10-31-20

JULIUS/GHOST

Ghost: the spirit of a dead person, especially one believed to appear in bodily likeness to living persons or to haunt former habitats.

the center of spiritual life, the soul

a returning or haunting memory or image.

“Ghost” is the word I am looking for here. Jacob sent me an article to read on Robinson Jeffers in which there was a reference to his Tor House and Hawk Tower, all built by Jeffers of native stone. I replied to Jacob that I had a memory of the rock cottage at Mesa Vista, also built of native stones by dad and his brother, Uncle David, when they were young. And I mentioned Julius, my mentor in stacking dry wall stones at Mesa Vista. Jacob asked for more of a memory about Julius. That is what turned my thinking to ghosts.

As you will see as you read along, there is much here about stones and building with stones and what that might mean to those of us who have experienced this obsession. Even though the subject has a more recent reference, there is a thread to it that winds back in time to another stone building, that of the Tower that Carl Jung built for himself over many years. I will start there before going on with my own story.

In his book, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Jung has a chapter on “The Tower.” He originally conceived of this tower as a place of simplicity, something resembling a primitive hut. But as time went on, he found that he needed something more substantial in which to live. He added several annexes over the subsequent years and with each one the stone structure took on deeper meanings for him. There is an underlying appreciation for the building materials, the stones, themselves. He mentions one stone in particular that was intended to fit into the structure but which hadn't been shaped that way and he saw that it had a different role to play in the overall plan. When I was working on my own stone walls, I never picked stones for a particular place in the wall I was working on but always felt there was a place for every stone somewhere and so I took the next stone off the pile and worked it into the wall. Jung's original structure was a place of maternal and familial care (the hearth) and was built after the death of his mother. After his wife died, he added a tower that symbolized his maturation into old age. In each case, the stones selected and the buildings built had specific meanings for him, almost a dedicatory practice. That is the way I felt about the walls I built.

“It might also be said that I built it in a kind of dream. Only afterward did I see how all the parts fitted together and that a meaningful form had resulted: a symbol of psychic wholeness.”

He believed that his stone structures were inhabited by different spirits, one of which was Merlin.

“His story is not yet finished, and he still walks abroad.”

At one point in his story he is certain he hears a parade of people singing, laughing, and talking but in his waking/dreaming state he doesn't find anyone after a search of the tower. It was only later that he made the connection with another spirit from his classical studies.

“Such phenomena demonstrate that premonitions or visions very often have some correspondence in external reality.”

Interestingly, he makes a final statement about his own version of history and it echoes now a recurrent theme in our present circumstances. His history is, of course, tied intimately with his own past and the history of all those whose roots we share.

“Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the 'discontents' of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.”

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass ….”

I think Jung is bringing us back to the very complicated formulas that define humankind. His own experiences are informed by the history embedded in his memories and dreams and reflections. He makes the case that our visions, our apparitions, our ghosts are as real to us as the reality of every day experiences. In that light, let me take up my own story of one ghost that appeared in my own personal reflections.

Ghosts are sometimes thought of as frightening apparitions that visit people in sleep and sometimes, as in Dickens' A Christmas Carol, bring messages of admonishment or warning. My ghosts have never been frightening and when they come to me they encourage my memory of them in many ways. And that is never anything but something of a mentoring spirit, very supportive and encouraging and persistently inspiring. So it is with my Julius Reinig ghost. And that is how I will develop the memory of him for Jacob and the rest of you in this week's letter.

This entry gives me a chance to document some of the thoughts I have been having about him and around him this past week. Thoughts around anything other than politics at this point before next week's election indicate something at a different level of perception and that is a welcome relief from the relentlessly dismal reporting on politics. So, this is a matter of substituting something wonderful and inspiring for something toxic and penetrating. But what are ghosts for if not for bringing to someone a message of inspiration and deep connection?

I have many ghosts of this kind, like Julius. They visit me when I am reflective and separated by degrees from the surface din of activities on Main Street. They come to me and are reminders of one of the nuanced and deeper levels of love. As I have thought about Julius and his effect on me and my life, love is the word that settles emotionally. There is nothing academic about my ghosts. They appear as they were in real life, teachers of enormous lessons. Often, the ghosts were my teachers when I was very young. They were available to me in ways that people closer in the family, mom and dad, were not. All of them saw me as a fleshly person, truly saw me for who I was at the time. For them, I was not a clinical specimen (as with dad) or part of a blur of children (as with mom). I was noticed and nourished by the connection, each ghost in a separate and different way, but always genuinely regarded with kindness and, yes, love. I don't believe one can genuinely regard someone else as they truly are in a state other than love. I felt embraced in a substantial and warm way by each.

Julius was one of these ghosts. He and I worked together several summers at Mesa Vista where he was a groundskeeper. I was too young, maybe 13 or 14, to get a regular job, even though most of those early summers were also times to mow neighborhood lawns, which I did in addition to working with Julius. The rock cottage was still standing at that time, even though it had not been used since all the adult Navajo natives had returned to the Navajo Nation, a time when they could be treated for their tuberculosis on the reservation. The rock cottage, then, was a place to store the tools and small equipment Julius needed for his outdoors work. It was there that he and I shared our lunch times together in the cool of the cottage basement during those hot summer days.

I was assigned to Julius to work outside doing whatever he wanted me to do. This was mostly mowing or moving hoses to water the lawns and flower beds, all of which he kept with such precision and care. As the first summer wore on, he had me helping him with some of the stacked rock work on the terraces he was building around the front of the nursing home. They were to eventually blossom into masses of irises, one of the few flowers that didn't require extensive watering but which bloomed resplendently in mid-summer under his care.

Julius collected the stones for the walls from the fields around his house which was some distance out of town. He would load them into the trunk of his passenger car, the only vehicle he could afford. And he did that over many years, one load at a time, a few stones in each load. The work of handling the stones was a welcome task for me because I was at that time a fat kid. I admired my classmates at the time who were athletic and in good physical shape. I thought the stone work would help me to be more like them. The work of laying stone under Julius's tutelage turned out to be more than an act of physical conditioning for me. I look back on that time now and realize how porous my emotional life must have been to have been so affected by his mentoring attention. I'm not sure what he saw in me but he trusted whoever I was.

During lunch times we would chat and once I asked him how he could keep his shirt sleeves rolled down all the time when it was so hot to work that way. He rolled up one sleeve and showed me his sharply tattooed identification number of many digits (we were then only 14 years beyond the Holocaust and the end of World War II). He said he kept it out of sight but could never keep it out of his mind. Over time that summer he told me many stories about his experiences as a Pole coming from an area of Poland that had suffered invasion, occupation, and reversals over many decades. He explained about Auschwitz, just an angry and sterile blot in my own educational experience. Most times I would have to ask a specific question but he would always answer. His memories were never couched in bitterness or anger. And, in fact, he could recite verbatim the speeches of Hitler broadcasted over all inmates in the long buildings that housed the prisoners. I could never understand how someone as evil as Hitler could so mesmerize his victims. Even now, it is hard for me to understand this part of brain mechanics and history but such a thing is made more believable with our present circumstances.

Julius had his own ghosts that visited him all the time. He recalled some of them for me. He told me about how he and several of his fellow prisoners would accompany the sickest to the filthy communal bathroom and tend to them as they lived out their abbreviated lives soiled and starved, just doing what was possible and called for in the midst of impossible circumstances. His stories were graphic but unlabored and not told in any way to make his efforts there to sound anything more than they were for him—one human helping others. The least sick tending to the dying. He survived and attested to the role of chance in his survival. Yet, his ghosts never troubled him in ways a thirteen year old boy thought they should.

I suppose I made a subconscious connection between this man of integrity and kindness and the stone walls he was building. I suppose it occurred to me deep down inside someplace that the solidity and elemental permanence of stones was a way for him to participate in a memorial of sorts to his lost comrades as well as his own incomprehensible memories. Perhaps he dedicated each stone to them as he placed them on the walls, stacking one upon the other as if in a community of his ghostly lost kin. And there are so many stones that are required for a sturdy wall. There was not a day of stacking stone here at the farm over 45 years that I didn't recall the ghost of Julius. And the walls I built hold within them some small measure of what I imagined his walls contained—a devotion and a dedication to goodness and the rightness of kindness towards one's fellow human beings.

I believe that we are visited by the ghosts in our lives when we need them. They come often unbidden but always willingly. They bring to us the messages that their lives held and, in this and in present moments, they continue their mentoring and teaching. Perhaps it is something of magical thinking to believe that our ghosts appear in this way, but I will entertain a full dose of this magical thinking in these perilous times when there is so little in the way of inspiration and loving kindness. When Julius comes to me now I see that he comes with his message of acceptance and care out of his life of trauma, darkness, and wretched circumstances. He transforms my moments of dread into moments of hope, survival, and even endurance. He says that if the Holocaust can be opened and let to bleed its life, then this wound that can bleed and eventually heal can also be every wound we know.

All of us are in an eternal lineage of ghosts. We do not know when our lives will end here in earthly circumstances. We do not know for whom we will be living ghosts when we give up our skin bags. What I do know is that I will be wandering about as beggars do and I will appear to someone when I am aware of a call from them. And then I will appear, just as Julius appears to me when he has been wandering at the edges of my memory. All of us will some day be living memories. And we will not have lost the love for one another that our beating hearts once held so warmly.
 

8-31-20 SOURCES OF HELP: SELF-HELP AND BYPASSING

These seem to be the times of self-help as illustrated by all

 the books presently available in bookstores and the popularity of the genre in our culture. But what do we make of it and is it a useful category for us in navigating what we encounter on a daily basis in our lives? There is a certain allure to the beckonings of the self-helpers. We think we can attach ourselves to the methodologies someone else has worked out for themselves, assuming that what ails us and in need of help is identical to what ails the author of the book we are reading. Our hopes are predicated on a close match-up of their lives and ours. Yet, experience reveals that all of us are in need of help in some form and that our challenges are not identical to everyone else's. But there may be some processes by which we can begin to understand our own needs and challenges and that is where sources of help might be valuable. There are aspects of our behavior that are universally human and so we hope that we might gain some insights into and even some solutions for our own problems.

I am presently observing protest movements around the world but especially here in the United States and from a comfortable distance. My environment is of a rural nature in a state of a very homogeneous white race with the exception of many indigenous tribes scattered throughout. The protests have the character of “other,” of “over there” and not here. I am separated from what the protesters shout and their placards and posters say. I am sympathetic to many of their causes and yet puzzled by what their noise and violence achieve. I have these questions about protest movements throughout human history and especially my own lifespan that includes the protests of the 60s. Is it possible to draw a straight line between the vehemence of the protest, its apparent basis, and a defined outcome or result? Were the people who were drawn into the protest movement as sympathizers aware of the genesis of the movement itself? Were the energies of the protest shared by all?

When I look closer at protest movements in general and the specific ones we are witnessing today (BlackLivesMatter, police brutality, racial injustice) and try to answer some of the questions that arise for me, I am challenged to look closer at what universal elements they might contain that would help me understand why they exist in the first place. And I wonder, too, if the protests are expressions of a clear motive or if they might be bypasses for what is more fundamental and complex. What I mean by bypassing is to avoid either overtly or covertly the root conditions that lead to the eruption of a protest with all its noise and demands. In these situations I wonder what hard work is being bypassed.

Hard work is a concept that applies to just about everything we think and do. It implies that we engage the brain in ways that interrupt its comfortable default to a low energy state. It seems to prefer to languish in this low energy state unless called upon to do hard work, to think, to calculate, to discern. This is a natural state for the brain as it prefers to let its energy store up in preference to the needs of other vital organ systems that will probably require energy for metabolism in more immediate conditions, perhaps those of fight, flight, or freeze. Hard work is a conscious demand on the brain and awakens it to a condition of being available to dissect and deconstruct and reorder. This applies to solving mathematical puzzles as well as to understanding the causes and conditions of white supremacy and racial injustice.

Resmaa Menakem, in his book My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies (2017), explores what it is to act on implicit biases and how overt and covert oppression is stored in the body. This implicates Whites and Blacks, police and security officers and their victims, historical transmission, and the epigenetics of trauma. Epigenetics is a new frontier in genetic science and is opening up new avenues to the exploration of how the experiences of trauma are passed down in generations and how they affect genetic transmission but don't seem to change the underlying DNA codes. For instance, studies on Holocaust victims and their offspring indicate that the traumas directly experienced can be transmitted to their offspring and expressed in such conditions as chronic depression and social dysfunction in numbers higher than predicted based on the general population. There is growing biochemical evidence that this is a real phenomenon and one directly related to how traumas are embedded in the body. Menakem highlights this with the issue of race as it surfaces in the Black community, among Whites as White Supremacy/White fragility, and among the police forces and security forces originally configured to maintain peace and order but now heavily militarized to resemble an armed contingent. While his focus is on these elements of society, his expanded theme is on how trauma of any cause can create the conditions in our bodies that lead to chronic physical and mental diseases. He also offers some specific psychological and behavioral methodologies that can assist us in managing traumatic situations of any cause. In this regard, he echoes many of the same methodologies attached to spiritual traditions, where cultivation of bodily responses is the source of calming, settling, and grounding—the methodologies Menakem recommends for those confronting hostility, stress, and even violence in traumatic situations.

Sometimes, I believe we assign far greater authority to gurus of all stripes than they deserve. We are so eager to attach ourselves to anyone who offers us ways to bypass our suffering and to avoid the hard work of confronting the traumas that affect our daily behavior. Menakem could be one of those gurus, except he offers only the possibility of hard work to make progress on the underlying implicit biases that run us into trouble. His formulation of the difficulties with racialized trauma lead to strategies, exercises, and practices (he prefers “practices,” as that implies an ongoing commitment of intention) that depend on individuals doing the hard work of discernment of basic causes of trauma, whatever the source and whatever the manifestations. If one is intent on doing such intense work, then he says to begin with the body because that is where the trauma is stored. Anything less than that will be to invest in another layer of bypassing. And the trauma will continue to lie dormant and surface in myriad ways that are unhelpful at least and very harmful in full armor.

This work, this hard work, is a call to us to be awake to those aspects of our lives that cause us tension, stress, frustration, anger, and outright violence. Think of any corner of your life and look at it hard, asking the questions: “What is this? What do I notice? Am I bypassing the important elements to just feel better about a difficult situation?” Maybe there are stresses in a personal relationship, with impending retirement, with financial problems, with the loss of physical ability or the death of a loved one. We need to look deeper into our own personal sources of strength and abilities to find internal resources that will give us courage to do the hard work required. Any one of us, all of us, can do this. What it means is to first adopt an attitude of willingness to explore. Next comes the intention to go further and then the inquiry begins. Along with the nuanced questions there is a practice of somatic calming and grounding that prepares one for the hard work of discernment. This body work is a resource if practiced often enough to become a habit of self-care. Once a habit, it is available in situations of stress or conflict.

We begin to ask the questions that pry up the boards that have been hammered together to cover over the painful basic problem. With the adoption of this attitude and this intention, it is important to recognize that all of this comes without any assurance of success in getting answers to the questions we ask. And if we are fortunate to get some answers, there is no guarantee that the answers will translate into a successful outcome such as a promotion or marketable insight or enlightenment, such as a self-help guru might promise. At every opportunity in this excavation we refer to our bodies and what we are experiencing there. What comes up inside the body? What are you feeling just now? Is there constriction or relief? Is there some history that helps me understand how I feel? How does my body practice help me now?

Returning to the social protests that are now so present to all of us all around the country, what might be the hard work with them that could lead to a better understanding of their importance? It might be the approach Menakem takes in his examination of racialized trauma and to dig into the history of the idea of race itself. It might be to read the memoirs of those manacled in slavery or the details of the recent killings of Black men and boys to get a better understanding of how traumas are experienced by the victims. It might be to study what neuroscience tells us about how traumas are embedded in our bodies and then transmitted to other individuals and how they are inserted into social norms and habits over time. There is no doubt that we can learn from scientific experts and from people who have ideas about human behavior based on their own experiences. But the truth is that what hard work we do must begin in our own bodies. That is personal work to which we are all called.

Menakem has a number of quotations from James Baldwin, among others. James Baldwin was a public witness to issues of race many decades ago and wrote most eloquently about the Black experience. He was not taunting in his approach but certainly challenging. He called on both Blacks and Whites to do the hard work of reckoning with the trauma done to bodies, the trauma that we are now learning has a historical basis as well as a contemporary version we see in the protest actions in many major cities. He was aware that individuals as well as communities, societies, and nations were stuck in their progress for a healthier life of interdependence if they did not work through the trauma of racial oppression and its ideations. He was aware of the ease and comfort of bypassing, only to be haunted by the demon long kept dormant. Baldwin is also an eloquent and unsettling voice for the Black experience in America. Menakem, too, lets no one off the hard work hook and documents the White-on-White traumas inflicted over the centuries, long before race was a concept, as people of color were not part of the cultural make-up of early societies. So, traumas of oppression have existed as long as humans have been on the earth. Isn't it time to do the hard work of confronting such an ancient legacy? What could the future look like if we did? How could humans continue to flourish in their lives if we committed to hard work?

The confluence of individual, community, societal, and world wide traumas are part of our shared lives in the first century of this new millennium. The hard work of their realities is the call we can answer if our intention is to bring to light what ails us. Only in this way will we be able to work through and not bypass the most essential aspects of what it is to be a human being. It is to acknowledge the pains and suffering, the joys and sorrows that all of us experience. In this we are one.

7-17-20--PARADIGMATIC LOVE

Eventually it is love that I return to in my thinking. It is a vexing subject and one that recurs enough for me to notice and work with it. Considerations of love emerged in my coincidental readings into the works of Thomas Merton and William James. It is in the spirit of pragmatism that William James described in his many writings that I turn and face this powerful emotion that shadows me. In the recent past I have avoided using the word love as being too complex to be used as a single word. It is loaded with so much baggage for each of us, yet we know what nuance we intend when we talk about it or use it. Yet, the nuances are so complex and varied and we don't have enough words to delineate all of them. So, we are left with using one word for what we intend. Recent reading has put love front and center in my thinking. Reading Thomas Merton puts a different emphasis on love compared to reading William James or some of his pragmatist colleagues (Josiah Royce, Charles Sanders Peirce, Ernest Hocking, for instance). It isn't a word now commonly used in everyday parlance. It doesn't seem to be expressed in our present crises of pandemic, economic collapse, social activism, or perverted politics. There is a harshness and coarseness to public conversation that doesn't admit love as a descriptor for what motivates us in times of trauma or difficulties. We are more often caught and held by a more primitive set of emotions and reactions.

But, in the spirit of pragmatism, I begin with the bedeviling conditions of our common life in these times and work with what brings them forth just now, the strains of their genesis from history, how they are transforming how we think about human behavior and what they are telling us to do in a society rife with problems. It has always been that we have had societal problems but perhaps it is the layering of many of them just now that has brought us to a situation of reckoning, a forced need to look at them more closely. Looking and thoroughly and thoughtfully witnessing them opens us to an examination of their parts and their interconnections. The competing demands of each of the interest groups, the ways in which they are depicted in the media, the ways in which they are used and manipulated, make discernment of the truth of them difficult. And we are confronted with the granularity of life in so many ways if we look closely enough. But we must consider the graininess of most days if we are to venture out into the world.

The challenges for individuals are many, not the least of which is to know what we trust. It is a practice of daily reflection and to recollect the basis of “right view” and “right idea” in the spirit of the Buddha. The reminder is about what lies at the foundation of a compassionate view and idea. For me, that foundation does, in fact, return me to love. The power of love is too great to ignore. Love is not easy. Love is not always visible. It is for this insight that reading Merton and James makes sense. Love is ephemeral and elusive from the human perspective. Merton states this in many of his writings. He writes about “darkness” and its role in our relationship with the transcendent, with what he calls God. Light does not eliminate darkness but sometimes makes it more intensely what it is. The contrast between what humans expect and what is made available by the transcendent spirit is forced by our expectations for enlightenment. Yet, he assures us that we must continue to trust that God's love for us will never, never, never be withdrawn. It is to this notion and assurance of divine support that I turn in these times of tension and turmoil—and at all times. It is to love that I turn. And it is in a relationship that love has its most intense and true meaning and life and power.

The juxtaposition and interplay of light and darkness figure prominently in Merton's New Seeds of Contemplation (1961) and probably in one form or another in the works of most philosophers where light designates truth and darkness the shadows where humans stumble about seeking the light. The darkness is a reality for many and especially in what we incorporate into our consciousness from childhood where the dark was inhabited by frightening spirits made real. In adulthood we are “in the dark” in our confusion and traumas, even when we go about the daily tasks of living. The dark is an existential space in which we attempt to sort out conflicting emotions and ideas. Merton lends a richness and depth to the darkness when he says: “He Who is infinite light is so tremendous in His evidence that our minds only see Him as darkness.” We who are caught up in our conceptualizations and dualities fail to see that darkness is enveloped by the light, that there is a universal wholeness to the sacred, however one imagines it. Darkness is mystery for Merton, as it is for most human beings. Mystery is a vitalizing force that brings us to sensory experience where we shudder and crouch and surrender to what is inevitable. There is an inevitability to the darkness every day/night cycle. We emerge into the light when darkness recedes and it is this trek we reproduce every day of our lives on earth. Merton says: “The more perfect faith is, the darker if becomes.” Mystery deepens the more we are immersed in its exploration.

The idea of sacred darkness is what the mystery of love is all about. Love is a darkness into which we peer obliquely. Working with the confusing nuances and ambiguities of both love and darkness draw them together in my mind all the time. Losing one's way in one is like losing one's way in the other. And it is possible to view the darkness of love as a space surrounded by the universal light that Merton describes in his own faith. As we become more conscious of the darkness in which we find ourselves, we are awake to what makes the darkness possible and real. Merton says God is in the light and in the darkness. He is in the mystery and what is beyond and surrounding the darkness. Of course, this is a very Christian version of what humans have experienced in all of their history. However, there seems to be a version of the mystery in darkness in all traditions and cultures.

The love we have for one another is love transcendent and a part of the holistic love that pervades the universal light Merton sensed in his contemplative life. We are only dimly aware of such transcendent love in our daily lives, as much of our experience is enmeshed in habits and routines and pressured by events that come to us as fragments of perception. We do not realize that we are living within the darkness of the mystery that propels us forward. It is interesting that this search for the light transcendent often comes at the end of life for many, as it did for James. His Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) was an exploration of what was for many people part of their reality. Here he is in a letter to his wife:

“The moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible and I entered into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me, especially the good Pauline [Pauline Goldmark, a much younger acolyte], the thought of you and the children ….the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht [a reference to “Witches Night”, a gathering of spirits to celebrate the onset of springtime].”

Context and relationship, two states we humans can understand from both an emotional and rational point of view. These states pull us into what is “right” about them in Zen Buddhist terms. What is right about a loving relationship with another human being? With someone outside our world of color and belief? With a contentious world? With a God of love? Don't those who seek a deeper knowledge of human life eventually fall onto a path and a search for God's love? And isn't there a reward in this search, if only to feel that the search itself has deep value and some ultimate meaning? This search seems to have had more reality for Merton than it did for James, even though James was fascinated by those whose lives were inhabited by the reality of God, the transcendent. He documented this in The Varieties of Religious Experience and other writings later in his life. This was also true for his fellow philosophers, some of whom began the search earlier in their careers, as with Ernest Hocking in his The Meaning of God in Human Experience (1912). John Kaag, in his book American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), connects the philosophical search for God in American culture with the stories of love relationships in the lives of the philosophers themselves. And he includes his own story of the pursuit of love and the discovery of its power in his own life. In almost every instance the power of love was to give meaning to existence in the lives of the philosophers. It was the development of the pragmatism school of thought in philosophy that prepared the groundwork for insights into the eventual transcendent power of love. It was a long and hard trek to love, as it is for so many humans. These times of muddled interests, intentions, and tensions are a perfect workplace for love's search. It is out of this darkness we are experiencing that love's power can be more deliberately manifested. We cannot know the power of love unless we open ourselves to the possibility of love's energy. We cannot be shaped by that energy if we do not acknowledge the vastness of love's expressions. We cannot be effective in love's dispersion if we cannot open our hearts and minds to the necessity of change and the acceptance of others' points of view. In a way, we cannot begin to understand love's power if we do not begin the search for it within the dark structures and contexts of our lives lived every day. We know those dark structures the best. We can tell what ails us in the moment and it is from this “platform” of suffering that we can begin the hard work of loving. Aren't we hollowed out, emptied of the day's belongings, and visited by the spirits in the dark? And aren't we then refilled, refreshed, renewed by the dawn's light as we become more wholly ourselves once more?

Where does love come from? Is it an instinctual default the way anger and lust are? Is it a capacity unrealized until we are psychologically attuned to its need? These are questions that are of some importance, especially when observing that love's absence is so acute in these troubled times. It seems that anger and frustration leading to violence are the emotions that force themselves into the behaviors we are witnessing now. Perhaps love is that fundamental, elemental emotion that does not manifest until more dominant ones abate. Or, perhaps, it is an emotion that is only manifest when it is consciously tapped from a transcendent source (God?). In any case, it seems that love is hard to have and to hold, even in its most basic expression, that of its role in reproduction. The nuances of love are even more difficult to account for when we humans resort to our defensiveness and fears.

What is the meaning of love? By this I am wondering about what the purposes of love might be, given the above impression that it is a dormant powerhouse. Beyond the reproductive urge that we assign the term love, what makes love worthwhile? If, in fact, it is energy consciously gleaned from a transcendent source, how do we intend to use it? Is possessing it enough or does it have some constructive, creative uses? Is it a higher functioning of our human psychology that we are in the process of losing? Is this a withdrawal of a vital force from our spiritual lives? If this is so, then are we at risk of becoming more grounded in behavior patterns that reinforce divisiveness and selfishness? If we do not look to the heavens for some connection with spiritual sources, then the contexts of our lives are thinned out and we inch closer to our primitive state of survival.

William James developed a new way of viewing human behavior, of describing from experiences he observed what motivates individuals. He provided us with categories and patterns that have been used since his time to explain why humans act the way they do. It wasn't until later in his life that he entertained the idea that spiritual experiences might also be a way to describe the spiritual element in human psychology. Grounded as he was in experimental science (as we are ever more so today), he had to loosen the grip of the scientific method to accommodate a vital force that he, and we today, surmised was outside the analytical and measurable parameters of science.

Thomas Merton, on the other hand, recognized early in his adulthood that there was this realm of experience that escapes the technologies and experiments of science. Thomas Kuhn, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), writes about “paradigm shifts” in scientific thinking in which a new idea springs up without obvious tethering to the slower and more gradual processes of experimental science. These shifts produce a new way of viewing the discipline and provide a new plateau from which to progress. Merton and wisdom sages over the centuries exhibited just this same sort of dramatic shift into a spiritual life that can't be accounted for by any process of evolution or accretion, as in the processes of science. Zen Buddhists write about this experience of sudden enlightenment (satori) and it seems to conform to the paradigm shifts of science. I believe even Merton was aware of the transient nature of such shifts in perception because he refers many times to the usual experience of peering into the “darkness” and being in a dialogue with God, even when it is not possible to know that God is even present. Yet, devotion and faith are the elements of the substrate (a scientific term applied to the spiritual realm) that form our spiritual lives and it is this substrate that gives meaning to our lives over and above what science and technology may offer.

It seems the meaning of love is nuanced and includes constancy, trust, vulnerability, devotion, the notion of emptying of the self's perceived needs and wants in favor of those of another, and the willingness to experience the darkness of not-knowing (another Zen obligation). It is to hold mystery ahead of certainty and control and to hope for clarity and light, even when they are not obviously available. In these times, we are somehow satisfied to possess the risks and dangers of anger and hate without questioning their efficacy and meaning. We do not look beyond the primitive reactions that define our only basic human character. We do not look up to the heavens. We do not admit that we are often without answers to the great questions posed by the cosmos about our own survival and inevitable demise. We are selfish with our emotions and claim them in the face of universally shared suffering, pushing away from what is uncomfortable for us to notice and acknowledge. We act on our individual needs and wants and do not see that they often compromise what we can only obtain from making a paradigm shift into higher psychological/spiritual ground.

Shouldn't we seek this space, this unbounded realm, to accompany us on our journey through life's vicissitudes and travails and vast triumphs and joys? This is the leap of faith, a paradigmatic love, a love that is not easy and that asks of us the hard work of finding it and keeping it. Merton and James illustrate how an individual life may be the ground upon which love may be husbanded. Both writers offer us different ways of how to think about a meaningful life that begins with the laundry and ends with a gaze into an infinite and loving cosmos, every day. And, as we gaze, we surrender individual wants and our leaping faith makes our lives whole in the presence of a universal community.

THE FAMILY OF MAN—YES! PROPAGANDA!

In 1955 Edward Steichen, a photographer and curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, launched his photographic essay, The Family of Man, accompanied by a book with the same title, iconic cover art by Leo Lionni. The introduction to the exhibit and its accompanying commentary were provided by Carl Sandburg, Steichen's brother-in-law. The exhibit in different versions toured around the world and the book has never been out of print.

I can't remember when I first saw the book, the most popular version of it being a soft cover edition, an early paperback book. I suppose it might have been in the early 60s because it accompanied me to medical school in 1967 and has been in our library ever since. When I think about all of my travels and the moves we have made in our lives, it is amazing to me that some of these early books have survived all the commotion. The exhibit appeared in the first few years after WWII and at the time was considered to be an ambitious attempt at American propaganda to link with the Marshall Plan reconstruction of societies in Europe. In our present contentious times it seems a minor criticism to have directed at the incredible attempt to celebrate human activities and the life cycle. As time passed, there were more criticisms of the exhibit for slighting marginalized populations and indigenous cultures. The exhibit culled from some 10,000 photographic negatives the 500-plus photographs finally included. So, the exhibit was the result of an extensive effort to represent as many different populations as possible, with an eye to the beauty of the photographs themselves. As I think about how the original exhibit was viewed differently in different eras, it seems to me the critiques tell us more about the times in which they were made than the actual exhibit. If one were truly sensitive to our times in this aspect then we might suggest that the exhibit be called “The Family of Humankind” the reference to “man” now clouds feminist perspectives on culture. I do think there is value in preserving Steichen's effort as it was originally constructed, if only as a bookmark to the inclusiveness and goodwill of those times just after a world war that witnessed the suffering and losses of many millions of people. There is also value in looking at the exhibit through the lenses of our own times now. The exhibit can be a teaching for us in how to see and think about one another, even though we all differ in so many respects. The teaching would include attention to our diverse populations as well as our universal heritage as human beings. I don't believe the intention of the exhibit was to covertly or overtly manipulate viewers into what they should think.

All of the photographs were black and white and as I page through them now I am reminded of why the book appealed to me in the first instance. Steichen, himself, considered the exhibit to be the culmination of the work of a lifetime in photography. Each of the photographs communicates a different level of intimacy that only photography can capture in the faces, gestures, and interactions of the subjects. If one can separate the “common” from the “special” among us, then the exhibit weighed heavily on subjects whose names were probably not known at the time they were photographed in unposed situations and interactions. There are the few celebrities among them; the photos of J. Robert Oppenheimer teaching a class, Toscanini, and Judge Learned Hand leaning over a legal text. But for the most part all the subjects are human beings captured in the courses of their rich lives. The photos were grouped to correspond to the cycle of life from birth to death. No one seems to have noticed the photographer with camera held to the eye. All are engaged and grounded.

Much attention was given to the actual details of the installation as it was constructed. Some of the photos were mural sized, some closer to postcard size. Some were mounted close to the floor, others mounted on the ceiling. The viewer was invited to stand up close for some and far back for others as a way of seeing the world of human activity in its panoramic dimensions. I had only the book as a reference and so it was not possible for me to experience the grand scope of the actual exhibit, but the book has served me well. Over time, as I have read magazines and newspapers, I have clipped photos from those sources and in retirement began a pasting project on poster board, making collages of the images in a mostly random fashion. Now, as I look back on some of them, I see that the seed for this project was planted many years ago with The Family of Man. There are an infinite number of images that one could gather from the billions of people now wandering the face of the earth. Each of us could be a study subject for such an exhibit.

When we look at the photos in the book, we are looking at ourselves in a mirror as well as others in very different settings. We are struck by the commonality of the human experience, no matter where on earth people wander. When I think about how different this type of exhibit might be today, I have only to look at my own collection of photos to see people in refugee camps, families at borders of countries attempting to cross into a new life, and children in detention who have been stripped from their immigrant parents. I see children still starving, women giving birth in difficult circumstances, patients in hospice care with devoted companions. I also see images of distant nebulae in galaxies never before imagined, creatures from the depths of the ocean never before captured. There are dictators and Nobel Prize winners, geniuses of technology, and images of poets who have died. Some of the photos are posed but most are moments of time in which a person is caught off guard, moments of self-absorption, confrontation, or meditation. There is no limit to how we can experience and process life that unfolds for us.

When I think about the initial criticisms of the exhibit and the implications that this exhibit was an America trying to propagate some specific doctrine in order to sway opinion, I pull back. If it was, indeed, propaganda, then it was an effort to show how much all of us share even at the end of a devastating war that engulfed millions of people and caused immeasurable suffering. One of the more controversial images was of the atomic bomb mushroom cloud from one of the test sites on Enewetak Atoll. It was a reminder of how possible it was to bring further destruction to the earth and its inhabitants. It was sober propaganda to draw all of us to the reality of what powerful forces man had created. For me, living now in a decidedly permeated nuclear age, I see the black and white photographs of human beings living their lives in stark relief against the potential destruction of those human lives and contamination of the earth for millennia. To what better uses could The Family of Man propaganda be directed? In the grand scheme of the life cycle all of us share, how do all the superficial differences and partisan battles add up in significance? It seems to me that we need books and exhibits like these to remind us of the joys and sorrows in our lives and how we can comfort one another despite our cultural and ethnic differences. Should we not devote more to the welfare of our neighbors, be they around the corner from us or across trackless oceans? Should we not show compassion that is essentially the message embedded in the black and white photographs so tenderly recorded and displayed and published? Can one look at any one of the photographs and not see compassion behind its selection? Even the Civil War soldier lying dead in the trench with a gun across his body must elicit in us compassion for him and for the loved ones never to hold him again or perhaps to even honor him in death by being able to bury him instead of knowing that he was interred in an unmarked grave with other fallen soldiers from both sides of the conflict. And the faces of distressed women with children captured by Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn worrying in the poverty of the moment and looking into the unknown future. These, too, with the beggars and grief stricken, the jubilant grandmothers, the storytellers and the students—all draw from us the compassion we have for them and the compassion we hope for ourselves. This, then, is useful propaganda even today and perhaps especially today when compassion is now considered a “radical” response to all that seems to have gone wrong with the body politic and our common relationships.

The Family of Man would propagandize the message of love and compassion for the plight of all of us in our profoundly rich and perilous lives. It would remind us how fragile life can be, yet how resilient we are in the face of all its exigencies and vicissitudes, its diseases and destructions. And death. Yes, the propaganda message of joy and sorrow is accompanied by the reality of death. In this, then, life and its various parts and experiences is brought back to us in a way that allows for common cause on a tilting planet that succors us with the tender loving care only mystery knows. Are we able to return the tender care to one another as well as the earth, our home?

I invite you to explore more deeply The Family of Man in all its dimensions. Let this idea of common family life touch you as it has me. May it spread as only good propaganda can.

HANNAH ARENDT—THINKING ABOUT THINKING

We are living in a time of intense scientific scrutiny of the brain, mind, and their neuroscientific correlates. We wonder about the nature of mindfulness, about meditation, and all the neurotransmitters that are involved in the generation of emotions and, ultimately, human behavior. Hannah Arendt, in her book The Life of the Mind: Thinking, looks at the brain's most potent process through the lens of philosophy. Her book was published in 1971, years before the explosion in neuroscientific explorations. In thinking about thinking we have an inherent tendency to choose the results of scientific investigation and research over what a philosopher might say about the same process, a tendency, that is, to establish a duality of thought about the mind. But my own orientation is to see that both science and philosophy have something to offer in our understanding of how we think. In fact, the disciplines are complementary and support each other because both sides of the duality have as their mission to reach a deeper understanding of human behavior with the intention of making greater progress in how we understand ourselves and all other things and beings.

This mission of comprehensiveness and elucidation is a weighty one. The weight of understanding is greater for the philosopher because she must take into account many vectors and influences and tie them into a whole picture, whereas the scientist is focused on single particles of that same picture, not such a heavy task. I don't claim to see clearly what Arendt sees in her treatise on thinking. I am not well versed in the language of philosophy and its nuances. What I read from her book at the outset is an attempt to construct a platform upon which the elements of thinking can be separated and examined. She knows that these are the concerns of the “thinking ego,” referring to that part of all of us involved in the process of thinking, and that part that holds sway over how we think and, thus, what we think. She reserves for human thought the essential ability to choose what we think. So, my interpretation of her work may miss some very important philosophical points but there are some important ideas in it that inform my continuing understanding of the wonder of the human brain and thought.

Early on in her book Arendt stresses how thinking is different from the world of “appearances,” the activities of daily toil. It is this world that is dependent on what we perceive through our senses that feeds our intellect and through which we come to some understanding of a truth of the world around us (not the truth, a distinction she makes later on). Thinking, on the other hand, is generated by a process that is non-appearing, a process that involves a withdrawal from the world of activity and involves, too, a suspension of our perception of space/time, as well as a sense of our own corporality. This represents a detachment from the senses and sense-objects. This is the realm of philosophy. This realm of mind is invisible and controlled at will. It is active within the chamber in which a soundless dialogue (self-talk) between I and itself is ongoing in a continuous pattern. The thinking ego (in its withdrawn role as one who is being vs. doing) is the observer of sense objects and of the participants who are subject to the sense-objects of the world and the images they form (as in the realm of imagination). These are the distinctions she makes between the various layers of the amalgam of thinking and doing, the differences between vita contemplativa and vita activa, an ancient distinction.

One of her important points is to consider what she believes to be the ultimate aim of thinking and that is to make meaning. It is not, she says, to find the truth; an elusive, slippery, and inchoate property of thought. She implies that truth is contingent and not defined as a single universally accepted property. We are storytellers and meaning-makers and it is in this that we engage our thought processes. The way in which thinking joins doing is through the use of properties of the imagination. Here is how Arendt words this:

“Analogies, metaphors, and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds on to the world even when, absent-mindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience.”

“If the language of thinking is essentially metaphorical, it follows that the world of appearances inserts intself into thought quite apart from the needs of our body and the claims of our fellow-men, which will draw us back into it in any case.”

“... truth, in the metaphysical tradition understood in terms of the sight metaphor, is ineffable by definition. We know from the Hebrew tradition what happens to truth if the guiding metaphor is not vision but hearing (in many respects more akin than sight to thinking because of its ability to follow sequences). The Hebrew God can be heard but not seen, and truth therefore becomes invisible....”

“The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive.”

In another interesting section of the book she explores a concept of the soul.

“The soul, where our passions, our feelings and emotions arise, is a more or less chaotic welter of happenings which we do not enact but suffer.... Its invisibility resembles that of our inner bodily organs of whose functioning or non-functioning we are also aware without being able to control them. The life of the mind, on the contrary, is sheer activity, and this activity, like other activities can be started and stopped at will.”

Once again she emphasizes how active choice in thinking is a property of our brains. While thinking, we are detached from the “real world” so long as we continue to think. We tend to trade perceptions of the world around us for the invisible properties of thought. I think this is a very interesting distinction she makes. It inserts a strong element of personal agency and choice into a process that we take for granted as an independently organizing and guiding ability.

It is this ability to dissociate thinking from the doing of the “chaotic welter” of everyday life that surrounds us that resonated with me as I reflect on my own experiences with daily events, especially now in times of what seem like political entropy. Arendt writes that one of philosophy's uses is to “teach men how to cure their despairing minds by escaping from the world through thinking.”The idea here is that we can choose thinking as an antidote to the chaos of human behavior expressed through “appearances” and “sense-objects.”

“Philosophy is called upon to compensate for the frustrations of politics and, more generally, of life itself.”

The chaos and visible deficiencies of politics and other human pursuits raises the question, for me, of the nature of evil. I see much of what passes as acceptable behavior as arising from the seed from which evil blossoms. Arendt writes about this as well. Her position is that thought's quest is for meaning as a “kind of desirous love” and so the objects of thought can “only be lovable things—beauty, wisdom, justice, and so on. Ugliness and evil are almost by definition excluded from the thinking concern.” This seems like a controversial position to take, given that we often see evil as an active participant in our thoughts and behavior. Arendt continues that evil for her is an absence, something missing altogether from the thinking process. In this way, evil is equivalent to thoughtlessness. Not converting evil to speech or action eliminates it from thinking. So thinking (and thus philosophy) represents a refuge from the dark and dirty force of evil. In 1961, Arendt covered the trial of Adolph Eichmann for The New Yorker. Eichmann was an official in the Nazi regime and Arendt, a Jew, was interested in the trial as an extension of her seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Her coverage of the trial resulted in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). It was her position on evil and evil intent that was reflected in the phrase she coined to describe Eichmann as a bland functionary, “the banality of evil.” It was a philosophical position that emerged from her considerations of evil and explored in Thinking. She was criticized and even vilified for reducing someone, like Eichmann, to the size of a common criminal and not for depicting the oversized and ugly monster the Israelis presented to the world. She did not excuse the crimes of the Nazi regime as much as treat the evils done as results of thoughtlessness. Whether one agrees, or not, this concept of evil as absent from thought might help explain how people educated and sophisticated in so many ways can support demagoguery and the tyrannies of a despot. I am not sure that Arendt's arguments make me more comfortable with evil pursuits, but the idea that evil is absent from thought and the process of thinking is as good an explanation as any other of how evil takes hold among us. A continuing dilemma I face is how to explain how good people can support evil intentions and actions. Perhaps I will always have this dilemma. In any case, if evil is absent from the ambitions of thinking, then what are we to do with those who perpetrate evil acts? Evil is part of our chaotic and noisy everyday life and so, in that way, can be segregated from the invisibility of thought. People aren't prosecuted for evil thoughts, just for how those thoughts translate into the behavior that describes our relationships with one another.

Evil is just one of Arendt's concerns in her book, but a concern that emerges from all that we see around us and absorb through our senses. Evil is a force that requires attention and tending in our relationships with one another. Some of us (and me, when I was younger) would like to believe in and depend upon the best in people and relegate evil to some category of theoretical possibility. But we must contend with what evil actions produce and know it for what it is in our wobbly world. Can we keep evil out of our “lovable” thoughts? Is evil, as with Arendt's conception of truth, contingent and relative in ways that allow it to prosper? If we believe in individual choice, then perhaps we can choose to reserve thinking for just those thoughts that move us toward greater understanding, clarity, and love and live in a world that is anything but thoughtless.

PRIMARY SOURCES

Primary sources refers to written documents that originate within history that bring to light new ideas or perspectives that are then used in commentaries and analyses. Primary sources are the seeds of thought that then sprout extensions. The Constitution of the United States is one of these primary sources, as are the The Federalist Papers. The Federalist Papers was a series of publications written in 1787 and 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to support the ratification of the United States Constitution. Three of the Founding Fathers of America built a case for ratification but also, in the process, outlined in broad strokes the philosophy and structures upon which the new republic was based.

Primary sources are important for many reasons, not the least of which is to explore ideas that have proved generative over time. Every discipline one can name has its primary sources. Every scientific experiment, for instance, can be considered a primary source for what comes after it. It is important to trace back to the origins of ideas in order to understand how they have come into being and to then develop some perspective on our contemporary thinking. In this way we gain some deeper understanding of the original context for certain ideas and to see how they have evolved. I think asking the question about how true we are to the original is always a good one. What wisdom can we gain from examining the primary sources? Is it useful to know how our own ideas have been changed over time from the original forms? It is part of accepted wisdom in some cultures and traditions to think of the commentaries on primary sources as elevated and original in their own rights, even though their foundations can be traced back in time to a more durable document or narrative. It is also important to think of primary sources as beginnings and not ends. They serve us as points of departure in further explorations of thought extensions. They themselves may be extensions of previous seeds but they need to be organic and elastic sources for future ideas.

Politics is the ocean in which all of us swim and it has been so since time immemorial, since humans began to congregate and codify their beliefs. In its broadest meaning, politics constitutes the agreements factions of people have about how to manage their collective affairs. I suppose even primeval communities had their own methods of governance that allowed for the tribe to survive in a world hostile to their own interests. I think “factions” is a good way to look at politics, as most collective efforts at governance are composed of a set of minorities within a cohesive group. What was true for hunter/gatherers is true for us today. When the colonists decided to separate themselves from what they considered an oppressive monarchy, they were defining their set of beliefs against the backdrop of another set composed of its own factions. Factional prerogatives are not new to contemporary governments. Returning to primary sources challenges us to reexamine our own assumptions about what we think we know or what seems to us to be inherited wisdom. We are challenged to observe the contexts of our own lives as evolutionary steps in a changing landscape of human behavior.

What has grown more prominent in present times about factional governance are the great divides among the factions and the growing tendency to inhabit the factional preferences and not work toward integrating them into a larger fabric of cooperative cohesiveness. James Madison (1751-1836) wrote Federalist No. 10 in 1787 and it stands out from the rest as a statement of philosophy for the remainder. It is a primary source for understanding the perspective of one founding father and to see how it has contributed to our present day politics, if at all. He has written about how a “well constructed union” must deal with the “violence of faction.”

“The instability, injustice and confusion introduced into the public councils, have in truth been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have every where perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”

“To secure the public good, and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our enquiries are directed.”

In effect, Madison concluded that the common good is supported by having enough representatives to dilute the “cabals of a few; and that however large it may be, they must be limited to a certain number, in order to guard against the confusion of a multitude.” He acknowledged that any system designed to protect the rights of all would inevitably produce “inconveniences” for all factions. He is writing here about the elements of a system of governance that contribute to the maintenance of its parts and to the health of the whole. His summary takes into account the natural tendency for humans to have opinions that aggregate in factions. He is perspicacious about human behavior to include safeguards against the tyrannies of both majorities and minorities. To this end, he supports the structures established in the Constitution that both energize and limit equal and fair treatment of all citizens. It should be noted that Madison also swam in the ocean of the politics of his time and held slaves all his life. The slave trade was permitted under the constitution and he was the one who proposed that apportionment of the United States Senate be based on each state's free population and slave population that led to the Three-Fifths Compromise (1787-1868) that assigned to slaves a three-fifths fraction of a whole human being for determining representation and taxation in the states. Even in the times in which human equality and rights were being debated, the assumptions made about what constituted a human being were being drawn up along lines of race and a defined minority. Our assumptions today about the individuals we consider to be enlightened intellects were also human beings with clay feet and we can learn a great deal about the threads of history that persist today in our own society. Good ideas and bad ideas are part of the mix of politics. Madison recognized that and proposed mechanisms for limiting those ideas that allowed for factions to triumph over the common good.

In times in which the structures of stable government (for good or ill) are being questioned and, it could be asserted, marginalized or ignored altogether, it is important to be clear about the truth of the changes and their rationale. Where the changes seem to be random and at the whim of egoic passion, it is even more important to be awake to the extent to which they represent a danger to the pursuit of freedom and attempts at equality and justice. I think any time judgments are presented as simple and intuitive all of us must be alert to their validity and applicability. Returning to primary sources can be a method by which we can evaluate the validity of moves by one faction to favor their own causes, thus causing disruption to the fabric of governance that covers all citizens. We are left at the mercy of demagogues and tyrants if we do not excavate the legitimacy of history and what lessons it can teach us. Primary sources are a priceless reservoir of wisdom and balance that are accessible to us in our quest for understanding our 21^st century American character. They are equally important for those values of enduring worth and to see the values once considered true that no longer serve our ongoing struggles to attain the lofty ideals of the founding fathers, those inalienable rights encoded in our national psyche.

Concepts of governance and what we are now experiencing change all the time but depend on structures established centuries ago. We jettison those structures at our national peril, just as we entertain chaos and despotism when any structures of self-governance (families qualify here, as well) begin to break down. One of our hopes for stabilization is what Madison presented as a bulwark against such chaos and that is to dilute the power of factions by a sufficient number of agreeable representatives (families don't work under this proviso most of the time). Tensions and pressures of individual and group prejudices will always be present in how we govern ourselves. This contributes to the strength of the republic if kept in balance and also contributes to opportunities for change as we examine the fundamental properties of the system.

It is worthwhile to point out that politics might be the ocean in which we swim every day, but consulting and studying primary sources applies to any discipline or corner of our lives that we might otherwise take for granted. We must be ever alert to the tendency to freeze ideas and treat them as inflexible dogma. The power of curiosity and the practice of inquiry are instrumental in our attempts to dig as deeply as we can into the hierarchies of power and influence that affect our lives. In this sense, there is a reason to question what is presented as “common sense” or as common knowledge. Knowledge can become diluted and subject to the contexts of different oceans (like those of the sciences, the arts, economics, education, etc.) in which all of us swim from time to time. We need to remain wakeful and alert to what we hold as prejudices and acknowledge partial truths, our partial understandings, and how everything changes over time. If we cannot know the future (and we can't), then often the best we can do is to question what we do know and that often relies on history and its primary sources. We would be wise to consult them and wiser still if we can learn from them. When we can understand their teachings, then we are better able to make the changes that will benefit more of us citizens in our collective efforts to make better lives for all. Let us never assume we know all the answers to problems and so let us always keep a healthy practice of inquiry. What is it? Is it true? Do we believe what we do because we need to believe we are right? What assumptions are we making today about our lives that we might change by referring to primary sources? What seeds are we cultivating?

Since I crafted the ideas above, the House of Representatives has begun impeachment proceedings against President Trump. I reread my comments with this pivotal event in mind and I think what I have written stands the test of relevance. I didn't change any of it, knowing what I do about the present events. I believe that our democracy is strong enough in the institutions encoded in our constitution to withstand the insults of a demagogue and the processes by which he can be removed from the seat of power. We are returning to primary sources for the support and strength we need in these times.

EXQUISITE PRESCIENT AESTHETICS

The beginning of science is art.

The beginning of art is seeing.

The beginning of seeing is looking.

When we look, what do we really see? This is the question that emerges out of my study of the life and work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934), a Spanish neural investigator and pathologist who focused his attention on the histology of the central nervous system. Learning about him raised many questions about the possibilities of a life's work and, especially about Cajal's life and the distinction made between art and science. I think what I discovered is that, for him and maybe for all of us, we need to particularize before we unify our thinking about anything. We seem to need details in order to see the whole. We can't deduce or synthesize or conclude without knowing the particulars. Ironically, the whole can't be seen until all the pieces (or as many as possible) can be brought into the picture. When we do that we can be surprised by what coalesces. Because most investigations are vast in their scope, our impression of the whole is ultimately only partial and temporary until more information is obtained or more experiments are performed. This is as true in science as in art.

What did Cajal notice? Cajal's father was a professor of anatomy and Santiago followed in his footsteps through medical school and into a professorship of anatomy, even though his early interests were in art and photography. In science his interests were focused on the study of histology (study of cells in tissues) of inflammation and basic cellular structures. He was aided in his studies by the available technology of the light microscope and a technique for staining cells in microscopic slide preparations, a method developed by the Italian scientist Camillo Golgi. These technologies allowed him to explore the histology of the central nervous system, a lifetime study that earned him and Golgi a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906. It is important to Cajal's life story to outline the way in which he devoted his time and energy but, of course, that is only the beginning of what his life's work signifies. There are many threads and themes in his life that one could pull on to see the whole of it better. It is his studies of neuroanatomy that are of primary interest, even though one could also write about his family life or his own writings (his autobiography, Recollections of a Life, is considered to be one of the finest scientific autobiographies), among many other threads in a life of multiple interests and accomplishments.

What is striking to me about his work in histology is the beauty of the drawings he did of the cells he studied under the microscope. It is interesting to me that he was also interested in the early techniques of photography (he wrote a book on the technology and art of color photography and many of the portraits of him are self-portraits, the very first “selfies,” I suppose) and one can see in his drawings some of the stop-action motion that characterized the early experiments in photography. This reminds me of how Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), too, was fascinated with photography and especially the work of Edweard Muybridge and his photographic motion studies. The lives of Cajal and Eakins overlapped in time and in other ways, too. Eakins was devoted to the idea that the study of gross anatomy enabled the artist to shape the surface anatomy of the human body in ways that conformed to the truth of its functions. Cajal also discovered much about the functioning of the human brain from its anatomical structures, only from the microscopic perspective. Each was an artist in his own right and each began with the particularities of anatomy. The beginning of science is art. The beginning of art is science. When we make too many categories and distinctions, we lose sight of the fact that the goal is to understand the entirety as a marvelous construction. Science and art are wedded in reality and we lose much if we feel a need to pick one or the other when we want to know about the structures of body, brain, and mind.

The drawings Cajal made of the human central nervous system are intimate observations of structures that often show all the marks of progressive understanding. There are in some of his drawings the preliminary pencil lines that resemble ancient palimpsests. There are heavy lines and darker colors to designate primary foci of investigation. There are ghostly structures to indicate the tangle of background fibers and tracts. We are asked to notice his lettering and numbers that put some order into the layers of brain tissue to show locations and proximities. He has also highlighted specific areas by painting in contrasting white washes around structures and these are an artist's working marks. Some cells are exaggerated in size to call attention to their importance in the drawing. His working methods often meant that he would spend mornings peering into his microscope and then drawing from memory in the afternoons. He estimated that he had done 20,000 drawings but only about 2,500 survive. One can only imagine how prodigious his work methods were to produce so many individual studies.

His drawings were more than descriptive and artfully beautiful. They were also maps of brain function. We don't stop to think how important the little arrows are in understanding a map. They designate location as well as direction. One can see their importance to Cajal's thinking and his formulations of brain function by noticing how he used them. They relate to his ability to bring motion, the motion of photography perhaps, into a two-dimensional rendering of brain cellular structure, an otherwise static image. The deductions he made of nerve function were prescient and many were corroborated and supported only decades later when more sophisticated technologies for studying cellular structures were developed. The beginning of science is art. Cajal's autobiography is divided into two sections, one focused on his science and the other on his art. Yet, his life was an example of how it is possible to unite the two divisions. We take things apart in order to put them back together into some cohesive and comprehensive whole. When we do gather the pieces we often find new combinations and new meanings. When taken as a whole, what we observe is something with artful properties. It isn't until we begin to dissect the parts, either with microscopes or unaided eyes, that we discover the miraculous interweavings and interdependence. Cajal's drawings were ideas about central nervous system function, a very complex aspect of human anatomy and as yet unyielding in the secrets of how brain becomes mind.

Cajal developed an approach to the study of neural function he called the Neuron Theory. This was a description of neuroanatomy in which nerve cells were contiguous and not continuous in structure (the Reticular Theory), as championed by Camillo Golgi. Additionally, the Neuron Theory contained Cajal's Theory of Dynamic Polarization where chemical signals (now referred to as system information) flowed in only one direction along the nerve fibers, the directions designated by the arrows drawn on the maps of anatomical structures. The interruptions in nerve structure allowed for transmission of nerve signals by way of chemicals that crossed the small spaces between nerve bodies. This was not confirmed until the 1950s with electron microscopy. Many other theories proposed by Cajal were also confirmed many decades after his work was first published, all based on what his eye could see through his microscope. He was looking and also seeing, a prerequisite for discovery.

Prescience is far removed from guesswork. Cajal's foresight was based on endless hours hovering over a microscope and drawing what he could see. He brought to his scientific work an artist's eye and sensibility. What he recorded demonstrated that what he saw was structure and pattern and he translated these into elements of form, specificity, interdependence, complexity yielding to simplification, and information transmission—all precursors to intelligence and the evolution of mind. We are still far removed from the correlations that link our brains to our minds even in the most simplistic ways. Modern neuroscience has made strides in making connections between brain function and thought and behavior patterns but there is still no accounting for what makes me different in my thoughts from you. We know that all we are, how we act and interact, is confined to the processing in our brains but we don't have many clues as to how identities are formed and shaped in that marvelous machine, a machine that never sleeps the way we think sleep occurs. We don't know all the details about brain function in its normal state and less about abnormal brain function, about how it heals and about synaptic plasticity. Does the brain create the mind? Is learning a function of brain or mind? Where in the brain do we harbor our spiritual selves? How do we get the sense that our ideas are evolving and that we are growing in awareness and wisdom?

Today's Connectome Project is designed to map all of the brain's neuronal connections. Will that help us understand the answers to some of the questions asked above? If the neurons aren't connected in an interwoven reticular pattern and brain function is dependent on chemical transmission in one direction only along individual cells and if normal function recruits neurons from all over the brain, then do we think we will be able to know how the brain generates and supports the mind? In thinking even this, how will we track all the millions of connections and sparkings that help us think it?

I find it interesting that Cajal and Golgi championed diametrically opposite theories of nerve structure and function but shared a Nobel Prize for their work. We don't see this same open-ended acceptance of the idea that even in science (maybe especially in science) there are partial truths to be discovered and that science is more like art in being malleable, improvised, and creative in format but never fabricated. And it is also true that science is as often wrong as confirmatory in its results. But don't we learn as much and perhaps more by what science can't confirm as by how the results confirm the hypotheses? Don't we approach art in the same way? Isn't every piece of art an experiment? Don't both scientists and artists use the same neural structures in the brain, perhaps borrowing fibers and bundles from one another and recruiting for different purposes?

Cajal was honored in his own lifetime and not only by being awarded a Nobel Prize. One of the cells he first described and drew was named the “interstitial cell of Cajal.” It is a specific neuron within the smooth muscle of the gut that is a generator and pacemaker for the slow waves of gut contraction that mediates between motor neurons and the smooth muscle cells, allowing for the all-important movement of waste along the GI tract. In a gesture that honors Cajal's devotion to life viewed through the microscope and into the cosmos, Asteroid 117413 was named Ramonycajal in his honor. So, in the gut of us human animals or in the heart of the cosmos, Santiago Ramon y Cajal is truly honored as a man for all times. His life and work were art forms in the service of science and a greater understanding of the brain and mind.