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Madrugada. Get up, get up. Questions crowd my brain even before I am fully awake. I can feel a modern-day version of the Tian Wen bubbling in my gut. How wrong it seems to advance and defend propositions, to use the declarative mode at all. How joyfully wrong! And having read the Buddhist ruminations of Hoarded Ordinaries just before bed (I hoard them up, you see, and read a whole week at a time), I am bowing to my own teacher, the tireless coyote of the mind. (When was the last time you saw a monkey roaming freely in the wild, Lorianne? Or is that the point behind the metaphor, that we keep monkeys in cages? Ah, a new Disney classic waiting to made: Free the Mind-Monkey!)

Coffee. A new book so good I can’t bring myself to go outside and sit on my porch as I do every morning to give my mind a chance to pick up some fresh scent-trails, listen for the snap of a twig three miles off. But for no good reason I am happy, happy. I can’t decide whether to sing or shout, so I just keep quiet. But that’s probably O.K.

Juan Ramón Jiménez, you didn’t tell the whole truth. There are such things as holy fools, yes, but in your ceaseless gravity I sense a grave digger quite a bit more pious than the clowns in Hamlet. I want to alter the third line of your famous poem: with the substitution of a single word, everything changes. Así:

Mis pies ¡qué hondos en la tierra!
Mis alas ¡qué altas en el cielo!
–¡Y qué dolor alegría
de corazón distendido!–

My feet, so deep in the earth!
My wings, so far up in the heavens!
–And in the heart stretched
between them, such suffering happiness!–

– or was that really such a dramatic change, I wonder?

Alba. Waiting for the sun. A cold front has blown in, leaving the sky almost cloudless except along the horizon. I’m standing with my back to the 30-year-old spruce grove at the top of the field, looking at the familiar panorama of ridge after ridge, the long, low wrinkles on the earth’s skin that are the sign of great senescence for these so-called mountains.

Familiar? Wait a second. If I didn’t already know what I was looking at, how would I be able to tell that the thin band of cloud stretching the length of the horizon isn’t in fact a farther, higher range? It’s just a shade lighter than Tussey, Nittany and Bald Eagle Mountains below it – as it should be if it were a slightly more distant sierra, towering, I figure, some 15,000 feet higher than the measly 2,400 feet attained by the present mountains.

The longer I stare, the less convinced I am that this is not the case. I could be a time traveler, gazing back a couple hundred million years to the Appalachians’ first upheaval. The Appalachian orogeny (one of my favorite words!). But it doesn’t feel that way; I’m too fully locked into the present. And the funny thing is, for no good reason I can think of, ever since I left the house I have been whistling under my breath, over and over, a theme from Hovhaness’ Mysterious Mountain. I mean, I haven’t listened to that in close to two months – and the last time I did, I felt more than a little bored with it. It’s hardly a complex work, and I know every goddamn note. It seemed utterly familiar, though still an old friend to be sure. Like someone we know too well to be surprised by any longer, if that’s not too trite a way of putting it.

So anyway here I am, and I can’t get this tune out of my head . . . Well, I don’t try, actually. I am a big believer in the use of monotony as a kind of mental floss. The coyote gets that enticing scent in his nostrils and he can’t leave it, you know, he just keeps on trotting, mile after mile, neither too fast nor too slow – eating up the horizon. There’s an odd noise in the grove behind me – it sounds like nothing so much as a brief snatch of human conversation, a man and a woman. Maybe a squirrel or something – I have been hearing a chewing noise off and on. But I had sort of pegged that for a porcupine. Well, the sound doesn’t repeat itself, so who knows?

Minute by minute the sky changes, the red-orange band getting darker, but the mysterious mountains looming up behind the familiar ones only seem to grow more solid. I wish I were either a better writer or at least a blogger with a camera, so that I could show you exactly what it looks like. The one break in the ridge of cloud is east-northeast, right where the sun ought to rise. And as I watch, a broad, dark line emerges above this gap, a good 20,000 feet higher than the main chain: the crest of some hidden Himalayan masif. Orange sky above it, pale “clouds” (actually, the absence of cloud) around its imaginary slopes. The sky glows. I have a sudden realization: my glasses are really, really dirty!

Amanecer. The spell doesn’t break. (Never. Not as long as the Wile E. Coyote of the mind keeps bouncing back!) What happens instead is that a new spell is cast overtop of it. One mask is traded for another. Mt. Sumeru breaks into a dozen sun-touched fragments, floating blue stones edged in fire. Then up up up up up like nothing you ever saw comes the mask you can never really see without going blind. What color is it, I wonder? I’m not talking about that old yellow dwarf, that astronomical body, I’m talking about the sun. It gives off a reddish light at the moment, but that won’t last for more than a few minutes. I turn and enter the spruce grove. Now that the wait is over, one craves the close-at-hand.

The coyotes have been worrying the deer carcass quite a bit since the last time I checked. (This is one of probably at least twenty-five such carcasses within a half-mile radius. It was a tough winter.) The front legs are splayed out at right angles to the chest cavity, which has been cleaned down to the ribs, but the hind feet are together and point straight back. In other words, this deer carcass seems to have been arranged to resemble Christ on the cross – there’s Coyote for you! – with the hide pulled up like a cowl around the neck; the head is missing. A patch of reddish orange light stretches toward it. I am noticing details of moss and twig, I am keeping my ears open – the dawn chorus is past its peak, of course – and there’s a call I recognize but can’t quite place. Four high notes in a row, quasi-mechanical – just once. Bird of prey, I think, but which one?

As I leave the grove I am thinking again about some of the recent observations from the two Buddhist bloggers I read the most faithfully, Dale and Lorianne. The wordless Hovhaness tune is momentarily overwritten by some remembered lines from the thrash band Pantera (taken completely out of context, but what isn’t?). In typical thrash metal style the lyrics were hurled, halfway between a song and a shout –
WHAT’S – WRONG – WITH – YOUR – MIND?
it’s time to RISE
it’s time to RISE
it’s time to RISE
– and it gives me a chuckle to think about either Dale or Lorianne actually listening to this kind of music.

Día. I head down along the nearly 200-year-old, moss-covered woods road we call Laurel Ridge Trail. I am anxious for the fate of all the tiny, tender leaves of the oaks after this below-freezing night – the sun can’t rise fast enough for them. Ten minutes later, as I’m descending the ridge with Hovhaness once again ghosting in and out on my breath, I suddenly remember who it is that makes that monotonous call I heard on the other side of the spruce grove: the saw-whet owl.

If you go to my mother’s website, you can see a picture of a saw-whet owl perching on her hand. You can also see, down at the bottom of the page, what the view from the top of the field looks like. Meanwhile, I will think about some of the other posts I could have come up with had I not decided to write this one. Meanwhile, terrible things will take place all over the world – some of them preventable, some not. Meanwhile, the poet Arthur Sze, author of The Redshifting Web, will sleep off a hangover and wonder just when synchronicity became so utterly predictable. Meanwhile, I will try – and fail – to recover a rare, original thought that occurred to me just moments after remembering about saw-whets. How utterly unmindful of me! But the sun also rises. The coyote also pauses to mark his territory. Truly the light is sweet, says the Bible. Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.
__________

UPDATE: Title changed 4/29 – I already used “Good morning, blues”! I am starting to seriously repeat myself & I haven’t even been at this for half a year! (If it gets too bad, I will switch to an all-poetry format.) Incidentally, the last two quotes above do not occur sequentially in the Bible; “Truly the light is sweet…” comes from Ecclesiastes, whereas “Man is born unto trouble” may be found in Chapter 5 of Job. (But you probably knew that.) Incidentally #2: It’s safe to say I would never have become such a fan of the Bible were it not for the inclusion of these two books, along with the Song of Songs. Can you name any other sacred texts generous enough to admit the voices of radical skepticism and eroticism?

This month, my plan for full-spectrum dominance of the blogosphere has claimed its first two victims. Alas, poor Tonio, I didn’t know him very well at all! He never gave me a chance. Of course, he didn’t exactly go – this is cyberspace. There’s no elsewhere. You’re either here or you’re not, but most of you who are here are only here for a few minutes each day, so your presence is not merely virtual but suppositional as well. I’m like that cat Schrödinger, ya know?

Ergo, as long as I forebear from gathering site statistics, it’s as easy for me to imagine that I am talking to a large crowd from atop the good soapbox Via Negativa as it is to believe that I am preaching to the choir (& who more worthy of a sermon, after all?) – as it is to acknowledge that I am mainly talking to myself: my most inattentive audience by far! The larger the crowd, I says to myself, the more attention I get. Yes, Master Bates, says my sardonic self back to me.

“Commonbeauty” couldn’t take the heat, the pressure, the constant strain. The blogosphere is a cruel mistress. He had other fish to fry. And unlike me, he always eschewed cliches! What a sap.

Perhaps my most fiendish scheme is to prevent other potential competitors from entering the arena in the first place. I have set up a dozen front companies – venture capitalists and talent scouts – always on the lookout for fresh perspectives and exciting new ideas to smother to death under virtual wheelbarrow loads of money, sex and drugs. Those statistics you’ve seen, about how 90 percent of new blogs fizzle out after just three or four entries? You think that’s an accident? FOOL! Listen: we will bury you.

Needless to say, this is quite an undertaking. “I’ll be the last guy to let you down,” says the undertaker. He doesn’t know that his employees are mounting a union drive that will culminate with the collectivization of the whole enterprise. That’s what you get for hiring Diggers.

I do my own digging with a golden shovel. It works fine as long as I don’t hit a rock. When gold goes up against sandstone, guess who wins? Little grains of quartz, the commonest crystal in the world. Apply heat & pressure over a few million years & boom! you got a mountain. Put gold in it, & you get California. Thus Hollywood. McDonalds. Full-spectrum dominance, babe. Even as you read this, my agents are fanning out across the Internet, launching surfeit-of-service attacks on your blog hosts, distracting the U.S. copyright office’s attention from your numerous & flagrant violations with the fata morgana of file sharing, stuffing your puny comment boxes with fatuous & irrelevant messages.

But I am, as you know, an armchair mystic. As long as my butt is comfortable and my belly is full, I can babble bliss with the best of ’em. The whole purpose of religion, says the Chinese-German philosopher Ni Qi, is to ensure good digestion. So why should I tolerate sedition right in my gut?

I speak, of course, of the not-so-cynical speaker of Diogenese whose tub-thumping act has provided a sort of low amusement in these parts. At first, he was content to quote something and add just a line or two of his own, as we agreed. But then he started to get a little full of himself – that’s my department, says I. So we had a little talk, Mr. Dead Greek Anti-Philosopher Dude & me. I showed him the invisible corpse of the albino elephant, expatiated on the common end of all beauty – he could see what sand trap I was driving at. Is that where he wanted to end up? On the street, right outside the 34th Street Station, with a can full of pencils instead of a modem and a cardboard sign instead of a blog?

Yes, it was.

So today, even as I ease the capacious & distinctly malodorous Tub of Diogenes into an unmarked grave, I play midwife to the bitch called Payback & help whelp a new feature. From an all-but-imaginary post outside the 34th Street Station in Madhatter, New Jerk City, the thinker formerly known as Diogenes will telegraph Words On the Street. No more links to the Internet, no more content-providing safety net. These Words must be brief enough to fit on a cardboard sign – but pithy enough to sell pencils to the dark-suited illuminati of the PDA.

In addition – or rather, in substitution – the non-feature formerly known as Counter will be re-christened the Tomb of the Unknown Reader. I imagine y’all as pilgrims, dontcha know, visiting such holey sites wherever they be found, hither and (mostly) yon. Picture, if you will, a low and humble stone, far from the madhatting crowd at the 34th Street Station, in the middle of a peaceful grove on the great gray green greasy banks of the Limpopo River. Where the statistics go – not to die (for they were hardly ever alive) – but to pray for rebirth as fully sentient beings.

So Reader, beware. Anywhere else, you could become a statistic. Walk carefully. Don’t give out change unless you’re willing to change something of your own: your name, your clothes, your beautiful house, your internet service provider. Don’t give credit where credit isn’t due: “Visa” won’t actually get you across borders; “American Express” is a slow boat to China; “Mastercard” is a slave’s badge. You can go to the gypsy. You can go to the ant. Or you can come here. Don’t settle for anything less.

“Things are getting a bit quiet here because I am happily occupied in the embodied world. There are many felicities, both in the realm of the obvious and in the territory of the secret.

“I have been thinking also about the fate of this blog, the good ship commonbeauty, and about how to give this enjoyable little experiment the graceful and natural death it deserves.

“Two strange thoughts have accompanied this. First, a couple of lines over at Lois’s page (heart@work), in which she talks about the inexpressibility of many of the experiences she’s been having (April 14). Somehow, that touched something very real in me. My blog, which has aided my acts of witness, has also been, in its own way, an impediment to witness. I am curious about the unprinted territory commanded by Socrates and by Gautama and by Yeshua and their many nameless ilk.

“The second is an article at Dave’s page (vianegativa) which, oddly enough, I have not yet read. It is the recent article on poetics (April 13), and I have this instinctive feeling that, when I finally do read it, the attention I will wish to pay its prescriptions will leave me precious little blogging time! So, blame Dave. . . . ”

commonbeauty 18 April 2004

*
“The strangeness happens when Joel (the Carey character) discovers that his unhappy, impulsive girl-friend, Clementine, has had her memories of him erased, so she can move on unencumbered by the past. Distraught, Joel decides to do the same thing. The complication arises when, as his memories of her are being deleted, he changes his mind. The movie surprised me with its somber ending (which, of course, I will not divulge).

“According to Hollywood, if you deliver solid entertainment and viewers enjoy themselves, they won’t care about trivial things like inconsistency, improbability or impossibility. With regard to Jim Carey’s latest movie, I found that to be true. The fact that memory erasure technology is totally inconsistent with current science or any conceivable future science didn’t dampen my enjoyment one bit. . . .

“Memories aren’t like individual data files stored on a computer hard drive. Memories are actually recreated on the fly, much as web pages are recreated new every time they are requested. So you can’t locate them anywhere in the brain for erasure. Also, different parts of the brain are involved in generating these memories. Furthermore, people program their own brains as they grow up, so every human brain is programmed a little differently. So memory generation doesn’t work exactly the same way in every brain. In short, no brain scientist on Earth could even imagine a technology that would permit the erasure of specific memories. It’s one of those things that probably will never happen . . . ”

Book of Life 21 April 2004

“Recently, a friend confessed that her memoirs had replaced her actual memories – her original impressions, images, interpretations, and emotions overwritten by the revisions stored on her laptop hard drive. Notebook scribbles, structured paragraphs, aestheticized dialogue. These are her reality now.

“‘I will be telling a story,’ she said. ‘And my husband will stop me. That is not what happened, he will say. That is what you wrote.’

“This is not to say her memoirs lie. Rather, it points to the ways in which essays are shaped – formally, aesthetically, emotionally, and otherwise. Creative nonfiction writers do not merely retrieve and record the artifacts of their lives, digging them out from the sediment and arranging them for display. They imbue them with meaning. In order to create that meaning, they reshape the emotional, psychological, or temporal contexts. Subtle as this process may be, it is also extremely powerful.

“But something even more fundamental – more powerful – is revealed by my friend’s story. When original memories are replaced by our crafted ones, what does this mean? Just like in archaeology, the site is destroyed by our own digging. Forever altered. . . . ”

evidentiary: alchemy 6 April 2004

The Spring/Summer 2004 issue of Wild Earth has several thought-provoking pieces. Here are a few excerpts.

“Pressed flowers. Bird nests, butterflies behind glass, shells. Hand lenses and tattered field guides. A child reaching for a feather in the grass. Natural history.

“It’s going extinct, and nowhere more quickly than where we need it the most – in our colleges and universities. These days, you don’t need an understanding of – or even an interest in – natural history to get into a graduate program in ecology or any other branch of biology. Financial support for basic natural history research is all but gone. The close, scrupulous observation of nature has a long and illustrious history, but it is now sliding into oblivion . . .

“It’s as if biology has split into two kinds: for-profit and not-for-profit. The for-profit kind: that’s molecular biology, the ‘New Biology’ much in vogue these days – understandably so. Discoveries at the molecular level have revealed layer upon layer, wonder after wonder, in a world of complexity none of us could have guessed at a half century ago when the revelation of the double helix set the genomic era in motion. Yet this has led to the reductionist point of view that everything in biology is explicable by molecular processes, that explaining biological events at the molecular level is the ultimate goal of biology . . .

“And the not-for-profit biology? That’s natural history. Knowledge for its own sake. A field for the passionate amateur and the inspired schoolteacher – and until lately, the professional biologist. Biology departments are phasing out traditional courses in natural history. It’s incipient at some universities and well underway at many others.”

Thomas Eisner and Mary M. Woodsen, “The Science of Wonder: Natural History in the Balance”

*

“No one knows how many synthetic chemicals act as endocrine disrupters. A partial list includes a variety of pesticides, products associated with plastics (including plastic drinking bottles), breakdown products of household detergents, cosmetics, and a number of common industrial chemicals. Little is known about endocrine disrupters because previous tests for health effects focused on cancer. Endocrine disruption, like the earlier discovery of synthetic carcinogens, is a novel surprise.

“Can we think our way out of this problem? Endocrine disruption is impossible to predict based on a molecule’s structure, and effects may be difficult to evaluate experimentally because they include behavioral changes that are often less obvious than physical abnormalities. Moreover, endocrine disruption may occur during very brief windows of embryological exposure (as short as a few days), and may involve interactions between different chemicals. How many interactions are possible among the 58 endocrine disrupters that the Environmental Working Group found in the blood and urine of its nine study subjects? Are we smart enough to understand and manage the cascade of possible effects?”
* * * *
“A rat on a treadmill learns that if it runs when it hears a beep it can avoid an electric shock. The rat can also learn to turn to avoid a shock. But rats cannot learn to rear up on their hind legs to avoid being shocked. The explanation for a rat’s learning pattern is simple: shocks are unpleasant, and running and turning are innate avoidance responses. In contrast, rearing occurs to satisfy curiosity and is an innately exploratory behavior. The rat’s bran cannot learn to avoid danger using a naturally exploratory behavior. So even when rats frequently happen to avoid a shock by rearing, they never make the connection and learn to avoid the shock by rearing when the beep sounds. In fact, over a number of trials, a rat will rear less and less when rearing is the only way to avoid the shock. In an environment alien to its intelligence, the rat exhibits less, not more, of the behavior that could help it to avoid an unpleasant outcome.”

Matthew Orr, “Intelligence Lost: Pitfalls of a Tamed Planet”

*

“Rain drummed on the hatches and splashed off the decks, but still we could make out the sound of a wolf howling from the cliffs over the cove where we dropped anchor. There was only one wolf, although we listened carefully to make sure. The howl started low, leapt up, slid across the water, and sank away. Nothing answered the wolf’s call. Frank and I listened, as the wolf must have listened, the question probing the clouds and damping out in the forest, in the draperies of lichens and drooping hemlock boughs. . . .

“When my colleague, a concert pianist, explained the augmented fourth, she brought both hands in front of her body, palms skyward, fingers spread, and lifted the air. For her, words are not enough to explain this interval. This is a sound that floods the soul, she said, and she strained forward from the waist. The augmented fourth is a heartbreaking interval, dissonance that comes close to consonance, pulls itself so close, but never reaches the perfect fifth that is almost within its grasp.

“She leaned over the keyboard and played two notes: C, F-sharp. Then she flooded the room with music made of the unfinished intervals, harmonies that lead to resolution but never reach a place of peace. Tony, reaching for Maria. A Greek chorus pleading with the gods to have mercy on Orestes’ soul, this man who has murdered his mother. Tristan, reaching for the white sail that will bring his beloved Isolde on a following wind. And Robert Schumann, poor lovesick Schumann, yearning for Clara. Yearning: this ancient word, diving straight through history from the beginnings of language itself, a word as old as home and earth. No one in Christian medieval Europe sang the augmented fourth, my colleague said. It was the diabolus in musica, the devil’s chord – so powerful it could grab a parishioner, drag him to his knees and pull him, scraping on the paving stones, straight to hell. And there I was in that tide-dragged island wilderness, also on my knees, trying to understand the pull of these same two notes.”

Kathleen Dean Moore, “The Augmented Fourth”

It is by now bleedingly obvious that the occupation of Iraq is unraveling for entirely preventable reasons. As Noam Chomsky pointed out the other day, it takes real talent to fail so spectacularly.

Now, I realize people don’t come here for politics. But the question of how common sense can be so consistently and flagrantly hijacked by idiocy relates directly to the main theme of this weblog. While the architects of the Iraq policy (going back through the Clinton regime to George I) may not have been exactly “the best and the brightest,” they were far from stupid – in the sense that they had (with one or two obvious exceptions) the best educations money could buy. And as we all know, formal education makes people more broad-minded and tolerant, right?

What I am working towards here is a hypothesis about the relationship of arrogance to ignorance and spectacular failure. There’s more than one kind of ignorance. The worst kind comes from people who think they do know it all, who fail to recognize the limits of their own intelligence – and who refuse to listen to the councils of any higher power, be it vox populi or vox dei.

I’ll develop these ideas more fully another time. For now, check out this report from the Guardian about the march of folly in Argentina.

I think I can, I think I can . . . write a short blog post for once! Hang a virtual sign on the virtual door handle reading, Gone Out Walking. Because it’s that kind of morning: first clear blue day in over a week, with temperatures forecast to climb into the 50s or even 60s. At this rate, the last of our snowpack (on the north-facing side of the gap, right above the railroad tracks) may be gone by the weekend. Trailing arbutus is already starting to blossom, but I’m hoping this weather will bring out the shadbush. Those first splotches of white, contrasting with the red/orange blush of maple on the otherwise bare, brown mountainsides always fill me with delight. Well, “delight” doesn’t begin to express it, but . . . If I may indulge in a flagrant abuse of Christian jargon, this first major blooming event signals for me a transition from Nature’s kenosis (self-emptying, self-limitation) to pleroma (fullness, abundance). (Incidentally, anyone who’s stopping by in the vain hope of actually learning something about the via negativa can ponder what the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia has to say about kenosis.)

A stray thought from the vaults:

Nature writer and anthropologist Richard Nelson once wrote, “There may be more to learn from climbing the same mountain a hundred times than from climbing a hundred different mountains.” Yes, but one shouldn’t imagine that all discoveries are equally joyous. In my bleaker moods, I think: pain is simply the price of understanding. Of taking a stand.

But aside from the wordplay, what the heck does understanding have to do with taking a stand? I am such a sloppy thinker . . .

And now there’s a stray dog on my doorstep. Gotta go.

Today I want to pose a simple question: can we – should we – feel compassion for those who lack all compassion? Does it even make sense to try and empathize with those who cannot empathize? As an act of imagination, this may be an interesting and even heroic effort. But in real life, things get messier. Psychologists tell us that people with sociopathic, psychopathic and narcissistic personalities are often very charming and charismatic. Many of them have become masters of feigned emotions that they don’t really feel. This strikes me as the perfect foil for a truly loving imagination.

I know I’ve made a number of slighting remarks about the science of psychology in the past, but this is a phenomenon that really interests me. One of my brothers first brought it to my attention several months back, as he struggled to understand the bizarre behavior of a colleague. And as I read descriptions of this disorder, I was reminded of several people I knew or knew of. Here’s some background:

“For many years, psychologists have studied the frightening reality of psychopathic or sociopathic personalities — the serial killers, the child abusers, the pathologically consistent liars and incorrigible thieves. The scientific study of these individuals was systemically organized by Hervey Cleckley and his 1941 classic The Mask of Sanity, and today the specialist Robert Hare is one of the foremost authorities in the field. According to Hare, the key emotional and interpersonal traits defining the psychopathic personality syndrome are: a smooth, glib capability to lie, manipulate and dissemble; a completely callous lack of empathy or concern for others; shallow emotional affect and lack of remorse; and egocentric grandiosity.”

If you happened to be watching television or listening to the radio yesterday evening, you may have heard this fascinating exchange:

“What would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?”

“I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. (Laughter.) John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just – I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn’t yet. . . .

“I hope I – I don’t want to sound like I’ve made no mistakes. I’m confident I have. I just haven’t – you just put me under the spot here, and maybe I’m not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one.”

This same individual has often been dismissed as a shallow figurehead or a dimwit, but those who have had the occasion to observe him closely claim he’s neither. For example:

“He has no trouble speaking off the cuff when he’s speaking punitively, when he’s talking about violence, when he’s talking about revenge . . . When he struts and thumps his chest, his syntax and grammar are fine. It’s only when he leaps into the wild blue yonder of compassion, or idealism, or altruism, that he makes these hilarious mistakes. . . . [He] could not say, ‘Shame on me’ to save his life. That’s a completely alien idea to him. This is a guy who is absolutely proud of his own inflexibility and rectitude. . . . He’s all about punishment and death. It would be a grave mistake to just play him for laughs.”

A Google search turned up other curiosities. Some people evidently feel that the best way to deal with the compassion-deprived is with flower power:

“The most important consideration to keep in mind when we take on a difficult case, such as a sociopathic disorder with criminal behavior, is that the person who stands before us is in their essence, a soul/spiritual being, no matter how disturbed. We may need to work in a very slow, progressive way to retrieve the core part of the human soul, and we may very likely need the help of other professionals with specialized expertise. Our efforts will need to include not only what we can accomplish in a given professional session, but ongoing prayer and meditation that holds such a person in the light of understanding and summons their submerged aspects of compassionate feeling and morality. For the practitioner some of the flower essences that can facilitate the necessary insight, compassion and commitment to sustain the healing process are Holly, Yellow Star Tulip, Star Tulip, Calendula, Cosmos, Angelica and Impatiens.”

And it’s not as if such individuals have never laughed or cried:

“Soon after arriving, he was asked to write an essay on a soul-stirring experience in his life to date and he chose the death of his sister. His mother had drilled it into him that it was wrong when writing to repeat words already used. Having employed ‘tears’ once in the essay, he sought a substitute from a thesaurus she had given him and wrote ‘the lacerates ran down my cheeks.’ The essay received a fail grade, accompanied by derogatory comments such as ‘disgraceful.'”

The aforementioned book The Mask of Sanity, by Hervey Clecky, cautions that

“However intelligent, he apparently assumes that other persons are moved by and experience only the ghostly facsimiles of emotion or pseudoemotion known to him. However quick and rational a person may be and however subtle and articulate his teacher, he cannot be taught awareness of significance which he fails to feel. He can learn to use the ordinary words and, if he is very clever, even extraordinarily vivid and eloquent words that signify these matters to other people. He will also learn to reproduce appropriately all the pantomime of feeling; but, as Sherrington said of the decerebrated animal, the feeling itself does not come to pass.”

I have many reservations about the practice of inventing neat little categories to try and bring order to the staggering diversity of “personality types.” But that’s what discriminatory reasoning does, and it’s a powerful tool – where would science be without it? Another classification scheme describes the compassion-deprived as “authoritarian”:

“Authoritarian personalities are organised around rabid hostility to ‘legitimate’ targets, often ones nominated by their parents’ prejudices. Intensely moralistic, they direct it towards despised social groups. As people, they avoid introspection or loving displays, preferring toughness and cynicism. They regard others with suspicion, attributing ulterior motives to the most innocent behaviour. They are liable to be superstitious.”

Indeed, we can all probably think of examples like this one:

“This is a guy who was a torturer, a killer, a maimer; there’s mass graves. I mean, he was a horrible individual that really shocked the country in many ways, shocked it into a kind of – a fear of making decisions toward liberty.”

One might assume that the individual under discussion is Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov. “Independent human rights groups estimate that there are more than 600 politically motivated arrests a year in Uzbekistan, and 6,500 political prisoners, some tortured to death. According to a forensic report commissioned by the British embassy, in August two prisoners were even boiled to death.”

Or we could be discussing the supremely narcissistic and authoritarian Turkmenbashi, who seems rather in a class by himself:

“Last year Mr Niyazov instituted a holiday in honour of the muskmelon, a relative of the watermelon, complete with lavish festivities, and ordered that everybody take part. ‘This godsend has a glorious history,’ national television announced. ‘Our great leader, who has a great love of his nation, has brought the name of the tasty melons to the level of a national holiday.'”

As regular readers of this weblog know, I tend to agree with the Kabbalistic analysis of personality: the sefirot. There’s a lot of appeal to the idea that the will to power/judgement must be counterbalanced by a well-developed capacity to forgive, and that so-called evil results from an excess of the former. “Judge not, that ye be not judged” still seems like good advice – especially when dealing with those for whom the exercise of punitive judgement is second nature. But – to return to the question I began with – should we try and love such people? A woman named Hope advises against getting too close. As she wrote on a message board last week,

“Healing does come although I still have nightmares about this person once in a while however the dream has changed. I have dreamt lately that he’s come back asking for forgiveness and now many years later, I just smile in my dream when he talks about our great life together and in the dream I say who are you trying to kid. In real life the person of whom I speak did try to contact me 1 year later and feigned apologies, and as convincing as he had once been I knew I was not dealing with a normal person and knew I never would. I have been reading some of the postings and see many from people who say they still love their sociopaths and hope they change. They are not capable and never will. All the best to you.”
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ADDENDUM

My brother Mark sent along the following thoughts via e-mail, with permission to reprint here. He is reacting to the article from the Guardian cited above. The remark about all fundamentalists being authoritarian types struck him as particularly absurd. He went on to say, “As you know, I can’t stand Freud; he’s the Marx of the mind. Blaming everything on Mommy and Daddy is easy and convenient; it’s the oldest trick in the book for people trying to open up some sort of a space for Bush so that we may see him (or any/most leaders and bosses) as anything more or less than the (lying liar) sociopaths that they are.

“They are different from us, which is why they are where they are, and we are where we are. Their goals are the goals of the Prince, possibly the most horrifying truthful book ever written. Their lust for power–Stalinists, Maoists, Fascists, Nazis, neo-cons, the blacksmith and sorcerer–is destructive; the joy is in the destruction. All these ‘true’ feelings of the so-called monsters, Tamerlanes, are locked in their black-box interiors; what we get is shadows and creepy smiles, no admittance of guilt, hollow men. The thing is, they don’t UNDERSTAND guilt, because they have extremely reduced or possibly nonexistent capacities for empathy–they just don’t get what ‘society’ is about.

“It horrified me last night that Bush seemed so curious, so lacking–he just could not for the life of him figure out any flaw he might have. You might say ‘But they’re all that way. They have to be, to rule.’ That’s the point–rule IS what I call evil, and a God who rules is the evil/perfect projection. They ARE different, often geniuses, wonderfully creative; ‘no one understands them’; ‘they just can’t have their way.’ They realize with clarity–because they stand so far outside the networks of social relations that define the rest of us poor soaks–just how many flaws the rest of have. Because being social is not a ‘good’ thing, per se.

“They tap into our dissatisfactions. They help us channel our feelings of inadequacy, frustrations, outward, they teach us to hate others and to worship ourselves. They then sit back and enjoy the destruction–Nero fiddling, Rome burning. Capitalistic competition feeds on these principals; in the ‘community of states’ the US is the number one antisocial country in the world–collectively, the American hive-mind doesn’t understand why They hate Us; we’re cleverer than everyone else, we help them solve their problems, and this is how they reward us.

“All of what I am saying is found in one way or another in the classic clinical study of psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity, by Hervey Cleckley. Psychopathy, however, is present in all of us, but passes a threshold in some of us (one out of 25 or 30). It’s not uncommon, and it’s not insanity–it is simply a ‘personality type.’ And, we have very few self-professed psychopaths out there; it’s their ‘loved ones’ who turn for help. They don’t get what the fuss is all about.

“In terms of politicians and other [wielders of] of power, I do know that all this sounds like [the movie] ‘They Live.’ But the idea that they are ‘just like us, but with power’ I believe may be a lie. I haven’t stopped being the way I was just because I’m in charge of a classroom. I haven’t turned into a little dictator. I am not being shaped by my environment to such an extent. . . . Apparently psychopaths–10-20% of the population in jail, at most; probably less–are the ones most easy to ‘rehabilitate.'”

From the NY Times: “Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal, the director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University in Atlanta, has shown that if the normally pugilistic rhesus monkeys are reared with the more conciliatory stumptailed monkeys, the rhesus monkeys learn the value of tolerance, peacemaking and mutual hip-hugging. Dr. de Waal, who wrote an essay to accompany the new baboon study, said in a telephone interview, ‘The good news for humans is that it looks like peaceful conditions, once established, can be maintained,’ he said. ‘And if baboons can do it,’ he said, ‘why not us? The bad news is that you might have to first knock out all the most aggressive males to get there.'”

First, let’s kill all the lawyers. Then, arrange to have all future lawyers reared by stumptailed monkeys. It just might work! And even if it doesn’t, it would make for some great reality TV.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a little while, how about giving me some feedback? Such as: what I could different, what I could better, what you’d like to see more or less of – that sort of thing. I put together a survey form that you can use if you want to – it’s here (and the link will be permanently archived in the Backgound and Backtalk section at left). I tried to make it as entertaining as possible. But please feel free to make up your own questions, too. Or send me a questionnaire of your own. Thanks!