The Faulty Plumbing of Your Flaky Mind

My new TV-free life gives me a lot more time to read. Last night, I read a New Scientist review of Gary Marcus' new book, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, which was so damn mindbending, it made me want to buy the book. He shows how the mind is held together by gum and duct tape -- meaning it is of a clumsy design. Apparently, brain modules that evolved for one purpose often take on roles that they weren't really designed for. "So our mental functions, while adequate individually, can harm us when working together-such as when our reasoning skills and healthy sex drive conspire to talk us into disastrous affairs. I guess Shaggy was on to something when he sang that it wasn't me, song. "It wasn't me, it was my mind." Marcus'observations are somewhat scary because they make so much sense. Just read his Idea Lab article on our awfully unreliable memories and further complicate your view of yourself and all the dumb choices you've ever made.

The Morning After

And so the date is done and I've counted another year, brought in the day with drink and an overflowing cup of friendship. (the last four drinks were probably unnessecary and show that I may be older but I'm not getting any wiser). The naked exhibitionism that is this blog is also testament to the immaturity and suspectness of my edifice, dear reader. So trust my words no more than you would the breeze.
The first person to call was my mother, who I love for her peculiar honesty and intuition, whose articulation of the fear that can accompany the birth of a child, has left me with a precious awareness of the subtext in motherhood. As a youngling playing with large-eyed dolls, I had always assumed that women were filled with immense joy after the birth of a child. That it was one of those blessed, unambiguous states of being....
I'm thinking today of women and men who don't quite feel so fantastic, who are hit with waves of doubt, who were/are good mothers and fathers, despite the apprehension and loss of self that accompanies birth.
I thought this sort of feeling was not possible to translate into language. But of course, a poet would find a way to do it. Sylvia Plath's 'Morning Song' is perhaps the most brilliant articulation of the awe and fear surrounding birth I have ever read. It's not important to know, but she wrote it shortly after she became a mother.
The startling genius of this poem is hard to break down, but read it once, pause and then read it again. Wonder at her command of language and metaphor, rythm and structure and then look around and see if your world still looks the same.

MORNING SONG

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles,
and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.
New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

The Tale of Two No-Good Tribesmen

I woke to fresh lizard kill this morning. A tail-less corpse, upturned on the floor. The two layabouts pictured here no doubt assume that this is a great offering to be appreciated by their leader. There is much solemn skirting about said kill while I clean it up. Still, I am glad they accord me such respect. As we all know, hierarchy and power dynamics, especially in a tribe of three, are very important. So I have given them their reward: scratch under chin and soft white bellies. They've forgotten they have claws which is good. I also forget that I have claws. My personality hypothesis today is that my claws are way too retractable and that I need to sharpen them a little bit. Maybe I need to relearn some hissing too, while I'm at it, I mean if I even knew how to hiss in the first place. What am I on about? I am poor this morning and radioactive. Half-life = 32 years. But that's going up to magic number 33 soon. Oh how lovely are the peaceful notes of middle-age where angst is dulled and one thinks of soft rugs and plush carpets. I think I had better shut up now.

Moving To The Country

I'm moving countries in seven weeks. All it means is that I have a bunch of tasks and a couple of lists to follow meticulously. I have to complete said tasks by certain dates and cross out with a tick. That's all. Cool.
That's what I tell myself. Actually, even if I tick off things, I'm obsessing about tangential stuff, the accumulation of life, papers and memories bound up with this house, this island.
So I'm a little emotional it seems, which is fine. Why I expect to function like a robot is anybody's guess, but I think we all expect ourselves to be robotic to a certain extent. We assume it makes life easy. It doesn't. Nor does losing it. Balance, my dear Watson, is key. And for me, balance immediately arrives when I see images like these. Can only be described as tres, beaucoup good!

The Science of Wonderment

My penchant for quoting studies (usually to the long-suffering soul who listens to all my boring theories) is born out of a need to formulate my own rational understanding of behaviour. I like knowing, for instance, that women under stress tend to secrete more oxytocin--the hormone that promotes feelings of empathy and bonding while men tend to secrete testosterone, the hormone that is most associated with feelings of aggression. I think it explains a lot of things. It makes a lot more sense than those annoying 'women come from outer space' type relationship books that oversimplify the differences between men and women. It also explains why friendships between women are nurturing in very special ways. My women friends, you all know who you are, thank you for the warmth of your sparkly-eyed empathy. But I've actually been equally, if not more lucky, with my men friends, who have so often taught me the anatomy of grace in difficult situations.
But I digress. Through the ages, science has often been seen as an agent of disenchantment. The reasoning behind this line of thought is that science curbs the imagination and leaves the mysteries of the world in tatters.
A new book called Cosmic Imagery: Key Images in the History of Science, by John Barrow, a Cambridge cosmologist, challenges this view by showing how the history of art and that of drawing is tied to the history of science. The Guardian (How empty would my life be without Guardian online? Even the thought scares me) has a wonderful review of Barlow's book and an accompanying slide show which shows the original scientific image that inspired Van Gogh's Starry Nights, among other things. But what might happen as the technology of visual reproduction grows more and more sophisticated? Will the sheer power of immersive realities bump off the imagination? This is the scenario that Barlow envisages, and it's definitely something I'm going to be wondering about for a while:

"We can imagine what the next stage will be, with holographic creations and alternative realities. So, for example, instead of reading Shakespeare, we're increasingly going to find ourselves transported into a Shakespearean environment. Instead of imagining, which will be thought of as hard work, we will be dropped into an experience. We see this saturation of interactive experience already with the web, and I see the future very much as one where subjects are increasingly presented in a way that removes the need to exercise one's imagination."

Best ever one-line review of The Prestige

I watched that Prestige movie -the one where Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman play crazed and obsessive-competitive magicians.
My friend, the New Asian who lives in LA, wanted to know what I thought about the film. New Asian and I go back a long way, bound by our mutual desire to deconstruct all manner of cinema, even really important films like Bounce and Bring It On.
I told New Asian that it was a good film. "That part where they squash birds was hard to watch. Their competition and obsession was believable and tension-creating so I quite liked it. It made me question what entertainment really means, how we sometimes enjoy watching things go bad, that we are secretly thrilled when we watch something macabre even as we shake our heads in horror and recount the trauma of it later to our friends. There's something vaguely self-congratulatory, a misplaced pride even, at having been a firsthand witness of something awful. And that's awful but true"
New Asian's response: "These are two really obsessive and bitter dudes who need to chill, though chilling would reduce their greatness."

This Post Will Change Your Life

There's a guy at work who buys a sugary biscuit before he starts writing his column. He's very focussed about his writing and incredibly disciplined. He's not always wandering off to get a coffee or a tea, mid-sentence, like some other people we know. (me)
I just read about a study which shows he's on to something good. Apparently, when blood glucose is depleted, we're less able to exert self-control. The researchers say that the brain has a limited reserve amount of glucose, which allows us to handle the initial task demanding self control. Once that glucose supply is depleted, self control becomes much more difficult, across an array of different tasks.
Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian refers to this study in his latest column, the title of which I love and have shamelessly lifted. He talks about the effort needed to resist the power of our surroundings. For instance, "food that gets eaten because it's there; evenings spent watching TV because there's a TV in the room. Or bigger things: a job you fell into because it came along, or a relationship."
The point is that resisting these things uses up real energy. Burkeman argues that this is why willpower can be only a temporary or partial solution in changing a behaviour.
"It's exhaustible, and if you rely on it too much in one area - eating healthily, say - you will find that you don't have enough left over for the rest of life."
But there is a moral here for me...if I really want to concentrate on something or resist something or hopefully, someone, I need to eat a bar of good dark chocolate first.