Sacred Disorder

The New York Times has been publishing a blog, “All-Nighters,” which it describes as “an exploration of insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life.” It’s of personal interest to me since I’ve suffered insomnia ever since my mother’s death four years ago.

I found the March 19 entry, “Why We Need to Dream” by Jonah Lehrer, especially interesting because it dispatches with the argument of recent years that dreams are erratic firings of the brain’s components — sound and fury representing nothing.

Lehrer cites plenty of recent research demonstrating that not to be so at all. Researchers now say dreams are likely efforts to discover associations between all events and images. In other words, they assist problem solving and leave no ostensibly unrelated material unexamined (and thus their weirdness). Indeed, dreams are important to the creative process generally:

In recent years, scientists have discovered that R.E.M. sleep isn’t just essential for the formation of long-term memories: it might also be an essential component of creativity.

In a 2004 paper published in Nature, Jan Born, a neuroscientist at the University of Lübeck, described the following experiment: a group of students was given a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. This required the subjects to apply a painstaking set of algorithms. However, Born had designed the task so that there was an elegant shortcut, which could only be uncovered if the subjects saw the subtle links between the different number sets. When left to their own devices, less than 25 percent of people found the shortcut, even when given several hours to mull over the task. However, when Born allowed people to sleep between experimental trials, they suddenly became much more clever: 59 percent of all participants were able to find the shortcut. Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming “set the stage for the emergence of insight” by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.

This is certainly no surprise to me. I’ve told clients for years that when they find themselves blocked in a creative project, to “sleep on it.” It’s old advice, but I long ago learned that if I write the first two paragraphs of a column before going to bed, the column virtually writes itself the next morning.

It’s a great feeling to see this confirmed by neuroscience. It also validates Freud’s position that dreams are intimately connected to real-life events, no matter how other-worldly their narrative is, and have important information to impart. In my experience, dreams not only reveal the positive unseen associations the personal psyche makes. They also reveal the unhelpful associations that may, for example, underlie a repetition compulsion.

Dismissed in recent years as some sort of quackery, much of Freud’s and Jung’s depth psychology is increasingly reiterated by brain science. Depth psychology was the subject of my PhD studies and it’s quite gratifying to see its fascinations, like dream imagery, regain the attention they deserve.

(Of course, in another Times blog post, a contributor reports that sleep deprivation eases depression, leaving the question of what a depressed artist should do!)

The current issue of the Gay and Lesbian Review includes an interview with Edumund White about his new biography of the poet Arthur Rimbaud (right).

If you know Rimbaud’s work, you already know I’m a huge fan. The name of my blog, “Sacred Disorder,” is taken from a line in his long poem, “Une Saison en Enfer” (”A Season in Hell”). Rimbaud’s story is fascinating for many reasons, much of it outlined in the interview with White.

One rather incidental mention in the interview took me by surprise — the speculation that Emanuel Swedenborg’s work indirectly influenced Rimbaud, via Balzac and Baudelaire.

I grew up on the periphery of the Swedenborgian church. My father spent his childhood in Bryn Athyn, Pa., a community originally founded by members of that church. I was born there but my parents moved south soon after my birth, first to Charlotte and later to Atlanta. There was no Swedenborgian church in either city, so I got very little exposure to the religion, except during the few years we moved back to Bryn Athyn when I was about 11.

We did sometimes meet with other families in Charlotte and Atlanta to listen to tape recordings of services in Bryn Athyn. My father usually led these. Also, a minister of the church visited several times a year, like a circuit preacher, to conduct services and show us slide shows about the life of Jesus. But, for all practical purposes, I didn’t have most people’s exposure to religion and I’ve always thought that was mainly a good thing. I’ve seen many clients — gay ones in particular — whose lives were made miserable by religious upbringings.

Despite that, I have been continually amazed how often it turns out that writers and thinkers I admire have been influenced by Swedenborg. I think part of this is simply the fact that Swedenborg’s influence has been much broader than is popularly known, especially on the Romantics like Blake and Whitman. But he also turns up as a serious influence on favorites of mine like D.T. Suzuki, Jorge Borges and Jung. He influenced many others.

I’ve thought a good bit about why I end up drawn to writers who themselves were drawn to Swedenborg and I think it probably has to do with his so-called “language of correspondences” by which an “internal sense” of the Word [Bible]” emerges. This is something like a language of metaphors or mythopoetic exegesis — a poetic way of seeing the world. Indeed, it’s not unlike the way depth psychology approaches the psyche. Gaston Bachelard, another favorite of mine, put it this way: “The psyche’s reality is lived in the death of the literal.” I think Rimbaud is expressing much the same idea when he talks about the way “disorder” is essential to apprehending reality, as I’ve written in an earlier paper.

Swedenborg had other qualities that I think many of these writers admired. Principally, he was also a scientist — an important one — and he did not find the mystic’s path incompatible with empirical analysis.  This was also Jung’s position — and Freud’s if you substitute “artist’s path” for “mystic’s path.” (And Freud was Rimbaud’s contemporary.)  Also, Swedenborg was remarkably frank about sex; he wrote extensively about it.  (See Freud again.) And he understood the importance of dreams. (Ditto.)

I think it would be accurate to say that Swedenborg’s opus — of metaphors and myth, of visitations by angels, of tours of other worlds, of looking behind the seen world to the invisible, of attention to the body and its appetites and dreams — is consistent with James Hillman’s description of our task to sort through the “pandemonium of images,” a phrase he borrowed from Jung.

Still, it astonishes me every time I encounter Swedenborg’s name in the context of a favorite writer. But it’s also a good feeling, reminding me of the times I spent in Bryn Athyn, the happiest periods of my childhood.

This is what Federico Garcia Lorca wrote while living in New York City during 1929 and ‘30,when the stock market crashed. It sounds awfully familiar.

“The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever. This is what comes of a Protestant morality, that I, as a (thank God) typical Spaniard, found unnerving.”

J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, spoke at Harvard’s commencement on June 5. Her topic was “The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination.”

It’s a wonderful talk, particularly in its explanation of the way empathy is a function of imagination.

Here’s a link to both the video and written text of it:

http://harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html

Any leftie worth his peace-symbol lapel pin has a soft spot for Gore Vidal, 82 and as relentlessly acidic as ever. The Independent recently featured an interview with Vidal on the cover of its book section (see image). I call him a leftie, but here’s an excerpt from the piece:

He hands me a copy of the book Ain’t My America by the so-called “radical reactionary” Bill Kaufman, who challenges, from a right-wing perspective, the expansionist policies of Bush and Cheney. “I am considered to be a radical leftie and of course I am not. Neither is Kaufman. We are the original patriots. Like General Washington. We are, for instance, strongly opposed to foreign wars.”

“Joseph Heller wrote a chapter, towards the end of his life, which was called: ‘Every Change is for the Worse.’”

“I won’t contradict it.”

“You would consider yourself to be living under a dishonourable regime?” “Absolutely.”

“With a corrupt president?” “Yes.”

“Who cheated his way to power?” “Oh, yes.”

“Is this the most pernicious US government you have ever experienced?” “Yes. It is inconceivably bad. There is nothing that one could ever have imagined to be so bad.”

“So what hope do you have for what you’ve described as the American Empire?” “None. It’s finished.”

“How do you see it ending?” “No more money.”

“You once wrote: ‘Robert Frost thought that between fire and ice, the world would end in ice. Plainly it is going to be fire this time.’”

“I don’t think so now. We’re too cowardly. We would be at risk if we attempted to blow up…”

“You’re already at risk.”

“Not to anybody truly dangerous.”

“How about a meltdown in the Middle East precipitated by Iraq and Iran? Doesn’t that sound dangerous to you?”

“Well … our people are very, very stupid. And stupid people are apt to make huge mistakes.”

“And your hope for the future?” “Politicians are shadowy people. We don’t know what they may be capable of. The one certain thing is that there will be big surprises. They may be pleasant surprises, but it is my experience of history that most surprises are unpleasant.”

Read the whole, depressing piece by Robert Chalmers here. It also includes a lot of personal information.