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Psychology

Nothing is fixed

Feeling demoralized? Acknowledge it.

Sad? Allow it.

Worried? Accept it.

These emotional reactions have a function, just as positive thinking does. They connect you to others, help you to be alert and prepare you to find protective measures. For a full treatment of emotion regulation, ways in which we manage our feelings if they interfere with daily functioning, I recommend a book by Stanford psychologist James Gross that explores every facet of the process. And since we’re at it, I have also written on the way emotions affect memory, most recently, as of this April, here.

On days when negative feelings approach the level of despair, however, turn to James Baldwin. In his 1964 monograph, Nothing Personal, in response to the Harlem Riots where a Black kid was shot by a White police officer and co-authored with his friend, photographer Richard Avedon who provided portraits, he manages to infuse us with a sense of obligation to live and act and stop despairing. (A detailed review of the edited reprint, (insanely expensive, alas,) here.)

The essay begins with a sly criticism of American advertisement, (sort of ironical when you consider that his collaborator on this book, Avedon, was the most influential fashion photographer of the post-war times) but then turns to the darker issues of being a minority in the United States.

We have all heard the bit about what a pity it was that Plymouth Rock didn’t land on the Pilgrims instead of the other way around. I have never found this remark very funny. It seems wistful and vindictive to me, containing, furthermore, a very bitter truth. The inertness of that rock meant death for the Indians, enslavement for the blacks, and spiritual disaster for those homeless Europeans who now call themselves Americans and who have never been able to resolve their relationship either to the continent they fled or to the continent they conquered. Leaving aside-as we, mostly, imagine our- selves to be able to do-those people to whom we quaintly refer as minorities, who, without the most tremendous coercion, coercion indistinguishable from despair, would ever have crossed the frightening ocean to come to this desolate place?”

(Photographs today thus of rocks, in grinding sea.)

After describing multiple causes for despair, Baldwin eventually turns to an emphatic call for hope and persistence in dark hours.

One discovers the light in the darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light. What the light reveals is danger, and what it demands is faith.”

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For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed (emphasis mine;) the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.”

Full text of the essay (print it and keep it on your night stand for dark hours!) here.

We might not be able to hold each other physically right now, but the idea is of course at its root one of mutual support and reciprocal solidarity with each other. We can be the light for others, even in hours where things get pretty dark within our own soul. Be a light for someone else, it’ll reflect back, I’ll guarantee it, just as I concur with the claim that nothing is fixed. Ever. We simply need to adjust our time horizons.

Smith’s lyrics for Long Old Road are cited in the essay. Here is the music.

LONG OLD ROAD Bessie Smith 1931 Bessie Smith rec June 11th 1931 New York

It’s a long old road, but I’m gonna find the end, It’s a long old road, but I’m gonna find the end, And when I get there, I’m gonna shake hands with a friend.

On the side of the road,I sat underneath a tree, On the side of the road,I sat underneath a tree, Nobody knows a thought that came over me.

Weepin’ and cryin’, tears fallin’on the ground, Weepin’ and cryin’, tears fallin’on the ground, When I got to the end, I was so worried down.

Picked up my bag, baby, and I tried again, Picked up my bag, baby, and I tried again, I got to make it, I’ve got to find the end!

You can’t trust nobody, you might as well be alone, You can’t trust nobody, you might as well be alone, Found my long lost friend, and I might as well stayed at home!

And here is a full album.

The Will to Disobey

“Vorsicht, Kindchen, Vorsicht!” (Careful, kiddo, careful…) was a constant refrain in the household of my childhood, outnumbering even the “Straighten your back!” and “Darling, would you fetch me my cigarettes….”invocations.

Vorsicht – care, caution, precaution, restraint – built an invisible fence around a child’s desire and need to explore, to risk. For my war-traumatized parents, danger (understandably) lurked in shadows and around every imaginable corner. “Don’t jump off that swing, don’t race your bike, don’t hitchhike, don’t spend time to travel abroad instead of proceeding straight to your clerkship,” the variations were endless. Physical danger, psychological danger, danger to the vision of an unencumbered life in a straight line from school to university to career to marriage to happily ever after. Anticipatory fear was literally a cloud forming a cage.

Steep Creek Falls

Except that we escaped through the invisible bars, at every possible turn, skimmed knees, black&blues, twisted ankles, tropical diseases be damned. I never felt more alive than when climbing prohibited trees as a kid, when sleeping rough on the beaches of Morocco in the early 70s, or hunting for orchids in the temperate rainforests of Venezuela. In fact, lovingly imposed constraint continually incited the opposite: a yearning for risk taking, a struggle with conformity, a will to disobey.

Alaskan Bunch Berries
Anemones
Bead Lilies
Avalanche Lilies
AvalancheLilies
Wind Flowers
Bear Grass

All this is on my mind because in some miniature ways I still thrive on adventure, even when it is now limited to scrambling up and down a pile of rocks on an otherwise moderate, although insanely beautiful hike.

Luckily someone lend me gloves…
The top

No more solo hiking for me, like last year in New Mexico. Photographs today are from an outing last week where two kind souls invited me sight-unseen (regarding my physical condition) to explore with them a tiny slice of the Pacific Crest Trail (Rock Creek Pass). Am I ever grateful they took me with them – Charlie and Dennis, I owe you!

Wildflowers abounded, water rushed down the outcrops, lichen glowed in the diffuse light, snakes saw no reason to scurry away, rock wrens serenaded us and old growth forest calmed the soul along the way.

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Risk taking, of course, also figures in the larger picture of deciding how to approach life while the country re-opens. We are no longer talking about thrill seeking, but a real and present danger to our lives, if we risk infection with Covid-19.

Any decision has to be based on an assessment of the probabilities of both the danger levels in situations we might seek out or avoid and our own specific vulnerabilities. Outside differs from inside, crowdedness differs from emptiness, duration of encounter with others is a huge factor, as is the presence or absence of masks. Your age and your health status has to be part of the equation.

Indian Paint Brush
Penstemon
Balsam Root (I think)

For me, there is also the question of why. It is not just going to be what am I doing, but why am I doing it? What are the reasons that justify for me to take risks? Do I go back to work, because I and my family could not survive otherwise? Am I truly needed for something, or am I too compliant to simply refuse? Am I staying away from the outside world because I let irrational fear rule me or because I legitimately cannot afford to risk infection? Is there such inherent meaning to be part of a community, or not being idle, that it justifies tolerating moderate risk at my work or the market place? Has fear become a mistress that we need to find the will to disobey?

Bleeding Hearts at the Bottum
Pioneer Violet
Arnika

The same is true for the larger question of risk and civic participation, when you decide the time has come to protest even in the face of radicalized police- and state action, perpetuation of historical injustice.

It is even a question when you contemplate actions often associated with protests, rioting and looting. Asking ourselves why people are doing that might provide surprising insights. One of the best explantations, both in content and rhetorical skill, that I have come across is in the attached short video. Note I have not linked to any other reading today, just so you have time to listen to a powerful voice. (Bonus: you will never play Monopoly again….)

And for music today one of the best choirs in the country with a familiar encouragement:We are not AFRAID today! Let that guide us, within reason.

Have you no Shame?

One of my favorite outbursts in my ongoing battle with the deer in my garden is: “Have you no shame?” Preferably yelling it loudly, as much as my grumpy lungs allow, or my consideration for my lovely neighbors who don’t need more of my screeching. Not that the deer react – they go on munching on my rose buds, my pink wild-geranium flowers, my columbines, their business – you name it.

Even in the wild, well, in the wilds of Tualatin, where they should be less accustomed to human/deer interaction they do not budge. Photographs from Monday’s walk are evidence that I could approach them to up to 2 meters with my small point&shoot camera. Then again, I did not yell, because I was happy to see them anywhere but in my stripped-down flowerbeds.

 

Much to know about deer, including the fact, among others, proclaimed by a science site: “The Chinese water deer is the only species that doesn’t shed its antlers, because it doesn’t have any.” Glad that could be added to the canon of irrelevant but funny bits in my brain.

Levantine Cave Painting Art, dated from the end of the Mesolithic Age and during the Neolithic Age at Valltorta-Gassulla Cultural Park in Spain near Valencia.

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I’m actually more interested in talking about shame rather than deer today, since the absence of the former, whether among those cloven-hoofed ungulates or certain members of the political sphere, has significant consequences for our well-being. Thoughts about shame were triggered by a book review of a book by Ute Frevert, managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, and director of its Center for the History of Emotions.

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), Adam and Eve, (1526)

The Politics of Humiliation: A Modern History, now translated from the German by Adam Bresnahan, concerns the relationship between power and shame, shaming, or humiliation. Three areas of interest are used to explain the psychological mechanisms: shaming as punishment for individual transgression in the political, public sphere, humiliation online and in school, and foreign policy between countries. I look forward to reading about the history of how shaming developed across the centuries. “It is the story of the democratisation of the right to dignity and honor, which at different times were regarded as belonging only to the aristocracy and not to commoners, to adults and not to children, to men more than women, to a sovereign and not to a people. ” It is certainly interesting to think that not only the display rules of emotions differ between cultures, or genders, but that there were differences, across time, in who had a right to a particular feeling, or the power to induce it.

Attributed to JOHN FERNELEY JR. (British 1781-1860) The Stag Hunt

 

The ever looming memory of Nazi public shaming of women married to Jews, (or Norwegian public shaming of women in love with German soldiers) also raises questions about gendered approaches to shame: women often had their hair cut forcibly and in public, humiliation always directed at their bodies, in war (ancient and recent) often through the ultimate humiliation of rape.

Frida Kahlo The Wounded Deer (1946)

Found this stag on a hike on Mt. Hood near Paradise Meadow two years ago

As a cognitive psychologist I am of course most interested in how an emotion can be utilized to enact power or manipulate people, mechanisms spelled out in a 2018 interview with the author here. The distinction between shaming and humiliation is important. Shaming was always used as punishment for a norm-defying person to get them to repent and then back into the fold. Humiliation, on the other hand, has the goal to stigmatize the person and set them apart from the group. The state or political actors historically used these mechanisms, but nowadays on-line platforms have joined in, with body/fat-shaming just one example (which reminds me: I did NOT find Speaker Pelosi’s fat shaming of a certain monster appropriate, in fact it irritated me to no end. You can’t join the gutter.)

Here is the contradictory part: on the one hand we, as a society, value honor and respect (and rightfully decry its absence), but on the other hand we show increasing appetite for public humiliation, just look at all those reality shows. The psychological mechanisms seem to point to a gain in self esteem or sense of group membership when we berate and belittle others, openly and in front of everyone. If we are part of the group that is humiliating rather than humiliated, it gives us a sense of security and belonging, as well as power. And if we create specific out-groups through acts of humiliation we can utilize their status for our political purposes, directing and displacing anger at those victims. (Although seemingly, if we are paid enough, we are also willingly complying with a potential state of humiliation – just look at the lines of the casting show. Honor has a price, after all, as Frevert puts it.)

 

Franz Marc Crouching Deer (1911)

I think, well, I hope that knowing about the mechanisms of how humiliation works enables us to inoculate ourselves against related attempts to employ it as a tool, attempts surely to increase in the context of the election campaign. If humiliation thrives on having a public participate, it is up to us, the public, to refuse to be participants in the spectacle. We can turn away.

Now all I wish is for the deer to do the same.

Today you have a choice between Mozart’s The Hunt and Haydn’s (The Hunt) and Cesar Franck’s Accursed Hunter – maybe the latter felt some shame….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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First you photograph, then you – forget

Over the weekend, I switched computers from old to new which brought me to the brink of a nervous breakdown. My old programs did no longer run, I had to order new ones in addition to the hardware, figure out changing configurations and face the fact that the forcibly purchased 2020 Photoshop – my toolbox for creating all of my art – did not look or act like the one I’ve been using for the last 8 years. Dropbox is still not working, even my computer whiz – husband is unable to change the ugly font of my mail program. You get the idea.

Neighborhood nature to the rescue, since my walks in state parks, in bird sanctuaries, all my usual haunts are now closed. I brought the camera and today’s photographs depict some scenes from the outing – my gratitude for my surroundings is boundless in these months. As is someone else’s.

*

Plenty of others had the same idea. But overall there was a quietude that was new, and plenty of occasions to watch little wrens, juncos, ravens, and song sparrows daring to be out in the open. First blossoms peeked out of the shrubbery, and the shows had lost their icy edge. The light was glorious, my soul got a good airing.

While I tried to capture some of the beauty, I thought back to a discussion we had last week at home (again). Is there a cost to taking all these pictures? What do we know about photography’s effects on memory? I mean millions of photos are taken everyday, posted on various sites, significant events in our lives recorded. Do we pay more attention to the scene we photograph (which would enhance memory) or less, because we are so preoccupied with getting the shot itself, or presenting a certain view of the world in our postings (which would hurt memory)?

Relatively recent research on this topic seems to indicate that memory suffers. If I have you go through a museum, for example, and ask you either to photograph (with the idea of posting the pictures later) or not, both groups enjoy the experience itself in similar ways. But a surprise memory test a week later reveals that the picture-taking group performs worse in how much and what they remember. People also lack parts of the experience that was non-visual – the sounds, things that were said around them – in their memory banks. This was true for both, controlled studies and those happening in a natural environment.

So, how do I think about that? If I have no recourse to my photos, and my memory is needed to answer questions (in the witness stand, for example,) yes, then it’s a problem. But the gain from sharing my view of the world is enormous, allowing others vicarious joy and experience, and deepen the post-event thoughts through talking about what I saw. In the usual case of being able to see my photos in my archives or an album, they bring back the experience as visual reminders, as faithfully if not more so than any spontaneous recall would. For longer, too, in many instances.

The memory issue, therefore, is not giving me sleepless nights. I am more concerned with what the ever-ready camera at hand does to the moment of the experience. Do you enjoy a walk in the woods if you snap pictures along the way? Are you open to the entirety of the experience, or distracted by a constant search for motive? Can stillness, provided or inspired by nature still happen when you are fiddling with gadgets? The answer, this Sunday, was a resounding YES! The picture taking was secondary, almost an afterthought, when I had delighted in some particular view. For many of the birds I didn’t even raise the camera so I would not frighten them away.

Peace prevailed, and trailed me home. Joy returned when uploading the photos, re-engaging with the forest views. Small blessings in difficult times.

Now if we were in Japan, we could stumble on our hike onto an almost half a mile-long construction, a xylophone that plays Bach’s Cantata 147 in the middle of the forest.

Closer to home, we can just hang out on the porch and listen to this, one of my repeats, I know, but I like to hear it often, for the slavic mix of joy and mourning.

First you see it, then you – think

It is an interesting challenge for the photographer to make do with what we can find in our suddenly severely limited environments. What can I depict, without resorting to my archives, something that is of interest, contains some beauty or has informational value?

How can I find newness when everyday I see the same things, retrace the same steps in my neighborhood? How can I be open to discoveries when my mind is churning with thoughts about the fate of this nation, the suffering of people across the world, the friends who are sick and irritation at my own body that is taking way too long to get back up to full speed?

And how will you, the reader, react to things taken out of context, things seemingly banal when stacked up against your own worries?

Well, as photographer, I simply do the best I can. Today’s pictures for example, were captured by iPhone just along the street where I live, seen simply because I was looking down, open to small patches of color and hiding my red eyes.

You, the viewer, have the thing to do that you always do when seeing something within a limited context: you try to to make sense of it. That should be easy when I tell you the topic is “found by the wayside.” It becomes more interesting, when the viewing stimulus is more complicated and I can manipulate what I’ll tell you about the context.

And just like that we are at the interesting part of today’s musings: a brand- new study about how people interpret “objective” video evidence, when I give them deliberately manipulated contextual information. What you “see” combined with what you “hear” leads to different reactions.

Simple design: I show you a video that depicts the exertion of force, (or not) enacted (or not) by a police officer who you can’t see clearly since the events were documented via a typical dash- camera (the ones now in use to help us discern whether applied force was excessive or not.) These videos are of real events, grainy, bad quality, no sound – exactly as they are when brought as evidence to court. In our experiment, depending on what group you are in, I tell you that the officer who acted was male or female, White or Black.

What are the results, when I ask you about what you saw and how you would evaluate that evidence? When officers used force, people trusted officers less and perceived them to be less effective relative to when they did not. Despite all participants viewing the same interaction, people who thought they saw a male (vs. female) officer perceived his use-of-force to be driven more by internal traits, such as being aggressive and emotionally reactive, and less by the external situation, a behavior pattern which was associated with decreased trust and perceived effectiveness. In contrast, people perceived female (vs. male) officers’ force to be driven more by external aspects of the dangerous situation, which was associated with increased trust and perceived effectiveness. For what it’s worth, there was no observed interaction with the presumed race of the officer.

I find this interesting – and hasten to add that this is a new finding, not yet replicated, and who knows if it will stand. For one, cops who use force are seen less positively than those who don’t. Female officers, however, were more respected than males, when they exerted force. Usually it is women who are seen as emotionally reactive and driven by internal motives, even when thought to be less aggressive than men. Their counter-stereotypical behavior here is interpreted in their favor – for once. If they acted out, it must have been in reaction to external factors, threatened violence against them or some such.

Independent of those findings, though, the interesting aspect is of course that seeing something with your own eyes can lead to strikingly different evaluations, depending on the contextual information provided by others that shapes your perception as a whole.

So what do you make of this?

In the absence of any further information?

While you think, I’ll provide music sent to me by a friend that made my day – I’ll give you context: Mozart. Magic Flute. Papageno…. followed by the conventional version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMXD4h5w8D8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87UE2GC5db0


Necropolitics

Honestly, I am not trying to add to all of our fears and sadness. I do think, however, that we need to face some substantive issues, if we want to learn from this crisis before the next one, climate catastrophe, hits on an incomparably larger scale than Covid 19.

This way: Justice

Therefore I decided to introduce a paradigm today that has been in my thoughts. Fascists in Germany revived a concept in the 1930s of “Thinning The Herd” which goes back to the 18th century belief that when the population exceeds resources government should use war, famine or widespread disease to thin the herd. Now why am I thinking of that?

To counterbalance the heaviness of the topic, photographs today are of chalk arrows that I found on Sunday’s walk in the neighborhood park. In my imagination they point to the goals we are all trying to reach. Should be trying. MUST try!

This way: Peace

Achille Mbembe is a distinguished Cameroonian historian and political philosopher, one of the most brilliant thinkers on the African continent as well as in the US – he holds dual appointments at Duke University and in South Africa. Among the honors he received for his work on social grievances, postcolonial politics and racist thought structures was the 2015 Geschwister Scholl prize (members of the resistance group the White Rose executed by Hitler) and the 2018 Ernst Bloch prize (a German philosopher known for his seminal work The Principle of Hope,) for his philosophy outlining the need for a more humane world.

This way: Solidarity

Mbembe has developed the concept of Necropolitics, the idea of the subjugation of life to the power of death in our contemporary world. In simple words: There are powers that get to decide who lives and who dies, using proximity of death as population control. Before we apply this to our current situation let’s acknowledge that not everything is about the virus. Instead, there are ubiquitous ways in which large populations have been politically and economically managed: people exposed to wars, genocide, refugee crises, prisons, in Syria or the Gaza strip, as well as those whose poverty and precarious living circumstances have been increased through political removal of safety nets, all are governed through direct or indirect proximity to death.

This way: Equity

The philosopher talks about new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjugated to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of “living-dead,” calling them death-worlds. They are governed by certain forms of economics, which withholds public goods and rights, making existence precarious. They are structured through confinement of precarious populations in certain spaces, most often in camp-form. Refugee-camps, prisons, ghettos, banlieues, suburbs, favelas, all serve as examples. Often these are policed or militarized spaces in which human beings are controlled and can be killed, “a permanent condition of living in pain.” Underlying these management structures is the key characteristic of those in power accepting (e.g. the refugee camps on the Greek Islands) if not actively pursuing (e.g. war in Syria) the possibility of death on a large scale.

This way: Bridge to Safety

We can find these kinds of politics not just in authoritarian, but also in democratic states, where the state confines, imprisons and persecutes certain populations. Not that violence is a state monopoly: when private groups in a society separate into those who arm themselves, and those who are not armed (militias vs citizens,) the idea of killings as something acceptable is normalized. The production of weapons, both for private use or in the context of expanding wars, is a source of economic revenue in these political systems. Exploiting natural resources for economic gain also tolerates that populations are endangered, displaced or eliminated, or future generations sacrificed (Amazon rain forest destruction, for example.)

This way: Anti-Racism

What moral justifications can possibly be given for the way human populations are treated by the powerful? Mbembe offers a catalogue of their excuses, such as the eradication of corruption, different types of “therapeutic liturgy”, “the desire for sacrifice”, “messianic eschatologies”, and, importantly, “modern discourses of utilitarianism, materialism, and consumerism.” The underlying causal mechanism for necropolitics to be performed and expanded in a given society, allowing for exploitation and natural elimination of poor or powerless populations? Racism, both in its institutional and private forms. It’s beyond my scope here to go into detail – here is his book. (And here is the article that I relied on heavily for the summary of the concept.) Eye-openers.

This way: Environmental Protection

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Back to Covid 19. Doctors and first responders who have to make utilitarian decisions about who gets to live and who will die are not to be faulted in this crisis. Younger lives are weighed against older one, existing conditions against healthy bodies, parenthood against singles, how else can you justify distribution of scarce resources. There are, however, whole governments who have also made utilitarian decisions – this time to benefit individuals (keep the numbers low so my re-election is not endangered) or political ideologies (the free market rules, I am not invoking the Defense Production Act for manufacture of rescue items, or the closing of beaches) or, as I write this, to choose a structural system – our economy and its value – over people’s lives (scrap “expendable” scientific offices, fire “expendable” administrative personell, remove social distancing rules to restart production.)

This way: Sustainability

When someone literally says that the cure cannot be worse than the disease in this situation, they imply that lives need to be sacrificed for profit. And whose lives will this be? Who are the disposable people that no-one is directly mentioning? For every single middle-class or wealthy person there are masses of those who are already going to work sick, because they cannot afford to lose their wages. For every safely ensconced work-from-home person there will be those stuffed into public transportation and factories. There are those who live in cramped quarters because of poverty, or imprisonment, who will drop like flies. There are those who have no access to medical help until it is too late, for fear of cost, or absence of clinics in their counties. There are the homeless who have a high percentage of underlying conditions.

This way: Community

We should say it out loud: those who are deemed disposable are, for the most part, poor, uneducated, deprived of resources, and, in the US, all that is correlated with being black or brown. You think I’m making this up? Look at yesterday’s comments from the Republican right after our dear leader started to get impatient with the duration of the shut-down: here is but one example

Or the Texas Governor suggesting that lots of grandparents would be willing to die to rescue the economy for their grandchildren (never mind that 3.6 million children are raised by their grandparents in this country…) – an expendable group is identified.

This way: Grace

Our task, then, first and foremost, seems to me to identify who is in power, who employs necropolitics, and who benefits from them. That is where the first change has to be forced, by putting someone else at the helm. Secondly we have to pinpoint the underlying economic systems that have enthroned their representatives for their purposes, and figure out how they can be shifted towards a more just and balanced distributions of our communal resources. We can no longer rely on a patchwork of individual support, non-profits, mutual aide societies who try at alleviate the worst of the suffering. Structural change is the only thing that will save us. Quite literally save us, as it turns out.

This way: Back home to write about it all…..

Music today are cheerful African acoustic tunes (Happy birthday, Lieblingsschwester!)

And Rest in Power: Cameroonian Jazz legend Manu Dibango has died from Covid-19 at age 86. Here is his 1972 hit, “Soul Makossa

Wait, Charmain!

Or was it Charmin? Cotonelle? One of these names starting with a C.

Why let a good crisis go to waste? We might as well learn something psychologically interesting. I will not be able to do anything other than speculate about the hoarding of toilet paper – and speculate I shall. But I do have something to say about the psychology of disgust, which, as it turns out, comes often into play when people are facing epidemics.

(As an anti-dote, photographs today are the most enticing things you can imagine, Trilliums, the harbingers of spring, although, they, too, are white…)

We are actually not seeing hoarding of those toilet paper rolls in any clinical sense of the disorder. Hoarding (as a psychiatric condition) is defined by a persistent need to save things, serious distress when you have to get rid of them that interferes with your daily life, and clutter in your house to the point where your living space is no longer functional.

All across the world, independent of culture, people are panic-buying the stuff. Not dried meals, canned food, or other staples of the pantry, for the most part. Toilet paper! (And, as it turns out, pot in all of its variations, but that is a story for another day.)

How did we get there? Here are some suggestions: You are worried about safety and in need to feel in control, so you turn toward wanting to be prepared. Buying something big that is relatively inexpensive, doesn’t have an expiration date, so you’ll use it eventually, regardless of what happens, is an attractive option when you think of how you can prepare for potential lock down (people go, in other words, for the zero risk bias.) Once people start buying more than usual, the shelves get emptier. That signals to others that there is competition for something of value, so they pounce, too.

Add social media, that now cajole others to share their toilet paper, or post sometimes truly funny jokes about it, or show their cellphone videos of people physical fighting over it, and the signal gets amplified to the point where there isn’t a person around who doesn’t wonder if they have enough and pack their shopping carts should they be the first at Freddy’s after restocking. The repeat visual messaging clearly inflates a sense of danger and urgency.

It’s not the the actual threat of a dearth of the familiar hygienic wipes, but the fear of unavailability, which then triggers the mass purchases which in turn result in unavailability. The generalized fear of the early buyer leads to object specific panic in those later in the game who then overreact.

It is no coincidence, though, that when we are worried about infection, disease, failing bodily functions etc. we turn to things associated with cleanliness. Threat of illness heightens our aversion to the things that many feel are disgusting, and so we try to control that aspect of our lives.

Research by Paul Rozin at Penn and David Pizarro at Cornell University has provided important insights into the psychology of disgust. Disgust is a universal mechanism to prevent us from contagion. A sense of revulsion makes us shy away from biologically harmful things like vomit, feces, rotting meat and, to a certain extent, insects. (Details can be found here.) With growing populations on this planet, disgust reactions also lead us to shun people who violate the social conventions linked to disgust, or those we think, rightly or wrongly, are carriers of disease.

In fact, disgust however subtly instilled and not even consciously experienced, can change your value judgments. If I show you pictures of disease pathogens and then assess how you view foreign people, Africans or Asians, say, you rate them more negatively than those do who were previously shown non-disgusting stimuli. If I put you in a room that I prepped to smell like a horrible public toilet, you feel more animosity towards groups not your own, homosexuals in particular. Disgust, in other words, is encouraging or aggravating xenophobia and homophobia. (In some experiments people found a correlation between the degree of conservatism and the ease of being disgusted, leading to harsher judgements – the more conservative the greater the disgust, but that seems to work more for homophobia then everything else. I’ll check at some later point if it has been replicated.)

Disgust, once elicited in jurors hearing about vile details of a crime, makes it difficult for them to take into account mitigating factors important in the process of law, such as the intentions of the people involved in a case. Disgust also clouds a juror’s judgement more than feelings of anger.

And disgust, elicited by external forces (I have you watch a really yucky film clip) can make you sell totally unrelated stuff you own – a mug or pens I gifted you earlier – at knockdown prices. The Disgust Disposal Effect makes you want to get rid of stuff somehow associated with your current state, regardless of how little it is related to the source of the disgust.

Here is the 1987 landmark paper by Rozin and Fallon who first explored the emotion and how it might possibly be acquired. Looks like it is culturally transmitted, and young children have to be taught to experience disgust and how to behave towards its objects. Feces are central to the early education, and so it might be not surprising that we see something that is intrinsically associated with the control of feces to emerge as a focus when we are threatened with contamination. Just as we sell cheap when disgust was independently induced, we might buy high and wide when it feels like the purchase might counteract the disgust that is latently plaguing us.

Charmin, here we come!

And here is one of my favorite musicians of all time, with a nicely disgusting portrayal of a common condition…..
Here is more of the album, which I will play today all day.






Go, Stella

Maybe my brain is certifiably going downhill, but I watched this video of Stella, the dog, jumping over and over and over and over into leaf piles yesterday with such fascination and abandon that I actually forgot to worry for the entire 3 minutes of its duration.

I have, as you’ll know if you have followed me for the last years, never posted an animal video, I believe, outside of some scientific demonstrations of the intelligence of crows or some such. But this was what I needed. Joy, pure. Go ahead, roll your eyes already….

It mattered, because I was thinking about animals in two very different, but related contexts: For one, the horrific use of racist language – the Chinese virus, the Kung flu – by people working in our government is just one step removed from the language that comes next: dehumanizing terms that compare people to animals, humans to what is conceived of as subhumans. From a previous blog entry:

Psychological research, originally looking into Nazi use of dehumanizing language in preparation for the Holocaust, has shown that merely listening to it increases the willingness to use violence; some international agencies even consider that kind of naming a precursor to genocide. Once a class of people is dehumanized, the usual compassion and empathy that we extend to fellow human beings is weakened. The part of your brain that controls social relations becomes less active, a physiologically measurable effect when you are exposed to this kind of language. The door to systematic mistreatment is then wide open.

And secondly, I learned about the (differing) roles animals played in the Third Reich, from a by all reports fabulously researched and described new German book by Jan Mohnhaupt, Tiere im Nationalsozialismus. Here is my summary of the book review (not yet in English translation, alas):

The book looks at animals as the daily companions of Nazis, as means of propaganda, as depictions of the enemy and as pest. Horses were seen as heroic, trained to find landmines and boiled to save soldiers from starvation. Potato beetles were intended to be used as a biological weapon to induce starvation in nations at the Eastern front. Brown bear cubs were kept as a source of entertainment for concentration camp wardens, in a “zoo” on site built by inmates. Dogs were seen as part of the master race, cats as Jewish. German Shepherds in particular, represented the purest of German dogs, the idealization of the populist-national race ideologies. Apex animals like lions and wolves (Hitler’s code name was Wolf ) ranked net to ………pigs! Pigs scored high in their fanatical phylogenetic universe, setting a contrast to Jewish custom that declares pigs unclean for consumption.

Jews were soon not allow to keep pets and had to euthanize the ones they already owned, because the Gestapo did not want to deal with them after their owners were deported. Nazi scientists applied knowledge and methodological approaches extrapolated from animal research to humans once the moral borders had shifted toward labeling our own kind as subhumans or human animals. The racial fanaticism managed to elevate some animals above humans, in other words. But it also allowed to engage in plans for genetic “purification,” just like farmers attempted to perfect the breed and purge the coarser element.

This becomes particularly evident if you look at Nazi legislation. (Here is an essay in English that delivers the details.) To summarize, by 1933 laws for the protection of animals and the regulation of slaughter and hunting were passed. Herman Goering announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments” and threatened to “commit to concentration camps those who still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property.” Between Nazi leaders’ affection for animals (Hitler was a committed vegetarian) and enmity towards humans, and the political and ideological purpose served by abolishing the moral distinctions between animals and people the systematic extinction of whole groups of subhumans was just a matter of time.

How is that for downward comparison? Did I make you forget about our own situation for a minute? If not, just watch Stella again!

Yesterday’s walk – you guessed it, Oaks Bottom – served as the background for composing today’s blog. It’s a miracle that so many birds hung out, given that the place was filled with young, noisy families trying to escape cabin fever…

Ach, Emily….

Dickinson, she leaves me confounded. Always. And now this poem, that I have been mulling over for some weeks. What to make of the words below, what do they intend to represent? (You can tell I am still thinking about yesterday’s musings about artists and representation….)

By the Sea

Published 1896 (posthumously)

I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –

And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – opon the Sands –

But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt
And past my Boddice – too –

And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion’s Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –

And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –

Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –

So here is a woman poet, a recluse, who never saw the sea, I am told, writing about her visit. Planning a visit, note, not a walk on the beach, or a look at the water, but an encounter. She left early, thus avoiding being caught by the dark, took the protective dog, sensible precaution if you think this is about a woman out there on her own. She encounters a world just like the one she knows from home, the women at the bottom, the men on top. The mermaids doing what women do so well, looking their sisters over, judging.

The sailors trying to get their hands on you and rope you in – all menacing enough to induce that familiar feeling, being just a little mouse easy to be stepped on in the sand.

A slightly hypnotizing ballad rhythm, interspersed with these long dashes, making you stop and take in what she says.

And then she’s in the water – no man moved her; did she move herself into the waves, slowly going in like so many before her, ready to give up? Or is the ocean approaching, about to drown her, or representing a sexual danger – or enticement – an interpretation frequently offered because of the various items of clothing described in the inevitable rising, items that hint at fetishistic objects? Is the dew drop on a dandelion leaf describing her sense of diminutiveness, fragility, to be devoured by the floods, water returning to water, like dust to dust? Or is it a watery pearl, a metaphor for an altogether different aspect of the female anatomy?

But then she starts to move herself – just like she set out for the visit (remember started in the first line?) she now sets to leave, willing it, with him (the sea took on a personal pronoun) following. Her shoes filled with foam, a precious, pearly gift, or something to weigh her down or a tantalizing allusion to other bodily fluids, she turns her back on the pursuer. He decides to bow out – this time – once she reaches solid ground, anchored in community unfamiliar to his solitary existence.

Death? Desired or inflicted? Sex? Desired or inflicted? A feminist clarion call? I couldn’t care less. The poem whispered something altogether different in my ear in our current situation of unfamiliar danger.

We have a choice.

We can succumb to varying forms and degrees of despair, feeling helpless like little creatures easily crushed. We can give up and step into the devouring vastness of fear, letting it drown us. We can permit the lead of fomenting depression weigh down our shoes. We can allow panic to rise practically to our throats and choke us.

Or we can turn our backs to all that, willing it. There is no guarantee of safety – the sea – be it our fears, sadness or the pathogen itself – might not be willing to bow out the next time. But here and now, we can start to step back from it, both literally and metaphorically, and turn our eyes to the solid town, the community of friends, neighbors and strangers, who can act in solidarity (albeit in physical distance) to get us all through this, if not make us safer. We can focus on increasing support for those in need instead of catastrophizing. We can organize or be part of a movement that will carry the lessons we learn during crisis into a reshaping of our society for the better in the long run.

I know those words are more easily written than enacted. I have days where I barely make it out of bed. But we can alternate – on days where I am low, you can lift me up, and I’ll do the same on other days for you.

We can refuse to be a mouse!

So what happened to the dog – so prominently mentioned in the very first line and disappeared ever since as if protection was but an illusion?

Why, modeling social distancing, of course!

Where’s Milo???

Here is Copland’s music for some of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Hang in there, folks!

Silence, golden?

So here is a dilemma: do I listen to the advice of my Beloved who insists that art shouldn’t come with an instruction manual? Or do I listen to the urging of friends to provide extensive explanations for my, admittedly, often complex photomontages? Do I tease with titles? Rely on short introductory artist statements? Write up lengthy descriptions of individual works?

Montages today from an old series (S)Elective Affinities Here: Water Rats

It is not just a theoretical question. I have two exhibitions coming up, with two very different series, and quite a body of work. (Details attached below.) With no introduction whatsoever you can have the most personal encounter with an image possible, defined by your own visual pleasure or your own thoughts evoked by the piece. Will you miss something? Perhaps. Will you understand what I was trying to accomplish? Maybe. Will your reaction be influenced by some extraneous manipulations? Definitely not.

On the other hand, does it help to understand the context of the larger body of work to decipher this or that meaning? You bet. Do textual references enable you to understand the framework and relations to art-historical elements? I’d say. Can I smuggle concepts and ideas into your head that guide your perception? Count on it.

La Couturière

It is all about manipulating attention.

I’ll save the truly fascinating, larger topic of attention research for some other day and focus on the basics today relevant to the questions above.

In the simplest of terms, attention is a mechanism that relies on multiple control mechanism. The exogenous control of attention comes from stimuli in the environment that trigger your attention automatically – the streaking movement perceived from the corner of your eye that has you look to where it came from. The piercing noise that alerts you whether your like it or not. A sudden burst of color that grabs you. A design of a page that draws your eye to a certain position. Something is literally grabbing your attention, hard, if not impossible, to resist.

Parallel to that we can control much of our attention endogenously, choosing where to look and what to process on the basis of what holds meaning for us, what we are trying to find, or what we expect to see or when to see it. (This, by the way, is what makes experts so good at perceiving in their field of expertise: they know where to attend at what point in time, which is crucial for events unfolding in time – think referees at a sports competition or mothers catching the kid at the moment where it falls off the play-structure.

The Analysis

Back to art: If I put a concept into your head, by alluding to something, or simply asking a question, or showing you hints that trigger stereotypes, you will attend to the work in front of you trying to integrate what you see with what you ponder. Here is the classic demonstration (Yarbus, 1967) by a Russian psychologist who used one of the very first eye trackers to check where people attended when moving their eyes to various locations on a given stimulus.

He asked subjects to look at a reproduction of a Russion oil painting An Unexpected Visitor painted by Ilya Repin in 1884, with different questions in mind, provided by the experimenter. The conditions included [1] examine the painting freely. [2] estimate the material circumstances of the family. [3] assess the ages of the characters [4] determine the activities of the family prior to the visitor’s arrival. [5] remember the characters’ clothes. And [6] surmise how long the visitor had been away from the family.

As you can see the patterns of eye movements (the black lines going back and forth) to explore the painting was dramatically different from condition to condition, with your “set” or assumptions about the potential discovery guiding your attention.

Here is an overlay of 2 question conditions and the recorded eye movements onto the actual color reproduction, making the differences even clearer (work by Sasha Archibald) (free examination at center, question about material circumstances of the family to the right.)

And here is of course the trick: only those things you attend to will get fully processed in your visual system, and potentially put into your memory stores. Unattended input might linger on some low levels of the processing hierarchy but will soon end up in the dustbin with all the other junk our brains discard. Details that might have significance will be simply overlooked if we were not conceptually driven to check them out. That might be of crucial importance if you are called as an eyewitness. But it also might affect how you embrace or understand a work of art, particularly if it is detailed and representational.

The Director

Then again, you might share the opinion of one half of our current household: I either like it or not!

Exhibit 1: Tied to the Moon

Stevens-Crawford Heritage House Museum
603 6th St, Oregon City
March – June 2020
Open: Friday – Saturday, 11:00am – 4:00pm
Admission: $5

Artist Reception on March 21st – 11:00 am – 1:00 pm

http://clackamashistory.org

This 2019 photomontage series describes some of the common experiences of women across centuries. Just like our physiologies are tied to the phases of the moon so are we tied through shared life events and states connected to our lives. A lot has changed for women; not enough has changed for women. Giving birth, raising children, aging, being loved or abandoned, being controlled or forging our own path has always been basic to the female experience. Finding solace among sisters or competing for scraps as rivals was often part of our existence. Curiosity, skepticism, learning and rebelling had to be fought for. Longing, dreaming and hope were part of the way.

Exhibit 2: Postcards from Nineveh

Oregon Coast Council for the Arts

Newport Visual Arts Center – 777 NW Beach Drive, Newport, OR 97365

March 7 – April 25, 2020

Artist Reception March 14, 1:00 – 5:00 pm, talk at 4:00 pm

On display is a new (2020) series of works that combine photographed snippets of 17th-century Dutch paintings of whaling expeditions along with contemporary environments.  It calls for attention to environmental stewardship at a time where nature is under threat. The title is a play on Jonah (the one swallowed by a whale) who was a reluctant prophet, ignored by the people of Nineveh. We, on the other hand, should listen to clarion calls about the need to protect our oceans and fish populations.”

Here is a piece of music by Arvo Pärt where silence commands everything around it. (For more examples of composers using silence, go here.)