Month: November 2018

Ball Lightning

~ graham best

I often use my intuition to select my next read. One advantage of that approach is how it protects and honors the plot. I don’t arrive at the book already aware of everything it will be about, but rather discover the story as it unfolds, as most authors intend.  In the case of “Ball Lightning” by Cixin Liu, that discovery process paid high dividends.  The book actually altered my perception of Reality in a lasting way, as great science fiction best serves to.  I would like to preserve the possibility of that outcome for you, so this review will also be an exercise in discretion regarding spoilers.  I am not going to give away the brilliant surprises and wonderfully weird expressions of poetic license that occur along the way. With the hope of inspiring interest, I will simply note that they shine—at times incandescently.

It’s a fitting metaphor for a book about lightning.  Is this book about lightning?  Like lightning itself, that plot point flashes forward as the clear foreground concern for the reader. It carries the story. But it also opens the story into surrealist science.  If only to enjoy greater familiarity with a rare meteorological phenomenon, one does well to participate vicariously in the suspenseful investigation performed here, as if the book is detective fiction and the electricity laboratory is the crime scene.  That said, this lightning is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.  It defies the laws of Physics; it leaves no fingerprints; and its aloofness is otherworldly.  Meanwhile, its primary attraction to each of the main characters is also so painfully personal that the novel accomplishes a satisfying pathos in its final chapters. You likely won’t see it coming even as I suggest it will.

One further pleasure for me was how the novel slowly matches form with content regarding its most ambitious theme.  Let’s say you decided that the nature of Reality was not solely objective and quantifiable, but also had a great deal to do with the observer who is taking the measurements.  Let’s say you entertained the hypothesis that the observer is part of the reason the observed even happens in the first place, and how it happens.  If you happen to be writing a novel that invites this kind of philosophical speculation, how terrific would it therefore be if your disclosure of the story transitioned from direct 1st-person narrative to nearly 3rd-person narrative as additional main characters claim the pages, and finally to having one of those characters tell the ending to another for you, so that nothing about the conclusion can avoid the big question of what role observation always plays?  For me, form met content in this manner and the book gained an extra credit point for integrity of storytelling technique.

But far and away the most gripping aspect of “Ball Lightning” for me was how it altered my perception of Reality.  This author affected me that way once before when I read “The Three-Body Problem,” a more recent trilogy of his that eventually cemented him on the map for readers in English.  In both cases, the sequence has been such that 1) I gasped; 2) I momentarily lost my breath; 3) I went blank mentally for several seconds while my thinking reset to permit startling new possibilities; and 4) I broke into a big smile and enjoyed my own eyes as if for the first time.  That effect slowly faded, but never reversed.  The common cause was Liu’s epic connection to scale and his masterful dexterity about destroying it.  For science fiction he is a mad-hatter Lewis Carroll, decanting potent “eat me” and “drink me” potions to the whole universe.    

Caring for Artists

~ graham best

Over the years I have worked with many practicing artists as regular clients at my psychotherapy office. If you are one of them, forgive me this enjoyable general write-up about serving the mental health needs of the artistic community.  I do love to.  If you are not one of them, may you still find some illuminating reading here.  If you want to be one of them, what are you waiting for?  Let’s care for your muse! Actually, let’s care for your muse no matter who you are, because I’ll bet on it that you have one.

You have one, because there are, of course, many ways to be “creative”.  Even restricting creativity to formal expressions of it in “The Arts” is a bit misleading about the role daring self-expression plays; can play; and best plays in everyday life.  But the great thing about working with Artists who more or less identify with that title is that their chosen practice of creativity puts the general principles of all creativity into high relief, the better to examine, emulate, and encourage in everyone.  I have banked a lot of time with artists as a teacher and counselor.  I ended up in those roles by first being an artist myself.  

What does all that connection to the art process show me? Firstly, that the art process is in fact exactly that: a process. For the muse to inspire most, it requires an orientation of deep involvement.  One does best to love the process itself.  One must train oneself to prioritize the experience of making the art as the paramount concern, not secondary to reaching the results.  Imagine if you behaved that way in your daily life. Imagine the flow of ordinary experience as captivating and meaningful, just because it is happening, not because it leads anywhere or resolves anything.  With that point of view, you are likely to hear the joyful laughter of your muse in your heart, and laugh along with it.

Artistic practice also accelerates or refines one’s contact with the obstacles we all have to face if we want to find personal growth and well-being. It is a precious crucible in this fashion.  The things we all put in our own way on the road to contentment come sharply into focus in the pure reflective surface of regular artistic activity.  Artists promptly and inevitably grapple with the deepest human questions pertaining to self and the world.  Am I good enough?  How do I fit in overall? How is it possible not to and why is that interest valuable and necessary? What purpose do I serve?  Who and what am I underneath what I presently assume about myself?  That last one is where art admits its own purpose as a spiritual quest.  I suggest it is one, if we are calling it Art.

This suggestion is ultimately why creativity and psychotherapy marry so well.  As artists build real commitment to their craft, they meet its chief  requirement to open themselves more and more deeply.  These openings are not incremental for the personality, but typically dissolve it to varying degrees. That clearing function is liberating, but also daunting, and it operates best with good company to support and affirm it.  The artist is not going through something other people never will or never can, but often going there faster, and much more unmistakably.  When artists know and embrace that aspect of their situation, the stakes then multiply further.  So too does the creative contact with life.

 

Growth & Grieving

~ graham best

Imagine for a second that you and I are replaying an early moment in the history of Psychotherapy. Let’s use the original wording from that period and say that one of us is the analyst and the other is the patient. Our method for this pretend session will be word association: the analyst states a series of seemingly random words and the patient responds to each one by stating the first thing that comes up, sincerely if possible. Although we might engage this way for hours, the following pairing still stands out for us as one of the more haunting ones: when one of us says “growth”, the other solemnly responds “grieving.”

That pairing is jarring because of how we customarily regard these two ideas. We think of growth as something positive, implying gains, while grieving, because it is painful and involves major loss, more often figures as something negative. Except for that possible link between them as characteristic antonyms, why associate one with the other? Why juxtapose growth and grieving? Their apparent incongruity makes a good case against uniting them at all. The case in favor of uniting them rests on its possible higher alignment with common experience.

When people grow, they often grieve. I see it all the time in my psychotherapy practice. For me that timing for grieving gives a stamp of authenticity to the growth, as if sealing it in place. One explanation might be that a process we all understand and accept when we see it in one direction is simply happening in the other direction, but no less sensibly. That is, we expect grief to come first. When we lose something, we grieve our loss. Then when the grieving finishes, the inner space becomes available for expansion and growth to refill us. Does this process have to take place in that order? No, not really. When people start new relationships to get over a prior one or whenever they unexpectedly break down in tears while things are going very well, the process expresses in reverse.

But I think there’s more to it than sequence. I think growth brings out grieving because once we have grown in some way, we have moved to a new vantage point from which our past becomes clearer. When we then look back on who we were before the growth took place, we see how that former self painfully lacked what the new self now contains. For instance, when one of my clients gains greater capacity for setting personal boundaries, that new habit further clarifies for the client how he or she has been living without sufficient boundaries until now, and the costs. There is terrible pain to reckon with in that accounting of the past. There is typically a sense that a lot of time has been lost, that opportunities for deeper living have been missed or misused. Sometimes trauma surfaces, as if for the first time. Grieving such losses, actual or imagined, is one way we claim our new growth as something highly significant.

Take a moment to reflect on times when you have grown in some way. Maybe you graduated from a challenging course of study. Maybe you made a bold move to take your life to the next level. Maybe your heart opened more deeply to relationship and love. Maybe your spiritual path became more compelling in quality. In every case, one aspect of your expanded capacity will be its power newly to illuminate how you did not access that capacity before, and how painful it may seem in retrospect to have lived out of touch with it. The grief from that reflection need not be a problem or a strike against success. Rather, it usefully corroborates that personal evolution has taken place for you. It is simply part of being human that rich expressions of emotion usually punctuate our most expansive experiences.

The Nietzsche Effect

~ graham best

The 2012 release of American Nietzsche by University of Wisconsin Madison History professor Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen adds a rich new layer of scholarship to the life and work of modernity’s most volatile philosopher. The Nietzsche we meet in the early pages of this book is not simply the upstart hooligan of brash ideas against Christianity and late Western morality in toto, but before then a rare kindred spirit of Ralph Waldo Emerson, among America’s greatest and most original reflective voices. In this book readers learn that young Nietzsche deeply revered Emerson and we see photographic evidence that his encounter with Emerson involved overflowing marginal notes in all personal copies of his work.

But these Emersonian origins for Nietzche’s mammoth mission in Philosophy are not the primary reason for including the word American in the title of this book. The majority of the chapters center, instead, on how Nietzsche influenced American thinking, not how American thinking influenced him. Ratner-Rosenhagen takes us on a sweeping tour of Nietzsche’s critical reception in America by every kind of reader from theologians to pulp fans. We follow Nietzsche’s impact on American thinking from his first days of publication, through the sudden termination of his career and sanity, through his isolated death in 1900, and into the intellectual upheavals and wipe outs of the 20th century, many his offspring.

It becomes painstakingly clear on this journey that Nietzsche sent shock waves of every kind into the heart of the American experience, consistently forcing it to reckon with its own needs, limitations, and hypocrisies. Time and again the reader encounters electrified examples of how unrelated readers yearned for some aspects of Nietzsche’s message, yearned against other aspects, and frequently struggled to make universal sense of the message at all, never reaching easy consensus. The Nietzsche who distills out of this treatment is the quintessential version: challenger, motivator, hero, hellion, and icon. Ratner-Rosenhagen aptly notes that the common factor in all encounters with the explosive work of Friedrich Nietzsche by thinking Americans is that for all of them it became undeniably personal.

As if true in secondary form, that effect occurred for me also while reading this book. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s detailed examination of what mattered to Americans and to what ends they employed, resonated, and objected to Nietzsche made for lively reading, as if inviting me into the same situation. I found myself taking a deeper interest in the fact of being interested in Nietzsche at all, and about what my interest in him reflected about my position in the world as a reader and an American. In fact, after finishing this book, I have a new urge to coin a phrase about Nietzsche, all credit for the assist to Ratner-Rosenhagen. My new phrase is “the Nietzsche effect” and its primary meaning is that Nietzsche brings forward the urgent philosopher in all of us. If for no other reason, reading this book is worthwhile if only to better inhabit yours.

But for the intellectually curious, I also recommend it as a profoundly informative rhapsody on the philosophical stakes of defining America and the nature of Meaning across the revolutionary historical expanse of the 20th century. The book clarifies in many ways how deeply embedded Nietzsche is in the intellectual and spiritual trajectory of the species at present, a fact of which he was well aware, far in advance of full recognition of it by anyone else, coloring his self-assessments as outrageously egomaniacal , bombastic, and strange. Still: he was right! Nietzsche first called out the moral and creative decline of the human spirit under the influence of stale institutions whose secret agenda is a universal will to power. In many ways, this revelation dovetailed well with the American quest for personal liberty, even when confronting it for its gall or lack of gall. This book illuminates that process.

The Alien at The End of This Book

~ graham best
“How humiliating…” — Grover

You may already know of Carl Gustav Jung. You may know him fairly well. Still, you may be surprised to find out he did enough exploratory writing pertaining to UFO’s for a collected work on that subject: Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. It’s a very good read, although it may not answer the obvious question do flying saucers exist or not. Instead, it offers a uniquely Jungian point of view on that idea, expanding limited notions of what existing really means.

OK, a short confession. I came across this book because I was wondering lately about how much I would like there to be proof of extraterrestrial life. That yearning operates cyclically for me. Sometimes I feel it, sometimes I don’t. Over the last few months I was feeling it like gangbusters. I noticed I was watching a lot of UFO documentaries with an insatiable appetite for them. By the way, they are best in the hours after midnight as a replacement for sleep, doubling their dreaminess. I wanted to know what the heck was getting into me with this behavior.

The main suggestions proposed by Jung really helped. They resonated with me. They elicited that special reaction that feels like the ring of truth: simultaneous surprise and recognition. I said, “Wow, I agree. It feels true.” Should I tell you what Jung talks about? Not before warning you that I’m about to. If for any reason a spoiler at this point is not to your liking, stop reading right here. As Grover warns in The Monster at the End of this Book: don’t turn the page. If you do, there’s a monster at the end of this paragraph. It won’t be Grover. Or will it?

Who’s still reading? For those who are, here’s the bottom line. Jung describes how the human psyche typically deals with material it has not been able to assimilate by projecting an external symbol, as if communicating something that way. UFOs are that external symbol. They are projections of the human psyche, based on material it has not been able to incorporate. They are also compensatory, which means they contain the attempt to put something back in balance. What exactly is out of balance is where this theory most compelled me.

On the subconscious level, suggests the theory, we are all profoundly affected by the perilous state of human affairs on Earth. We are all well aware in our souls, but not as completely in our conscious minds, that our species has created the capacity to render itself extinct through nuclear war, but lacks the maturity to safeguard us against that foolish outcome. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were two actual examples of going in that direction. Since then, there has been a cold war, stockpiling nuclear weapons. Smaller countries have joined the global arms race. Countless detonations have occurred in the name of practicing. At this time the political climate on Earth is anything but reassuring of human safety and survival.

This danger manifests within us as a profound helplessness and fear. Then, according to Jung, our psyche responds by compensating for it. Because the helplessness and fear are not fully integrated in our conscious lives, the psyche’s response to them won’t be either. It gets projected outside as a meaningful symbol—in this case, the ancient form of the mandala, the symbol of wholeness. By this theory, Jung equates UFO’s with a projected longing in our species for the spiritual and moral wholeness that will be our likeliest salvation in the face of imminent self-annihilation.

Unfolding this argument, Jung goes to great lengths to explicate the uncanny equivalences between mandalas and UFOs . He addresses all the typical UFO characteristics exhaustively, covering exceptions such as cigar-shaped spacecraft and how they relate to the story too. He also connects UFOs to the ways that humans have always looked to the heavens in times of mortal insecurity. The main difference now is simply our greater technology, which therefore influences the content of our projective process like a translation matrix or filter.

Do UFOs exist? Another fascinating part of the book is that Jung ventures some bold ideas about how major archetypal projections tend to take place. He describes how psychic events like these often occur in tandem with physical ones that pertain to them, so we need not rule out one explanation of UFOs for the sake of another. Instead, we can view all the explanations as occurring together. Calling it Synchronicity, Jung sees this process of meaningful coincidence as a hallmark trait of important psychological revelation. He therefore invites us to expand our thinking: let it include opposing ideas, such as real and projection, because they need not contradict each other and are not necessarily incompatible.

Ubik? U Bet!

~ graham best

Philip K. Dick wrote Ubik in 1969, well into his career, perhaps as its acme; the storytelling and reality-bending are that good. In 2009 the book found its rightful place on Time Magazine’s list of the 100 greatest novels since 1923, not that Dick fans needed that validation. The road to fandom with Philip K. Dick can strike like lightning or creep up on you slowly. Once you’re on it, the originality and genius of sci-fi’s modern master loom ever larger.

Why wouldn’t they? Frequently enough, Dick infuses his work with philosophical interests of vital importance to him at the time of writing. In the case of Ubik, he was deeply engaged by the Tibetan Book of the Dead (aka the Bardo Thodol), which basically maps the terrain that consciousness travels after death during the bardo state, the interval between death and one’s next rebirth, a Buddhist point of view involving reincarnation and how to manage it wisely.

Assuming its own spin on that system, Ubik presents a near future in which psychic abilities have a corporate presence in the world, and big business depends on talented mediums both for gaining an upper hand on competitors and for protecting against surveillance by them. All the active characters in the book are part of a dominant company that offers such protection: Runciter Associates. Together, they stumble into a giant misadventure that warps all notions of living versus limbo.

That skillful erosion of assumed reality is where Ubik really shines. It simultaneously puts its cast and its readers through a disorienting discovery process with no obvious resolution ahead, raising plentiful questions along the way. You may find yourself asking how safe it really is to trust the things you are typically entirely certain about, such as being who you think you are in the life you think you lead. Because the book is also very funny, it somehow elicits this grave introspection in a way that feels playful and liberating, not morose or heavy. Yes, the word “grave” in the prior sentence is a smashing good pun.

Do I recommend this book? Yes. If you want to go for a superlative ride in the fine mind of an American master at the top of his game, Ubik is a unique sci-fi offering that perfectly combines philosophical sophistication with pulp sensibilities. It leaves no loose ends in terms of answering to its own suspense, yet the answers it provides also touch on greater metaphysical speculation. In fact, the ending is so correct that it fully cements the novel’s resident spirituality. I read this book again immediately after finishing it. I might thrice.

Following Dreams

~ graham best

The various lectures and writings by Carl Jung collected under the title Dreams share a common theme, but explore it in different ways. The opening chapters are by far the most accessible, treating the reader to a view of how Jung’s ideas evolved in regard to dreams, moving from respectful consideration of Freudian theory to eventual outright rejection of it as far too limiting for its fixations on sexuality, defense mechanisms, and personal liability. In the end Jung simply cannot be content to kowtow to his former mentor’s ideas. As a big fan of Jung, I cherished this glimpse into the early phases of his individuation process.

I also enjoyed how the collection further illuminates many of Jung’s most profound contributions to Psychology, while focusing on dreams as the primary subject. The book therefore invites the reader to consider the Collective Unconscious, Major Archetypes, Psychic Compensation, and Individuation as they pertain to dreaming. Throughout his career, Jung stated quite plainly that he regarded dreams the best investigative tool for the human psyche, because they operate outside the influence of the conscious mind and directly express the unconscious in full regalia. It is therefore no wonder a book dedicated to his work on dreams inevitably involves most of his key theories. It also reveals his pioneering commitment to the vital importance of Subjectivity as the most valid form of personal authority, while global calamities were dogging the flailing 20th century.

Then the second half of the book throws you farther into the deep end. Jung presents a sequence of roughly 50 dreams, derived from 300 by one dreamer, that illustrate the individuation process and its thematic use of mandala symbolism as the Archetype of perfection and wholeness. The fact that Jung chases out a full narrative of major inner growth and development in the dreamer by means of the dreams is deeply fascinating, and also challenging to follow. There is some risk of losing the forest for the trees as Jung goes to painstaking length to connect details from each dream with highly arcane historical parallels from ancient sources that get no easier for the reader as they come forward in time. In fact, the emphasis on the relatively recent medieval practice of alchemy may provide the hardest precedent to follow from the bunch. That said, the attempt to often rewarded me and then blew my mind on multiple levels.

Are you wondering how? The following story is the kind of thing that can happen when your heart, mind, and spirit open more to Jung, in my opinion. At first, as I was reading this book, I sensed that his ideas were making an even deeper impression on me than they had in the past. They seemed to be moving from intellectual resonance to something more pressing, as if imparting a felt-sense to me of a collective unconscious in which I had a real hereditary share. I started taking it very seriously that there is so much more to me than my ego consciousness and that the deeper parts are ancient, autonomous, and vastly intelligent. I began to feel something akin to transformation.

So this morning I took time to meditate for over an hour as a way of appreciating and nurturing the Unconscious, passively surrendering to it, my eyes closed, my body perfectly still in a sitting posture, my hands folded, my breathing slow and steady. I gently let go of my thinking process and simply rested. Unprocessed emotions came and went. Deeper relaxation set in. I was not expecting anything else. Nor needing it. It was enough to take and enjoy a good meditation. Ahhh….

In that state, an unsolicited synthesis percolated in me that while Jung was analyzing mandalas in the dream series, he had often pointed out that in many dreams the dreamer had typically crafted or found a protective space in the shape of a square in which to commune with Archetypal aspects of self. Inside each sacred square the dreamer encountered mandala symbolism of many kinds, but always spherical or circular like mandalas, symbolizing the wholeness that can result from integrating the Unconscious. This memory about the book then gave way to the sudden understanding that I too was sitting on a square meditation mat and directly beneath me was my round sitting pillow. Those items were my version of the dreamer’s sacred square with its inner mandala, while they were also a traditional spiritual commonplace that has always secretly corresponded to archetypal longings in the self. This sudden conflation of experiential and historical layers profoundly impacted me. At the end of the meditation I recognized the Collective Unconscious as a living truth.

Then I set out for the morning to tutor two students before doing sessions at a therapy clinic. After a thorough review of some homework difficulties, I asked the second student to look at our long list of Algebra goals and tell me which one he wanted to work on for the next 30 minutes. Without looking, he promptly replied, “It’s time to work on circles.” I showed him that—what do you know?—I already had a worksheet open for that topic, because it had come up with the prior student also. As I demonstrated for the second time that morning how to turn a jumbled binomial equation into the helpful standard formula for a circle, the name of the technique for this process hit me like a thunderbolt: completing the square! For two hours since my meditation epiphany, I had again been doing something pertaining to circles that called for surrounding them with “squares,” the math wording expressing the dream concept. This unlikely additional echo fired goosebumps all over my body and I lost the ability to speak for nearly 15 seconds, my hand in the air to reassure my student, who waited patiently. I have no doubt I owe my new sensitivity to these revelations to reading the dream book.

Gestalt Psychology: Got Boundaries?

~ graham best

Gestalt Psychology arose in the cultural climate of the United States in the 1960’s, an era famed for the Summer of Love in San Francisco and the massive concert at Woodstock in upstate New York. It was a time of upheaval and radical reorientation across the whole country. A trend of conformity and extreme conservatism from the 1950’s gave way to its own worst nightmare: outrageous self-expression. Nothing was safe against the new point of view, including Psychology.

Until that time the Freudian model of psychoanalysis dominated the clinical scene. If you wanted to have therapy, you entered into a relationship of doctor and patient that functioned on the premise that doctors will figure out what is wrong with you—that is, analyze you—and then explain that information to you to bring about your cure. People sometimes call this paradigm the medical model for its similarity to many medical practices, which often place exclusive authority in the doctor, relegating the patient to a passive recipient of expertise.

This paradigm contradicted the times. Or more precisely, the times contradicted this paradigm, and eventually replaced it with an alternate view of the relationship between therapist and client, self and other, self and the world. In his first book, “Ego, Hunger, and Aggression”, Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, outlines a very different point of view for these pairings. In early versions, the book bore the subtitle “A Revision of Freud’s Theory and Method”, emphasizing that this material was a conscious departure from the status quo. In later printings, the subtitle came into its own with an emphasis on “spontaneous personal encounter”. Imagine that possibility as a way of living.

The book introduces and explores the core concepts of Gestalt Psychology. One of them is a principal theory about contrast: all qualities depend on their opposites. For instance, there is no hot without cold, no up without down, no here without there. It seems simple at first, but apply it to your thinking about the nature of self and things get pretty interesting. If that experience also depends on its opposite, there will not be self without other. So many problems on Earth derive from attempting to obliterate other and here we have a philosophy that pronounces it indispensable instead. That kind of opening bodes well for diversity, difference, and mutual appreciation.

It also leads into many deep and related areas, such as organismic self-regulation, which is a name Perls uses for homeostasis, the process by which living things interface successfully with their environment, a consideration that brings the nature of the contact between self and not-self into high relief. As Perls makes clear, that contact happens exclusively at the boundary between self and surroundings. He also describes the core disturbances to contact, laying the ground work for the Gestalt therapeutic model. The model posits the areas of contact as workable boundaries, and views their presence or absence, along with their quality or lack of quality, as the determining factors in whether one suffers or thrives in one’s life. Satisfying boundaries equal sound living.

This first formal installment in Gestalt Psychology is an emergent tour de force. It offers a broader and more comprehensive picture of the human condition than had preceded it in the world of therapy, in part because it is fundamentally a holistic philosophy at its core. Its devoted emphasis on systems thinking places human beings in a very wide context and elevates what it can mean to be healthy and intact, to be human at all. Many of the book’s core ideas have implied origins in prior recorded wisdom traditions, such as Taoism and Zen, among others. These venerable roots feed the book’s specialized applications to individual psychological well-being.

Van Gogh: Why Suicide?

~ graham best

This recent biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith contains a very rich reconstruction of what Vincent Van Gogh’s life was like. There is a lot of great new material about his crucial relationship with his brother Theo, who worked in an art gallery and often supported Vincent in his artistic journey. I recommend this book to any fan of the famed Dutch post-impressionist painter, especially if you are seeking inspiration about finding your calling and expressing devotion to it with your whole self.

The book became a bestseller on account of its controversial appendix, which questions whether Vincent’s death was a suicide, as critics often contend. The authors gather a lot of missing data about the final period of Vincent’s life in Auvers-sur-Oise in northern France. They flesh out Vincent’s relationships at that time and clarify that several people there targeted him as a freak, especially the older brother of a student friend of his.

In the alternate version of Vincent’s death, that brother, discovered to like playing cowboy, is the owner of a faulty gun that often misfires, and the townspeople are well aware of the situation. One day Vincent goes to paint in the fields and happens into these brothers, using the gun. The older brother teases him, as ever. The gun goes off by accident. Vincent takes a shot to the gut, stumbles home, where he lays in bed for two days, at first believing he’ll recover. Two days later it is clear he will not and he finally answers persistent questions about what happened by saying, “No one shot me.”  Ostensibly a direct quote, that remark in itself belies a certain urge in the speaker to cover something up.

I include this book in my reviews section because of this alternate ending. It raises questions about not only the facts, but human nature. Many people object to this reinterpretation of how Vincent died. There is a stubborn glamorization and romanticizing of suicides among suffering artists, as if that act is somehow a fitting end for a tortured soul. Vincent’s mental health struggles and voluntary residence in at least one asylum make him perfect fodder for that treatment. What do you think? Do you think a new vision of Vincent’s death as an accident reduces his legacy or biography?

Personally, I feel the new circumstances elevate his story. As Vincent lays in bed for two days, he comes to understand he is not going to recover. As his life concludes, he makes a choice to protect the two boys by saying he shot himself. In this light, his final earthly act is an expression of deep compassion and a wish to spare the two young men a needless criminal investigation, especially the younger brother, who was Vincent’s friend. Facing death, Vincent’s compassion also extends to the person whose hand held the weapon, a terrible accident, more mischief than malice.

To my tastes, for Vincent to claim he shot himself, when in fact he is looking out for the futures of a friend and for his misguided brother, well, the story rings true to me as what Vincent would do, much more true than a suicide does. I see the person who made all those amazing paintings and originally wanted to be a preacher until his own zeal got him canned as the same person who would cover for those boys, and his final cryptic words support the idea. I also find this version of Vincent’s death much more heroic than suicide, and therefore more pleasing. Rather than losing to despair, Vincent let go of his life with a profound and characteristic sentiment of brotherly concern.  Rest in peace, sweet soul.

Love Your Fate

~ graham best

Some very inspiring conversations lately make me want to write about Nietzsche, the 19th-century German philosopher, who declared in a famous vignette called The Parable of the Madman that “God is dead!” By leading with that reference I am not looking to conduct a big discourse on institutional religion at this time, but rather to create a context for exploring Nietzsche’s theory of Eternal Recurrence and its call to abide by an ethic of Amor Fati: love of fate. To see that all these things are completely connected in Nietzsche is to dwell very deeply in his personal vision of life and the human condition. To dwell there with him as a serious exercise about one’s own vision of life is Psychology at its best.

What was Nietzsche driving at with his assertion that God is dead? He was talking about the decline and disintegration of the moral foundations of late Western civilization. Oh, that. Stated alternately, he was calling attention to how human beings make moral claims and pointing out that people base those claims on questionable foundations. For Nietzsche, morality did not come into the world through infallible divine agency as an absolute and eternal standard to guide proper living, but rather arose out of the human agendas of the people curating the moral code, if not outright creating it in their own interest. By stating God is dead, Nietzsche was announcing about the moral climate in sway over western civilization since the rise of Christianity that humanity must move on to a new vision. He imagined that transition as a needful evolution for the species.

Such is the context for Nietzsche’s infamous portrait of the Ubermensch, a so-called over-man, who sees beyond the crumbling foundations of the morality around him and leaves them behind as useless and untenable, called instead to develop his own vision of proper living based primarily on personal truth. Taking on that challenge is the new road to authenticity and self-realization, according to Nietzsche. He preaches on its behalf through the visionary hero of his most prophetic and artistic work Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a new bible of sorts for an age losing its last one. The replacement, however, is not like for like, but a sea change of the highest order, involving maximum self-responsibility and personal reflection. That universality about truth and ethics is a fiction is only the starting point, leading powerfully inward.

It would not be a stretch to regard Nietzsche as an advance expression of many of the 20th century’s most revolutionary developments. Prepare for some bold claims in that regard. For instance, when Albert Einstein shifted Physics from its Newtonian center to a paradigm of Relativity, he was accomplishing a fundamentally Nietzschean coup, turning Time itself into something malleable. When we use the word Postmodern to capture the breakdown of any unifying structure binding culture together, we may just as plausibly say Post-Nietzschean instead, since he forged and landed that hammer. In Psychology, when we note that hierarchical models such as Freudian Analysis led to more egalitarian approaches involving client-centered emphasis, we are noting the influence of Nietzsche that authority resides within each subjective self only. Nor is there another or better home for it elsewhere.

For Nietzsche that discovery opened a thought experiment called The Eternal Recurrence of the Same. He imagined a situation in which a demon comes to you with the shocking factual pronouncement that you will live every detail of your present life over again into the future infinite times without the slightest biographical variation, and that you have already lived it that way infinite times in the past. This airtight loop has the potential drawback that whatever you lament most about your choices and destiny are indelibly written into it and any longing for one iota to be otherwise is an impossible folly. In fact, that longing is the source of all suffering. Nietzsche imagines most people will gnash their teeth and fall into abject despair at this news. On the other hand, he also offers the radical invitation that what the demon has told you is the best thing you could ever hope to hear.

At this point personal psychology enters the situation. Why is the demon’s suggestion good news? How could it be? Because it positions the listener to reorient in the direction of maximum life and vitality. If, by Nietzsche’s reckoning, someone rejoices at the prospect of living the same life repeatedly without changing anything at all, that person is saying the most categorical Yes to existence. Such was Nietzsche’s vision of the best possible life: one which looks adversity in the eye and says I know and affirm your necessity too. I say yes to you to say yes to myself. Ostensibly the benefits of this attitude are the liberation of the deepest creative powers that humans can attain and a more thoroughgoing expression of one’s potential in the world. Of course they are. Through acceptance emerges craft.

Nietzsche’s commitment to this ideal drew him to the Latin phrase Amor Fati, a love of Fate. That word has many associations for people, such as the oppressive and often painful play of circumstances. For Nietzsche it meant turning that point of view on its head so that even the hardest part of one’s experience, or especially the hardest parts, are the forge from which to shape one’s best self. Imagine doing so for a moment. Try to see yourself saying Yes to every disagreeable feeling within you and all persistent obstacles you encounter and have encountered, not because you are helpless against them, but from real appreciation of their essential role in your highest development. Become the willing and active participant in your own evolution. Love your fate, not as a verdict against you, but in order to shape it. The more you love its muck, the more influence you will gain over it into the future.

As a final consideration, think about applying this vision on a wider basis, not only as a personal psychology, but also as a worldview. Try it out. Look at the world (or the whole universe) as the operation of necessity, as Fate. See about the world that absolutely everything is interdependent to such an extent that none of what you like about it exists without what you don’t. I’m not suggesting a resignation about the undesirable parts, but rather a genuine appreciation of them that goes infinitely further in quality and integrity than a sustained aversion and lopsided disposition ever will. From this new worldview, diversity becomes clearly inevitable and, if you can see it that way, very beautiful. Even that which contradicts the beholder’s natural subjective biases gains an exhilarating attraction as the ceaseless coming forth of creativity in life, affirming all creativity, including one’s own. The agent of Amor Fati affirms the world and the self as a unity.