established powers and also on the reflections of other people who learn of such actions. And I would suggest that such actions might be seen as crazy if taken up by one private person acting alone without framing publicity, and pretty crazy if taken up by a handful of people with little or no publicity mobilized, but less and less crazy the more people are engaged in actual bodily present actions, whether they control the publicity much or not.

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Militarism going forward

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Steve Benson

Militarism and its virtually sacred, officially unquestionable manifestations, in its most “efficient” and extreme forms such as JSOC, reinforces the authority, persistence, and dominance of the American mythos, since its relationship to civilian lives is substantially unreported and enigmatic to the American public, while “plausibly deniable” to the world at large. Military force provides the critical mass that keeps up US momentum in the exploitation and pacification of the third world (not to mention the perpetually renewed incentives to oppressed populations to spawn insurgencies, a.k.a. “terrorist groups”), while holding on to a premise of US as having presumptive and enhanced “rights” in its relational posture toward “the developed world.”

This is what “civilization” has come to for the United States. Militarism is the net we are tightrope-walking above. It will catch us when we fall: the US is set to become a palpably military state. (We are already what is called a “fiscal-military state.” Defined at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal-military_state)

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News coverage of APA convention vote on psychologists’ participation in interrogation processes within national security settings

Posted on August 8, 2015 by Steve Benson

An email I sent at 11:30 today, Saturday August 8, 2015, to the list serv of the Maine Psychological Association:

Remarkably, the NYTimes’ James Risen covered the vote that was held this Friday in Toronto. His story was relegated to the lower half of page 11 of today’s edition, underneath a story about the Obamas’ vacation in Massachusetts. I can’t find it either in my daily email of NYTimes headlines nor in the page at nytimes.com that offers an extensive summary of all stories of the paper today.

[In the email, I here explained I was sending a copy of the complete article as an addendum, with my highlighting. Those interested can find it at the Times’ website, through a search for “Psychologists Approve Ban on Role in National Security Interrogations By JAMES RISEN  AUG. 7, 2015”]

The Wall Street Journal did not mention the vote or convention at all in today’s paper. (I was at my local library searching through the print editions of these two papers, rather than on line, to be able to make these observations.) The Journal does however carry a small lower page story about a report from the human rights committee of the OAS accusing the Obama administration of dragging its feet on clearing uncharged and evidently not dangerous detainees out of Guantanamo. Another news story, easier to find in the mainstream, identifies the Obama administration’s efforts to step up the pace of detainee delegation to other nations, which may be happening largely in anticipation of the APA vote and the OAS report. See http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2015/08/07/world/asia/07reuters-usa-guantanamo.html.

The paucity of coverage of the APA Council’s nearly unanimous vote (and the Times’ relegation of it to near-oblivion) is remarkable in light of the strategic role of the participation of psychologists in the enhanced interrogation of detainees who are typically held without known charges and all without rights of habeas corpus while subject to the ongoing torture (according to international human rights authorities) of forced feeding if they decide to join in a wide-spread hunger strike, while they are secured in a highly classified, secretive installation off our national borders.

Without having secured the green light for psychologists to participate, the Department of Defense, the CIA and the FBI might have very reasonably failed to sustain the kinds of interrogation and forced feeding practices that they have, early and late in the Guantanamo/black-sites period, a loss that might have led to more such detainees being held for interrogation under the auspices of other nations’ detention facilities, with interested covert visits from American security interrogators. Whether that scenario would have been preferable or more horrible for those detained is open to question, while it might serve primarily to support a NIMBY defensiveness of plausible deniability for the US. The mess that our “war on terror” has spawned and continues to augment is not going away easily at this point. And clearly the administration’s policy is to prosecute it, come hell or high water, leading to assassinations by drone or JSOC forces on other nations’ territories with or without their permission. We have “boots on the ground” anywhere on earth that the administration decides to put them at the moment, as a matter of clearly developed national security policy.

Mainstream news sources like The Times or the US government will not be found offering statistics about the number of hunger strikers currently active or the number of prisoners currently force-fed in Guantanamo, even in an article like that at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/us/guantanamo-hunger-strikers-petition-divides-officials.html?_r=0, about a detainee currently litigating (at 75 pounds and counting) for release 13 years after he was found “along the Afghan border, and . . . accused of having gone to the region to fight with the Taliban and of having received some weapons training.” The wrong place at the wrong time, as they say.

The article implies that his hunger strike is an isolated occurrence and that letting him leave Guantanamo might signal the efficacy of hunger striking as a tactic for other detainees to resort to, in order to manipulate the system and secure release. Nevertheless, you can see some numbers referenced in a recent Huffington Post story on a major ethical stand taken by a nurse at Guantanamo. He refused to participate in a forced feeding there and consequently found charges made against him by military authorities and his duties downgraded, although since then the case has been dropped (without explanation, evidently). In that article you will find reference to an internal military document at http://www.scribd.com/doc/254035173/Forcefeeding that explains that forced feeding of a mentally competent person is never acceptable to “international law and certain medical ethical standards”. Have psychologists been involved in advising or observing these feedings? Who can say? If not, why not? If so, how do we parse the ethics of their toleration of this practice?

Yesterday’s Democracy Now! radio/TV program featured excerpts from the Town Hall Meeting held Thursday under the auspices of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, for those interested in checking out some of the speakers there. Risen is also interviewed for several minutes. The producers of the program considered covering this issue important enough to base the show’s production in Toronto this Friday, rather than NYCity. You can see, hear, or read the show or segments of it, as you prefer, by checking at http://www.democracynow.org/

Steve

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After I was asked by email whether the title of my last book is a pun

Posted on July 25, 2015 by Steve Benson

Open Clothes seems to me like it qualifies as pun, although since there’s no syntactic context beyond those two words, I don’t know if it is — I am not researching the definition right now, anyhow. What I can say is it was one of those things that occurred to me, as ideas will, stupid or bright, pregnant or stillborn or whatever, and it began to feel right. I imagine in retrospect just the phrase “open close” occurring to me as a potential title for something, then for the book, with the associations for me that I try to open up and re-open or keep open some conventions, concerns, uncertainties, feelings, ways of knowing my way through this ecosphere, and yet there is also, like it or not, some closure, as things become past, set, lost to memory or understanding, or simply kind of opaque and enigmatic. So we have those two verbs.

And they can also be adjectives, as one might open something keeping it close, and that sounds especially intimate, which also may resonate for a reader of this book, as at least to me most all the writing there seems to suggest and do what it can to enact a sort of intimacy of address and inclusion and risk, in its various sections.

The shift to “open clothes” returns the phrase into sounding like the two verbs, while also insisting again, but playfully now, on intimacy. Poems and words and language seem to me like clothes, in that they are not the core realness and livingness of interdependent life in this existence, but that living’s own mercurial and dynamic, metamorphic, interactive qualities call on words to analogize (I notice the word “analog” in there) in a linear account or structure some semi-authoritative (even while we will, hopefully, mistrust authority) rendering of evidence of what does or can happen — out there and in consciousness.

So trying to exercise that closure and that closeted mode of knowing (which so often, in this book and elsewhere, doesn’t at all “tell all”), while also holding it open to attention and awareness and doubt, seemed again to characterize my project, whether effective or not — to use it while also opening it to examination, with willingness to acknowledge a sense of its partial, temporary, material, constructed, culturally specific and other conditional aspects.

           (Thanks to David Benedetti, for asking.)

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The Unthought Known: Consolidating Corporate Hegemony through Perpetual War on Terror

Posted on April 5, 2015 by Steve Benson

The legacy of death, disability, grief, terror, trauma, and debasement resulting from and inherent in the aggressive and mis-attuned American and European handling of the economies and cultures of the Middle East are well known and readily discoverable. However, they are all but unmentioned through the narrative that we consume at home, in occasional shock and awe, of the repeated sudden and violent incursions of the United States of America [US], Israel, and their occasional allies against Muslim and Arab peoples and their governments, who are expected to remain subservient and submissive to decisions rationalized to the advantage of the dominant military powers.

US policies in relations with the Middle East reflect two underlying formulations, neither of which is made explicit in the narrative of this front: a) an instrumental single-mindedness to promote and insure dominance and control, which are developed through decisive responses to the sporadic and disconnected local and regional movements that resist, defy or repudiate encroachments on the rights of the indigenous peoples and their states, and (b) the dissociative force of prior engagements in collective trauma, in both the US and the Middle East, that afford compelling influence to an “unthought known” that supports the US and its allies in staging reprisals of traumas of national development inflicted and suffered over the course of recent history.

A.

Observers can only wonder over why the US would repeatedly spur the growth of anti-US terrorism through its own terrorist assaults on human rights, infrastructures, and states, which may be most evident recently in the Middle East. The US’s motives for engineering and implementing these incentives to collective hatred and increasingly effective recruitment go unmentioned, aside from its paradoxical insistence on this as a means to stabilize and secure the Middle East for its native people, thereby securing American security as well. The US appears to undermine this objective relentlessly through its hostile and aggressive incursions and usually high-handed diplomacy. To persistently aggravate the incitement to recruitment into anti-US insurgencies and terrorist movements seems perplexing and counterproductive, unless it is instrumental to the powers behind the US military. Who is calling the shots? And why?

Noam Chomsky, among other analysts of world affairs and US policy, clearly identifies the wide scale of implementation of terrorist interventions and programs by the US, NATO, Israel, and allied states. In an interview broadcast on Democracy Now! on March 02-03 2015, he points out various ways the US undermines elected governments, plans or performs assassinations, and makes unmandated wholesale attacks on such nation states as Libya, Cuba, and Iraq in operations that respected international observers understandably consider acts of virtual genocide and flagrant or reckless precipitation of civil wars abroad. I quote Chomsky, from a transcript published on the Democracy Now! website:

NOAM CHOMSKY: You’ll recall, when the Snowden revelations came out, the immediate reaction from the government, the highest level—Keith Alexander, others—was that these NSA programs had stopped, I think they said, 54 or so acts of terror. Gradually, when the press started asking questions, it was whittled down to about 12. Finally, it came down to one. And that act of terror was a man who had sent, I think, $8,500 to Somalia. That’s the yield of this massive program.

And it is not intended to stop terrorism. It’s intended to control the population. That’s quite different. You have to be very cautious in accepting claims by power systems. They have no reason to tell you the truth. And you have to look and ask, “Well, what is the truth?” And this system is not a system for protecting terrorism.

Actually, you can say the same about the drone assassination program. That’s a global assassination program, far and away the worst act of terror in the world. It’s also a terror-generating program. And they know it, from high places. You can find quotation after quotation where they know it. Take this one case that I mentioned before, this child who was murdered in a drone strike after having watched his family burnt to death by drone strikes.

AMY GOODMAN: In Yemen.

NOAM CHOMSKY: What’s the effect of this on people? Well, it’s to create terror. The close analyses have shown that that’s exactly what happens. There’s a very important book by Akbar Ahmed, who’s an important anthropologist, who is a Pakistani, who studies tribal systems and worked in the North-West territories and so on, and it’s called The Thistle and the Drone. And he goes through, in some detail, the effect on tribal societies of simply murdering—from their point of view, just murdering people at random. The drone attacks, remember, are aimed at people who are suspected of maybe someday wanting to harm us. I mean, suppose, say, that Iran was killing people in the United States and Israel who they thought would—might someday want to harm them. They could find plenty of people. Would we consider that legitimate? It’s again, we have the right to carry out mass murder of suspects who we think might harm us someday.

How does the world look at this? How do the people look at this in this village where this child was who said that they’re terrorized by constant drone strikes all over North-West Pakistan? That’s true. Now it’s over most of the world. The U.S. war—so-called war against terror—has been a smashing success. There was a small group up in the tribal areas of mostly Pakistan and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, and we have succeeded in spreading it over the whole world. Now they’re all everywhere—you know, West Africa, Southeast Asia—simply generating more and more terror. And I think it’s—you know, it’s not that the U.S. is trying to generate terror. It’s simply that it doesn’t care.

I do question Chomsky’s final assertion, above. He seems to say that the US doesn’t care about whether it generates terror or not. He does not say that the US purposefully generates terrorism among the civilian populations of the world who find themselves pitted against chronic and fatal incursions. However, he might be hard put to deny it, if pressed to justify his dismissal of intentionality.

The disclosure of the photographs of humiliation and torture at Abu Ghraib a decade ago incited a virulent and comprehensible fury around the world at America’s evident attitudes toward unindicted citizens of Arab states. That US armed forces and intelligence agents have tended to flaunt disregard and contempt for Muslim beliefs and Arab customs is not due to mere ignorance of the information gathered about their culture. Indeed, this information has been suppressed, ignored or utilized in developing and exercising means of humiliating and traumatizing people of the region, inciting a predictable hatred and counter-aggressive will.

Following a highly destructive, demoralizing, and fatal “shock and awe” bombardment of Baghdad, although Iraq had shown the US and its allies neither threat nor aggression, there followed an occupation of indefinite degree and legitimacy, marked by failures of reconstruction, laxness of legal protections, and high-handed rearrangements of governmental authority under a nominal show of democracy unconvincing to its citizens. The elastically prolonged period of regime change was marked by an epidemic of abrupt nocturnal incursions into households to arrest residents by force, without charges or other information made available even to their families. An atmosphere of increasing mutual violence and paranoia sparked increasingly common incidents of random and reactive aggression from occupation forces and insurgencies. Deaths, injuries, illnesses, injustices, trauma, grief, economic collapse, and failures of essential infrastructure systems increased, as did internal conflicts among the population. US policy, privileging one portion of the population over another, led a once-harmonious cultural community toward venomous internal ethnic conflicts and civil war. The toll of depleted plutonium in the environment on the population, stemming from the two US incursions over the past quarter century, has never been assessed by the invading forces.

Chomsky points out lucidly how effective American’s militaristic foreign policy has become at establishing the grounds for terrorist movements such as ISIS, as a more traditional colonial and imperialist methodology of world domination yields to a pre-emptive first-strike mentality. This pre-emptive orientation leads logically to targeting suspected insurgents and those who associate with suspect groups and persons – an enormous and growing category of the world’s population—for incarceration, aggressive interrogation, and termination. Diplomatic negotiation inevitably yields to reactive and reflexive behavior, under the pressure of repeated humiliation and trauma.

It follows, then, that as our military’s efforts to contain and expunge groups like ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban progress to increasingly desperate and ruthless measures, American citizens, at home or abroad, will be targeted for counter-aggressive terrorist actions, in reaction to assaults large and small on the security of the populations of weaker states. As a result, US policy makers will predictably conceive brutal and devastating measures against a growing enemy as increasingly imperative. The powers that be in the US establishment have not indicated how they will destroy such forces abroad without finally destroying the peoples from whom they spring and among whom they live.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case opened regulatory floodgates to money from wealthy super-corporations to fund election campaigns and thereby influence not only who is elected but how they will make key decisions of policy and legislation. Consequently, the presumptive authority of large multinational corporations is clearly identified with that of the US government. Today, decisions in the name of defense and counter-terrorism cannot be made without consideration for the demands and expectations of such dominant international commercial forces.

Why might such interests allow the build-up of international terrorism, that of our targets as well as our own? Why isn’t this mess bad for business? How can the development of mutual counter-terrorism and endless war pave the way for growth and security in the commercial sector?

There may be in our government and its monetary support structure some persons who really don’t care and some who abhor this consequence of American policy, whether they consider it intentional or not. Nevertheless, the logic and efficacy of such mutual counter-aggression dominating a field first opened up by pre-emptive strikes is unquestionable. Such policy intentions are never referred to as such in corporate media. Instead, they are indefinitely suspended, as if disappeared, from the menu of ideas listeners and readers might reflect on, much as the impact of climate change on our recent spate of extreme weather conditions remains unmentioned by media meteorologists.

However, the powers that administrate the world’s economy, typically represented in the G8 summits, the Davos Forum, the International Monetary Fund, and other high-level policy boards of the world’s economy, are eminently influential in policy oversight of the US government and its intelligence and defense services. Such powers cannot afford to be ignorant of contemporary world affairs or intellectually deficient in analyzing the costs and benefits of American policy. One can only assume that the radical growth of aggressive anti-American terrorism has to be well taken into account within their grand scheme of doing business and maintaining their edge over any potential competition in the capitalist economy of the 21st century.

Increasing their market share depends on securing and dominating access to natural resources such as oil, water, and land masses. The powers that our elected officials depend on to stay in business as statespersons and legislators necessarily see their expedient access to such resources as fundamental incentives. It makes logical sense, then, to presume that aggravations of, incitements to, and proliferations of terrorist hostilities against our military and civilian populations, when generated from regions rich in such commercially useful resources, are actually intended and instrumentally depended on.

The logic may be as follows: American strategies of managing business as usual, including drone strikes to assassinate foreign citizens, enhanced interrogations to imprison and disable foreign citizens, and sanctions against whole nations of foreign populations, result in ever-expanding terrorist reactions. As a consequence, our military and Congress may claim justification for increasingly aggressive and severe forms of pacification of the domains from which counter-aggression has sprung. Dominant authority by international commercial interests over resources and policy of these states may be increasingly effective. These consequently expanding, far-reaching, and indefinitely projected policies, formerly framed under the rubric of a “war on terror” and now of a rhetorically indefinite and suspended sort of anomia, continue to generate facts on the ground that are taken to obligate American and allied forces to perpetual police state actions world-wide, binding our military and diplomacy to compel foreign states to submit to American dominance of their own military and domestic police policies and forces. Such a radical encroachment over the world’s land, people, and states provides an advantageous opening for multinational corporate control and exploitation, as well as for the imposition and enforcement of so-called “free trade agreements” designed to supersede regional and local regulations, restrictions, and policy within and among the nations of the signatories.

Our government and corporate media show no sign of readiness to reconsider policies resulting in non-negotiable incitements against foreign populations. These interventions are presented to our volunteer military forces and to our voting citizenry as moral and patriotic measures to protect us from enigmatically mushrooming threats. Generating such spite, mutual aggression, and desolation, while continually preparing for further development of crises and retaliations, is a grisly, horrific means of preparation for the eventual security and prosperity of the corporate control over a fully policed state with ample forces and wide-scale management of institutions of incarceration.

B.

Such outcomes may not, in the long run, bode well for the US citizenry. At present, Americans are largely entranced within the corporate media’s fantastic framing of the saga of American exceptionalism, which is taken to justify patriotic consent to official policy, no matter how irrational or preposterous. Threats posed by officially targeted enemies abroad anchor the story line of good versus evil, us versus them. “Destroying” the enemy, along with others construed as somehow associated with the enemy, if only by religion or proximity, is still effectively sold as a worthy and desirable achievement in itself. To the extent that this narrative is accepted, embraced, or simply allowed to stand, Americans are lulled into affirmation of their government’s foreign policy and support its initiatives with their tacit consent, even while their own state is eviscerated of citizen benefits, turning a blind eye to their material needs and safety and bankrupting the democratic process for fire sale to the highest bidders.

I can easily believe that this assessment is not generally admitted into discussion by many who are instrumental in implementing and supporting militaristic interventionism. The analysis above, as a framing of the situation, may not enter into their conscious thoughts. Yet its implicit logical process proceeds unarrested, gathering force as it accelerates, currently in the momentum of opinion that ISIS can and should be eradicated. I propose that the underlying narrative of this logic constitutes an example of “the unthought known” in our everyday life.

In Forces of Destiny (Aronson, 1989), British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas writes, paradoxically enough, that this phrase, “the unthought known,” “refers to any form of knowledge that as yet is not thought.” The knowledge in such an instance is not articulated, may not yet be accessible to language. A person may in some way know but cannot actually think what is happening, why it’s going that way, in mind or in behavior. Such an “unthought known,” stemming sometimes from preverbal formative relational influences, including repressed trauma history, may determine the course of a person’s expectations for life and persistent history of relational functioning, while remaining inaccessible to cognitive attention and memory. A mood or attitude, such as one of fear, rage, or vigilance, can be aroused by such a schema’s activation and persist to strengthen its determining power in the person’s life.

Stretching a use of this theoretical concept, I suggest that “the unthought known” may also occupy a government and culture’s behavior and framing of its actions at various levels of awareness, while evading conscious recognition and ethical assessment, particularly when the population responsible for and collusive with governmental decisions shares a primordial history corresponding to the re-enactment under inquiry. The continuing legacy of subjugation and destruction of the native North American populations and enslavement and brutally enforced degradation of African Americans and other racial minorities are among the constructive traumatic episodes that made possible the creation of this nation and the development of its economy. Unconscious re-enactment may be inferred in the US’s present assumption of dominant authority and forceful aggression in the Middle East.

Steve Benson
03 03 – 03 22 2015

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Thoughts about affiliation and militarism

Posted on January 11, 2015 by Steve Benson

Driving to work a couple days ago, listening to the Democracy Now! headlines and barking out echoes and ripostes, as I tend to do, early in my morning, to get my voice in shape, to stay alert to Amy Goodman’s hectic delivery of information, and to vent my attitudes, I found myself verbalizing something about how our innate human interdependency and sociality and attachment needs not only orient us toward mutual care, group mind, loyalty and love in connection with our collective body (whether as clan, nuclear family, profession, workplace, ethnic fellows, sexual orientation, or nation) but also can fuel our hostile, war-mongering, aggressive, hateful and militaristic attitudes and behaviors.

By us, I mean “people,” of course. And of course this was spelled out in some rude short-hand, there in the car, where I was tooling along alone without a recording device turned on.

My concept, though, came back to me this morning washing breakfast dishes. If there’s an us that we value as native, vital, meaningful, safe, mutually supportive and helpful, there may be, whenever the sympathetic nervous system [SNS] kicks in, a them — whether it’s a sabre-tooth tiger, a plague, a boogeyman, an economic threat, a looming impression of enigmatic difference that feeds a potential paranoia, or an enemy that’s been identified in our cultural milieu (I notice we Americans still are as a culture seeing Russia in a very presumptive, negative, demonic light, and we are still regarding most Americans as un-Americans, whether because they don’t live in the USA but in some other part of the Americas or aren’t yet citizens here or have values or practices that appear to question or threaten those we have accepted as definitive of America — even when these values are as peculiarly selective as being-employed, or skin color, or going to a Christian church).

​The impulse to create an other, as alien and as threat requiring control or annihilation (which is to say, an absolute and final control — such as our government hopes to impose on terrorists through drone strikes), may be an inherent capacity of humans, most likely to be exercised when a culture confronts or engages some kind of mix with what hasn’t yet been well assimilated. Bali or Tahiti before the​ onslaught of tourism and westernization come to mind, perhaps stupidly in me, as examples of peaceful (partly because isolated on an island) cultures — there must be more and better examples I am not scholarly enough to remark here. Our age of globalization and information explosion puts virtually every cultural difference into our implicit data bank, for Fox News or Democracy Now to remark on selectively, for better or for worse, so there is always fodder ready to this purpose, and information overload itself can add to the escalation of the SNS.

This is how, at the moment, I think that militarism and domestic terrorism and school massacres are expressions of the same thing: human goodness, in its affiliative and cooperative nature, under threat from apparent danger — often misguidedly advertised, for one reason or another. (Greed is another control demand, which I see as based in insecurity — which itself is culturally sanctioned and encouraged in our American-Dream consumerist and individualist culture.) I feel interested in and good about thinking this way, partly because it matches my seemingly unshakable sense that people are good, that love and connections are fundamental to us, and that psychopathology is a problem in the adaptive or organizational activation of these fundamental traits and needs (e.g., trauma screws it up big-time and results in adjustments that often don’t fit so well in a peaceful couple or community). I also am encouraged by hearing that people under 30 these days are much more likely to have overcome or not to have been primed by racist and sexual prejudices — though I wonder whether the same might have been said of my own Boomer generation by those older than us . . . and here we are again still.

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The unthinkable as the slaughter of schoolchildren

Posted on December 21, 2014 by Steve Benson

This was a so-called military school in which children were slaughtered mercilessly, and as well as I can understand its project from news sites, this meant it was a school devoted to service to families of the military regime in power in Pakistan, which had recently targeted sites associated with the Taliban as among its areas of influence, sites that had previously not been bombed that now were getting bombed.

In the Wikipedia article devoted to the attack on the school, the Taliban’s spokesman himself seems to find the deliberate, ruthless and hours-long slaughter of the children unthinkable, to judge by his speakings:

TTP spokesman Muhammad Omar Khorasani said that “we targeted the school because the Army targets our families. We want them to feel our pain.”[29] “Our six fighters successfully entered the Army school and we are giving them instructions from outside,” said Khorasani by phone.[30] Khorasani also said “Our suicide bombers have entered the school, they have instructions not to harm the children, but to target the Army personnel. It’s a revenge attack for the Army offensive in North Waziristan.”[31][32]

In Wikipedia’s account of the military campaign beginning this June that the Taliban claim this massacre was a response to, one notes the following:

After the attack, the Pakistani military launched a series of aerial strikes on militant hideouts in the tribal areas along the Afghan border. At least 25 militants, including foreign fighters, were killed on 10 June.[42] Two drone attacks on 12 June killed Uzbek, Afghan and local militants.[43][44] On 15 June the Pakistani military intensified air strikes in North Waziristan and bombed eight foreign militant hideouts, killing as many as 140 militants (most Uzbek, including persons linked to the airport attack and airport attack commander and mastermind Abu Abdur Rehman Almani).[45][46] The intensified aerial strikes in the wake of the attack were an extension of operations against militants conducted over the last few months.[42]

Within this account (and, I suspect, all or most all others covering this operation), no children or women, disabled or elderly persons are evidently counted or, perhaps, identified as part of the count. Nor were any “militant hideouts” reported as mistakenly identified by the Pakistani military — in which case, their aerial strikes are certainly far more skillfully chosen and executed than those of the US military. But I’m not sure this is reliably to be assumed.

But we do have some statistics, however precise or rough, on the outcome of the United States’ executive’s military wing in its campaign of surgically precise drone attacks on terrorists in Yemen, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. A recent article in the Guardian is worth reading in full (at http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147). It starts by noting that two drone strikes that both unsuccessfully targeted Aywan Zawahair inside a village in Pakistan cost the lives of 76 children and 29 other adults.

Two paragraphs from the middle of this article read:

“Drone strikes have been sold to the American public on the claim that they’re ‘precise’. But they are only as precise as the intelligence that feeds them. There is nothing precise about intelligence that results in the deaths of 28 unknown people, including women and children, for every ‘bad guy’ the US goes after,” said Reprieve’s Jennifer Gibson, who spearheaded the group’s study.

Some 24 men specifically targeted in Pakistan resulted in the death of 874 people. All were reported in the press as “killed” on multiple occasions, meaning that numerous strikes were aimed at each of them. The vast majority of those strikes were unsuccessful. An estimated 142 children were killed in the course of pursuing those 24 men, only six of whom died in the course of drone strikes that killed their intended targets.

​​The coincidence of “142” children in this quotation and “140 children” cited in the school massacre will not be lost on us once it is noticed.

The unspeakable has been under-reported but present with us for quite a while. To not know, not remember and not discuss has been a familiar norm, particularly in the United States. The Triangle Building fire, the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the chronic sexual abuse of young children by their clergy, the mass incarceration of African-American boys and men in our own time​ are only a few of countless examples of unspeakable yet systematic (or system-driven) devastation on a massive and scale that remain for the most part as much out of mind as out of site — above all, here in “the homeland of the free.”

I agree this is very difficult stuff to theorize, but there are dots that are connectable, however horrific, gut-wrenching, and irrationalizing their particulars happen to be.

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The American Psychological Association, detention and torture, and the news

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Steve Benson

I can understand anyone’s becoming quite tired of looking into, discussing, and organizing thoughts about the issues relating to the American Psychological Association [APA] and America’s role in civil rights violations in Guantanamo and elsewhere, particularly as the tightly held classified communications, even about matters a decade in the past, remains impenetrable. I myself allied in the mid-naughts with a developing group called Coalition for an Ethical Psychology to protest what I perceived as a deceitful, short-sighted violation of ethical principles in the APA and in its program for withholding of dues and finally withdrawal from membership. I joined Psychologists for Social Responsibility as an alternative, international organization to represent my position of care for the bigger picture from the point of view of my income-producing profession. This post is adapted from a letter to a few colleagues who are prominent members of my state association.

Many psychologists are lobbying and campaigning within as well as outside of the APA toward the end of reconciling the national organization with psychology’s and the people’s best interests.  A year or so ago I wrote a piece at the request of the editor of the Maine Psychological Association’s newsletter intended to support and encourage some necessary inquiry by members of the national association who read the state association’s newsletter that might lead to constructive reforms in the APA to bring it into alliance with its stated mission and policies. In the all-too-lengthy and possibly inept article we published in the newsletter, I hoped to offer enough information that readers could understand how a controversy on these matters had begun and why it was in fact not going away, rather than to argue from one side or another. I tried to avoid expressing my personal feelings of hurt and anger over a betrayal of trust, since my own personal feelings really are beside the point. If harm has been or is being done with the support of federal and APA authorities, I am not the victim here, after all, but a collusive partner, as citizen-taxpayer.

The fact that 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners teamed up last week to write an open letter to try to get the President of the United States to release a Senate committee report on interrogation practices of the previous decade that he’s been sitting on for a year or more and that is already highly redacted by the CIA speaks to the continuing frustration of persons of conscience as well as their unwillingness to let the matter disappear into the sanitizing vacuum that tends to absorb much actual American history. I doubt that full disclosure of the report would enhance the APA’s reputation; I hope I am wrong.

In the past month a new book by James Risen called Pay Any Price has brought the controversy of the APA’s collusion with torture and illegal detention into a newly focused discussion in the media, at least to the degree that media still permits such discussion at all. Risen’s book is not primarily about the APA’s activities or its relation to the national military, security and intelligence apparatus — I gather this is at issue in one chapter of a book presenting a much further-reaching set of stories united around the tendency toward regrettable and unethical decisions being made in response to deregulation of federal government agency rules, burgeoning of financial opportunities and promotion of wide-spread anxiety in the wake of 9/11. (The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology has a lengthy and detailed response, primarily in the form of follow-up questions, to the APA’s dismissal of Risen’s material in Pay Any Price about its relationship to civil rights violations. Inspect and reflect on the concerns raised at http://www.ethicalpsychology.org/materials/Coalition-Questions-for-APA-Board.pdf.)

It’s been remarkable to see two articles coming out in the past week in national psychological research journals on the evidence that (1) mistrust especially of authority is dramatically on the rise throughout our national culture and that (2) anxiety within an organization tends to generate an increase in failures in or obviation of ethical decision-making. I find them important to reflect on as we live in a period where mistrust and anxiety appear increasingly busy and omnipresent and may be complexly interactive (as we often see in individual clinical cases, and then some), with terrorism, climate change, and risks of many other kinds incessantly on the rise. As our government increasingly insists on surveillance of its citizenry’s personal lives and activities, it guards its own behaviors and knowledge from citizen’s view to an increasing degree. It’s hard to see just how the American people are responsible for their government these days.

Obama’s administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidential administrations combined, despite Obama’s campaign pledges to promote transparency and support whistleblowers in his 2008 run for President. A person’s got to wonder. Where would Woodward and Bernstein and Ellsberg be now, if Obama had been president then? Something significant is going on in American journalism that undermines the capacity of the American people to participate in a national democracy and even in a broadly joined debate, as media outlets are increasingly centralized under the control of highly complex corporate interests and the classification of information as secret is more and more broadly extended and enforced. My local Peace and Justice group lately screened a Canadian film (one remarkable for earning no reviews I could find on line in US corporate papers although released commercially as well as on line more than a year ago) about the corporate news media’s suppression of investigative journalism. Even to my jaded mind it was eye-opening and shocking. It’s kind of a thriller, as documentaries go: fast-paced, entertaining, and tight, with plenty of detail and personalities emerging in the 4 or 5 reporters whose stories are tracked, and you can watch it free at http://shadowsofliberty.org/watch/ I am recommending it to people who feel that being able to get the news still matters. It helps for those who still care to connect the dots of an information and communication system shared on a large scale within our society or a historical narrative spanning more than the past month or two.

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I know what I’m thinking

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Steve Benson

And it is that I like playing what’s on the CD player in random order not because life is random (sometimes I wish it were, at least for a few moments, just to see) but because it gives the lie to the fallacy that anything passes in sequential order, it reminds me of simultaneity, it clarifies in practical moments a sense not that anything can happen but that cause and effect are merely strategies of thinking, and association is also. I seem to type more typos all the time. I do try to correct them. Have I? Anyway, while cooking this marvelous and horrible meal that may turn out to be comestible, I decided suddenly I felt like hearing that album of Early Takes that George Harrison didn’t put out but occurred to him posthumously, and I felt that I was getting it started on random sequence on my 3CD boom-box player from 13 years ago but nothing happened. No movement. So I pressed the arrow that points toward the right as I’ve sometimes found effective, and it immediately got me to hearing Eric Dolphy’s band close to the end of his life playing a tune that I knew immediately was about remembering Paris, and I have a feeling he recorded it in Europe and never did make it back to the states, but that’s his business and I’m not researching it.

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Notes on revision and evasion

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Steve Benson

These are two excerpts from February 2014 correspondence with Cathy Wagner about how I revise and improvise my writing:

No, usually I do little or no editing, myself. In recent times (books like Open Clothes or Blue Book) I indicate in the authorial notes whether or how I have edited anything based on a transcript or act of writing. E.g., in the newer of those 2 books there has been only very selective cuts, no rewrites, as I recall. This relates to the Ginsberg/Kerouac school of spontaneity and stylistic whatever-I-do-is-writing mode or pose, which I am neither doing nor critiquing, but availing myself of as a premise for doing whatever I am doing. I would not say the poems are a record, but I would say that the transcripts are a poem, and also that the original live oration or sound recording or manuscript or typescript was also a poem. To call the in-print (on the page or on a screen on line) published (which means for others, potentially anyone, to see) version a poem is the hardest of all, rather than saying it reproduces inadequately a poem, no matter how carefully I’ve made choices on typography and layout, perhaps because still it is the furthest removed from my own clumsily intuitively decisive inept hand and mouth. But I will call it one anyway. An embodied simulacrum of my intentions for transposition to the page/screen. To say the poem itself is a transcendent entity that cuts across or encompasses these diverse incarnations feels totally pretentious and false. Not true of Dickinson either. Her embodied hand-written poems include the paper they’re written on, we know now more than ever. The published typeset versions are just accounts of them, documentation approximating their form and the writer’s intentions.

Anyhow, I used to edit some and may again, would like to, but haven’t found the time. If I write an essay, like the 2 reviews published in Jacket2 in the last couple years, I rewrite a good bit, as long as I can stand it, then hope for the best. Two projects in which composition was largely comprised of revision come to mind, namely “Reverse Order”(which appears in a book of the same name) and Briarcombe Paragraphs (in a chapbook of the same name), both of which I feel are major achievements of my frustrating and irreconcilable willfulness. In these each segment (stanza or paragraph) was composed at one extended sitting, using the previous one (itself its own final draft) as basis for revision (in the case of the poem, I also reversed the sequence of lines when I first typed them out before I began to revise it into a new stanza). The piece called “On Time in Another Place” that is also in Reverse Order was extensively revised, as a set of isolated paragraphs, over the long time I was out of the country around 1984-85, then I spliced the paragraphs together, alternating lines between them in a way I made of collaging them, and that required some careful tender revision too, without changing the paragraphs’ composition much.

Meanwhile, anyhow, if and when I am simply improvising, as writing on the page or screen or in the sounding air, I am indeed as you say editing in my head, there are roads not taken. I notice that once I feel like “I know where this is going” I feel obliged to change it. This is a sort of characterological fault or necessity (I don’t want to call it a compulsion, I don’t think that’s fair to it) that has made it impossible, just about, to write narrative, though on the other hand, when I wrote my (heavily edited and rewritten) parts of the Grand Piano books I did not worry about this or feel a pressure to do this. So it has to do with the poetry act of art writing, basically, and it includes my personal history of finding myself sick with shame and disgust when I didn’t follow this willingness to let go and see work slide into a frame or tone, a voice or tense that I hadn’t been anticipating. On the other hand, I have often hoped for a given attitude, manner, or relational quality in an improvised work in public, only to find I couldn’t locate that at all in my actual behavior and production, so that I was already fully thrown back on not-knowing how to do it or what could/should come next and thereby the necessity of actually improvising, rather than simply reproducing something I’d imagined or rehearsed. The chosen constraints or rules I’d committed to in advance would in effect save me by giving me something to hang onto while bouncing off of, so that I could find a weird and basically unpredictable if not uncanny rhythm of seeming contact and suspension to orient to, even as it changed or refused to change as I went along. Hard work, in a way. I don’t know whether ‘the unconscious’ enters into this work, but I have no objection if it manages to; forgetfulness is certainly rampant to a degree I could call amnesiac, as I often can remember very few moments of what I’ve said until I hear it later.

There is a meta-discourse and a discourse and the textual production, particularly when improvising aloud, clearly slips around between these two impersonations that are actually impossible for me to distinguish with any conviction. They reflect each other, reflect on each other, mimic one another, infect one another.

Anyway, clearly your method of writing as you describe it in your fourth paragraph here is very very different and allows for a play of levels and discourses in a different set of ways that is most compellingly pleasing-and-disturbing. I don’t know how many people rewrite their works. Most people you and I like a lot in their writing do I think revise, rejuxtapose, refinish, scratch and contort their work variously between the sketches, notes, and drafts it starts from and a final piece.

. . .

I thought a little more (endlessly) and recently listened also to a ‘reading’ I gave at St Marks on 3 9 2005 in which I first gave a tentative and unresolved short reading (with some improvisation) from the Open Notebooks section of what was then my brand new book and then I did an improvisational piece that lasted about 25 minutes I think. Just standing against the white wall or pacing and gesturing, talking. It was on the same model as the piece I had already done at Discrete Series in Chicago (which Erika Staiti used verbatim for a video — both are linkable to from my website, stevebensonasis) but it comes out very different, less ruminative and airless, more artificial and passionate. I could send it to you via Dropbox if you like. But the point of saying so is that this is another way I have revised work, as if ‘in the camera’ as I’m speaking an improvised work, by ‘repeating’ the same utterance with a discrete or indiscreet alteration on more or less every iteration. (I also did this in a work called “Enter,” during which I was also writing other variations on the same clauses, and it’s not available from me in video but I made a text version of the entire thing and that’s also on line.) For a few years I focused on this approach to improvising/revising works, with mixed satisfaction, in that some episodes were marvelous to me and some highly disappointing as some limitations, in myself or the method, showed in a dull tiresome way. I had felt that way about the St Marks piece until I re-heard it while driving on Friday.

A way I have done work that is in a sense private and not poetry (as your trance vocalizations may be) is the piano improvisations, which my Yamaha can record up to two of at a time, and which I gradually begin to download into my laptop and post occasionally at ReverbNation. I have also made a link from the website to the page there lately. These are not my best — the best have all been played without recording, or the recordings lost. I often have wondered whether and how I could work piano playing into my poetry readings but, aside from the difficulty often of arranging a keyboard at all, I haven’t yet found any way in which the two mix. That may eventually come.

Another thing I thought of about how I edit in situ while improvising work orally or in text is that I think I am gauging whatever I produce relative to the listener/reader’s access to something. I am not maintaining any specific or consistent idea of what I want the reader or listener to be able to grasp, understand, or hang on to, so that the handholds or hooks or openings toward significance or interest are mercurial sometimes and always subject to change. But I am aware that I also can’t really make the work totally oblivious to the other who is attending to it (actually or potentially), and a few attempts at work that are procedurally focused on chance applications of words to page without attempts at linkage or attachment of any kind have never (to my recollection) made it into the presence of any public. Stuttering or shouting m ay be a way of offering such access, as well as grammatical and semantic familiarity or representation (in the sense that “You believe in crouching play antiphonies,” for instance, represents a person having some kind of conviction in entities with specific characteristics, even if it’s hard to tell what this may mean).

Usually, all the same, I do mean things by what I utter in such improvisations; I am usually saying things that I believe are ethically acceptable to utter as assertions, even though they may not be particularly valuable in and of themselves, and even though some things I say are presented merely as gestures for some momentarily palpable reason and I really don’t mean them as assertions in the world of my own understandings, even though I may not indicate any difference between them and gestures I would indeed ‘stand behind.’

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December film viewing

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Steve Benson

I borrowed schizopolis and cosmopolis from netflix at the same time to watch them as a double bill, back and forth if necessary, over a week or two’s time. although the latter was more cinematically engaging and personally challenging and disappointingly poignant, the former carried the intimate smell of the real, albeit burning, which has stuck around for weeks. a more catastrophic and inspiring double bill for schizopolis, destructively generative and ultimately fitting would be exit through the gift shop. these two films, particularly framed against one another, raise enough questions to fill anyone’s scrapbook.
“it’s like I’m playing chess—I don’t know how to play chess, but life is a chess game for me.”

I don’t think I’ve seen any other Kiyoshi Kurusawa movies and I can’t tell whether I want to. Tokyo Sonata is disturbing, as it constantly changes key. You can’t tell what kind of movie it is, even when it’s over, though every step of the way you know you’re in a movie and it’s working one way or another. So it seems like realism is punctured or trumped by surrealism that turns out to be an idealization of realism–an extraordinary representation of things as they just are. It seems to me to present the truth about middle class family life. What do they think of it in Japan?

The best rock documentary is all about music in Istanbul?
Crossing the Bridge induces that simultaneous self-consciousness and absorption in the other that one experiences on visiting a strange city, in another country, with a language of its own.

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the new electric Dylan of 196x

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Steve Benson

Listening to Joan Baez sing this while I’m washing dishes before washing my face before bed,
I think how Dylan’s Edie Sedgwick romance and Warhol superstar Factory loomed in the film
once Cate Blanchett was transmitted into his body and then the other way around
and wonder how fully Dylan became for a time the folksinger of the Chelsea Hotel
having accepted a differently idealized folk from the movement folkies and soft teen rebels
so as to know how far he could go into the dream of the ideal and its conflicted priorities
I’ve never read an actual biography of Dylan, as I don’t count the Chronicles Volume 1
as in any way an actual account but rather a substitute and simulacrum, like the songs
in Self-Portrait as it has stood its ground from 1970 on into a crumblingly desiccating
future desecrating one earnest stage at a time of self-representation and appeal to the truth

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Property

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Steve Benson

“Possessions sat lightly upon her; she once said to me that she was no more concerned with their existence than she was with her own.”

–taken from p.184 of John Bayley’s memoir of his relationship with Iris Murdoch, called Elegy for Iris

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Community

Posted on December 25, 2013 by Steve Benson

I commented today in facebook in response to a question about writing and community, Mark Wallace asking “Writing in community. Writing outside of community. Writing inside and outside of community. Writing neither inside nor outside community. And? Or? Plus, the issue of living, which is related to writing though not at all the same thing.”

Community is full of first impressions and saturated in projections that occur before during and after acquaintance with any given community. I feel and it seems to me behave/perform quite differently in different experiential communities. My long-distance community is nurturing in ways my locally lived community is not, and vice versa. My personal community-of-one (resonating and reflecting, surprising and goading myself through my presentations and productions) is for me essential to any creative endeavors, regardless of access to or interactions with any interpersonal community. And despite its ambitions to omnipresence and omniscience, it’s the most mercurial and elusive of them.

Community might be recognized as those who are interested enough to be affected by one another, hopefully to mutual benefit. To write something down presents the inner track of one’s mind to be available to others, whether by accident or intention. I have thought usually of my productions’ introduction into a shared culture as instances within a conversation and/or interventions in a continuing discursive experiment.

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The return of “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry”

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Steve Benson

25-year-old essay starts over

With technical help from Tom Mandel, I have restored the text of a 6-person collaborative essay by Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, and myself that appeared in Social Text 19/20 in Fall 1988.  We based this version on a scan that Tom made from the journal’s pages, in a copy on which I had 25 years ago inscribed corrections to alterations the editors had made for reasons opaque to me.  One of those alterations was to add a subtitle to our title, calling our statement “A Manifesto.”  This was not our plan.

In working on this over in March 2013, I have consulted not only the journal’s published version with my notes there but also a final or near-final typescript printed from a personal computer earlier, which I once dated in my own hand as “late Sept 87,” to bring the text into conformity with that typescript except on the rare occasions that I noticed an error in agreement or spelling. A lot of details were changed to make the text look and behave the way we had intended it to. I also consulted Barrett Watten’s unpublished letter dated 10 14 1988 to Andrew Ross at Social Text identifying “typos, changes, and other decisions on ‘handling’” the text in publication and a letter dated 05 25 1988 from Barrett to Louis Amdur listing changes that Andrew, Sohnya Sayres, and he had agreed on making in the text.  The May 1988 letter identifies a major source of error as the somehow “mangled condition” in which Louis had received the disc that Barrett had sent to him.  Just how it manifested as “mangled” is left to our imaginations, as the correspondence doesn’t explain this.

Thus I have tried to prepare the most accurate text. A google search yields a variety of website references to this text, and at least three places where it is warehoused and available for download. It is clearly of continuing interest to various persons, who can now find it published in the textual condition intended by the writers.

Download the essay.

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