The Wave in the Mind

Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite science fiction writers, so it's probably no surprise that I also really enjoy her non-fiction.  I read No Time to Spare, her reflections on aging, apropos of her death in 2018.  This collection of essays focuses mainly on the mystery and craft of writing.  The title comes from a letter that Virginia Wolf wrote to a friend when she was suffering from "writer's block".  She felt the characters and story were like an onrushing wave in her mind that was unable to break into words for lack of an appropriate rhythm.  It's an appropriate title since quite a number of the essays are concerned with rhythm in both poetry and prose.  From the perspective of someone who writes a lot, these are pretty fascinating.  They're complemented by several related paeans to reading aloud that are enough to make one want to press a street urchin into service just to have an excuse to recite The Lord of The Rings.  While there are plenty of opinions and ideas that would interest a general audience in this collection, I would say that it's squarely aimed at those of us who are both familiar with her work and writer's in our own right.  Even within that Venn diagram, the real focus of the book is on the process of writing fiction, and even the particular story and character driven sort of fiction Le Guin usually writes.  So while her descriptions of how to "pull a story from the air" are inspiring, I wonder whether they apply equally well to the type of more abstract short fiction, inspired by Chiang and Lem and Borges, that I'm most interested in writing.

The Master and His Emissary

A while back I heard interesting things about Ian McGilchrist's massive tome, so I picked up a copy at the cat bookstore just in case I someday managed to get around to it.  Gradually, as my readings in the philosophy of technology began to coalesce around the idea that technical objects nicely illustrate a fundamental dualism in approaching the world, I began to wonder if the book could shed some light on the problem.  On one side we find teleology.  Machines execute fixed goals.  It doesn't matter how complex the goal is, or how sophisticated or flexible the machines' approach to achieving it.  Even the perfect automata still does a particular thing 'automatically'; even self-driving cars still just drive, and the most sophisticated AI chat bot ... chats.  On the other side, we find exploration.  Life establishes new goals.  Which is in a sense to say that it has no true purpose, unless this would be to avoid getting permanently trapped by some impermanent goal.  When we talk about freedom and self-determination we are inherently talking about the living.  The automatic machine is the furthest thing from the self-determining organism.  But the conflation of these two ideas seems to be at the core of many perennial philosophical debates -- there's constantly confusion between determining a self and a self which determines.

Now, when I first heard it, I was intrigued but skeptical of McGilchrist's claim that there is a clear consistent difference between the workings of the right and the left hemispheres of the brain.  Wasn't this sort of facile opposition debunked years ago?  After glancing at his "Preface to the New Expanded Edition" however, in which he speaks convincingly of his more nuanced and updated take on hemispheric difference, I decided to take the plunge.  My thought was to add a different take on the same dualism between means and end, technology and life, matter and spirit.  And McGilchrist definitely develops a dualism related to what we've been talking about, and in this sense the book was relevant to my purposes.  In short, he identifies the Left side of the brain as the part that grasps and manipulates through analysis and abstraction (technology), while the Right side lives the particularity of our emotions and body in the context of a broader world (life). 

Unfortunately, while it certainly reiterates it, McGilchrist doesn't do much to help us further explore this dualism.  This is largely because his book sucks.  I rarely quit reading something halfway through, but there are exceptions, and this is one of them.  This has nothing to do with thinking that McGilchrist is wrong in any factual or philosophical sense.  The problem is that he's ultimately a pretty simplistic thinker who imagines himself as a profound philosopher.  As a result, he wastes an enormous amount of ink cramming his superficial understanding of anything and everything into the same repetitive left-brain-bad-right-brain-good box.  His wild welter of disorganized ideas only acquires a profound gloss though sheer force of reductive repetition; the divided brain is only 'profound' because McGilchrist sees it everywhere.  In this way he succeeds only in reproducing the same long list of antonyms he ridicules in his preface (xii).  Of course, lining up various dualisms in two columns is a temptingly way of making sense of the world because it feels so complete and satisfying.  However, no matter which terms figure in your lists, this style of thinking never even reaches the non-dual depths of understanding why the Force is like duct tape. 

Reading the blurbs and hearing the interviews, one imagines that The Master and His Emissary will be focused mainly on brain science.  After all, the supposed point of the book is the profound importance of the different ways the left and right hemispheres of the brain see the world.  Unfortunately, McGilchrist is no scientist.  And if you read the bio carefully, you discover it carefully skirts the question of whether he's even a medical doctor (look like a BM is the equivalent).  In fact, this is a just a philosophy book with a chapter devoted to summarizing some of the science related to hemispheric differences.  And what a poor summary indeed!  To begin with, despite studying literature, McGilchrist is a terrible writer.  Many many sentences are so bad that I can only imagine the (lack of) grammar results from dictating them.  The editing is atrocious both at the level of the text, and the level of the coherence of the ideas.  The whole thing reads like someone's first draft or working blog, with almost no thought spared for how it (doesn't) carry the reader along.  

Take, for example, this early chapter on the science behind the divided brain.  Now, I've studied some science, in fact even some neuroscience.  I'm also receptive to his overall idea.  And yet McGilchrist doesn't even come close to convincing me that there is coherent pattern to the differences between the left and right hemispheres.  We are told again and again that the difference lies in how they operate, not in what they do.  It's all meticulously footnoted.  But almost none of the studies that demonstrate this difference are explained. McGilchrist simply asserts that this is what the mountain of research tells us.  Trust him, he's cutting through all the inevitable controversy and subtlety that attends interpreting experiments like this and just giving us the overall picture.  For anyone even a little familiar with this area, it beggars belief that his level of generalization is justified by the specific research he summarizes.  But who knows?  Since we don't hear much about the research itself and about how it convinced McGilchrist, how would we ever judge how far he jumped to reach his sweeping conclusions?  We'd have to go read the whole bibliography ourselves and form our own opinions.  This is just terrible writing pure and simple.  It's no way to even talk about science, much less do it.  No, without and argument, there is no science.  That's what science is.  Those are the fucking rules.  So while I can't pass any judgement on whether McGilchrist is right about how the left and right brain work, I can certainly claim that in a hundred pages he said almost nothing to make me believe he was right.

However, as I mentioned, The Master and His Emissary is really a philosophy book masquerading as a book about the brain.  Less than a fifth of the text is devoted to neuroscience.  So perhaps it's not terribly important whether his story about the science is convincing or not.  Could we simply ignore the marketing and read it as philosophy, exactly as I proposed to approach it at the outset?  We were already exploring a dualism that has so many names we're not even sure it's a single dualism.  Maybe another name for the same split is Left and Right, even if these terms have no relation at all to the human brain.  Perhaps the brain is not the issue here dude.  If we read McGilchrist as a philosopher (which is how I imagine he sees himself) does his philosophy of left-right duality help to illuminate some of the deep issues that we've encountered in thinking about technology?

Nope.  McGilchrist is interested in some interesting stuff.  He has a long chapter on the origins of music and language.  He writes about the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Wittgenstein, and his hero Heidegger.  He tells us about the inadequacy of the materialist conception of the world and even outlines a theory of how our dualistic divide can be healed -- Right reabsorbs what it has given to Left in a moment of transcendent aufheben.  But none of his thoughts on these topics is of any more use than his approach to the science.  Everything is treated so breezily, from such a great altitude that it turns into an indistinct mish-mash.  He alludes to all these profound philosophical ideas, but then slurs together many that are so profoundly different.  I mean, do you really think those philosophers I named all shared the same core dualistic system?  Despite the density and range of his text, McGilchrist is incapable of leaving us with anything more than the impression that everything can somehow be reduced to the distinction between Left and Right, Part and Whole.  And of course, the holistic Right turns out to be primary and better in every sense -- ontologically, practically, ethically -- which begs the question of how on earth the Left triumphed in this Manichean struggle.  In the end, his entire thesis is encapsulated in the breathless praise of Hegel's Right-Left-Right pattern (pg 203).  We move from good unity to bad duality back to good unity.  Everything must be mapped onto a schema that doesn't even have four chords. Thus the whole book suffers from something similar to Hegel's encyclopedic obscurantism -- it tries to makes the same simple idea sound profound by endlessly repeating it in fancy language.  But we know there's nothing more boring and more faux profound than the dialectic; it presupposes everything that it pretends to explain and makes a mere illusion of real change.

So I'm going to quit halfway through.  The second half of the book promises to explain how the Left slyly triumphed over its better half.  It's certainly a glaring question given McGilchrist's account.  But at this point I can't imagine his answer would be at all interesting.  And I just can't abide another ramblingly dense yet intellectually insipid 250 pages.

Healing Trauma

The first book in the MahaSati reading list is Peter Levine's Healing Trauma.  Levine has worked extensively with people who suffer from PTSD or sexual trauma and has developed a set of exercises designed to help these folks.  I have to admit that I approached the book with a certain caution because, while trauma seems to have become trendy, I'm quite grateful that my life hasn't felt very traumatic.  Levine, however, insists that we almost all of us have some level of trauma stored in the body.  And in the context of MahaSati training, the point is simply to explore strategies for dealing with reactive patterns stored in the nervous system.  So if you too can find talk of trauma triggering, the ideas may make more sense if you recall that we all have bodies with nervous systems.   Over time these systems acquire many reactions that operate well below our consciousness, and only some of them are useful and adaptive in the present.  'Healing trauma' then could be thought of as nothing more than developing some intentional regulation of our nervous system. 

Levine's book is short, and mainly reads as an extended preface to the exercises he uses in a therapeutic context.  Which is perhaps what makes it a bit unsatisfying from an intellectual perspective.  It could be that he develops a more interesting theory of trauma somewhere else, but here at least there's no real explanation of why these exercises work.  Instead, we really just get a metaphor.  Trauma is what happens to the body of an animal when the natural stress-response mechanisms of flight, flight, or freeze are somehow interrupted in running their course.  Note that it's not these instinctive mechanisms themselves, nor even the life-threatening stress of feeling like prey that lead to trauma.  Trauma is fundamentally the 'stuckness' of being unable to respond to stress in a 'natural' way.  I think it's fair to object that this metaphor doesn't even really rise to the level of being an explanation.  But this objection carries less force when we see how adamant Levine is that trauma is not a psychological but a somatic problem.  If this is true -- if trauma doesn't have much to do with how objectively awful the stimulus was, or how subjectively intense our psychological response to it felt, but is simply a sort of somatic blockage that leads us to repeat fixed reaction patterns -- then it's actually hard to imagine what a better explanation would look like.  Why does the body get stuck?  What causes it to release?  We'd have to ask the body these questions directly, and ignore any psychological story that purports to articulate the body's response.  

It turns out that this is exactly how it feels to do the exercises.  There's a lot of physical shaking, discharge, and energetic flow.  And it doesn't seem to mean anything.  For me at least, this doesn't happen with every exercise, or even with most of them.  But in my experience the ones that do work, work repeatedly, and, as it were, randomly, without any clear sense of understanding why they work or where this energy is coming from.  There's no story, no images or words, there's just energy.  In fact, it's unexplainable enough to make one wonder whether any progress is actually being made.  It gives none of the satisfaction of 'figuring it out' that talk therapy can provide.  It's just ... tension and release.  I trust that over time this is doing something good for me?  At a minimum, these practices do seem to improve awareness of the body.

Just for future reference, here's the list of 12 exercises.

1) Feeling physical boundaries -- tapping, showering, string tracing, massaging

2) Grounding and centering -- feeling feet or sit bones, feeling a pet

3) Resourcing -- listing internal and external resources

4) Focus on positive -- find an object with positive valence and think of positive past moments and feel their effect on you

5) Tracking the effect of thoughts and images on the body (pendulating)

6) Tracking the sensations of guided imagery -- this one requires tracking sensations as you listen to a brief audio story

7) Discharging fight -- feel the desire to push back against and defend by pushing against a partner

8) Discharging flight -- feel yourself running away from a predator by making running in place motions

9) Discharging freeze -- let yourself feel completely slumped, overwhelmed, and in despair, then slowly straighten out of it

10) Feel into the physical sensation of immobility, and then let it pass -- a low level everyday version of 9

11) Orienting -- let yourself look slowly around the room as you find your place in it

12) Settling -- hugging yourself in a series of postures designed to finish discharging energy

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

I enjoyed the Broken Earth Trilogy so much that I must have picked up any other N.K. Jemisin book that was on offer at the cat bookstore.  Unfortunately, as you would expect from someone's debut novel, this one isn't as polished as the later stuff.  Nevertheless, she's still a good storyteller and world builder, who can create complex characters you like enough to be invested in and frustrated by -- even if some of them are gods.