On Flourishing

I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. - David Brooks

Emily Dickinson's Refusal

The Plenty hurt me - 'twas so new -

Myself felt ill - and odd -

As Berry - of A Mountain Bush

Transplanted - to the Road -

Nor was I hungry - so I found

That Hunger - was a way

Of Persons Outside Windows -

The entering - takes away -

A poem as blessed breathing room

On some level poems can, of course, do good works and bind us together. Everybody will tell you about that, but I'm never very interested. I'm convinced, rather, that poems bind us apart. They disconnect us from that pestering illusion that we are almost connecting to the world.

Oh, what can that mean? Well, we are alone, and poems make us more alone. But wait, I don't mean "alone" in the bad way, what we feel when we know that spending all the money in the world isn't going to keep the shimmer on life; I mean "alone" in the good way.

Alone in the sense of experiencing inside yourself a cascading series of exquisite discriminations and connections which leave you in the fullest possible possession of your self while simultaneously providing the most intimate escape from self, as though the twisted double helixes of your secret code got some blessed breathing room from each other for a minute.

- Kay Ryan

How corporations are sociopathic

The Supreme Court, in its Citizens United decision, effectively allowed unrestrained corporate influence in American politics, based partially on the idea that corporations are legally "persons" with constitutional rights.

If corporations are indeed "persons," their mental condition can accurately be described as pathological. Corporations have no innate moral impulses, and in fact they exist solely for the purpose of making money. As such, these "persons" are systemically driven to do whatever is necessary to increase revenues and profits, with no regard for ethical issues that might nag real people.

But, you say, corporations are owned and managed by real people, so surely immoral corporate actions might be inhibited by them? Well, not really. First of all, the officers and directors who run corporations are actually duty-bound to act in the corporation's best financial interest, and that means they are obliged to do whatever they can within the law to make money. Thus, this fiduciary duty requires corporate management to set aside ethical niceties when they get in the way of corporate profits. This is why tobacco companies market their products to kids when they can - only laws prohibiting such conduct will keep them from doing so.

This is especially true when we are dealing with large, publicly traded corporations. Whereas a small corporation could have local ownership, management, and community roots that might resist the drive for profit in certain situations, publicly traded corporations almost always answer to institutional investors and have tremendous pressure to produce short-term profits. The management chain in a publicly traded corporation is necessarily geared for profit, not ethics.

Thus, the entity is a "person" with a totally self-absorbed psyche, a narcissistic "person" that has enormous resources to advertise and market itself to the public, to hire professionals of all types to influence public opinion, to litigate and lobby as needed, to ruthlessly pursue its goal of revenue and profit, and to join other corporations and industry associations in crushing any opposition posed by mere individuals or public interest groups.

- Dave Niose

The creation of Falstaff

The wonder of Shakespeare’s creation [is] the immensely bold, generous imaginative work that took elements from the wasted life of Robert Greene and used them to fashion the greatest comic character in English literature.

Greene was by no means the sole source. Like many of Shakespeare’s most memorable creations, Falstaff is made out of multiple materials, much of it not from life but from literature. Shakespeare understood his world in the ways that we understand our world—his experiences, like ours, were mediated by whatever stories and images were available to him. When he was in a tavern and encountered a loudmouthed soldier who bragged about his daring adventures, Shakespeare saw that soldier through the lens of characters he had read in fiction, and at that same time he adjusted his image of those fictional characters by means of the actual personal standing before him.

In inventing Falstaff, Shakespeare started, as he so often did, from a character in a play by someone else, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which had been performed by the Queen’s Men in London and on tour. This crude anonymous play, which chronicled the near-miraculous transformation of Prince Hall from wastrel youth to heroic king, included a dissolute knight, Sir John Oldcastle, as part of the crew of thieves and ruffians in which Hal had become enmeshed. Shakespeare took over this figure (he originally use the same name, only changing it to Falstaff after the descendants of Oldcastle objected) and built upon its spare frame his vast creation. He took the stock figure of the braggart soldier, the blowhard who is always going on about his martial accomplishments but who plays dead when danger comes too close, and combined his with another venerable comic type, the parasite, always hungry and thirsty and always conniving to get his wealthy patron to pick up the tab. To these he added features of the Vice in the morality play—shameless irreverence, the exuberant pursuit of pleasures, and a seductive ability to draw naïve youth away from the austere paths of virtue. And he conjoined with these some elements of a newer cultural stereotype, the hypocritical Puritan who noisily trumpets his commitment to virtue while secretly indulging his every sensual vice. But to contemplate these pieces of literary flotsam and jetsam is already to see how complete and unexpected was Shakespeare’s transformation of them…

To a degree unparalleled in Shakespeare’s work and perhaps in all of English literature, Falstaff seems actually to possess a mysterious inner principle of vitality, as if he could float free not only of Shakespeare’s sources in life and in art but also of the play in which he appears. If a theatrical tradition, first recorded in 1702, is correct, Queen Elizabeth herself not only admired Shakespeare’s great comic character but also sensed this inner principle: she commanded the author to write a play showing Falstaff in love. In two weeks’ time, or so it is said, The Merry Wives of Windsor was written, to be first performed on April 23, 1597, at the annual feast to commemorate the founding of the Order of the Garter. Famous already in Shakespeare’s lifetime, constantly alluded to through-out the seventeenth century, and the subject of a distinguished book-length study as early as the eighteenth century, the fat knight has for centuries provoked admirers to attempt to pluck out the heart of his mystery: great wit and the ability to provoke wit in others; spectacular resilience; fierce, subversive intelligence; carnivalesque exuberance. Each of these qualities seems true, and yet there is always something else, something elusive that remains to be accounted for, as if the scoundrel had and the power in himself to resist all efforts to explain or contain him…

“An upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers”: Greene and his crowd, despite their drunken recklessness and bohemian snobbery, saw something frightening in Shakespeare, a usurper’s knack for displaying as his own what he had plucked from others, an alarming ability to plunder, appropriate, and absorb if Shakespeare took what he could from Greene—if, as an artist, he took what he could from everyone he encountered—he also performed a miraculous act of imaginative generosity, utterly unsentimental and, if the truth be told, not entirely human. Human generosity would have involved actually giving money to the desperate Greene; it would have been foolish, quixotic, and easily abused. Shakespeare’s generosity was aesthetic, rather than pecuniary. He conferred upon Greene an incalculable gift, the gift of transforming his into Falstaff.

– Stephen Greenblatt

Mystery and Solitude in Topeka

Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper
into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through
what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through
which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing
why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems
to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known,
and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it
is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which
two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one
that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.

- Mark Strand

On King Lear in the storm

A man walks and walks. He wants to escape, in these mountains, the shadow of his enemy. That shadow comes upon him like a storm of rain. Walking, he runs, tries not to run, not to be seen to run, lest running make him seem afraid. His baited hurry makes him grotesque. He moves mechanically, like a scarecrow. The wind catches him before the falling water does. He draws his coat around him and pulls his hat over his eyes, but the wind and rain pour through unstopped. He cannot see. Mud clogs his feet, stains his clothing and hands. Falling, in flight, he yells, and finds in that alien sound a way to outwit what he cannot outrun. He screams again and again, and then turns the scream to a laugh. He turns his face to the weather, opening it to the rain. When the water makes him wince, he makes his wince a smirk. He flourishes spray around with his arms, kicks up fresh mud, catches water in his hat and tosses it back into the laden air, or pours it over his own head. He throws shreds of hair into the wind or hurls up soaked paper from his pockets. His mouth tastes of earth. He shuts his eyes to increase the darkness, pressing his palms to his eyes to make flashes that mirror the lightning. He makes of the rain a dancing partner or a puppet. The air is full of water drops, full of children, statues, palaces, and eyes. The storm is full of noises that amplify his speech; it answers his calls and drives other sounds from his ear…what he cannot outrun he tries to outwit, or out-jest; he tries to mock, co-opt, or…make it over into a home or a kingdom. [These shadows] fly in the air, arrive on the rain and wind; they slip behind eyes, echo in the unreadable laughter of fools or the demented babble of demoniacs. They are scattered like seeds on a barren landscape. They conceal themselves within gifts and benedictions, becoming parts of a world. – Kenneth Gross

Therapists on The King's Speech

Traditionally, the theory behind trauma treatment is that you relieve the pressure of haunting memories when the individual talks about it. Yet research shows that Developmental Trauma Disorder affects a part of the brain words can't reach-the limbic system, specifically the amygdala and hypothalamus, all lower in the brain and far from the cortex, the seat of thinking, logic and reason. This is why the understanding and insight produced by "talk" and behavioral therapy doesn't fix trauma. The patient doesn't hear it. The traumatized brain cannot process the words.

Consider Logue's methods: singsong, guttural utterances and curse words, physical movements such as rolling on the floor. The patient's intellectual grasp of his condition is irrelevant. Although Bertie eventually opens up about the childhood abuses he endured: humiliation and criticism, harsh disapproval of his father, King George V, the leg braces he was forced to wear and sexual abuse by a nanny. Yet healing is the product of the developing trust between him and his therapist. Since trauma involves a psychological injury resulting from multiple, chronic, prolonged, developmentally adverse events, treatment requires the establishment of intimacy. Logue knows he has to create a "safe place" for his patient: "I will call you Bertie, and you will call me Lionel."

In the movie's last scene, Hitler's shadow looms, and an entire country awaits reassurance. "Speak to me," Logue commands his patient in a calm, firm voice that breaches the canyon and places this momentous speech in the safe place of intimacy.

The red light flashes. Bertie begins to speak. The trauma has been overcome- by the trust and security of his friendship with the man who understands his problems and treats his deep, underlying issues. The King has entered the safety of a world that makes room for the goodness that was inside him, waiting for a chance to emerge. I work every day to establish this kind of trust with my patients. If only the outcome of trauma therapy were always as beautiful as the end of this poignant Hollywood movie.

- Frederick Woolverton, Ph.D.

Understanding Prince Albert's ("Bertie") nonverbal language of stuttering and body twitches, Lionel has him practice relaxation exercises sing, roll on the floor, shout obscenities and feel his emotions, probe painful childhood repressed memories and finally feel a growing friendship between two equal human beings. Using seriousness, rhythm, play and improvisation in the "transitional space" between them, Lionel bridges Bertie's negative self-talk with positive glimpses and new narrative of his future as a respected and self-determining king.

- Ilene Serlin, Ph.D.

Logue uses Socratic means to re-shape Bertie's long-term irrational core beliefs: Stuttering is irreversible; I am weak of character; I am defective; I cannot be a competent king. In the course of working with his coach, King George VI discovers that he has far more strength of character than his older brother; that he is able to meet the challenge of war with Germany; that being left-handed and knock kneed as a child are not signs of inferiority or defect. Perhaps the biggest revelation is that in contrast to remaining brow-beaten by the words and teachings of his pompous and hypercritical father, and intimidated by his inept and insecure brother, the new monarch, King George VI, reshapes his personal narrative and discovers his own inspirational voice.

- Harvey Milkman, Ph.D.

Lionel Logue, the speech therapist played by Geoffrey Rush, lacked credentials, fame, a posh office, success in his own acting ambitions and a home that was sufficient for hosting royalty. What he had was the ability to both believe more in the King than the King did himself, while also creating an equal relationship, insisting on calling him Bertie and setting ground rules that he chose.

Rush's character held his own, believing in his own worth and what he could offer (even in the midst of vast inequality). He also never lost sight of how human the King really was, seeing him with his imperfections and wounds. He saw him-his amazingness and his insecurities.
Isn't that what we all crave?

And the final line of The King's Speech came onto a black screen before the credits rolled, attesting that it can work: "Bertie and Lionel remained friends through out their entire life."

- Irene S. Levine, Ph.D.

Getting out of our rut: psychotherapy rewires the brain

“Psychotherapy works by rewiring the brain. Every time you become aware of something new in a psychotherapeutic session, you activate an existing rigid neural network, you make it more malleable and you can alter it with the help of awareness.” – Dr. Norman Doidge

In psychotherapy, clients are guided to be more aware of thoughts, challenge them and ultimately change their brains at a cellular level. Ironically, plasticity can lead to flexible behaviors and positive change, as well as to rigid behaviors and habits, both good and bad. Doidge calls this the “plastic paradox” and offers the metaphor of fresh-fallen snow on a ski hill. On your first pass down the hill, you create a new path in the pliable or plastic snow. If it was a good run, you’ll likely stick close to that path on subsequent passes down the hill. But well-worn tracks can eventually become ruts in which you can get stuck, he explains, likening these ruts to the rigid, destructive behaviors patients want to change.

In therapy, patients are, among other things, guided to set up road blocks on those tracks and to discover new pathways through the snow. Sometimes that roadblock can be as simple as learning to recognize and inhibit what had been an unconscious response.

“The fact is...we are all on a continuum and all of us have these areas that are not functioning okay and others that are functioning okay,” Doidge says. “Anyone can benefit because neuroplasticity is the modus operandi of the brain. It’s the way it works.” - Theresa Boyle

Two views of ambition

In Marlowe’s vision of the exotic East, vaunting ambition, stopping at nothing, leads to the establishment of a grand world order, cruel but magnificent. That order, as part two of Tamburlaine shows, crumbles, but only because everything eventually crumbles: there is no moral other than the brute fact of mortality. In Shakespeare’s vision of English history, vaunting ambition leads to chaos, an ungovernable, murderous factionalism and the consequent loss of power at home and abroad. Despite or even because of his ruthlessness, Marlowe’s hero bestrides the world like a god, doing whatever it pleases him to do—“This is my mind, and I will have it so” (4.2.91). By contrast, Shakespeare’s petty Tamburlaines, even though they are queens and dukes, are like mentally unbalanced small-town criminals: they are capable of incredible nastiness but cannot achieve a hint of grandeur. – Stephen Greenblatt

How Shakespeare steals

Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Nobel Greeks and Romans (description of Cleopatra):

“She was laid under a pavilion of cloth-of-gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her.”

Shakespeare’s version of the same scene:

“…She did lie
In her Pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’er picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling cupids,
With diverse coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.” (Antony and Cleopatra, II, 2)

At first glance Shakespeare’s version seems very similar, all be it in verse form, but there are important differences, differences which affect the way Shakespeare invites us to see Cleopatra. For instance in North’s version Cleopatra is dressed like a portrait of Venus, however Shakespeare’s Cleopatra ‘o’er pictures’ (or outshines) the portraits of Venus which are themselves more beautiful than nature.

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra is more beautiful even than a painting which is famed for being more beautiful than nature. Her boys too move from being dressed like Cupid in artwork to being simply ‘like’ cupid. Once again there is less sense of a painted picture in Shakespeare’s version, we are being offered something which transcends the achievements of art. Though one might argue that rather than being more naturally beautiful than art, Cleopatra’s appearance it is in fact a level of artistry that goes far beyond mere imitation or painting.

So Shakespeare builds on his source material, shaping it to offer new views of Cleopatra, and weaving into it a whole debate about nature, art and artistry. - Liz Woledge

And see how Shakespeare physicalizes his source, transforming abstractions into concrete images much more easy to visualize. The generic "pretty fair boys apparelled" becomes the more scenic and specific, "Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling cupids," likewise "with little fans" becomes "diverse coloured fans" and the bland, "fanned wind upon her" becomes the dynamic, spectacular "whose wind did seem / To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool, / And what they undid did.” Also, of course, Shakespeare changes and arguably improves the music of the original, often through alliteration, in this case enhancing and playing with the "s" "i" "w" and "d" sounds.

A natural philosopher

Corin And how like you this shepherd's life, Master Touchstone?

Touchstone Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is nought. In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now in respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my humour well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach. Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?

Corin No more but that I know the more one sickens the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants money, means, and content, is without three good friends; that the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun; that he that hath learned no wit by nature nor art may complain of good breeding, or comes of a very dull kindred.

Touchstone Such a one is a natural philosopher.

- Shakespeare, As You Like It

Shakespeare’s method of opacity

The opacity in Macbeth is not produced by the same radical excision of motivation Shakespeare so strikingly employed in Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. If the audience does not know exactly why Hamlet assumes his madness or Iago hates Othello or Lear puts the love test to his daughters, it most assuredly knows why Macbeth plots to assassinate King Duncan: spurred on by his wife, he wishes to seize the crown for himself. But in a tortured soliloquy, Macbeth reveals that he is deeply baffled by his own murderous fantasies:

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not. (1.3.138-41)

At the center of the familiar and conventional motive there is a dark hole—“nothing is / But what is not.” And this hole that is inside Macbeth is linked to the dark presence, within his consciousness and within the play’s world, of the witches. Do they actually arouse the thought of murdering Duncan in Macbeth’s mind, or is that thought already present before he encounters them? Do they have some affinity with Lady Macbeth—who calls upon the spirits that attend on mortal thoughts to “unsex” her (1.5.38-39)—or is their evil completely independent of hers? Does the witches warning—“beware Macduff” (4.1.87)—actually induce Macbeth to kill Macduff’s family, or has he already waded too deep in bloodshed to turn back? Do their ambiguous prophecies lead him to a final, fatal over-confidence, or is his end the result of his loss of popular support and the superior power of Malcolm’s army? None of the questions are answered. At the end of the play the weird sisters are left unmentioned, their role unresolved. Shakespeare refuses to allow the play to localize and contain the threat in the bodies of witches.

Macbeth leaves the weird sister unpunished but manages to implicate them in a monstrous threat to the fabric of civilized life. The genius of the play is bound up with this power of implication, by means of which the audience can never quite be done with them, for they are most suggestively present when they cannot be seen, when they are absorbed in the ordinary relations of everyday life. If you are worried about losing your manhood and are afraid of the power of women, it is not enough to look to the bearded hags on the heath, look to your wife. If you are worried about temptation, fear your own dreams. If you are anxious about your future, scrutinize your best friends. And if you fear spiritual desolation, turn your eyes on the contents not of the hideous cauldron but of your skull: “O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!” (3.2.37).

The witches—eerie, indefinable, impossible to locate securely or to understand—are the embodiment of the principle of opacity that Shakespeare embraced in his great tragedies. Shakespeare’s theater is the equivocal space where conventional explanations fall away, where one person can enter another person’s mind, and where the fantastic and the bodily touch. - Stephen Greenblatt

The "artistry" of Bobby Fisher

Fischer’s passion for puzzles was combined with endless hours of studying and playing chess. The ability to put in those hours of work is in itself an innate gift. Hard work is a talent.

My argument has always been that what you learn from using the skills you have—analyzing your strengths and weaknesses—is far more important. If you can program yourself to learn from your experiences by assiduously reviewing what worked and what did not, and why, success [in this case, chess] can be very valuable indeed.

It was his relentless, even pathological dedication that transformed the sport. Fischer investigated constantly, studying every top-level game for new ideas and improvements. He was obsessed with tracking down books and periodicals, even learning enough Russian to expand his range of sources. He studied each opponent, at least those he considered worthy of preparation. Brady recounts dining with Fischer and hearing a monologue of the teen’s astonishingly deep analysis of David Bronstein’s openings before the two were to meet in the Mar del Plata tournament in 1960. No one had ever prepared this deeply outside of world championship matches. Today, every game of chess ever played, going back centuries, is available at the click of a mouse to any beginner. But in the pre-computer era, Fischer’s obsessive research was a major competitive advantage.

In his play, Fischer was amazingly objective, long before computers stripped away so many of the dogmas and assumptions humans have used to navigate the game for centuries. Positions that had been long considered inferior were revitalized by Fischer’s ability to look at everything afresh. His concrete methods challenged basic precepts, such as the one that the stronger side should keep attacking the forces on the board. Fischer showed that simplification—the reduction of forces through exchanges—was often the strongest path as long as activity was maintained. The great Cuban José Capablanca had played this way half a century earlier, but Fischer’s modern interpretation of “victory through clarity” was a revelation.

Fischer’s uncompromising approach had an even greater impact on the chess world than his results. I am not referring to any “special moves,” as often suspected by those unfamiliar with the game. It was simply that Fischer played every game to the death, as if it were his last. It was this fighting spirit that his contemporaries recall most about him as a chess player.

Fischer was ill, some said, perhaps schizophrenic, and needed help, not censure. Others blamed his years of isolation, the personal setbacks, the persecutions both real and imagined at the hands of the US government, the chess community, and, of course, the Soviets, for inspiring his vengefulness…Clearly this full-flown paranoia was far beyond the more calculated, even principled, “madness” of his playing years, well described by Voltaire in his Philosophical Dictionary: “Have in your madness reason enough to guide your extravagancies; and, forget not to be excessively opinionated and obstinate.” That is, purposeful and successful madness can hardly be called mad. After Fischer left chess the dark forces inside him no longer had purpose.

- Garry Kasparov

Santayana on poetry at its best

Poetry is not at its best when it depicts a further possible experience, but when it initiates us, by feigning something that as an experience is impossible, into the meaning of the experience we have actually had.

- George Santayana