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!)

[Morford] has a forthcoming book, The Daring Spectacle, a collection of his columns. Initially, Morford did meet with agents, and he had a lot of interest from traditional publishers.

“I encountered a lot of excitement for the book,” he says, “agents and publishers alike said, ‘Yes this is a great idea. We like it.’”

But the book deals they offered were not what they once were. There were no more big advances, and national book reading tours with stays in swanky hotels. Morford says he was told, “that whole idea has sort of vanished, has sort of gone away. There is no more marketing money.”

Morford began to wonder if he even needed a big publishing house. He looked around and discovered a burgeoning industry of companies that help authors publish their own books in any format they like, from the traditional printed book to e-books and the Kindle, and now for the iPad. Morford decided to publish with a company called Bookmaster.

Part of what surprised me about this piece was the statement about money and book deals. In the ’80s, I received a contract from Harper Collins to write a book, Good Country People, about what remained of Flannery O’Connor’s world in the rural South. For several reasons I’ve recounted elsewhere, I never finished the book. One of those reasons was utter depression over the matter of marketing. I was paid a $10,000 advance fully up front — considered generous for a new author in those days — but I was told that I should expect to make no more money.

“It’s all controlled by marketing,” my editor at Harper Collins told me. “They won’t be willing to spend a lot of money promoting this book, but they might for your second or third book. But don’t think that you’re going to live entirely off royalties and an advance while you write your next book.”

I did not find the process of writing a book at all pleasurable, so knowing that I wasn’t going to make any money — while I probably offended my family with the book’s sexual contents –  resulted in a creative block and I never finished the book. As I often tell people, “I wish I had finished it, but, as an occupation, writing books seems very overrated to me.”

In subsequent years, I received three inquiries about compiling my magazine stories or the “Headcase” columns I wrote for Creative Loafing for 20-odd years in book format. This sounded like a tedious editing job to me and the inquiries were during the years I was studying for my PhD. I didn’t want to spend my little spare time doing that. (And I’ve made a vow to myself never to undertake a book with an advance again.)

In recent years, several of my clients and friends have successfully self-published their books. Unlike me, though, they are very self-promotional types. Despite my longtime work in media, I do not enjoy public attention. That’s part of the appeal of being a dining critic to me. The effort to maintain anonymity is a great excuse for avoiding the direct public gaze.

There’s also the question of publishing in digital format — for the Kindle or the new iPad. People I know have stuck to self-publishing physical books. Personally, I read more online than I do in print now, so I wonder if my brain isn’t better programmed for digital books. I’m also personally fascinated with the mixed-media capabilities that the iPad offers.

It’s interesting to consider how the literary establishment itself could be affected by this change. Call me crazy, but I’m guessing the folks at the New York Review of Books don’t routinely pick up self-published or digital-only books. How will the literary hierarchy preserve itself if publishing is radically democratized?

]]> http://cliffbostock.com/sacreddisorder/?feed=rss2&p=189 http://cliffbostock.com/sacreddisorder/?p=179 http://cliffbostock.com/sacreddisorder/?p=179#comments Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:38:57 +0000 Cliff http://cliffbostock.com/sacreddisorder/?p=179 Here are two poems I like very much. I frequently refer clients to them because they express what I’m often trying to communicate about the value of images and beauty in my work. It is not ultimately analysis that moves us out of our psychological blocks. It’s the image, the aesthetic, itself. Both of these poems describe the apprehension of beauty and end with basically the same (rhetorical) question: “Have you changed your life?”

The Swan
By Mary Oliver

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings
Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

Archaic Torso of Apollo
By Ranier Maria Rilke

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

UPDATED BELOW

My favorite cat ever was Chester, a 20-lb. black and white cat I adopted from the Atlanta Humane Society when he was about 2 years old.  A friend used to call Chester “a dog in a cat suit,” because he was far more gregarious than the usual cat. People who usually didn’t like cats loved Chester.

Chester lived to about the age of 14. He was diabetic the last three years of his life and I had to give him daily insulin shots. During one of the most awful weeks of my life, I came home and found Chester having a seizure. I rushed him to the vet’s office, where he had to be euthanized. (He had lived much longer than expected.) This was the same week two good friends died of AIDS. Everything seemed to hit me at once in the vet’s office and I began crying uncontrollably. That was about 15 years ago and I still dream frequently of Chester.

Friday night, I stopped by the Ponce de Leon PetSmart’s adoption center, operated by a volunteer organization called Furkids. I saw a black-and-white cat named Spanky. His appearance naturally reminded me instantly of Chester. But then he also did exactly the same thing Chester did when I first saw him at the Humane Society. He stood on his hind legs and inserted a paw through the cage, waving at me. A kid standing beside me said, “That cat likes you.” I played with him through the cage and it was clear that he was hyper-affectionate, like Chester.

I resisted adopting him for a handful of reasons, including the fact that our two cats, Mr. Mew and Marlene, died in the last few years and I’m not anxious to have that brutal experience again. The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt inclined to adopt him. Wayne offered to go with me today, Saturday, to check him out again.

When we got to the store about 12:15 p.m., I went looking for someone to let Spanky out of his cage, so we could play with him a bit. But I couldn’t find anyone. A sign said that adoption center volunteers arrive there at noon on Saturdays. By 1:30 p.m. nobody had arrived. We called the two numbers posted on the door — and both of them were fax lines.

The store manager came by and suggested that we go ahead and fill out an application to adopt Spanky and she would see that Furkids got it. We did that and, as we were preparing to leave, a man showed up. We thought he might be the volunteer, but he turned out to be someone who had been trying for two weeks to adopt Spanky and had heard nothing about his application, despite the claim that they process apps within 72 hours. He also said — contrary to what PetSmart employees told us — that he never found anyone manning the place unless it was to clean the cages.

We were disappointed that he had filed an application before us, but he seemed like a very nice guy and I was glad Spanky was getting a good home. Well, that presumes anyone at Furkids eventually bothers to process the guy’s application.  Apart from my disappointment, I was astounded that an organization supposedly devoted to the welfare of animals would keep a cat in a small cage for two weeks when someone wanted to adopt him.

I told this to the store manager, who became very defensive, claiming the store had no control over Furkids’ operation. That made Wayne angry and he pointed out that she was holding our application, was going to file it for us and was in charge of the store that provides Furkids’ space. He noted, pointing to Spanky’s likely adopter, that it wasn’t true, as she had said, that volunteers were almost always there as scheduled.

Finally, Wayne said the store should at least require Furkids to post something on the cage when someone has made application to adopt a cat.  I pulled him away at this point. I haven’t seen him get that angry since he kicked the hell out of a bus in Turkey after an eight-hour nightmarish trip on it.

I know that it’s not easy to operate an organization on a volunteer basis, but if nobody’s going to show up, at least have a working phone number where people can leave a message. (The store manager did leave a message on a private line for us.) And if you’re going to say you process applications within 72 hours and can’t do it within two weeks, don’t say you’re putting the welfare of animals first. Spanky and the other cats in the PetSmart center seem to be functioning as marketing tools for Furkids, which has many more cats for adoption on its website.

In fairness, Furkids had a fundraiser scheduled for Saturday night at Variety Playhouse, so perhaps their volunteers were putting their energy into making preparations for that. But that’s why god gave us the power to post a sign on the door when schedules change.

I hope Spanky gets out of his damn cage soon! And I hope nobody else has to loiter there for hours, only to learn that someone else has already applied to adopt the cat they want.

(Photo of Spanky from the Furkids website.)

UPDATED MAR 31, 2010

To my surprise, I received a phone call yesterday from a volunteer with Furkids. She said she had about 10 minutes of questions she needed to ask me. I told her I was surprised that she called, given that someone else had filed an earlier application to adopt Spanky.

She told me that there had been some mix-up in communications with him. But, she said, order of application is only one consideration in deciding who adopts a cat. After some discussion about our negative experience at the PetSmart store, she proceeded to ask me a series of questions that reinforced my earlier sense that I was trying to adopt a human baby.

We would have to sign a contract that Spanky would never be permitted to go outside. Because Spanky is so social, there must be another pet in the house. (There was no explanation of who made this determination.) If that other pet was an indoor-outdoor cat, we would have to find a way to keep Spanky inside and we’d have to prove that the other cat’s shots were current by providing the name of a veterinarian she could call.

In our case, the “other cat” is Nubs, a neighbor’s cat that basically just moved in with us. I told the volunteer that I did not feel good about asking the neighbor if she’d kept Nubs’ shots current. (In any case, in the past we have used services that come to various venues every month or so to innoculate pets at greatly reduced prices.)

By this point in the conversation, at least 15 minutes, I was over it. I’d already reconciled myself to the fact that someone else had beat us in the application process, but I also found this interview process offensive. Some of the questions were obvious “trick questions” and, for being so, I found myself having to resist lying. I also found myself getting angry. I knew all of her concerns were legitimate but the bottom line, I said, is that Spanky has spent two weeks, probably more, in a small cage with minimal contact with anyone, even though two obviously competent people have tried to adopt him.

The volunteer explained that FurKids has over 400 cats for adoption, that it’s a no-kill shelter and thus can be pickier than the Humane Society about who can adopt its rescued cats. “The Humane Society kills a lot of cats,” she said. That’s tragic but it’s a very good reason to adopt at the Humane Society rather than Furkids. To me, this is an organization — a volunteer organization — whose good intentions exceed common sense in some regards.

]]> http://cliffbostock.com/sacreddisorder/?feed=rss2&p=188 http://cliffbostock.com/sacreddisorder/?p=182 http://cliffbostock.com/sacreddisorder/?p=182#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:02:09 +0000 Cliff http://cliffbostock.com/sacreddisorder/?p=182 Here is (goddess) Patti Smith seemingly channeling Marianne Faithful channeling Debby Boone on a ’70s kiddy show.

It’s pretty rare for my interests in food and psychology to meet one another (although the formation of taste does fascinate me). Last night, I had a dream in which the two collided.

The dream was set in the food court of a huge multicultural flea market. There wasn’t much of a plot. I was sitting at a bar eating some kind of food I could not really identify at first. The owner, obviously Indian, kept insisting I try this and that dish and I found most everything mediocre at best.

In the dream, I kept thinking about how often I’ve told people that a chef’s ethnicity is no guarantee that the food he cooks is either authentic or good. The most familiar example is Mexican cooking. I’ve been in lots of restaurants where the staff and clientele were Mexican and the food turned out to be mainly Tex-Mex or tasted really bad regardless of authenticity.

Such was the case in my dream. I realized after a few dishes that I was being fed something like really awful Indian fusion food. The climax occurred when the owner presented me a hot dog wrapped in naan bread, insisting that it was a “genuine Indian pig in a blanket.” I burst out laughing in the dream, noticing that the delicacy had been retrieved from a carnival-style cart. The man insisted that it was a regional specialty. He talked nonstop, eventually getting angry at me because I kept laughing at his claim. Then I found myself getting annoyed.

My father appears

At this moment, my father, who died two years ago on Thanksgiving, appeared in the dream. It may be that the man behind the counter turned into him. There was immediate tension between us, just as there inevitably was in real life. (I’ve written a lot about how my father disinherited me.) He stood beside me and his disapproval and contempt were overwhelming.

In the dream, he was young, probably in his late 30s. He asked me, in accusatory fashion, why I was complaining. When I was a teenager, he used to lecture me endlessly about my “bad attitude” and started the same in the dream, telling me I shouldn’t question what the Indian man had been telling me.

“So,” I said, “I’m supposed to simply dismiss my own experience — just like I’m always supposed to do with you. No matter how nasty you are, I’m supposed to pretend like you’re not. You told me I was to blame for my unhappiness all my life but when mama had her stroke you became miserable yourself. You stayed that way until you died and blamed everyone else for your unhappiness.”

Suddenly, my father started crying. It his hard to describe the emotional impact. He lost all his defenses and I felt profoundly sad myself. I also felt love flowing between us. My fear of him was completely gone in that moment. It was such an alien feeling, even in the dream, that I felt like I’d lost control of myself. Everything seemed to be melting.

I woke up sobbing.

Dreaming as usual

It’s not unusual for me to dream about my father. The horrible thing about being disinherited is that it leaves you feeling fated to try to work through the rejection for the rest of your life, with no sense that you can gain acceptance, since the rejecting  parent is dead.

I think the first part of this dream was a metaphorical expression of the reality of my circumstances when my father was alive, especially as a child. I had no choice but to listen to his distortions — like eating the absurd food I was being fed in the dream — because any effort to resist his anger only made him more enraged or icily contemptuous at best.

Dreams often seize the most mundane images of our lives, like eating at the bar of an ethnic restaurant, to express something in a metaphorical, oblique way. Pat Berry, author of Echo’s Subtle Body, compares the work of psychotherapy to the way Perseus slays Medusa. Because looking directly at Medusa would turn him to stone, Perseus views her in the reflection of his shield in order to decapitate her.

Similarly, we often can’t face the ugly truth directly, so we need to find some means of approaching it indirectly. Dream images are one way of doing that. Indeed, humor — like the absurd image of the naan-wrapped hot dog — is another. (And humor is under-utilized in therapy, which is founded on Freud’s tragic view of life.)

In my dream, my actual father is approached through the comedic metaphor of the dining scene. The implication is that his contempt disguises both his actual love and, perhaps, his lifelong fear that the depression he reviled in me was lurking within his own psyche.

The dream doesn’t suggest a particular remedy apart from the usual: forgiveness. I think it also demonstrates the difference between depression and real grief. The former disguises the latter with all kinds of neurotic symptoms like denial and festering anger.  Depression also numbs the heart’s capacity to love, it seems.

I’m certainly not unfamiliar with the process of forgiveness. One of my own therapists stressed it constantly, even as I was waking up to the reality of my experience with my parents. That was 20 years ago. I think I did fairly well with that process with my mother, but not so well with my father, mainly because he scared the hell out of me — so much so that I avoided visiting my mother during her last 15 years as a stroke patient.

I would really like to come to peace with my father’s rejection of me, but I did learn that forgiveness is a slow process. I also learned that its value is pretty strictly the peace it accords. It doesn’t disguise the truth or make one want to enter a relationship with the person who needs forgiving — any more than my sense of humor made me willing to eat a naan-wrapped weenie!

Anyway, I wanted to post this video if only for my own records. I posted it on Facebook, where every post has a lifespan of — what? — 60 minutes? This is a young Romanian woman who makes frequent, often funny videos about the damage religion does us. In this case, she cites the beauty and pain of the world and alleges that we create gods to justify our inhumanity.

Check out her many other videos on her YouTube page.

Tuesday, June 16, is my birthday. It’s also Bloomsday, Dublin’s annual celebration of writer James Joyce and his world-changing novel, Ulysses, published in 1922. Bloomsday is named after Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses, which describes a single day in his life, June 16, 1904.

I’ve always enjoyed the coincidence of being born on the day that the 20th Century’s most notorious novel took place. The book was banned in the United States until 1933 and was still considered risque when I was a kid. (No, I wasn’t born in 1930.) I remember buying the novel at Miller’s Bookstore in Buckhead when I was in high school and getting some very disapproving attitude from the woman who sold it to me. This quality of unconventionality and defying authority — particularly moralistic and puritanical authority — was well established in me early on.

In some ways, buying the book was prescient, too, because, being full of references to the original Ulysses, it demonstrated the broad significance of the mythology that had already come to fascinate me in my Latin classes and is so much a part of the depth psychology I studied for my PhD.  I later learned that Joyce’s daughter had undergone an analysis with Carl Jung, whose specific work in depth psychology led me to study the field.

It’s strange how much of life makes sense in retrospect. Events that seemed completely random and unrelated weave themselves into a sensible narrative and picture of character. (I described something of this in an earlier post about my continual encounter with the work of Emanuel Swedenborg.)  James Hillman, the post-Jungian whose work has obsessed me for almost 20 years now, describes such experiences as flashes of the soul’s destiny. Neuroscience is providing mounting evidence that much more of us is given with birth than we’ve previously believed. Whether you regard character and destiny as qualities of the indefinable “soul” or some literal organic process, the effect is the same: Our lives have meaningful telos.

I hasten to say that this is not an either-or proposition. The Greeks analogously understood that, from the empirical perspective, we live in a heliocentric universe, but they also believed the image of Apollo crossing the sky in a fiery chariot was important as an “as if” metaphor. Likewise, we know that we are not blank slates at birth, but, not knowing exactly how we become ourselves, the poetic image of soul expresses the felt sense of this mystery by which our lives seem directed. Poetry is as important as science in our lived experience. It really is.

The last year has been painful in several respects. Our cat of more than 12 years, Marlene, died. This remains so painful to me that I haven’t written about it. Marlene put me to bed every night, climbing on my chest and rubbing my “heart charkra” until I fell asleep.

Another painful loss was Creative Loafing’s discontinuance of my “Headcase” column. As I’ve written earlier, I was in great need of a break after about 20 years of writing it. But it’s become increasingly apparent to me how important it was in my own personal process. I’ve had a couple of offers to resume it with other publications but I’ve avoided making a decision. Part of my grief around this pertains to watching Creative Loafing suffer the declining fortune of the press all over America.

I continue to feel great pain about my father’s disinheritance of me, which I’ve written about earlier (and I did decide to decline participation in a TV documentary on disinheritance). Such an act is calculated to make the disinherited child feel rejected for the rest of his life — not only by the parent but by siblings who, by their honoring of the disinheritance, reinforce the parent’s rejection.

At the same time, however, my dreams during the last few months have turned from raw expressions of anger at my father to more and more recollections of pleasant times with him. We’re destined to love our parents, it seems, even if they reject us — and I guess parents are destined to love their children even when they feel rejected by them. His own mother long ago told me my father would never really grow up. After horrible, often weekly phone calls in which my father used to call me every name imaginable, my mother used to get on the phone afterward and tell me, her voice tremulous, to ignore him.

I remain enormously grateful to my partner Wayne, who has shown me more love than anyone in my life ever did. His mother, like his father before he died, has likewise treated me with open-hearted love that is so alien to me in a parent that I have often found accepting it difficult.

Finally, I’ve noticed that as I get older, I become ever more haunted by the innumerable friends who died during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic, including my first partner Rick. Most of them were barely into their 30s. It is an ongoing source of mystification to me why so many friends, far better people than me, died and I’m still around. The memory of the holocaust of the ’80s and my increasing appreciation for the love I do find in the world make me more impatient than ever with needless suffering.

I’m especially appalled by politicians and their media sycophants. Barack Obama, who seemed like such an avatar of genuine change, is rapidly taking on the appearance of another political conman, literally instiutionalizing the corrupt ad hoc policies of the Bush administration and ignoring the promises he made in nearly every respect. As I often tell Wayne, the only good thing about getting old is knowing I probably won’t be around when the U.S. turns into a bona fide banana republic.

At the top of this post is one of my favorite songs, “Anthem,” by Leonard Cohen. This is my favorite version, by Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen from the 2004 film about Cohen. The imagery in the video reinforces the underlying message of the first noble truth of Buddhism — that life is suffering. (Cohen is a Buddhist.)  The song’s point is that suffering is inevitable but must be opposed when it is brought about by governments. Still suffering’s direct experience is essential to finding meaning:  “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” And it is this shattering — the breaking of the heart, really — and the apprehension of meaning that prepare us for love: “To every heart,  love will come, but like a refugee.”

I think this is what I’ve come to understand more deeply in the last year. We hurt in order to make space for love. Once it inhabits our hearts, its safekeeping for ourselves and others is all that matters.