blog du jour

Creativity and schizophrenia

June 28th, 2010

Recently my brother emailed me a link to a very interesting BBC article titled “Creative Minds ‘Mimic Schizophrenia.’” Long a subject of fascination to Gerry and me, this link between madness and creativity runs, you might say, in the family.

We think we walk on solid ground, while all about us the planets buzz and crash.

Without divulging too much of the family dysfunction (let’s just say we don’t have to do too much original research to be conversant about this topic), we can say that the seven Zeck kids, like the seven dwarfs, hey-ho and go off to work with a mad twinkle in their eyes. On any given day, they may produce strokes of creative genius or tear their own, and their colleagues’, hair out with their absolute nuttiness. (Here’s a bestseller possibility for half of our family charter: Habits of Highly Ineffective People.)

For Gerry and me, in particular, connections come quickly, surprisingly, madly. One thing is connected to the next, apparently unlike thing, apparently random thing, with lightning speed. And it may take outsiders (saner audiences) some time to realize the series of jumps that product the connections. For me, a writer, this madness is a matter of metaphor. For Gerry, an artist and photographer, it’s visual images. (See the therapeutic ink drawings on his blog.)

At any rate, as the BBC article says, both schizophrenics and creative people “lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.”

No, you won’t find us muttering into our beards on the street corner or begging there for food or drink. But we do, for sure, mutter into our creative beards and come up with all kinds of thinking that may be called, charitably, or from the point of view of “normal” society, whatever that is, aberrant or absurd.

What such shizzy thinking does, seems to me, is break down the absurd and shaky lines between the verities or realities posited by the “real world” of logical positivism. Day to day, we may need such psychological structures in order to convince ourselves that we and our allies are on solid ground, that the world is not continuously quaking beneath our feet, that we are not momentarily on the verge of the abyss, in the yawning jaws of a Haitian hell.

So is our world structured. By mutual assent we live on in the cheery air and solid ground. But the madman and the artist threaten this complicity, don’t they? Their minds LEAP over the abyss, and they cackle at our collusion in such madness. The world is solid? Have it your way. The planets are in their orbits? Have a nice day. The night skies flame with colliding worlds. Meteor showers crash on our houses. We stay abed dreaming our perfect world, our comfy living, our lovely kids.

Tags: creativity, schizophrenia
Posted in Art, Psychology | 5 Comments »

Gustave Flaubert and his sentimental education

June 22nd, 2010

Gustave Flaubert

Just finished reading Flaubert’s novel A Sentimental Education (1869), one of the signal works of fiction of the 19th century.

From the beginning, the hero, Frédéric Moreau, is an ingénu . He comes from the country to the city and is blown away by its rich spectacle. Even on the way, in fact, he is enchanted by the sight of a lovely married woman, Madame Arnoux, and it’s his connection to her, throughout the book, that forms the governing metaphor.

Frédéric wavers in and out of Marie Moreau’s sight, wooing her discreetly, implicitly, because he both admires and respects her and because her husband, rascal philanderer and scalawag that he is, is a friend of Frédéric’s.

There are a few moments when Frederic draws so near to her that he can caress her and confess his love, but at the rapturous height of these approaches his mistress, an uneducated girl named Rosanette, bursts in on the scene and spoils the effect. Well, spoils Frederic’s romantic or sentimental designs, anyway, at the same time she furbishes the plot and drives it on.

While today’s romance reader might be crushed by such a development, it accords perfectly with Flaubert’s design. Life is not a bed of roses, whether with Rosanette or Marie (or the rich woman, Mme. Dambreuse, he plans to marry for her fortune). Life is not a straight route from province to capital and thus to perfect happiness and fortune. Frédéric is, after all, only “moderately gifted,” as the book’s jacket copy suggests. He’s the average and sensual man with all his dreams and distractions. And he flits from one to the other. He studies law, but doesn’t pursue it. He yearns for art, but is not trained in it. He aspires to a political career (this at the time of the 1848 revolution), but does nothing to earn it.

He’s inherited a small fortune, which allows him to live comfortably in the capital, but does not give direction or coherence to his life.

At the end of the book, he concludes that he has suffered from “too much sentiment” or passion, even as his best friend, Deslauriers, a lawyer, has been overcome by too much lawyerly logic.

It’s this 19th century use of the word “sentimental” that informs the title. It’s not that Frédéric is a weepy nitwit, but that passion rules his life. He is a true heir to Goethe’s Werther, who shoots himself for unrequited love (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774, is mentioned in Education).

Frédéric is thus not a true hero, nor yet the modernist anti-hero. He is a shmuck in some ways, or schlemiel. The reader may become impatient with him, as we see him throw himself this way and that, with no clear direction. Or see the author throw his puppet around, at any rate, and chuckle a bit, up his sleeve, at his character’s misdirections.

On the other hand, we may sense in Frédéric our own false steps, our lack of clarity, our appreciation of passion as an overruling value.

So it seemed to me this morning when I read in the Star Tribune about a candidate for governor of Minnesota who has an entire history of litigious passions behind him. A lawyer himself, he has sued, and been sued, by vendors and lawyers. He has pursued a career of righteous indignation. The article used the word “feisty” in the headline, but we may wonder if “obnoxious” and “irascible” aren’t better character clues. Perhaps the candidate combines passion (Frédéric) and logic (Deslauriers, the lawyer). Perhaps we voters should assess his character and make an intelligent choice. If we’re sick of lawyers in high office now, should we be just as wary of litigious fools?

And should we step back from our own life’s steps and missteps, and see if we are on a profitable path?

Tags: Flaubert, logic, passion
Posted in Art, Contemporary society, Politics, Psychology | 2 Comments »

The sad slow churn of the years

June 21st, 2010

Last night our neighbor Barb dropped over and regaled Jen and me, over a glass of white wine, on the theme of the toll the years take.

Not a cheerful subject, to be sure, but though Barb has mentioned her problems before with the two strokes she suffered soon after retiring from her job five years ago, she added last night a sad litany of the physical and emotional consequences of these attacks. How her hearing has suffered, and her vision. How her mobility has been impaired (she fell and broke her hip at the first stroke). How she as a lifelong dancer has been put up on the shelf.

This along with stories about her three children’s financial difficulties made for a pathetic evening. An evening, I mean, filled with pathos and some yearning, on the part of all, for a return of the good old days, whatever and wherever they were.

The difference between your 40s and 50s can’t be overestimated, Barb suggested. And between your 50s and 60s, your 60s and 70s. The years march on, and we fall, it seems, and are ground underfoot like dust.

Jen carves the Father's Day roast while Ruby sobs and Gabe looks on.

It was the dusk of Father’s Day, 2010. Jen had feted and fed me with another great meal, and son Gabe, daughter-in-law Heidi, and granddaughter Ruby Mae had blessed us with their cheerful presence. (Well, Ruby was cheerful till she spazzed out, after too short a nap, and cried into her corn.) But the day was giving way to evening. The buzz of the beer and wine was attenuating. The crickets’ cry had given way to Barb’s lament on the vanity of human wishes. We were gathered together, in other words, and well content for the moment, which was, it seemed, the only moment available, and even as we chewed our steak, our salad, our cud of thoughts, we were being ground up and offered to the gods and to our heirs, assigns, and successors.

Tags: elegy, impairment, lament
Posted in Love and death, Nature | 4 Comments »

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house

June 15th, 2010

Went to a neighbor’s daughter’s high school graduation party the other day. Had a great time with the pretty grad and her parents, other neighbors and guests, my wife, and my granddaughter. Not to mention the Middle Eastern food and the drinks.

There was, however, a coterie of people from a nearby tony suburb (I won’t say its name but let’s just say its inhabitants are known by the acronym Every Day I Need Affirmation), and they wouldn’t let you forget it. Their perfect hair, their perfect clothes, their perfectly empty talk all expressed their origins and aspirations.

At one point they were discussing real estate — their particular neighborhood, in fact. (Let’s call it Cake Eater’s Hill.) I happened to catch a stray wisp of the conversation, about how values had fallen during the recession, in one case, to an astonishing low of $900,000.

“What’s Cake Eater’s Hill?” I asked innocently.

“Why, it’s a very coveted neighborhood,” Ms. Snoot replied.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house!

Gee, I didn’t covet it. I’d never heard of it. But her reply, her whole attitude, brought me back to my Judaeo-Christian upbringing, which, with all its faults (too numerous to go into here), did have the advantage of orienting one to certain pretty human values. I seemed to recall an injunction not to covet one’s neighbor’s house. Check. And not to covet one’s neighbor’s wife. Check. (Nor his slaves nor his animals nor his barbeque!)

And wasn’t there something, implied in these commandments, about not coveting one’s neighbor’s brains?

All of which make it comforting to reside in this leafy and not very coveted contiguous suburb.

Tags: class, illusions, property
Posted in Contemporary society, Psychology | 4 Comments »

Finished symphonies

June 7th, 2010

Composing is hard, whether we’re talking music or writing. To compose yourself or your world, to make something out of nothing, light out of darkness, order out of chaos is not taking candy from babies. And it’s no mean trick, as Dr. Freud knew, to let ego be where id was.

Which may be why I can initiate story ideas but not to finish them, I guess. I have tons of great ideas for novels and stories, and have worked hard on them, producing extensive manuscripts but not necessarily to the point of satisfactorily finished productions.

It’s easy to get ideas, in effect, and hard to discharge them to the point where they match up with expectations.

Which is one good reason I’ve spent so much time on my houses over the years.

No, I’m not talking about building a house: that would be like building a book. But simply fixing the myriad little things that go wrong with a house. The entropic welter in which any owner of a home more than a few years old finds himself.

Right now, Jen and I are fixing up our 1955 Richfield rambler to put on the market. It’s about 3800 square feet of finished space, and all that finish exacts a price. Getting it all right, sparkling and functioning, requires a lot of elbow grease:

Painting
Tiling
Cleaning
Repairing woodwork
Weeding and gardening
Updating the irrigation system
Making last changes in the electrical

With a house as big as this, the list of maintenance and repairs goes on and on. We’re taking tons more time prepping this house than we did back in 2000 for our half-as-large American foursquare in St. Paul.

But fixing little things, one at a time, presents solid, measurable satisfactions towards a discernible goal. No, you’re not building a house but you’re perfecting it, or bringing it as close to perfection as is humanly possible, given your limits of time, money, and skills.

Three-pronged electric outlet, one of many that I swapped out for the original two-prong outlets in our 1955 rambler.

Here’s one of many electric outlets that I swapped out. That is, I installed a three-prong grounded outlet in lieu of the two-prong outlets that were built into the house according to 1950s code. A very simple task, just removing one outlet and popping in another. Because the original wiring here uses metal cable (greenfield), the outlets are automatically grounded; there’s no need to add a third, grounding wire. It’s just that a few appliances have three-prong cords and will not fit into the original outlets without an adapter. Which is a pain.

Voilà! Presto change-o! The two-hole outlet is replaced by a three-. And there’s no more adapting to adapters.

How satisfying is this smidgen of electrical acumen and addition? Immense! And at a price of 38¢ per outlet, 19¢ per cover, plus a little time.

Oh, in case you’re new to this kind of thing, don’t forget to flip off the breaker in your electrical panel before you do repairs or make changes.

And as for that novel you’ve been working on forever, can’t you just break it down into piddly little tasks, like changing out electrical outlets, and end up with an entirely satisfactory system?

Tags: electric outlets, finishing jobs
Posted in Art, Daily living | 3 Comments »

Frank and Frank in the morning

June 5th, 2010

Neighbor Mark's patio mandala, from which radiates a curved stone path. The new garden transforms even rainy days.

My neighbor Mark has been transforming his back yard, this last year, into a wonder garden. Before, just a shaggy maple and a lackadaisical Scotch pine, the yard is now landscaped professionally. Mark bought a professional landscape plan, that is, and has executed it himself.

Last summer, this good Buddhist aspirant put in place a circular stone-block patio, like a mandala. He planted trees, bushes, and flowers to fill in what had been vacant or unused space. This summer, he has added to the mandala a sinuous stone path, a loopy spiral that comes out of the center, thus, of his little world and whips like filaments through the western part of the back yard. You can’t resist, when you walk this path, two possibilities:

Meditating, gravely, like a Buddhist (or Catholic) monk
Hopping the stones, like a school child (on his way from school)

Speaking of faith and ecumenicism, Mark placed a little statue of St. Francis near the patio, under the maple tree, a gift, I believe, to his wife Skye. This St. Francis is a little guy and is sheltered under a wooden shrine. I observed him several times and thought he looked a bit lonely. Sure, he had the birds and the beasts of the field to cheer him up, but how about a little human company?

Mark's Little Frank (left) and my Big Frank chat it up one rainy early June morning.

Voilà! I whisked Jen’s and my larger St. Francis statue from our garden, which Jen has been working on furiously, and transported it to Mark’s marvelous new back yard. Nestled together now (my Francis on loan), the two Franks look like they’re having a good time. A little human conversation, it could be. A nudge and a wink about all things saintly. Sure, and they aren’t talking sports in the morning, lads! More likely, all things saintly. Or all things natural. So if you have a question and want to call it in, don’t think sports trivia please. But, rather, something about man’s impermanent place in the natural scheme of things. And how he might share it, finally, with all creatures great and small. (Including the damn bunny that’s eating the tops off our bachelor’s buttons! Why don’t I ring up Big Frank and see if he can’t have a talk with this rude rabbit?)

Cheers to Mark, finally, who as Voltaire advised, is ending up cultivating his own garden.

Tags: garden, mandala, St. Francis
Posted in Daily living, Love and death, Nature | 6 Comments »

Chicago, Chicago, my kind of town

June 3rd, 2010

Jen and I are just back from Chicago, where we spent a four-day Memorial Day weekend celebrating my sister Jan’s 74th birthday. (Someone’s getting old: stop it!) Jen and I flew in to Midway Airport, and Jan and my younger sister Jeannie took the train, from Green Bay, WI and Springfield, IL respectively.

Woman beholding woman: my sister Jeannie admires Gaston Lachaise's nude sculpture based on the ample proportions of Mme. Lachaise (Chicago Institute of Arts).

Chicago is a favorite place for Jen and me, who go there to celebrate birthdays and holidays, or simply to gawk at the tall massed buildings of the skyline and the world class art museums. Now that Millennium Park has been added to the city’s credentials, we are more than wowed, we’re staggered.

From our entrance at the northwest corner of the park, stopping for an animal puppet show, to our exit at the diagonal opposite, we were in a wonderland. At the northwest, there’s a semicircle of Roman columns and the names of the benefactors, who are hugely to be thanked. At the diagonal opposite, there’s a mini-golf course and a public garden blossoming with salvia.

The high points of the park would have to be the Cloud Gate, a reflective jelly bean sculpture under which you can walk and through which you can take distorting funhouse photos, and the Crown Fountain, twin towers overflowing with water that makes a quarter-inch deep sheet between them … and projecting images of faces out of whose mouths water jets. As you can imagine, these two sites attract throngs, of adults and children too.

Cloud Gate, a fascinating reflective sculpture in Chicago's Millennium Park.

But Millennium Park is just the latest, most spectacular jewel in the architectural and esthetic crown that is Chicago. It’s part of the spectacular massing of energies that the city projects to both natives and visitors. A more naive Midwesterner like me gawks at the tall buildings, bunched together and aspiring to the sky — helplessly. He gawks at the crowds of well-dressed (mostly) people who flow all day and, yes, all night down the pavements. He marvels how the crowds settle down for happy hour and dinner, and then surge out again to party or bar-hop, the nightclubs not closing down till 4 am.

Yes, the central city is not the whole of Chicago. It’s the crown, the jewel, the summit, the tops. And when you’re there you’ll get hit up by the usual big-city harassments, from political activists to beggars (purporting to provide directions, they direct their appeals, then, to your pocketbook). And when you’re there you should bring your Money Bags, for the central city is rich and gleaming, seductive and reductive too to the basic facts of your ability to pay.

A great place to visit, as people say, but a helluva place to live unless you make boodles of moola. We saw new highrise condos going up that start at $1.5 million (and go to over $7 mill). Well, that’s a helluva note.

Three sibs pose in Millennium Park; from left to right, sister Janice, Greg, and sister Jeannie. (Photo, once again, thanks to Jen Zeck.)

Tags: Chicago, downtown, energy, Millennium Park
Posted in Art, Contemporary society, Travel | 9 Comments »

In the catbird seat

May 25th, 2010

Last weekend my wife and I stayed overnight at her sister and sister’s boyfriend’s house in Hudson, Wisconsin. We enjoyed a wonderful lamb dinner Saturday night and, Sunday morning, a popover and omelet breakfast.

About 4:30 a.m. Sunday, I woke and had to go to the bathroom. While I was there, out the window I heard a marvelous liquid warbling — an ecstatic imitative bird cry — in the magnificent maple under which we had dined the previous evening.

I couldn’t imagine what bird this was, besides ecstatic. And couldn’t imagine the reason it might be in this state of liquid ecstasy.

A gray catbird, of the mockingbird and thrasher family of mimics.

A few hours later, over popovers on the deck, I heard the same bird warbling in the trees nearby and alerted the company. The more the bird filled its throat, the more we listened in thrall and looked for the shape of the singer overhead. Finally, we spied it and with the aid of binoculars got a good close look: a medium gray on the breast, a black head with red crest, darker gray back, and reddish feathers on the rump. It measured about 8 inches.

I thought at first it was a mockingbird because of the mimetic warbling. But my sister-in-law’s bird book proved it be be a gray catbird.

Now, all the books and web sites I reference say that the catbird’s song does not repeat phrases but mews like a cat. But this bird’s song was not just ecstatic, as say, but obviously liquid and imitative. I heard no mewings. And the bird definitely had a gray breast and black cap.

Perhaps this was a catbird so versed in mimesis that it outshone all other choristers. Perhaps it was a male lover seeking a mate with such ardor that it was winning the ornithological edition of American Idol.

No matter, the bird struck a liquid spirit in our hearts too, and made us glad and bursting with song, made us all companions in the catbird seat, near the tree top, a few minutes of a warm spring morning.

(If you know these mimic birds better than I do, tell us what you think. This site gives the cries of the catbird; this other site those of the mockingbird. My catbird, so I believe it to be, was melodious as the mockingbird but didn’t look like one.)

Tags: catbird, song
Posted in Nature | 1 Comment »

The transparent man

May 21st, 2010

This caterpillar, on a leaf in Savage Fen, southwest of the Twin Cities, exhibits remarkable transparency. Photo courtesy of Jaime Rockney.

The other day a business friend sent an image she’d shot in the wilds of Savage Fen southwest of the Twin Cities: an image of a caterpillar encased in its own gelatinous mold (left).

I was struck, of course, from the start at just how transparent the creature seemed. It didn’t have to spill its guts, say after a whirlpool of drunken parties or the 18 orgies that Chinese professor Ma Yaohai is accused of indulging in. Its guts were there for the world to see.

Now, it may seem a jump of logic, even allegory, to see through this creature into the lives of human beings. But without getting transcendental or Hawthornian, without too much strain, I think, we can see the caterpillar as an image of transparent man. In the plastic anatomical model by that name, which was popular when I was a kid, you could see all the veins and arteries, all the interior organs, of the human creature. What was inside, in other words, became outside — or was revealed to the outside.

The caterpillar is, in other words (why always these “other words”? because the originals just aren’t as clear or transparent as the caterpillar?), a physical creature whose interior is not differentiated, hard and fast, from its exterior. It is, after all, a creature in formation, or transformation — even transvaluation. The caterpillar is on its way to becoming pupa — and the pupa, then, to butterfly.

Perhaps if we humans were to be so transformed — physically and/or spiritually — we could go through this gelatinous, transparent process too. We could start out as wriggling and helpless leaf-eaters, covered in a translucent slime, and chomp our way into pupadom.

The pupa of the monarch butterfly hangs from a leaf like a "waxy jade vase." Click on pic for more on the growth of the monarch butterfly.

As pupas (pupils, learners, strivers), we would hang there, as this second image shows, like “waxy jade vases,” awaiting the emergence from within of our full flight of promise. We would hang in there, as they say, because we had no choice. And because the choice, however determined, was to result in the power and the glory of our full being.

Well, as Hemingway would say, wouldn’t it be nice to think so?

Hawthorne with his allegorical bent might have thought differently, but then he was a close heir of the Puritans, whom he both loathed and loved. And nearly two hundred years of art, culture, and society have gone over the dam since his flourishing.

Put it this way, it would be nice to think we could abandon our frail egos sufficiently — give up our opacity and pride — and soar above the fens and marshes of our everyday lives. Soar and see how effortlessly we can manage human flight.

Tags: accomplishment, caterpillar, transcendence, transparency
Posted in Art, Daily living, Love and death, Psychology | 1 Comment »

Watch dem effenheimers!

May 17th, 2010

The other morning I was working in my garage, trying to hammer a connector into a bit of irrigation hose, when I jammed my thumb against the hose. Immediately there issued forth a foul proclamation, shattering the weekend calm, the bright blue sky, the air of calm that pervaded our leafy suburb.

Watch out lest the effenheimer, like an evil spirit, snatch away the gladness from your day!

No, it was not just the effenheimer, as my neighbor Mark calls the F word in courtly euphemistic fashion. It was something fouler and more disturbing, for sure. It starts with a c, ends with an er, and, yes, has a suck in between.

At which my neighbor Chris, directly across the street, looked up from his task, in the doorway of his garage, and stared at me. I don’t know Chris well, or his family, but he’s never to my recollection used a foul word in my presence, not even the big D. So I was a bit abashed at being caught out, and wambled over to his side of the street to iron things out.

“You’re supposed to hit the nail, not your thumb!” he offered.

“Oh, man, that hurts,” I explained, showing off the dry cuts I get in the tips of my fingers, merely touching which causes me to yelp. “It’s advancing age and temper, too. Never get old, like me. Or cross.”

Like Woody Allen, I can provide this bit of ancient wisdom free of charge. No, don’t get old, or cross, or deaf, or bald. Don’t develop a paunch or high cholesterol. Don’t stare at young things, just because they’re half uncovered. And don’t let fly with the effenheimers, or worse — in public — just because life sucks!

Tags: foul language, obscenity, old age, suburbs
Posted in Communications, Daily living, Love and death, Psychology | No Comments »