A meditation on meditation

Define "meditation."  The workings of the mind; a thinking through of issues, ideas; what introverts do.  Re-define "meditation." Sitting, letting thoughts go, detaching from one's emotions. Write a sentence in which you use both meanings of the word. The sentence will fall apart in your hands, like wet drywall, refusing to wall in or wall out. White dust on a bathroom floor.

Malaika King Albrecht, whom I know from her exquisite writing on Alzheimer's, quoted Pema Chödrön yesterday on her Facebook wall: "You can cruise through life not letting anything touch you, but if you really want to live fully, if you want to enter into life, enter into genuine relationships with other people, with animals, with the world situation, you’re definitely going to have the experience of feeling provoked, of getting hooked, of shenpa. You’re not just going to feel bliss. The message is that when those feelings emerge, this is not a failure. This is the chance to cultivate maitri, unconditional friendliness toward your perfect and imperfect self."


Define "shenpa": Chödrön writes an essay on the word here. Usually translated as "attachment," she calls it a "hook," a "sticky feeling," a "tightening." (Good teachers translate translations into literal feelings, those that work inside the body rather than on a cloud.) "We never get at the root, which last night I was calling the scabies. The root in this case is that we have to really experience unease. We have to experience the itch. We have to experience the shenpa and then not act it out."

When we adopted our daughter from a Kathmandu orphanage, she had scabies. She scratched and scratched, legs, arms, body. We had to apply poison to her skin to kill the insect intruders. So one of our first acts of parenting was to poison our daughter. The better for her to "attach" to us, in the positive way that word is used in parenting. "Attachment parenting" is considered a good thing in the magazines, while "attachment" causes suffering, according to Buddhist teachings. The sentence falls apart.

Early this summer, I did some Buddhist shopping (meditation and capitalism are eerily aligned) and purchased a meditation cushion and a mat. They are a lovely maroon color that my cat loves; some days we meditate together, he and I. Equilibrium was what I sought, but equilibrium was not what my sitting brought. At the Diamond Sangha in Palolo, where I went for a refresher in meditation technique, I had an intense urge to run screaming from the zendo. On my own cushion, I find my meditations punctuated by grief, by scheduling, by Tinfish ad copy, by compositions like this one. Intruders all.

What surprised me most, however, was that these meditations freed up anger. It is not my anger, I know, but an emotional field. I do not feel that yet! Anger is energy, anger rides on waves of energy like a Carlos Beltran 400-foot home run into the body's upper deck. Anger does not answer to no. Anger fills the chest and means to explode, plasticity to everyday flexibility. (See Catherine Malabou.) I've found myself acting out, announcing my anger to colleagues, my husband. My mind has roiled with the usual poet-editor-angers, the no-one-notices-my-good-work self-pity festival. My feelings have not hurtled with such speed since my depression/anxiety disorder were successfully treated and my mind slowed to a liveable pace, a walk instead of a jet pak.

But as Chödrön points out, "we have to experience the shenpa and then not act it out." As Malaika writes, "it's called practice for a reason." Define "practice." The OED has it as: "The actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method, as opposed to the theory or principles of it; performance, execution, achievement; working, operation; (Philos.) activity or action considered as being the realization of or in contrast to theory." And I love how this sentence also crumbles, a broken tower of babel, as it juxtaposes the application of belief or theory with the contrast to theory. It is the operation of theory when theory falls away. It is the rain that comes after the clouds, as in Mānoa Valley, when the rainbows borrow a ride on the mist. 

There is so much at which to be angry. I'm pissed off that everyone else is angry, too, the BMW drivers, the entire species of lone gunmen, radio shock jocks, my kids. Twenty-TWO new condo towers in Kaka`ako, really? Our neighbor loudly curses her kids mornings and evenings. I'm angry at Ralph Waldo Emerson for telling us in "Self-Reliance" that we are powerful, that we should never conform, that "nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles," so that when we discover we are without power or control, we get angry. I'm angry at the notion that "the triumph of principles" is where we need to go. Then again, if Emerson had one more sentence, he might well undo this one.

Hyper-cognition & empathy in "Alzheimer's horror" movies

While doing research for a talk on Alzheimer's, aliens and the avant-garde, I ran across a phrase that aptly describes our culture's values as "hyper-cognitive." How otherwise could we be living in the age of what Charlie Jane Anders calls "Alzheimer's horror." According to Anders, "it's the ultimate terror: The number of people with Alzheimer's and other age-related dementia will double in the next 20 years . . . And we're starting to get more horrific tales about forgetting, or people losing their personalities."

But if "hyper-cognition" is a must for humans, those who need to be "productive members of society," part of the horror in some Alzheimer's movies is what happens when animals tested with anti-Alzheimer's drugs get too smart for their species. Their intelligence breeds anger, and their anger causes them to lash out at their hyper-cognitive scientific masters. At least this is the case in two movies I watched recently, Deep Blue Sea (1999), and the far better Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011). In the first, it's sharks that get too smart, and in the second apes. In both, humans get what's coming to them.

In both films, scientists are on the trail of drugs that will cure Alzheimer's. When these drugs are injected into animal-subjects, the animals get really smart. So smart, in fact, that the central ape in Rise begins to speak rudimentary English. At the end of the film (a clear set-up for the next) he whispers in the ear of James Franco (who else?) that he "is home" in the Redwoods outside of San Francisco, which is reeling from an incredible ape/man battle on the Golden Gate Bridge.

I'm not big on inter-species warfare. In fact, the ape movie lost me when the real action started. I was more taken by early scenes in the movie, where the scientist's father, played by John Lithgow, suffers Alzheimer's. He acts out, like a demented man (or perhaps like an ape in a strange place) by destroying his room, by threatening his caregiver. He wanders in his pajamas, ends up destroying several cars when he tries to drive away, an event that triggers the ape, Caesar's, incarceration in primate prison. But before this happens, a beautiful moment occurs between Alzheimer's sufferer and hyper-cognitive (for an ape) Caesar. It occurs at the dinner table, which is but one of the sites where Alzheimer's manifests itself. One of the primary symptoms is a person's inability to use tools. Alzheimer's sufferers, in other words, become more like apes. People forget how to use their forks and spoons and knives, or they use them in eccentric ways.

At the family table in the movie are the scientist Will (Franco), the chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis) and the father, Charles (John Lithgow). Charles cannot handle his fork, approaches his plate tentatively with his instrument held backwards. While making eye contact with Will, Caesar reaches over gently and turns the fork around so that Charles can feed himself. This scene would have been moving were it to take place between human beings, but is perhaps more so when the teacher is a chimpanzee and the student an old man who used to teach piano (he knew how to use his hands, in other words).  The scene is not so much about intelligence or the ability to manipulate tools, however, as it is about empathy. Inter-species empathy is a beautiful thing. I remember when we adopted our daughter, who was three years old at the time, that she would cry at night; our old cat, Jon Stewart (another story, indeed) would approach her as if to console her. It made matters worse, as she was afraid of the cat, but his actions clearly came of fellow-feeling, concern in response to another animal's cries. So it's hardly science fiction alone that makes Caesar an empathetic character. As Lithgow puts it, "There is this tenderness where Caesar is more capable than the old man. And there is a grain of plausibility there."

The plausible, then, is what moves us. While the human being has been reduced to the level of the ape, the ape is the creature that is most humane. The plausible has less to do with cognition than with feeling. If we associate memory with cognition, forgetfulness with low intelligence, then this film gives us access to the felt idea that our hierarchy is mistaken. As Stephen G. Post argued in 1995, "The value of a human being is not diminished by forgetfulness; we must assume equal moral seating and awaken a new beneficence toward those who can no longer remember." He extrapolates from there: "A common philosophical-existential emphasis on the self's 'authenticity,' defined as a consistent set of values and sense of self over an extended period of time, excludes those whose self in increasingly fragmented and scattered."

These films, one better than the other, show us that there is as much horror in hyper-cognition as in low cognition. If the ostensible horror lies in a shark's being too smart, then an able reader of the film can see that a deeper horror lies in the way humans have treated the shark (there's an under-the-surface-animal-rights angle to both these films). The important moment in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, in this reading of it, is a lesson for writers of Alzheimer's. As G. Thomas Couser writes in "Paradigms' Cost: Representing Vulnerable Subjects," "the subjects of ethnography must be Other, but should not be othered; they may be represented as different but not alien."

Here is the abstract to the talk I'm working on. I haven't entirely held to it, but the main ideas remain. Catherine Malabou's thinking about Alzheimer's has been especially helpful to me in revising my own ideas about writing Alzheimer's over the last several months.

Alzheimer's, Aliens, and the Cure of the Avant-garde

In What Should We Do With OurBrain?, philosopher Catherine Malabou argues that “any vision of the brain is necessarily political” (52). She distinguishes between “flexibility” and “plasticity,” between an identity favored by capitalism (think “flex-time,” “flexible labor”) and one that resists such flexibility by way of “plasticity.” According to Malabou, “plasticity” (from the French “plastique,” or explosive) is creative, even when it emerges from destruction. “An Alzheimer's patient,” she writes, “is the nemesis of connectionist society, the counter-model of flexibility. He is presented as a disaffiliated person: errant, without memory, asocial, without recourse.” As such, he can be compared to the homeless, illegal immigrants, or unemployed persons. All of these persons are wanderers, border-crossers, and are considered threats to stable notions of national or individual identity. I will discuss the ways in which Malabou's comparison works, in particular how the word “alien” comes to identify, and connect, the world of Alzheimer's with that of science fiction and contemporary American politics. 

 

I will argue that experimental writing both describes the “flexible” world and in some ways intervenes in it, proposing a “plastic” alternative. By doing critical readings of B.S. Johnson's House Mother Normal and other experimental texts on Alzheimer's, as well as of projects that bring art into Alzheimer's homes, I will show how experimental boundary-crossings not only describe the world of the Alzheimer's sufferer, but permit entry to the “home” by those not privy to the key, or the combination to open the doors themselves. The Alzheimer's home's “flexibility” (many are owned and operated by large corporations) can thus be resisted by the “plasticity” of art. The Alzheimer's patient's perceived rigidity can, then, be seen as (at least) an opening to social plasticity, to a sense of identities as plastic, fluid, wandered unattached to notions of the self that demand its “flexibility.”

From "weird reading" to "demented reading"; or, finding the appropriate in appropriation

          [photograph by Maggie Steber of her mother's hand]

I haven't read the essay, mind you, but my eyes strayed to this long sentence of Eileen Joy's this morning: "Whereas traditional literary criticism often seeks to reveal the psychic-cultural-historical orders in which texts play an important part (and thereby, for all of contemporary critique's disdain for what is 'universal,' texts are often subsumed, whether as willing or more subversive actors, into larger and supposedly totalizing orders of meaning, referred to, with some suppleness, as 'context'), a speculative reading practice might pay more attention to the ways in which any given unit of a text has its own propensities and relations that might pull against the system and open it to productive errancy (literay, 'rambling,' 'wandering'--moments of becoming-stray)" (29).

Or: “An Alzheimer's patient,” writes Catherine Malabou, “is the nemesis of connectionist society, the counter-model of flexibility. He is presented as a disaffiliated person: errant, without memory, asocial, without recourse.”

I've thought a long time about writing Alzheimer's, the most effective ways in which to honor the person who carries the illness (I'm avoiding "who is the illness") rather than scribbling about being the person who has to live with the person who carries the illness.  But I've not thought about what it might mean to read Alzheimer's, to do as Joy suggests, namely "wander" through texts, as I strayed through hers. Wandering is one of the major symptoms of middle-Alzheimer's. We found my mother several houses down from her own one day, seated on someone else's porch, staring at the empty street. Another day she wandered and fell.  One morning, according to a neighbor, she arrived at their door at 3 or 4 a.m. and announced that the sun had not come up that day. While this last presents an instance of inaccurate reading (she thought it was 10 a.m., when it was 3), in the hands of a reader it could have been an imaginative one. In fairy tales or science fiction, such things do happen.

Which gets me, in a round about way, to the question that sometimes comes up, and comes up today because I'm about to go a-reading on the continent (Denver, Philly, DC) from my latest Alzheimer's book, "She's Welcome to Her Disease." The title of the book comes from one of many monologues I wrote down in my mother's Alzheimer's home. My friend Vera loves the section called "NO CHEESE," which is likewise a "found poem." Reduced to the dimension of paper (or screen), that section records events in the Alzheimer's home around lunch time, when one of the residents always yelled out "NO CHEESE," lest someone might serve her some. While this section, like others, reads like avant-garde writing, it is utter realism, the recorded speech of several residents and of voices from the television, which always played counterpoint (or fugue) with the living voices. (Here's a version of that episode on the blog.)

After I read this section in Honolulu months ago, one of my graduate students came to ask me about it. She wanted to know about the ethics involved in using peoples' voices without their permission--permission that could not be had, in any case, because the residents are beyond permission. At a university where "human subject" forms are required for many projects, including those in oral history and the humanities, this is a live question. And it's a border crossing, this move from writing as oneself to writing as someone else (who is not the someone else they once were). At one point in my blogging life, someone from Manorcare wrote to ask me not to use names (I only used first ones) when I wrote about my mother's home, owned by that corporation. She, the writer, understood that I had done no harm, but she, the employee of "Corporate," simply had to do her duty. If she still has that job, she may read this entry, too.

I was, as Malabou would say, "flexible."  I reduced names to first letters, at least for a time. I kept going, but I stayed out of trouble, whatever trouble could have come of that. The question of medical privacy is real, but so is the problem of bad secrecy. How many Alzheimer's sufferers does an ordinary person see during the course of a day? Probably none, as they are hidden away, especially if they tend to wander. They are at home, or they are behind locked doors that require codes to enter. We do not see them, as if they are not there. We cannot read them. Names unlock some of these doors. There's an ethics of uncovering, as well as an ethics of retaining borders. But I get ahead of myself. 

These are conversations about borders. When is a walk actually a wander? When is wandering meditative and when does it amount to straying? (When is a dog a pet, and when a stray?) When is the record of a voice appropriate, and when is it appropriation? I talked to Hank Lazer about these issues when he was last in Honolulu. He said when he used to write about his grandparents, he considered what he was doing an act of honoring them, not one of doing them harm. That the conversation has moved in another direction from there, away from honor and into hurt, as if writing down the words of one's family or friends could (only?) wound them. In a place like Hawai`i, which is so small and where so many people know one another, the question is even more loaded. Consider, however, that borders can be crossed in the way that languages are translated. Something is always lost, but there is contact. Only in contact zones can we find each other, if our languages and cultures are not the same. Alzheimer's is that: another culture, with another lexicon.

Here is Maggie Steber, from the Leica camera blog (see direct links below):

--MS: That’s a great question. Of course in some ways I was desperate to make images for myself of moments and things that would remind me of my mother and the experiences we were sharing. But I also tried to distance myself when I could, in both caring for her and photographing her, to make images that showed in a more clinical documentary way what this process of forgetting looks like. It’s important to understand what someone with dementia goes through. I wanted others to have a better understanding of the process, to dissect the process so it doesn’t seem so scary, and that it passes. I want to encourage people to be the warriors for their loved ones and participate in their end of life experience because it is such a gift.

"What this process of forgetting looks like" requires a person to look at, to be with. We cannot do that in the abstract, it requires documentation. I can hear the question to Steber about whether or not her mother would want to be seen in this way or whether or not she is invading her mother's privacy or what right she has to "take" these photos (the verb does have an edge, does it not?). The intimacy of this looking requires distance, as Steber points out, and it's perhaps that distance that most disturbs the listener or the reader. To be confronted with utterly intimate detail, but to know that it requires distancing, is a vertiginous feeling. A disturbance. We're used to the gesture toward intimate detail, if not the detail itself. We assume that to move toward the detail is a form of pornography. Wandering covers surfaces, as does pornography. Alzheimer's porn to go with photographs of Detroit. Steber has heard this question, it becomes clear, when she points out her mother's own (former) habit of mind:


--MS: I also thought it was important, because my mother was a scientist, to take this more scientific, clinical approach so the images might have value beyond the emotional ones. Sometimes I made images because it was the only way I could be close to my mother when she didn’t know me and could no longer speak. Some days I would just photograph her face over and over. That was for me, to help me get through it, to imprint her face on my mind. In that way photography was therapy for me.  Instead of being heartbroken, I would photograph and it gave me comfort. The experience made photography something very visceral for me — it held my hand through this long process.

The photograph at the top, of Maggie Steber's mother's hand, is beautiful. The hands of the very old are topographical maps of histories we cannot know, especially if they no longer have the words to say them to us. They are ridged, purplish, dry, sometimes cracked, artifacts. They often do not work well, either because bones are arthritic or because the mind that made them move is no longer up to that task. Our hands alone are not up to the task of witnessing our parents' declines. So we reach out for the hand that Steber describes as photography, or as writing, or as any form of art. Holding hands with art is a lovely, weird, image. But when we read from our books, we hold those books in our hands; we hold them.

To write "art form" once one has lived with Alzheimer's is to know how fluid form can be, how boundaries shift, and how wandering assumes the form we might have assigned to the word "walking" before. This is why we write others' voices, take others' photographs, to offer them and us form within the wandering. This is how it gets easier, not more difficult, to find intimacy. As Steber says in words I almost thought were my own: "An even more important reason, as I expressed earlier, was that for the first time in my life, a rather contentious relationship as often occurs between strong-willed mothers and daughters, could be set aside or even forgotten. I became liberated from the memory of that." This is why the Ashbery poem hanging in the midst of the New Yorker article on dementia care was so significant, in part. It provided a counter-wandering for the content of the article. A context of wandering. As Joy writes: "This [her notion of 'weird reading'] will entail being open to incoherence as well" (30). She's writing about academic writing and reading practices, but why not explode them (with the plastique of demented reading) into a larger, floating, framework of Alzheimer's?  She advocates putting two unlike texts next to one another, then wandering over them. That is what the New Yorker (alas there's a pay wall part-way through) asked us to do when they (for whatever non-reason to do with layout) placed those pieces on the same page. That is what we do when we spend time with Alzheimer's, running the constant border between sense and non-.

Here is a photograph of my mother, who died two Junes ago (on the 14th). It's her hand that I see, even more than her eyes, which in this photograph seem more playful than they usually were in those last years.

NOTES:

The interview with Maggie Steber is in two parts.  Part one.  Part two. Thank you to Jonathan Morse for sending the link my way.

"You see I've always been a rather dull-spirited winch": Ashbery & Alzheimer's

The link between Alzheimer's and Ashbery is sonic and metonymic, not actual. This week, Rebecca Mead has an essay in The New Yorker (May 20, 2013) about dementia care. Her article focuses on a retirement care facility in Arizona called Beatitudes, in particular on the director of education and research, Tena Alonzo, who practices compassion in her work with dementia patients. The article complements Norman Fischer's new book on Lojong, the practice of compassion, which he adapts from the Tibetan tradition into his own teaching of Zen. Alonzo's practice, as one might call it, is beautiful: she herself underwent a public bath in front of caregivers at Beatitudes. Another time she had staff members spoon food into each others' mouths to show them how discomfiting this is for residents. If compassion comes of discomfort, then Alonzo is its guru. But there, hanging in the midst of the page that begins with the comment of an Alzheimer's expert about Beatitudes is a new poem by John Ashbery, "Breezeway." "What was most impressive was not what was going on, but what wasn't going on--the absence of palpable distress," says the Alzheimer's expert. "Alas, it wasn't my call," responds Ashbery. "I didn't have a call or anything resembling one."

To the left of Ashbery's poem, a skinny column tells us about "a bird-like woman" who seems inconsolable. The staff tries everything, to no avail.  Perhaps chocolate will help, they say. Or lollipops. Demented patients often suck on their gums, like babies. "The days go by and I go with them," reads one of Ashbery's lines. "We have to live out our precise experimentation." The poem wanders, like an Alzheimer's patient still possessed of a cocktail of memory and imagination, and ends up with a divine Batman (he is a Him). 

We've been watching old sci fi episodes the past few evenings: The Outer Limits ("Paradise"), Eureka ("You Don't Know Jack"), and a Star Trek episode in which the crew succumbs to very quick aging, dementia. In each of these shows, the primary fear seems to be of sudden onset Alzheimer's. Characters in their 20 or 30s suddenly resemble 80 or 90 year olds. (Make-up workers had steady jobs for a time.) In the first two of these shows, the episodes end with the birth of a baby; in the third, Kirk is brought back from the certain death of the entire Enterprise (an incompetent captain takes over when Kirk loses his memory) through an adrenaline-based serum. It's part of a new hunch of mine that aliens and Alzheimer's are often yoked together, whether in science fiction (which I know precious little about) or in the way we talk about those among us who wander (the homeless, the "alien"). That last perception comes of Catherine Malabou's political and economic reading of what she terms "flexibility" and "plasticity" in conjunction with Alzheimer's. If the powers that be demand our flexibility (flex-time, the willingness to move, to change jobs, and so on), then our own plasticity (change that comes often of destruction) may point a way out of this late capitalist nightmare.

Sci fi television is hardly about compassion, but there are moments in these episodes where compassion seems almost to cure Alzheimer's.  This is especially true in the "Paradise" episode where only the old couple who really loved one another can create a baby (from an alien's egg); the other old women who appear as young vixens, instigate one night stands, return to old age and die rather suddenly. (Yes, there's also some old-fashionized moralizing under the surface here.) Mother hands her daughter (incapable of having children) a baby, then returns to her old age, now clear of the Alzheimer's. Of course this is compassion in the service of entertainment--having just read David Shield's Reality Hunger, I reminded of my own love of meaning over entertainment value--but it's an act of love that pulls us back from Alzheimer's.

That is a moment of fantasy.  Alzheimer's, through the machinations of science fiction, where imagined things happen in real life, is really cured. In our real life, that cannot happen. Ptolemy Grey cannot find his and his culture's past by way of a magic (and ultimately deadly) pill. The story, insofar as it remains story, becomes one-sided. Caregivers go along with stories, play with them, until even story fades. Then the narrative is that of the caregiver and someone for whom time has fled.  In the best case scenario, that narrative is one of compassion made of simple acts, like a kiss in the photograph at the top of the Meade article. The article shows us how we can care for people who can no longer care for themselves. Or, as Daniel Tiffany wrote on my facebook page, where I linked to the article, it shows us "how to care for anyone."

"Otherwise there's no dying for anybody,
no crisp rewards."  [JA]

NOTE:

A 2005 link informs me that Scotty, from Star Trek, was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. He died July 20th of that year.