The Lives Of Others

Searching For A Cause

On Tuesday afternoon I took the L train downtown to go to a Practicum workshop at my school.  I got information about possibly working with grieving families, homeless children, and Native American Families.  The room, Namaste Hall, where we usually explored the depths of our souls in various drama therapy class, was crammed with a U of conference tables, well meaning people and excited students.  I had hoped to find a good place to work with the aging population, but the closest I could find was helping their families deal with their grief after the said aging people had died. 

The Train

After leaving fairly disappointed I skimmed the books at the goodwill and, feeling 0 for 2, went down to take the L home.  The train was spacious enough for me to sit by myself and lean against the wall near the window.  While listening to my ipod shuffle around my music library, I noticed an older man come in with something under his arm sit down.  Maybe I noticed him because of his adidas sneakers, which should have been on the feet of someone younger.  Then again, it is becoming more common to see older people wearing sneakers with their slacks, dress shirts, and sweater vests.  He sat down ten feet away and opened up the white package under his arm.  It appeared to be wrapped in white tissue paper.  He only unwrapped it enough to gaze at what was inside.  His face didn’t change as he leaned forward slightly.  He adjusted the package a little, as if taking in the item from all angles.  Again, I must note that his faced showed no emotion beyond an intense focus on what he was looking at.  For minutes upon minutes, stop after stop, he gazed into the unwrapped flower of paper, sometimes adjusting his weight, or tilting his head to the side, but never looking away.  I finally changed seats to see what he was looking at.  I sat a little closer when my angle was better, but I could still barely make out his treasure.  It appeared to be circular.  A plate?  A clock?  Yes, it as a clock, white with black hands and small pictures instead of numbers.  I squinted my eyes.  Birds?  Chickens?  This old man enamored with a chicken clock?  His lips parted, rubbing his chin absentmindedly as if he were looking at a difficult math equation?  As the train pulled into Castro station he quickly rewrapped the clock, stood up and left.

The Walk

Later that day as I was walking home I took a street with narrow sidewalks because they were lined with hedges.  I was almost upon them before I realized there were two people sitting on the ground, near the hedges, wrapped up in such an embrace that I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.  They seemed to be sitting next to each other, but facing opposite directions, leaning into each other, arms wrapped around each other’s backs, head’s on each other’s shoulders, similar dark clothes and hats, the hair of one over the back of the other.  In the falling dark it could have been two lovers, one comforting the other, a mother and child, or even none person wrapped in layers against the cold, clutching themselves.  I wondered what had occurred to form this apparition before me.  Assuming it was two people, what tragedy, or what ache, had brought them to such a still embrace?

The Church

Recently I was watching a film or reading a book that had a character going to church.  I noticed myself having a feeling I often felt, which was annoyance at how many things I come in contact with have Christian people or characters.  It wasn’t about them being bad or anything like that, it was just the sheer numbers, the inundation of seeing people experience this as if it were the norm, but it had nothing to do with my life.  I knew I had had these feeling for a long time, maybe my whole life, but had never really examined them.  I didn’t want to be a jerk and say “I’m annoyed with all these Christians!” cause how could I explain it and not sound like a jerk?  I would be lumped together with those who are annoyed with everything religious people do and I didn’t want to be seen that way.  Did I?  Then it hit me.

The Privilege

In  many of my classes we have looked closely at the privileges in our society.  If one is to be a therapist one must be aware of their preconceived notions.  For example: if I am spurned by a brown-haired lover, and feel anger towards brunettes, I better know this before I get a client with brown lox.  If I don’t my thoughts and actions will be controlled by a resentment that has nothing to do with my client.  By looking at our privileges we back the lens up to view society as a whole.  How is my life affected by things I don’t realize?  Apparently, a lot. More than the things I DO realize.  The ways we are privileged we can miss.  It’s the ways we are oppressed that we notice.  The main privileges we have discussed for Americans are; being white, male, straight, able bodied, neurologically typical, between about 20-50, accepted body type, native born, native English speaker, middle and upper class, and Christian.  If I am white, male and straight, I don’t often think of these are defining characteristics.  They are “normal.”  If I am a woman, or black, gay, in a wheelchair, or poor, these definitely form how I view myself, how I make my identity.  How could they not, when this is how society views me BEFORE it sees me as a person?

I came up on the privileged end of all of these, except the Christian one.  Okay, I have a lot of privileges, and because I’m privileged, others must be oppressed, and I’m benefiting form the oppression of others.  Hmm, something to think about.  How can I be more aware of my place in the world.  These are great things to be thinking about.  What I didn’t think of much was the one place I’m not part of the privileged group, the Christian group.  Until recently, as noted above.  And then it hit me.

The Revelation

This feeling I have, this exhaustion with being inundated with people unlike me…is this how people of color feel?  Women?  Immigrants?  People with cerebral palsy?  As academic as my understanding of oppressed groups had been, here was a tiny lens into what it actually FELT like.  So much of our arguments use the same words, but they mean different things to different people, because they FEEL different.

The Meaning.

We seem to think in analogies.  One thing is LIKE another.  Since every moment is different, everything is different, nothing is really the same or comparable, we must be thinking in analogies.  For example, if I hold up a ball and say I’m going to drop it, what will happen?  How do you know?  Have I stood before you, in this time, in this place, with this ball and dropped it before?  No, but similar examples have occurred.  We base what we think will happen on what has happened before.  The ball will fall to the floor.  If it doesn’t we are surprised.  We do this with how we view people as well.  The problem is, often we aren’t aware of it.  The next time we have a strong reaction to someone, whether in person or famous, try to race the feeling.  Don’t fear where it goes so much that you lie to yourself.  Be brave, see what it happens.

Jon Sarkin's Stroke

Hello Friends,

Once again I have no real post this week.  I have ben writing and working a various music projects lately, but I don't want to post the lyrics alone and the songs aren't complete yet.

Next week I will be back with my submission to the Chronicle of the Bay contest for "Tales of The City"-esque writing.  It is a riveting true story in less than 300 words.  To give you an idea of how short that is, I've done about ten percent already.


Karena send an article awhile back.  You'll see how it related to many of my past writings regarding identity.

Sarkin and his family were interviewed on This American Life in 2000.

The Soul Intro

Is there a real me? If not, who is my soul?

In one of Oliver Sacks’ most famous clinical stories, he describes, Jimmie, a patient whose memory was stuck decades in the past.  Every few minutes, his memory would wash itself clean, leaving intact the old recollections of youth and early adulthood, all the way up through his time in the Navy and World War II, to about 1945.  He could describe in great detail all the events of his before that point, but everything after had trickled through the sieve of memory.  After Jimmie tells Oliver Sacks that he is 19, and it is Forty-Five, Sacks relates in The Lost Mariner:

            “Looking at the grey-haired man before me, I had an impulse for which I have never forgiven myself-it was, or would have been the height of cruelty had there been any possibility of Jimmie’s remembering it.

            ‘Here,’ I said and thrust a mirror toward him.  ‘Look in the mirror and tell me what you see.  Is that a nineteen-year-old looking out from the mirror?’

            He suddenly turned ashen and gripped the sides of the chair.  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered.  “Christ, what’s going on?  What’s happened to me?  Is this a nightmare? Am I crazy?  Is this a joke?’- and he became frantic, panicked.’

Has Jimmie lat his soul?  Or is his true self still there, evidenced by his old memories?  But what does that say about his new experiences?  Is he still himself?  What about other cases, where people lose everything every few minutes, but also have lost their long-term memory?  Who they were is gone…or is it?

Writers and philosophers and doctors have talked about memory as who we are.  Bunuel said that “memory is what makes up our lives.”  In Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he equates death with the complete loss of memory, and each thing we forget as a small death.  Rushdie said, “We tell ourselves into being,” suggesting that our idea of who and what we are is a story we tell ourselves.  This is very different from the old idea of the soul, a bodyless consciousness that fills up this mortal coil and leaves it when the shell decays.  What if we learn things, then create an idea of who we are, where we end and other things begin, based on our senses.  What if when we forget these things, we are forgetting a part of the story we tell ourselves, and thus, letting our soul leak out with our memory?  What if the soul is not separate from the body at all, but an amazing creation from our organic hardware?

            First let me say, that I don’t have an answer.  I don’t want to get in a heated debate with anyone who thinks this is false.  There is no proof and will most likely never be.  If I know something is true, hey, let’s argue.  If I believe something is true, then I am using the weapon of a feeling, an opinion, to fight another feeling.  To me this is silly.  But I do believe these beliefs should be debated.  It keeps us honest.

I simply want to follow this train of thought and see where it goes.  A few stops along the way:

Is forgetting a small version of death?

Are we simply the story we tell ourselves?

What else does brain damage say about the soul, as well as good and evil?

 See you next week!

As always, any comments are welcomed, weather you disagree, think I messed up some facts, or are feeling bored, please feel free to let me know.

Follow the Circle Down. Where Would You Be?

Here is a little essay I wrote on Townes Van Zandt.  It is not all-encompassing, but an introduction to his life and music.  The next few weeks I'll be writing about artists and scientists and people I have met who experience the world vastly different than most other people.  This could be because of brain damage, a disease, or simply the way their brains are wired.  The more I learn about these cases, the more I ask, Who is the real me?  Does a real me even exist?  And if not, what does this say about the soul...

Please leave comments if there is anything you'd like to discuss, and if you enjoyed it, felt bored, etc...

“Shame that it’s not enough

Shame that it is a shame”

                                    - Townes Van Zandt, The Highway Kind

Trying to sum of Townes Van Zandt in words is like looking at a mountain reflected in a lake and trying to figure out what it’s all about.  You might get an idea of what it looks like, the same as if you looked directly toward its peak, but you wouldn’t know how the plants smell, what the trees in the wind sounded like, or know the view from the top.  You stare into the reflection and try to figure all this out, and falling leaf sending out ripples reminding you that you’re merely looking at a pool of water.

I’d say Townes battled depression, alcoholism and drugs for most of his life, but these characteristics were so woven into the fabric of his existence that battled feels like the wrong word.  These things poured into him just as music did, weaving a rich and strong and intricate texture that was frayed at the edges.  I think of him often, not because of his struggles, but the staggering poetry of his music. Yet, if he were a simple, happy man, or if he were alive today, would I look for so much in his songs?

Townes, who grew up in Texas, Montana and Colorado, came from a wealthy oil family.  He started playing guitar at 12, after receiving one for Christmas and seeing Elvis Presley on television.  He did well in school and studied among the mountains of the University of Colorado at Boulder.  It was during these years that he was diagnosed with manic depression, and his binge drinking became more pronounced.  I try to imagine him not as a young version of one of my favorite singers, but the strange heir to a rich, powerful family fortune.  His illness was attacked with the best that western medicine had to offer, insulin shock therapy. 

Electroconvulsive Therapy first came to be in the 1930’s.  Researches found that epileptics rarely suffered from psychosis, and vice versa.  Rather than splitting hairs about the difference between correlation (two things are connected in that they are caused by a third thing) and causality (one causes the other), it was assumed that inducing seizures in psychotic people could cure them.  Even reading accounts of this procedure, it is difficult to imagine the horror experienced.  Being strapped down to a stretcher, wheeled into the ECT room, and consciously watching the doctors as they silently attach electrodes to your head, then a drug is administered into your blood.  You awaken later, with no memory of what happened, only a strange soreness in your body, mysterious bruises, and a headache.  You have no conscious memory of going to the ECT room, but some primitive part of your brain fills you with fear when you are wheeled there again.

It was a few years later that the Italian psychiatrist Cerletti began to use electrical currents, which were amazingly much safer than the metazol or insulin induced seizures.  These early versions of ECT were dangerous and often caused death.  Over time, the procedure has become much safer, and shown to be effective with people suffering from depression, though its’ effect on psychotics, the original purpose of the procedure, has been shown to be ineffective.

In the 60’s, mood stabilizers had yet to be discovered.  And ECT hadn’t yet given muscle relaxers and barbiturates to calm the body before inducing dangerous seizures that could cause fractures and dislocations.  ECT has been shown to be very effect with unipolar depression (a cycle which only involves the sad, dark state of depression), but this is not the case with manic depression (a cycle that involves the low state of depression and the high, frenetic, productive, energized state of mania).  Shock therapy did not have the stigma it does today.  Like most suffering inflicted on minorities for the bulk of history, the only ones who don’t like them are the ones experiencing them.  His family probably thought they were doing what was best for him.  Years later, his mother regretted her decision more than anything else.

I don’t know if the insulin induced seizures helped his depression.  I do know that he lost most of his long term memory from the process, and that songs began to come to him, fully formed, in the middle of the night.  I imagine him sleeping in his trailer in the middle of the woods, no running water, but a flood of words and music braided together, stirring him from sleep, pulling his hands like a puppeteer toward his guitar.  Did these songs come from the same cocooned, mysterious place that caused him to reach for the bottle and the needle?  Before he lost himself to the lighting in his mind, he played guitar and he drank.  Losing his memory seemed to cast spotlights on the strongest parts of his life, his music, his addiction, and his loneliness.  Or was his memory hollowed out by currents of electricity, and then filled with a new kind of music and poetry?

On The Highway Kind, he says

My days they are the highway kind

They only come to leave

But the leaving I don’t mind

It’s the coming that I crave

Pour the sun upon the ground

Stand and throw a shadow

And watch it grow into a night

A fill the spinning sky

He takes the image of the highway, the long road of the past before automobiles, and twists it into each day of his life.  Without a past or future he is alone on the road, making up the world as he goes alone.  His depression, his shadow, cover the world and makes it into night.  The evocative image of pouring the sun into the ground may be an attempt to control the spinning sky, time passing, and the earth that turns without us perceiving it.

The attempt to make sense of one’s life by living it in ever moving solitude gives way to an even deeper study of depression.

Shame that it’s not enough

Shame that it is a shame

Follow the circle down

Where would you be

One of the defining characteristics of depression and anxiety is the awareness of one’s strange and painful feelings, and the shame from having them.  I don’t just obsess about cleaning the house, but I know my cleaning is excessive and I feel badly about it.  I have these strange urges I can’t control.  As far as I know, this guilt for being himself is never stated so clearly again, but may be opaquely present, hidden behind the canvas of his sad stories and epics.

To Live Is To Fly, counterpoints the beauty of life with the trappings of the human condition.

We all got holes to fill

And them holes are all that’s real

Some fall on you like a storm

Sometimes you dig your own

The meaning in life becomes filling the painful holes that we feel.  Perhaps he knew this through his art, but it may be the comparison of himself before and after the ECT.  Is our life made up of filling these holes, wherever they originated?  Is everything we see in life, what we call reality, created by the filter of our consciousness.  I am reminded of a quote by the author Anaïs Nin at the Exploratorium, an interactive science museum in San Francisco.  "We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are."

This brings to mind Franz Kafka, a kindred spirit of Townes who had the holes of tuberculosis and being a Jew in Europe fall like a storm onto his life.  His characters often explored the reality of their perception, or, their perceived reality.  He wrote stories about dogs, mice, moles, and most famously in The Metamorphosis, a cockroach, possibly to show that, like my friend Tom says, “We are all silly animals running around, trying to make sense of things.”  That is to say, a mole lives a moles life (blind, underground, listening for vibrations that warn of an intruder), a dog a dog’s life (seeing birds and flying dogs), and a human a human’s.  We either all are something special in the universe, or none of us are.

In the song Marie, Townes’ focused on the castaways again, this time the homelss.  The song begins

I Stood in line and left my name

Took about six hours or so

Well, the man just grinned like it was all a game

Said they’d let me know

This casts the image of one of Kakfa’s mysterious clerks who are always in the way, a piece of the inconceivable bureaucracy of the government, of life, that makes us feel small and powerless.  The man’s grin stretches long and wide in my mind, and is filled with sharp triangular teeth that fit between each other lke the monster of Where The Wild Things Are.  It is no surprise when, later in the song

Well the man’s still grinning says he lost my file

I gotta stand in line again

Perhaps the most poignant line is when the unnamed narrator imagines a happily ever after with his girl

Maybe me and Marie can find a burned-out van

And do a little settling down

Does he mean create a home or have some privacy when making love?  Can we, the audience of relatively comfortable people with homes imagine not just having a burned out van as a home, but not having it and wishing for it?

Perhaps his most famous song, Pancho and Lefty, counterpoints the story of the well known Mexican revolutionary general with that of a regular guy, the kind of person we don’t write stories about.  He doesn’t have a big exciting life and death, but a life that continues on into old age.

Pancho needs your breaks it’s true

But save a few for Lefty too

He just did what he had to do

now he’s growing old

We see the world in wide grand strokes, certain people stand out in history just as a large tree is more noticeable than the air all around it.  Yet the life we are most aware of I our own, a life we bend over backward to give meaning, and look for this mirrored in the great mena dn women of the world, even as we ignore those most like ourselves, the Leftys who blow through life.

Steve Earle called Townes “a real good teacher and a real bad role model.”  He also famously said “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”  Townes responded, ”I’ve met Bob Dylan and his bodyguards, and I don’t think Steve could get anywhere near his coffee table.”  Though privately Earle’s quote embarrassed Townes, and Earle later recanted, telling the New York Times, "Did I ever believe that Townes was better than Bob Dylan? No.”  Still, Earle’s words are filled with the adoration of a young man speaking of his hero, except lacking the romance, the sheen of perfection with which we immerse those we admire.  Townes made great music but was also a rambling man, plagued by alcohol and heroin.  Maybe the drink was the only thing that kept him alive though all those years after his mind was set alight.  When his surgery after a bad fall, he had to stop drinking.  After the surgery he was so plagued by the DT’s, the shakes an alcoholic has when deprived of alcohol, that his wife gave him a flask of vodka.  By the time he was home he was acting like himself again, talking and smiling.  He smoked a joint with a friend, had a few Tylenol PMs, and watched television.  Soon after, his old heart attacked him, as if he had held his breath too long under water and his lungs finally gave up.  He died on the couch, found by his youngest son.

Steve Earle has a great version of Marie, which doesn’t feel as overwhelmingly heavy.

Steve’s tribute to Townes written after his death.

Another of my favorites: My Proud Mountains

Introduction to My Philosophy

I have decided to take note of my philosophy.  This is not because I believe it to be amazingly original.  In fact, it draws from many sources, most notably neuroscience, cognitive therapy, Buddhist principals of mindfulness, physics, Nietzsche, the fiction of Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Sebald, the music of Guthrie, Dylan and Van Zandt.  Many of these ideas are not wholly, or even partially my own, coming from many deep conversations with my close friends, my fiance, and my family.  Finally, as the largest inspiration and altogether life changing experience, I must note my time working with children and adults with Autism and other developmental differences.  All of these have shown me that there is no one right and true way to look at the world, and if there is, we as humans don't know it.

But never fear!  If you are one to believe the word of God lies within one or more of the sacred texts of the earth, there will still be ideas and stories of interest to you, and possibly much of how we view the world is the same.  Our nation has become polarized by religion and political parties, highlighting what separates us rather than what binds us.

This book will also not be a new age synthesis of everything, a synchronistic view of the world, or a hippy-layman mentioning ideas that interest him.  Everything mentioned has been researched, discussed and double checked.  That said, this book will not be merely a love letter to science at the experience of the magic in the world.  In many ways, science is as much as belief system as religion, but it governs itself very differently.  The more I learn of the sciences that attempt to explain things, the more amazing our world seems, and the more our ignorance becomes injustice.

(this and the next blogs may be published someday, but will all most likely undergo revisions)