Artists and the Schizoid Personality

J.K. Rowling—great artist, bad person

I’m trying to write a vampire novel. It’s a cheap grab for marketable attention, yes, but I need to restart my long-delayed writing career. Therefore I’m trying to overstuff the novel with cultural motifs of capitalist resentment, misplaced sexuality, and status envy, the three benchmarks of mass-market vampire fiction. I find myself facing a problem, though. I simply don’t know enough about nonstandard sexual expression to write about it comfortably.

Sure, I know something about the fear, anger, and desperation which all monsters and their victims share. But since at least Bram Stoker, and certainly since Anne Rice, authors have used vampires as metaphors for sexual appetites so socially repellent that one must squelch them. Vampires are, by nature, dominant, violent, and voracious, preying on trust and innocence—all things I’m not. I’m doubting my ability to finish this project.

I’ve had this problem before. I’m more than competent organizing words in ways that readers find pleasing, and multiple trusted sources assure me I should seek wider audiences. But it’s a writing truism that stories require conflict, and for every protagonist with a goal, they require some antagonist willing to do anything necessary to impede that goal. Somebody must always, from the storytelling perspective, be the villain.

Especially in this age of Marvel craptaculars and Starwoid blockbusters, readers feel dissatisfied with ordinary human-scale conflicts. MFA workshops continue producing countless “literary” conflicts of the Kramer vs. Kramer style, which indie presses publish for prestige, and which seldom get a second printing. To snag enough readers to buy groceries, authors must mass-produce generational traumas, planet-destroying weapons, and truly demented monsters.

Roman Polanski—great artist, lousy person

And to write those monsters with the full dimensionality audiences have grown accustomed to, writers must occupy the monstrous headspace. One cannot write monsters without, at least occasionally, thinking like a monster. After all, truly terrible creatures like Dracula, Iago, and Lord Voldemort aren’t mere mustache-twirling villains in the Snidely Whiplash mold; their evil comes from someplace, and serves some motivation deep within the character.

Crafting fully fleshed monsters, though, means the monster’s thoughts live within the author. We see this sometimes in what authors affirm, or what they deny. J.K. Rowling, for instance, created Lord Voldemort, a thinly coded Hitler analogue. But in creating that character, she also incorporated Churchill-era war propaganda about an assertively fair-haired Britain becoming overrun with foreigners and, ahem, bankers. Then these beliefs spilled into her private life.

Shall I continue? Cinematic genius Roman Polanski wrote, directed, and starred in The Tenant, a thriller about encroaching urban paranoia and isolation, in 1976. In 1977, he was accused of—and confessed to—drugging and raping a minor, and has remained a fugitive from American justice ever since. Knowing what we do about sexual violence, the crime for which he got caught almost certainly wasn’t his first. Personal secrets undoubtedly drove artistic paranoia.

Many of Neil Gaiman’s best stories involve hurting women. Coraline, Stardust, and several Sandman plots all involve women fearing for their lives, going insane, or being held in captivity. Though Gaiman never went the full Green Lantern and stuffed women in refrigerators, he nevertheless motivated many of his best stories by causing fictional women pain. We now know that torture didn’t exist entirely in his imagination.

Neil Gaiman—great artist, terrible person

Art doesn’t emerge from whole, balanced, healthy minds. Like an oyster creating a pearl, the object of beauty begins with irritation and injury. Worse, in order to produce enough content to make a living in this media-saturated world, artists must do more than tolerate the irritation; we must prod it, feed it, and rip previously healed wounds open again. Even when it doesn’t produce literal violence, artists are unbalanced people.

When I describe artists as “schizoid personalities,” I don’t mean in the clinical sense. I mean in the older Greek sense, where the “schiz-” prefix refers to something torn or cut in two. The same prefix used in schizophrenia is the same root used in the word scissors, signifying something thoroughly torn, in ways it can never be completely repaired. Artists must tear themselves asunder to create fully realized conflicts.

And I must ask myself: am I willing to risk becoming torn likewise? Do I love art enough to create those thoughts within myself, knowing that I’m not immune to their lure? What if I create the monster capable of expressing such eloquent trauma—and then, like Rowling, Polanski, and Gaiman, I can’t control it? If artists aren’t unbalanced people when they begin, most will be so before they finish.

What Forgiveness Is, What Forgiveness Is Not

Lysa TerKeurst, Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace with Painful Memories, and Create a Life That’s Beautiful Again

Forgiveness is one of the most necessary, and one of the most difficult, aspects of the Christian experience. When neighbors, enemies, and earthly powers affront us, the Gospel calls us to forgive generously; but our human impulse is to nurse grudges and seek vindication. Essayist Lysa TerKeurst found this in her personal life, when her husband’s infidelity nearly imploded her marriage. So she went in search of what the Bible actually says about granting forgiveness.

I find myself divided about TerKeurst’s findings. Her conclusions are biblically sound, extensively sourced, and balanced by personal experience. She found that, whenever she couldn’t bring herself to forgive, her resentments turned malignant, wounding her far beyond the original transgressions she suffered. When she opened herself to the experience of Christlike forgiveness, she didn’t need to excuse the harm done, or compromise her boundaries. She just stopped carrying her old resentments around in her pockets.

However, I quickly noticed several elements missing from TerKeurst’s exegesis. For starters, though she describes insights she gleaned from her therapist, she cites nothing from science, and little from any extra-biblical sources. She name-drops St. Augustine, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Spurgeon in the text, hardly rigorous scientific sources. Her insights come mostly from personal anecdotes, and her text reads more like a memoir than therapeutic guidance. She assumes you can learn from her personal journey.

I also noticed the near-complete absence of one word from TerKeurst’s text: “repentance.” I don’t recall that word appearing until an appendix. Christians must frequently forgive someone who hasn’t repented or sought to amend their transgressions, because it’s more important to stop carrying that stone ourselves. But I’ve frequently observed that powerful people demand forgiveness before they’ve demonstrated a whit of repentance, placing the burden of transgression on the one wronged, and excusing the transgressor.

We’ve seen this recently in churches. Floods of accusations, not only against religious leaders who have socially or sexually abused their parishioners, but also against church institutions that papered over the abuse, have revealed decades of unhealed trauma. Insurrectionists bearing Christian insignia besieged the American government, then urged voters and legislators to “just move on.” Forgiveness has become an obligation the powerful impose on the masses, not a gift freely given to us by Christ.

Lysa TerKeurst

TerKeurst’s larger text contains important pointers and tools to enact forgiveness in our lives. Again, she roots these insights on her personal experience rather than larger psychological research, but pause on that. Her suggestion to, for instance, begin the forgiveness process by writing down the original transgression, and its long-term impact. After reading TerKeurst’s direction, I applied this exercise myself. I found that crystallizing the hurt into words makes it manageable, not vast and insuperable.

She also expounds about what forgiveness is not. Though TerKeurst accepted the struggle to reconcile with her husband, reconciliation isn’t an obligatory component of forgiveness. Sometimes Christians must unburden ourselves of others’ transgressions, but that doesn’t mean allowing those who hurt us back into our lives unconditionally. There’s a wide gulf between forgiveness, and being a doormat. TerKeurst dedicates an entire chapter to creating and enforcing boundaries to ensure the offender doesn’t hurt us again.

Perhaps the greatest shortcoming in TerKeurst’s reasoning reveals itself in one fact: after this book shipped, her husband returned to old habits, and she reluctantly admitted her marriage was over. I don’t say this to gloat. Rather, I want to emphasize the White Protestant fondness for forgiveness, separate from repentance, has consequences. God is loving and merciful, but God is also just, and Christians who elide the need for repentance miss part of the journey.

In the New Testament, the Greek word metanoia is variously translated as both “repentance” and “conversion.” In either case, metanoia signifies a transformation of mind, a complete reorientation of outlook in service of a renewed life. Metanoia doesn’t happen instantaneously, and it isn’t something someone professes verbally. Rather, repentance makes itself known in a life realigned to serve higher goals. Apologizing and accepting responsibility are good first steps, but repentance comes in a reorganized life.

Don’t misunderstand me. Though TerKeurst purposes to write a self-help book, she actually gives us a good memoir of spiritual struggle, one which yields valuable insights, even if—we now know—her struggle wasn’t complete. If we read it that way, we have plenty to learn from her experiences. But one of the necessary lessons is that forgiveness without repentance creates a downward spiritual spiral. Don’t carry burdens unnecessarily, but don’t rush to forgiveness either.

The New Public Face of Evil

This statement is absolute, unmitigated evil. https://t.co/SOacPGGBse

— Kevin L Nenstiel (@KLNenstiel) March 27, 2023

I usually don’t like using moralistic words like “evil” to describe politics, because black-and-white thinking obscures the human souls involved. But watching the mass right-wing dogpile that happened within minutes this week after the Covenant School shooter was revealed as transgender, I think that word is appropriate. The conservative desire to turn this into a referendum on a class of people is, in a strictly Christian sense, evil.

Marjorie Taylor Greene

The key to understanding this evil lies in the second half of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s comment, above. She correlates the shooter’s gendered hormone replacement therapy with mental health drugs. Et voilà, we reach the core of conservative judgment: people struggling with mental health are considered morally weak. And gender “dysphoria” is, to the conservative mindset, a mental illness, not a medical condition to receive treatment and respect.

Despite recent trends toward racism and bigotry in American conservatism, elected conservatives still recognize the importance of coded language. They can’t explicitly say racial groups are devolved or dangerous; that’s why Scott Adams can’t buy lunch anymore. The same rules, though, don’t apply to mental health. It remains perfectly acceptable to say people with PTSD, substance abuse issues, or plain old depression are morally weak and individually responsible.

Elected Republicans vote against providing assistance for mental health treatment on a strict party line basis for years. They only mention mental health after mass shootings, to deflect from weapons hoarding as a cause for violence. Mental health remains toxic in America; PTSD is still not considered a “legitimate” war wound, for instance, and not eligible for the Purple Heart. Mental health is considered a personal failing.

This duality becomes pointed after public displays, like Monday’s shooting. By making the shooter responsible by dint of personal moral weakness, conservatives exculpate the two military-grade rifles the shooter carried. If transgenderism exists entirely inside the sufferer’s head, then the sufferer is individually responsible for handling their thoughts. Any person who can’t handle their thoughts is beyond the pale and irredeemable.

But simultaneously, by making the individual morally responsible for their actions, conservatives make the group responsible. Because the group, in this case transgendered people, is organized around something that appears to be a moral choice, then transgenderism is responsible. The mere fact that violence by transgendered people is vanishingly rare matters little. The group is responsible for this individual’s moral failure, and therefore all group members deserve punishment equally.

Right-wing moral judgment depends wholly on a narrow definition of what makes a good or bad person. Conservatives believe moral qualities originate within the individual, and each person is completely unique and isolated. Therefore nothing causes an individual’s actions but the individual’s moral core. Good people do good things, and anybody doing bad is always a bad person. Extenuating circumstances and cultural conditioning don’t exist, it’s always only the individual.

Florida Governor Ron DeSandis, author
of the “Don’t Say Gay” bill

That’s why, even as Republicans rush to blame this individual’s mental health for their violence, they continue voting to discontinue public support for mental health treatment, or even food support. Conservatives scramble to deny mental health treatment, poverty protection, and affordable health care to those who need it most. Thus they deny two groups Jesus specifically cited in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats: the hungry and the sick.

Food and health, American conservatives assert, are luxuries people earn. Those who can afford them, therefore, are already morally good people who don’t need outside support, while those who can’t afford them, don’t deserve them. If they were moral people, the poor wouldn’t be in this predicament. Though American Republicans tout Christianity as their unifying moral force, they actively reject Jesus Christ’s exhortation to defend those who can’t defend themselves.

Thus America persists in doing everything possible to avoid protecting those most needful of protection. Because the defenseless are considered bad people, doing anything to defend them only empowers their need, which only reinforces their immorality. This directly rejects Gospel morality, as expressed by Jesus Christ himself, which states that the poor and the sick deserve Christians’ support, not because they’re uniquely holy or good people, but because they’re poor.

Don’t misunderstand me; this position doesn’t require endorsing changing gender roles or sexual values. This only requires acknowledging that all people are human, and deserve to be protected. But people like Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t do that. They believe protection only extends to “good” people, usually defined as people most resembling themselves. And I consider that evil. As Jesus Christ himself said, even the pagans and sinners can do that.

The Myth of Laziness in Modern Society

Devon Price, Ph.D., Laziness Does Not Exist

Dr. Devon Price believes we’ve all willingly swallowed “The Laziness Lie,” a narrative that ties human worth to productivity, self-sacrifice, and beauty. If we aren’t constantly economically productive, giving of ourselves for others, and pretty, we’re disparaged as lazy. This matters because “laziness” is an entirely personal fault, and if we aren’t following somebody else’s arbitrary yardstick, that exonerates the system and makes us individually bad people.

In brief, the behaviors we disdain as laziness in others, and in ourselves, serve solid purposes. When we’re fatigued, bored, and alienated from the fruits of our labors, we mentally check out from work. When loved ones impinge upon our limited mental energy with their demands, we become resistant and resentful of our relationships. When we’re disabled and literally can’t do any more, despite society’s demands to “push through,” we ultimately collapse.

Price therefore asserts that what we malign as laziness, is often our bodies or brains indicating that we’ve pushed too far. Fatigue or mental resistance are how our physical selves broadcast that they’ve been overextended. But our culture and economic structure demand we ignore our feelings as “irrational” and continue overworking ourselves. Our unelected leaders present fatigue, sleep deprivation, and pain as indicators of great moral virtue.

“Laziness” has a relatively recent origin. The word isn’t even attested in English, Dr. Price writes, until the middle fifteenth century—not coincidentally, about the time Western Europeans began keeping chattel slaves. Though global civilizations have always loathed idleness (in various ways), slave-owning economics necessitated inventing the “work ethic,” a codified way of blaming workers for needing rest, even when somebody else owns the fruits of their labors.

Price traces the development of “laziness,” as a moral pejorative, through industrialization, into modern technological society. Under capitalism, basic human needs like housing, food, and sleep, become rewards we earn by sacrificing ourselves to a forty-hour week. Sickness, weariness, and disability become something weak-minded people must endure stoically, not signs that we need to stop. Vacations and free time are luxuries, not human needs.

Devon Price, Ph.D.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Price dedicates around half his book to workplace ethics and “laziness,” and postulates multiple causes and solutions. What capitalist morality calls laziness, Price demonstrates, is a wholly reasonable response to bad pay and lack of autonomy. The mental barriers that demand we occasionally stop working, are only “bad” because they deprive owners of wealth. And workers can resist this exploitation by presenting a united front.

More surprisingly, Price’s other half goes beyond economics. Our relationships with others are often colored by fears that, if we don’t sacrifice enough of ourselves, we don’t love our friends and family enough. We often feel “lazy” and unworthy if we can’t support enough political causes. Even health and beauty frequently reek of “The Laziness Lie,” as disabled people and anybody who’s endured fat-shaming can tell you.

All these situations share a moral component. Whether it’s work, weight loss, or giving ourselves over to demanding kinfolk, we’re expected to perform with the constant, unrelenting efficiency of industrial machinery. But that’s just it, Price writes: we’re not machines. We’re not built from interchangeable parts. We’re complex, unique individuals with personal needs, and when we, or the people around us, ignore those needs, our bodies break down.

(Besides that, machines break down if they don’t rest occasionally.)

As a research psychologist and Loyola University professor, Price structures his arguments eloquently. He shifts seamlessly from individual experiences and case studies that demonstrate his point, out into themes of statistical analysis showing what these experiences mean to us. This is classic textbook organization: what’s true for the individual, proves portable to the population overall. Only the personal is truly universal.

Admittedly, many of Price’s case studies show evidence of selection bias. Everyone given the opportunity to describe their experience with burnout is college-educated and relatively stable. One person describes homelessness in the past tense; nobody’s pulling doubles at the factory or overnights at McDonald’s to afford childcare and keep a Dodge Challenger with expired tags running. If Price asked me, I’d love more economic diversity in his case studies.

Briefly, Price says, actions have purposes, even if we’re not conscious of them. When people start resisting externally imposed standards of productivity, attacking them (or attacking ourselves) as “lazy” uses moral imperatives to hand-wave the underlying problem. Until we find and address the purpose behind supposedly lazy behavior, nothing will change. When we accept our resistance as a sign of necessary repairs, we’ll finally fix our economy, and ourselves.

Your Childhood Nostalgia Is Stupid, and Dangerous

I’ve been thinking about Bobby Harrow*, who held Mrs. Martin’s class at Rancho Elementary School in Spring Valley, California, hostage for two years. He was boisterous and energetic, his mind not circumscribed by such effluvia as coursework or the fact that someone was talking. His nigh-pathological refusal to sit down, shut up, or stay on topic had the ability to derail the entire classroom. As often happens, Mrs. Martin ran her class to mollify Bobby.

Nowadays, of course, we’d diagnose Bobby with ADHD and prescribe pharmaceutical stimulants. But I knew Bobby eight years before I ever encountered the term Attention Deficit Disorder. In the early 1980s, he was simply high-spirited and disruptive, something his teacher needed to handle, and his classmates needed to live with. He was also intensely creative and a natural problem-solver, so Mrs. Martin needed to teach him channeling techniques, not just silence him.

I remembered Bobby this week, upon reading this spectacularly slovenly piece of GenX nostalgia:

Click to enlarge

Judging by the author’s profile, he’s probably approximately my age. Like me, he’s White. Nothing clearly indicates his personal background or childhood, but I’d venture that, like me, he comes from a conventionally suburban upbringing, where parents left the neighborhood daily for work, and school and perhaps the local strip mall were the only factors holding the community together. Neighborhoods like mine, and probably his, weren’t community, they were mailing addresses.

It wasn’t one neighborhood, either. My family moved around, pursuing my father’s Coast Guard career, so I experienced schools and neighborhoods in California, New York, Louisiana, and Hawaii. My parents always chose suburban neighborhoods, which they deemed “safe”; they’d never have admitted it aloud, probably not even to themselves, but that meant “White.” Therefore my upbringing was reasonably whitewashed, free of contact with unconventional demographic groups.

Because of my suburban raising, I didn’t know gay people existed until high school. Of course, they definitely existed; groups like Lambda Legal, the Gay Liberation Front, and PFLAG predate my sheltered Caucasian childhood. Similarly, I knew racism existed, but because I lived in well-scrubbed suburban neighborhoods, I never saw it; therefore, I never thought about it, and grew up believing it belonged to another historical epoch. I never had to know, so I didn’t.

Yet I definitely knew other things. Though I never encountered the term ADHD until 1991, Bobby Harrow definitely proved it existed; we just didn’t force-feed students like him Ritalin or Adderall to make them compliant. Similarly, I know, because Mrs. Martin told us, that she maintained a classroom first-aid kit that included epinephrine, because at least two classmates had food allergies. And autism definitely existed; the school just quietly dumped those students into Special Ed.

Therefore I find myself both willing and unwilling to forgive the tweeter above. For my first eighteen years, I didn’t have to know “different” people existed; I thought my suburban upbringing was normal. When I discovered it wasn’t, that some people had very different childhood experiences, I chose to learn and grow. Other people, mostly White adults, keep discovering different people have different experiences, and simply shout “nuh-uh!” It’s a thoughtless reaction, but I understand.

But I also can’t forgive people who don’t remember things that definitely existed. The simple claim that other people didn’t have neurological conditions, allergies, or even obesity, thirty years ago, only makes sense if this person and others like him willfully edit their memories. And to suggest that grade-school students sat quietly back then? Preposterous! Then as now, kids hated being confined indoors every day, and got stroppy and rebellious, needing repeated discipline.

When people younger than me complain about how lawless, crazy, and self-indulgent children are “these days,” I know they’ve made a choice. I was alive then; I know these problems existed, and often caused great disruptions. Yet somehow, I repeatedly encounter people who believe that today (whenever today is) has become monumentally worse than their own beloved childhood. And I wonder what kind of velvet-coated angel hatchery they claim they emerged from, free of friction.

Why do ADHD and autism diagnoses seem so common nowadays? Because we bother to look for them, Bradley! Why did nobody have nut allergies or Celiac disease when in your school daze? Probably because back then, people with food allergies just died, Susanne! Things aren’t getting worse, we’re just aware that bad conditions exist. If you can’t keep up, that’s a “you problem,” and you need to stop cluttering the discourse with your fake nostalgia.

*not his real name

Your Brain Is Part Of Your Body, Sort Of

Amy Cuddy, Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self To Your Biggest Challenges

Why do some people seemingly walk into a room and immediately own it? Charismatic entrepreneurs, tech maestros, and artists wield this magic, while us mortals witness them with awe. Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy admits multiple variables probably influence how we manifest what she calls “presence,” not all of which are portable. But Cuddy suggests we have one powerful variable under our control: how we stand.

Reading this book’s description, I expected something like a Dale Carnegie course. The dust-flap copy implied an introduction to “the power of presence,” the tweaks of attitude and comportment that we collectively identify as charisma. We who, for whatever reason, never quite learned society’s unwritten rules in adolescence, frequently look for streamlined guidance for how to handle fraught situations, like public speaking, job interviews, and first dates.

Instead, Cuddy advocates what she calls “power posing.” This means holding your body upright, back straight, chin out, feet spread. Take up space, Cuddy advocates, and your mind will become expansive enough for even the most threatening spaces. Though Cuddy spends time on preliminary concepts like the nature of Imposter Syndrome or the importance of honesty, her book’s heart is invested in the idea that if you pose big, your brain will follow.

I’m reminded of Jordan Peterson’s first Rule for Life: “Stand up straight with your shoulders back.” Like Peterson, Cuddy believes this releases beneficial neurochemicals, and justifies this belief by citing wild animals peacocking in their natural environment. At least Cuddy cites higher primates, not Peterson’s seriocomic lobsters. But both psychologists elide one important question: are humans in society essentially similar to wild animals?

Animal social structures are essentially flat. If one chimpanzee leaves the colony, it leaves every aspect of colony life. Human lives are more dynamic, and encompass work, school, family, volunteer groups, sports fandoms, hobby organizations, religious congregations, and neighborhood taverns. Having power in one environment doesn’t necessarily transfer elsewhere. Moreover, I may leave one workplace, yet still safely grab a beer with my former coworkers.

Dr. Amy Cuddy demonstrating
the “Wonder Woman pose”

Cuddy even admits her advice is deeply conditional. Power postures which she claims empower our preconscious mannerisms, come across as deeply phony if we actually do them in public. People seriously pulling what Cuddy calls the “Wonder Woman pose” mainly appear off-putting in group dynamics. That’s why Cuddy cites the behaviors great apes pull in colony environments, but recommends we mimic them in private spaces: because humans aren’t wild animals.

Further, Cuddy admits “power poses” are culturally conditioned. Western power poses, she acknowledges, don’t work in most Asian societies. Though Cuddy cites her own and others’ research to demonstrate posing’s efficacy, her subjects are mostly college students, a core sample critics call WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. I’d question whether these poses work in poor or rural environments, where the person who stands out most usually gets knocked down first.

Please don’t misunderstand. We all recognize the correlation between bad posture and bad attitude. Cuddy herself mentions the hunched posture of the overworked cube farmer, or the increasingly common neck problems faced by teenagers who spend hours bent over their phones. These postures put lateral stress on our spines, structural tension our bodies aren’t optimized to handle. Humans evolved in environments where standing straight meant better access to food.

However, that’s correlation; Cuddy imputes these postures with cause. It’s equally plausible to say “submissive” postures are survival mechanisms. The hunching seen in cube farmers cowed by the workplace, tragically resembles the “don’t hit me” posture demonstrated by survivors of childhood abuse. People make themselves small to avoid making themselves targets. Maybe that behavior is maladaptive in adulthood, but it perseveres because, at one time, it worked.

I don’t want to imply that Cuddy’s conclusions are wrong. I lack sufficient knowledge and standing to support such conclusions. However, reading her text, it’s impossible to avoid noting that Cuddy’s evidence, while staged in scientific terminology, relies heavily on self-reporting. I also balk at Cuddy’s dependence on testimony, as it’s easy to slant outcomes according to which users bother to write back. Disappointed end-users seldom write fan letters.

We’ve probably all stared into a mirror, holding ourselves erect and practicing our breathing and eye contact. Feels empowering, doesn’t it? But we quickly realize the benefits of peacocking are transitory in hostile environments. I don’t want to flippantly dismiss Cuddy’s precepts, which probably help the right people in the right conditions. But her presentation is too sweeping, and doesn’t leave room for people struggling to survive adverse or dangerous circumstances.

Notice To Vacate

I spent last week in a one-bedroom cabin overlooking Lake Waconda, a man-made reservoir just west of Glen Elder, Kansas. Lake Waconda is a popular destination for hunters, fishers, and other outdoorsy types, frequently busy with flat-bottomed boats and family RVs. I did none of these things; I simply took six days and five nights to stand with my feet in the water and listen to the rhythms of nature around me.

Americans, as a society, have accepted the idea that human worth derives from our ability to produce economic value. From chattel slavery to industrial peonage to yuppie consumerism, our economic structures have always taught us that life has meaning strictly according to the ability to generate wealth. Money, the way American society is organized, isn’t only a tool to fill needs and measure desires; it’s the yardstick of life.

Perhaps that’s why, unique among wealthy nations, Americans don’t enjoy a guaranteed annual vacation. The economic liberty necessary to occasionally “vacate” your social station belongs exclusively to those who can afford it. Paid time off becomes a form of bribery: my annual PTO ration doubled when I moved into an office position, because my writing skills are valuable, and the company bribed me to not withhold them.

That’s no kind of life. Human worth far exceeds our ability to make things for employers who would replace us in moments. We know this, too: vacation is a form of economic rebellion, a scheduled inversion of the demand for constant dollar-value productivity. The activities we undertake on vacation—hunting, traveling, or in my case, standing with my feet in the waves—are measured on days, not dollars.

And on vacation, days have meaning. At work, days are often demarcations of disappointment: the proverbial hatred for Mondays, thanking God for Fridays. On vacation, I spent days walking prairie hills, reading books for reading’s sake, and spending time with friends, while making and sharing good food. I seldom checked my watch, because my only deadline was sundown. These experiences, not their dollar value, make life worthwhile.

Standing with my feet in the
waters of Lake Waconda

Much modern life exists in constant tension: we yearn to rebel against a system we know is innately dehumanizing. But we also yearn for shelter and groceries, which means making an arrangement with the existing system. The monetary system we rebel against also subsidizes our rebellion. No wonder some working-class people start thinking it’s somehow virtuous to work weekends and never take days off.

Temporarily vacating from this system is countercultural, and countereconomic. By spending time in activities that cannot be monetized, by eating when I’m hungry and sleeping when I’m tired, I show respect to my body and soul, something a dollar cannot do. Leaving the economic grind, even for one week, means listening to myself, respecting my internal clock, and giving preference to the one thing I definitely own: myself.

What might a society look like, organized around empowered persons listening to themselves? If people could make economic decisions not from fear of starvation, but from owning a shared goal? Historically, economies have revolved around goals handed to the masses by people in dominion, whether corporate bureaucrats or state apparatchiks. But imagine a society where people could know their own rhythms, and set their own goals.

Please don’t misunderstand me. Employment is necessarily unequal, but I don’t oppose work. Even under utopian conditions, remunerative work remains necessary. It also remains desirable: after a week spent performing no writing (including this blog), I was eager to resume work. The difference is that, having spent time listening to my internal rhythms, I have a better understanding of what makes work meaningful, and what conditions I’m willing to accept for employment.

Vacating my economic station gives me the opportunity to evaluate my goals, and decide what steps I’m willing to take to pursue them. It lets me price my skills, tools, and time, rather than accepting the price provided to me by the bureaucracy. Most important, it lets me decide whether employment—that is, the conditions under which the economy makes work remunerative work available—satisfies my internal need for work.

No wonder Americans aren’t accorded vacation time. Despite our rhetoric of liberty, our economic structure, founded on systems of slavery, peonage, and debt, is fundamentally un-free. Time spent listening to ourselves, time spent nourishing our souls, threatens that structure. I found fresh air, clean water, and tall grass on the shores of Lake Waconda. I also found the economic conditions that could, with time, make me free.

Britney Spears, Fathers, and Womanhood Deferred

Britney Spears

Perhaps the most appalling news from Britney Spears’ testimony against her court-appointed conservatorship this week concerns her IUD. The revelation that her conservators—mainly her dad—are forcing her to consume pharmaceutical lithium against her will, probably says more about her long-term health and the harm being forced upon her. But audiences probably had more gut-level revulsion to learn that she can’t make her own reproductive health decisions.

With the vantage of hindsight, it’s difficult to consider Spears without her semi-rural Southern origins. Born in McComb, Mississippi, and raised in nearby Kentwood, Louisiana, she started in America’s Bible Belt, was baptized Southern Baptist, and first sang publicly in church. Though she left the Bible Belt, aged eight, to pursue her entertainment career, that upbringing cannot help but loom large in considering the tribulations she currently faces.

Reading the transcript of Spears’ testimony, I’m seized most immediately by how explicitly sexual her father’s control is. He makes decisions about her reproductive health, although she’s thirty-nine years old, because he perceives controlling her sexual decisions as an economic instrument. Britney’s body has become a commodity which her father markets, like he’d market her clothing if she designed fashion. Jamie Spears’ management of his daughter’s career is painfully sexual.

This testimony occurred just days after Spears’ family church, the Southern Baptists, shared a cringe-inducing “Modest Is Hottest” music video at a denominational gathering. I’m somewhat more forgiving of singer-songwriter Matthew West, who sings from a father’s viewpoint, because parents do frequently have to make decisions about appropriate wardrobe and comportment for minor children, who by definition can’t make such decisions for themselves. But that forgiveness only goes so far.

My problem is, Matthew West, like Jamie Spears, frames appropriate behavior in terms of being “hot.” That is, while the commercial forces that often dominate American life value women according to their ability to get naked, West values his daughters according to their ability to resist this appeal. Yet he openly frames this resistance in terms of sexual appeal and attractiveness. Like Spears, West dominates and commodifies his daughters’ sexuality.

The Purity Culture of the 1990s, which dominated—and frequently still dominates—Bible Belt Christianity, sees adolescent girls as entirely sexual beings, defined by their ability to tempt and entice men. Britney Spears and Matthew West express the extremes of this definition. From her beginnings, when Britney tied her shirttails above her navel in her “Baby One More Time” video, fresh-faced adolescent sexuality has occupied the core of her message.

Britney with Paris Hilton, ca. 2008

Yet Britney’s sexuality, sure as the West daughters, was controlled by her father and other surrounding adults. Jamie Spears made decisions about how to sell her:, for instance, letting Max Martin pitch her a debut song written for a vocalist ten years older than her. Jamie Spears made marketing and image decisions which were entirely, outwardly sexual. Before she turned eighteen, he made his daughter’s body into a commodity.

This tension between seeing one’s daughter as your little girl, and acknowledging her nascent sexuality, probably plagues fathers worldwide. I can’t imagine what frustration it must cause fathers to give advice and guidance about sex, knowing daughters will ignore some or all advice until it’s too late. Yet 1990s Purity Culture, and the opposite number embodied in Britney’s in-your-face exhibitionism, made girls into completely sexual beings, then entrusted that sexuality to fathers.

Readers old enough, like me, to remember the emergence of “purity balls,” know what I mean. These weird virginity proms spotlighted fathers and daughters in relationship. These girls were presented as already women, but per the arrangement, they consciously abnegated their own sexuality, entrusting it altogether to their fathers. These bizarre, frequently disturbing events turn adolescent girls into childlike dependents and also Jezebels at the same time.

In fairness, discordant events like this aren’t exactly inexplicable. As traditional gender roles have proved unsatisfactory, and have receded, without anything prepared to take their place; as sexual mores have evolved, reflecting the fact that most families don’t need to breed their own workforce anymore, older people feel dislocated. Rapid change, venturing into unknown territory, is scary. Some people seek comfort in extreme forms of nostalgia.

But as Britney’s testimony reveals, an iron paternal grip on youthful sexuality doesn’t prevent dangerous consequences; it just changes one unknown outcome for another. Britney’s expertly managed teenage sexuality and Christian Purity Culture couldn’t have existed without one another. Both saw teenaged girls as essentially sexual, and both entrusted that sexuality to heavy-handed dads. And now we’re paying for both.

On Needing To Be There For My Father

Left to right: my father, me, my mother, and my sister, on my parents' 50th wedding anniversary

I’m the kind of nerd who finds connections between whatever I’m doing right now, and something I saw while watching Doctor Who. The show’s looming presence in my life colors my values, interests, and ability to process experiences. This weekend, I spent copious time contemplating the episode “Twice Upon a Time,” in which a digital reconstruction of the Doctor’s comapanion, Bill Potts, says: “I am the real Bill! A life is just memories. I'm all her memories, so I'm her.”

My father admitted aloud on Saturday something his family had long suspected: his memory is going. His doctor screened him and declared his memory loss only moderate, nothing worse than men his age regularly face. His doctor cleared him to continue driving, though his ability to recognize landmarks is diminishing, and he needs his wife there to remind him where everything is.  He’s still my dad, but maybe a little less so.

If Bill Potts is right, if memories make us ourselves, where does that leave my father? Which memories are, precisely, “him”? At present, he hasn’t forgotten anybody’s names or faces, important life events, or major history. However, he’s sketchy on making new memories, which means having long conversations with him—as I learned this weekend—is becoming difficult. He needs my mother around to maintain his focus and remind him where he is.

I haven’t always been receptive to my father and his memories. Because he frequently had little interest in the present, and often wanted to live, morally, in the pastoral recollections of his youth, his memories often didn’t seem relevant to me. Now that they’re fading, I realize those memories have nobody left to keep them alive. He hasn’t recorded his thoughts, like mine in this blog; when his memories leave him, they will vanish forever.

Someday, maybe soon, he’ll start losing meaningful experiences from his past. What happens when, for instance, Dad gets restless and reaches for a cigarette, forgetting he quit smoking nearly ten years ago? Will that experience jar him? More important, will it jar him enough to make new memories? Or will it become something he has to experience time and again, because for him, the event is fleeting and momentary? When will it start changing him?

The science fiction I enjoy often romanticizes nonlinear beings, who experience all time simultaneously. Yet watching my father struggle this weekend, I thought: such creatures would be incapable of growth and development. When all meaningful reality exists right now, we have no ability to have new experiences, or put old experiences into context. We can’t grow. We can’t be better people than yesterday, nor have hope of being better people tomorrow. We just exist.

In my youth, as I’ve written before, I wanted to stop history in some beatified past, which happened to correspond with my father’s youth, though I favored the hippie culture he rejected. I wanted all change to halt. So did he, for different reasons. Yet watching him this weekend, struggling to drive around town without guidance, or have sustained conversations, I realized (and I think he did too) that halting change has horrific consequences.

Yet for him, that decision is made. Therapeutic memory treatments, he tells me, have made little impact. The present, for him, is dwindling, and the future with it; soon, this diminution will start squeezing his past, too. That means the burden falls on me, someone whose faculties remain intact, to experience past and future for both of us. Put another way, I have to take responsibility for being present with him, because for him, every moment will be this moment.

He’s losing the ability to change, but I’m not. My ability to respond, to adapt to his requirements, gives me new opportunities to incorporate his experiences into my own. While he’s losing the ability to grow individually, we can grow together, which means I have a rare opportunity to be there for him. I can help him exist outside the moment. I can be present for him, just as, in my childhood, he was present for me.

Because I think Bill Potts was ultimately wrong. We aren’t built from our individual memories; that’s arrogant and egotistical. Our experiences matter, but we require other people to put our experiences into context. Western individualism and neoliberal economics forget that we only exist together, collectively; my family, friends, and community give me context and meaning. Now, as his present retreats and his future shrinks, I can be my dad’s context.

For the Love of Roseanne Cash and William Shakespeare

Remember this classic from one year ago?

Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.

— rosanne cash (@rosannecash) March 14, 2020

Roseanne Cash

I wasn’t the only one to retweet this well-meaning but deeply misguided message. It got rapid traction, as artistic souls sought to remain optimistic diving into a quarantine we thought might last weeks. Almost immediately, Cash got pushback from netroots scolds accusing her of shaming anybody who couldn’t knuckle down. In that beloved interwebs tradition, a single tweet spiraled into massive contention.

One year later, who proved right? I ask, knowing that, in the last twelve months, my attention span has dwindled so much that I have difficulty sticking with one-hour TV dramas, much less reading and writing. These tasks, once easy for me, have become laborious; even writing and editing this blog essay has felt gruelling. Superficially, I feel inclined to blame myself for having accomplished little this year.

Thinking about it, though, I realize Roseanne Cash and I have made a fundamental attribution error. Shakespeare didn’t write King Lear during lockdown because everything was locked down; he wrote it because he was William Shakespeare. That may seem oblique, so follow me.

Cash, and by extension I, assume we all could be Shakespeare. We assumedly could shake off the circumstances in which we exist, immune to pressures like family and economy. But Shakespeare didn’t write in a vacuum. King Lear probably debuted in 1606; Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre became the official royal company, the King’s Men, in 1603. While writing King Lear, Shakespeare was part of the royal household.

Centuries of literature teachers tacitly presumed Shakespeare wrote for the sheer moral pleasure of writing. We’ve learned to assume that Shakespeare didn’t write for money, that he didn’t have rent or groceries, that he lived in a glassed-in world of pure art. Roseanne Cash, daughter of a country music legend, maybe assumes everyone has that same freedom, and could hypothetically just be free by thinking it. Maybe she doesn’t realize not everyone can.

These presumptions are, partially, economic. I don’t want to get quasi-Marxist, but Roseanne Cash has never lacked a safety net. She’s certainly had pressures: she has children, and house payments, and her own career. But I question whether she’s ever needed to see art, and the time required to create art, as a commodity. That is, has she ever needed to see art, and time, as scarce resources we purchase by trading away other opportunities?

William Shakespeare

Don’t mistake me, I don’t resent Cash the liberty to take pleasure in her work. Our go-go economic structure denies many people that liberty. We should aspire to, not resent, Cash’s ability to take pleasure in her work. Too many hard-working citizens today lack liberty to worry about nothing, go to museums and concerts, and enjoy their families. The world should have more, not fewer, Roseanne Cashes in it.

My point is, art arises from its context. Shakespeare wrote to get paid, because Tudor-Stuart theatre was a lucrative business. Groundlings didn’t do theatre as high art; Shakespeare made his living as a producer, and wrote so his company would have content. King Lear was a growth industry, the Marvel Cinematic Universe of its day. That matters, because our bodies and brains adapt to the stimuli we give them.

Working in the factory, I initially struggled. Assembly line work involves strenuous multi-part operations which only seem straightforward. But over months and years, tasks formerly difficult and painful became second nature; my brain adapted to assembly-line stimuli. Teachers make teaching look easy because they’ve spent years teaching. Same with carpenters, comedians, and chefs. Their brains and bodies have adapted to the stimuli.

The defining stimulus of quarantine-era America is hard work for vague, distant reward. Those like me, privileged to avoid furloughs, adapt to returning home knowing we’re stuck inside. No concerts, theatre, museums, or art. Others don’t even receive the reprieve of work, trapped with the unchanging stimuli of households, screen time, and ennui. Because we lack expectation of reward other than not dying, our brains lose significant creative ability.

Shakespeare wrote King Lear during lockdown, and Roseanne Cash probably wrote some damned fine songs, because their circumstances rewarded such productivity. Most of us don’t have that. We’re doing okay to keep our utilities paid and kids alive. And we’ve adapted to that, in ways capitalist enthusiasm can’t account for. For months, I reprimanded myself for this, because ingrained capitalist morality insisted I had to.

Therefore the question I have to ask myself is: what stimuli am I allowing into quarantine? And how can I improve them?

God, Drugs, and Loneliness

Hungarian-Canadian addiction specialist Gabor Maté, describing one of his patients, wrote one of the saddest sentences I’ve ever read. Referring to an HIV-infected sex worker under his care, he quoted her saying: “The first time I did heroin… it felt like a warm, soft hug.” This sentence has haunted me for years after reading Dr. Maté’s book. Imagine feeling so alone, so bereft of contact with something satisfying, that you find solace by driving a spike in your vein.

Dr. Maté writes about addicts suffering the lingering traumas of childhood abuse, while researcher Bruce Alexander, another expatriate living in Canada, describes addicts facing the consequences of loneliness. Both share one underlying realization, that people consume drugs because they lack something. Their souls feel so desolate, they’re desperate for some connection. For diverse reasons, they believe they’ll only get it by stuffing their bodies with foreign substances.

As humans, we’re acutely conscious of our innate solitude. Even surrounded by people, we feel alone, bounded by our material finitude. Wild animals and plants don’t need to ask what role they ought to pursue, what choices they should make; they fit into their ecosystem and pursue their instincts. Humans can’t do that. We make choices daily, and often spend years reckoning with consequences for our bad or poorly-considered decisions.

Yet we want something more. We’re aware the world exists, and we’re somehow part of it, but we don’t know what that means in any particular way. In times past, humans found meaning through two chief means: religion and war. Both give us roles and responsibilities, defined by something greater than ourselves, something into which we can immerse our beings. We can stop being finite, and become part of something vast, something meaningful.

Religion offers people deeper unity. The mystical impulse promises us the ability to know God innately, or become one with the Brahma, or understand and embrace our place in society. Religions offer humans the ability to not be alone. Despite the well-intentioned promises of secular scholars who claim all religions are paths to salvation (which is an innately Christian concept), all religions aren’t identical. They do, however, offer a matching promise:

Dr. Gabor Maté

You don’t have to be alone.

Except that, in a religiously plural age, we no longer experience religion as oneness. Answers aren’t clear-cut. We have to make decisions, knowing the high likelihood that our decisions are wrong, which possibly explains why religious people seem constantly at war with one another. To embrace religion today doesn’t assuage our loneliness, as our ancestors experienced; if anything, it makes us more acutely conscious of natural human solitude.

So we turn outside ourselves seeking unity. People define their identities through volunteer activities or political parties, through immersive hobbies or evangelizing secular values. We seek unity with something greater which, without religion, must be something within the world. That something is always outside ourselves, it can never be us. To seek meaning internally inevitably reminds us how alienated and alone we necessarily are.

Some people feel this pain, this isolation, so acutely that they just want the pain to go away. For them, the issue lacks nuance or complexity; the pain is so overwhelming that it has to stop. Whether through substances or the ecstasy of religious transport, they need the pain to stop now. Faith or drugs numb them to trauma and suffering long enough to feel normal, but not long enough to actually heal.

Not all religious people behave thus, of course, just as not all recreational drug users are addicts. People’s unique circumstances reflect the way they seek the union of souls. If they didn’t, we’d never feel lonely. We’d be finite and alone, sure, but we’d be finite and alone in the same way, and nobody would suffer distinctly. To be human is, on some core level, to remain constantly lonely.

The human desire to bandage our loneliness manifests in ways that people behave. We seek company, even to our own detriment; we embrace people we don’t necessarily like. How many “friends” do we have, whom we need to consume alcohol or drugs to stand being around? We numb ourselves to others because we need them, their company, their continuity. Sometimes we numb ourselves with substances, other times with liturgy.

Such maudlin meanderings seem superficially hopeless. Nobody likes to think that loneliness is tied to human nature. Yet thinking about it, I gain great comfort: everyone else is as estranged and isolated as me. I’m not alone in my loneliness. And that’s profoundly consoling.

The Artist As Public Monster

Phil Spector, during his murder trial

Music legend Phil Spector’s death, this weekend, has reinvigorated the now-common question: how do we remember great but awful people? Is Spector the gifted music producer whose “Wall of Sound” technique changed pop music in the 1960s, molding legendary songs for the Beatles, Ike & Tina Turner, and Connie Francis? Or is Spector primarily the murderer who lured actress Lana Clarkson to his house on false pretenses, and shot her?

I’ve contemplated this question before. When considering art, must we also consider the artist’s moral résumé? This goes double when art remains under copyright, and artists continue drawing residuals. If an artist also commits atrocities, as Spector certainly did—even before murdering Clarkson, Spector’s first wife Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett credibly accused him of physical and psychological torture—does that disqualify his art?

Prior generations seemed willing to accept their artists’ moral failures, which were often egregious. From the hyper-machismo of Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, to the wild sexual escapades of John Lennon and Elvis, to the self-destructive tendencies of Kurt Cobain and John Belushi, the artists whose work defined their times, frequently left trails of destruction behind them. This was just considered the price of being an artist.

It doesn’t escape me that such “tortured artists” are overwhelmingly men. While much attention accrues in online circles to J.K. Rowling’s belligerent TERF opinions, and Carrie Fisher’s violent swings of addiction and mental illness are legendary, they remain outliers. We can debate whether women artists are socialized to be more compliant, or whether we’re more tolerant of men’s abusive behaviors. But historically, we’ve let male artists be abusive.

Today, apparently uniquely, we have the expectation that Great Artists must also be Good People. The haste with which American audiences, and the entertainment conglomerates which need them, have abandoned, say, Woody Allen, attests that we demand artists represent our values. The Internet has made the public more aware than ever of artists’ personal lives; and we’ve responded by passing moral judgement on their work, measured by our billfolds.

But good people don’t make great art. They never have. Art emerges from some form of tension, whether it’s the narrative tension of a Scottish king usurping the throne, the cultural tension of teenaged musicians rebelling against postwar conformity, or the personal tension of comedians turning their private trauma into public art. Nice people getting along peacefully don’t have raw material for art, much less the motivation to pursue their public.

Roman Polanski, Bill Cosby, and David Bowie:
three great artists who left a trail of destruction behind them

This became clear for me, surrounding two famous addicts. James Frey, whose memoir Oprah endorsed before it became clear he’d fabricated nearly everything, made his reputation spilling the beans about his toxic personality. Stephen King, whose career-making books from the 1970s were mostly written in an alcoholic haze, scolded people for getting upset about this. Addicts, King reminded us, lie about anything. Frey’s fevered imaginings arose from his damaged personality.

One can make laundry lists of famous artists, again mostly men, whose great art emerged from their damaged personalities. I absolutely love Hank Williams, but it’s impossible to separate his melancholy, autobiographical songs from his drunken, philandering life. Sylvia Plath and John Keats, two of my favorite poets, made their undying reputations by exposing their inner torment, before both dying young. One need only mention Vincent van Gogh’s name.

Please don’t misunderstand me: Phil Spector killed a woman in cold blood, apparently off his medications for bipolar disorder. He committed a violent crime, and deserved every moment of his punishment. And his art certainly wasn’t interrupted, as he’d been living in semi-retirement since 1974. Nothing I say here should serve to excuse any criminal for harming others. If anything, we need to more stringently punish criminals with high public profiles.

Phil Spector had bipolar disorder; so did Patty Duke. Both turned their inner suffering outward, transforming their pain into generation-defining art. But both, in indulging their damage, also allowed their inner torment to fester. Both mostly disappeared from public around the same time, making occasional, insignificant returns. Patty Duke handled her pain through addiction, self-harm, and sex. Spector chose to harm others; that’s the only real difference.

Let’s just accept that healthy, well-adjusted people don’t make great art. We couldn’t have Phil Spector, the innovative, pioneering record producer, without Phil Spector, the bipolar patient who resisted treatment, and hurt others to muffle his own pain. We’ll have to accept this balance. And we’ll have to decide, collectively, how much suffering artists can inflict, before it becomes more harmful than the benefits of their art.

Fred Phelps, Coronavirus, and Me

“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.”
—Proverbs 14:12 (KJV)

Reverend Fred Phelps

Around the midpoint of his book Does Jesus Really Love Me?, gay Christian journalist Jeff Chu (now a seminarian) recounts meeting Reverend Fred Phelps, the notorious anti-gay activist preacher, in his Topeka, Kansas, office. On a shelf behind Phelps’ desk, in pride of place, Chu saw Phelps kept a plaque awarded to him by the Topeka NAACP. Early in his career, Phelps was a champion of racial rights and solidarity in Kansas.

This image has stayed with me for years, since reading Chu’s book. Throughout his career, Phelps embraced conflict; his particularly adversarial form of Christianity characterized his entire ministry. But early on, he embraced conflict on behalf of oppressed minorities, in a state historically riven between its urban, racially diverse eastern border, and its mostly white, rural, geographically vast west. He began his ministry uplifting the downtrodden.

What changed? I never met Phelps, never interacted with his congregation, so I’m reluctant to speculate. However, his congregation’s history includes an important note: Westboro Baptist Church began as a satellite campus of Topeka’s East Side Baptist Church, but quickly broke away. Westboro has continued without formal ties to any Baptist denomination, a solo traveler through a world its leadership regards as morally tainted.

Something happened in 1955. Fred Phelps suddenly decided he didn’t need other people. This means both organizational support and guidance, but also the religious instruction of other Christians. He decided to walk alone. Although he completed a law degree in 1964, and began working with the NAACP around that time, records indicate his courtroom behavior became increasingly hostile and belligerent, leading to his disbarment in 1977.

Phelps continued this pattern throughout his career. He started out collaborating with others, then became increasingly adversarial. Even his own congregation experienced this, and the Westboro board formally excommunicated their founding pastor in August of 2013, about seven months before he died. Phelps’ demand for righteousness gradually drove everyone away, even his own most loyal followers, piece by piece.

I’ve thought about Phelps recently, as isolation has become the standard behavior for Americans of all religious and political stripes. Trapped inside our houses, with only the company of our own thoughts and our most immediate nuclear family, many people find themselves going down roads they never anticipated: fighting with their spouses, turning into hoarders, and worse. Though the evidence is anecdotal, many Americans probably find themselves trapped in a spiral.

Like Phelps, many Christians have turned against their houses of religion and other allies: Oklahoma pastor Jakob Topper reports that about half of complaints pastors get today involve parishioners threatening to leave if the congregation doesn’t re-open, and the other half are parishioners threatening to leave if it does. Organized Christianity threatens to descend into a childish squabble over my feelings, not God’s work.

Nor is it exclusively religious. I’ve witnessed souls hurt and friendships ended over needless political fights, mostly conducted online. And I don’t mean fights between Trump supporters and the vote-em-out brigade; it’s mostly been between fellow Leftists, hurt and angered because somebody favors environment over labor rights, or whatever. As though, when facing the current administration, we could separate these issues from one another.

We’re all, like the young Phelps, unmoored now. The institutions that kept us stable, like work, volunteer organizations, and the arts, are indefinitely suspended or, in the case of schools, being run like something from a Hollywood dystopia. Only now are some Americans, including me, realizing how dependent we once were on our communities to shoulder the burden of our sanity. “Many hands make light work,” they say. I only now understand that.

Maybe that’s why so many people rebelled so quickly against quarantine procedures which many never actually honored. Even a very brief sojourn alone with their thoughts made them realize how badly they needed others. The wild, tempestuous, and frequently angry thoughts which, my friends report anecdotally, we’ve all suffered this year, proved too much for some to handle. Rather than stay trapped indoors, they turned that bottled wrath outward.

Americans are, perhaps, seeing our real identities exposed to ourselves, sometimes for the first time. The damaging power of loneliness forces us to admit we don’t like who we are, when forced to live by the way which seems right to ourselves. Isolation is destroying us, if the virus doesn’t kill us first, and there’s no cure for either.

Is Infidelity Really Inevitable?

Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, MD, Infidelity: Why Men and Women Cheat

It’s difficult to know how common infidelity might be in today’s sexually amorphous society. However, once it happens to you, the chance of lingering damage is 100%. Psychologists who study people who have been betrayed by their spouses say the damage resembles combat stress disorder, and people who have survived infidelity often spend years learning to trust again. How can we prepare for, or survive, this kind of trauma?

Manhattan psychologist Kenneth Paul Rosenberg started out as an addiction specialist, and he insists the neurological mechanisms of addiction strikingly resemble those of love. Hear me out. Though Rosenberg explains it better than I could summarize, in brief, addictions appear to mimic the human need for love and attachment. Addiction basically happens when our love impulse gets misplaced. Having read Johann Hari and Gabor Maté, I find this painfully plausible.

Discussions of “infidelity” sometimes stumble because we don’t have a consistent definition. Does infidelity require sexual intercourse? Rosenberg says no; if you excuse your flirtations because they don’t get physical, the damage to your marriage could be equally devastating. Yet even Rosenberg admits many of his own friendships with women are characterized by sexual tension. So clearly more factors than just “what we do” matter in calibrating infidelity.

Infidelity, in Rosenberg’s telling, has certain predictable neurological patterns. No matter the nuances of your real-life circumstances, the cheating brain goes through mechanical motions which scientists can map and diagnose. By understanding these, you can potentially identify when your thoughts stray into unfaithful directions, and prevent thoughts turning into actions. You can also reverse the trend if you’ve already strayed over the line into infidelity.

The real pain comes, not in your own unfaithfulness, but in discovering your spouse has betrayed you. (Rosenberg embraces moral terms like “betrayal”; he doesn’t hide his loyalties on the issue.) The one person you must trust the most, the one you turn to when others undermine you, becomes the one you actually trust least. You find everything ripped from beneath you. That’s where the PTSD-like damaging repercussions come in.

Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, MD

Fortunately, even in this moment, neuroscience offers us remarkable insights into handling and recovery. We know exactly what motivates people’s behavior in moments of betrayal: the desire to confront the wrong person, for instance, or our tendency to obsessively seek further evidence, a tendency neuroscientists call “pain shopping.” Yes, that’s a real term. And again, by understanding our harmful tendencies, we can avoid falling into the most common traps.

Rosenberg confronts one of the most common human failings in unstintingly scientific terms. This means using hard quantitative research to consider behavior that often has more than one cause. Unfortunately, though the dust-jacket synopsis promises the latest research, Rosenberg admits infidelity is difficult to study longitudinally, and some of his cited research is decades old. I find this regrettable, because all science reflects the era it was conducted in.

But in maintaining his scientific eye, Rosenberg doesn’t have some illusion of complete objectivity. As a clinical therapist, he salts his research descriptions with narratives culled from his practice, including group sessions and couples therapy (he works to maintain confidentiality). After all, no matter how scrupulously scientific his desires, infidelity is a human behavior, with all the complexity and nuance humans bring into the discussion.

Be aware, this means frank discussions of sex. Sometimes, Rosenberg uses the dictionary to call things what they’re called, but he also uses common vernacular language to ensure a general audience understands his meaning. Don’t say you weren’t warned when his language occasionally turns coarse. That said, there were some occasions where I felt his “plain English” ventured into unnecessary vulgarity. Let your values decide.

Rosenberg starts from an assumption of committed monogamy; though he has a chapter on open relationships, polyamory remains mostly outside his scope. He doesn’t, however, assume either heterosexuality or formal marriage (though he uses marriage language as a shorthand). Therefore, he remains approachable for most people in serious relationships. His precepts are scientific enough to apply to differing relationships, yet personal enough to customize for your unique situation.

Infidelity isn’t inevitable, and despite many cheaters’ self-justification, not everybody cheats. But some do, and when that happens, the consequences can go far beyond the sexual realm. Rosenberg wants you to honestly evaluate your situation, to gauge whether your relationship can survive, and how you can recover from your partner’s, or your own, betrayal. He doesn’t pretend it will be easy. But, given appropriate tools, Rosenberg believes that healing really is possible.

Grown-Ups Deserve Some Playtime, Too

Steve McDonald, Fantastic Machines: a Coloring Book of Amazing Devices Real and Imagined
Cate Anevski, Invisible Cat Activities: a Complete-the-Drawing Book
Tim Leong, Star Wars Super Graphic: A Visual Guide to a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Dude, why the hate for adult coloring books? We know coloring helps children improve manual dexterity, spatial recognition, and tri-dimensional vision. Coloring increases the chance your kid will become an engineer, doctor, or other highly qualified professional, besides being just fun. Do we think adults don’t deserve such educational play? Or have we become so strangled by social roles that we cannot allow ourselves to breathe freely for five minutes?

Despite the title, line artist Steve McDonald’s coloring book mostly spotlights real (or realistic) machines: a souped-up funny-car engine. The International Space Station. An ore extractor. A pump-bellows pipe organ. His one-tone illustrations, which look like they were done with a simple lining pen and basic drafting tools, are massively complex, inviting children and adults to apply colors and make the pictures look as realistic as what he’s already begun.

But he does more than that. By inviting participants to color the components of, say the Mars Rover, or a Victorian diving bell, he encourages users to understand the relationships between the components. A London city bus is even more complicated than McDonald’s drawings, and most people don’t contemplate how dependent we are daily on thousands of moving parts. McDonald encourages us to think about things we take for granted.

One of McDonald’s inventions is purely fantastical: a jet-powered flying ice cream truck. It’s pure Jetsons escapism. Yet McDonald renders even this d with intense attention, not only to the device, but the cityscape behind it. That’s why adults should color: because this seemingly escapist gewgaw actually jibes with something more complicated and profound. It makes us think. It encourages us to see the moving parts beneath the surface.

Click to enlarge

Cate Anevski goes a different direction. Inspired by those “invisible” cat memes, she presents minimalist illustrations of cats caught mid-motion, and asks us to fill in the missing background: monkey bars. Duelling pianos. Volleyball. Where coloring books encourage users to imbue life into somebody else’s drawings, Anevski wants us to create new drawings around highly expressive cats doing, y’know, cat-ish things. Because who wouldn’t love that?

The back-cover synopsis shows simple line drawings around Anevski’s cats. But the pages themselves are wide-open beyond the cats, which Anevski depicts as simple line drawings with sepia-toned accents. So be as ambitious, or as simple, as your imagination moves you. When Anevski calls for the invisible beach ball, give her the entire beach: swimmers, partiers, waves, and Jaws. That’s the point: you control the final outcome.

Like coloring, this activity book works for children or adults. It encourages imagination, but sets limits for audiences to work against. It disguises practising complex motor function and brain exercise as simple play. And the pages I’ve tried are simply fun. It requires more personal motivation than coloring books’ pre-established lines, but it works similar parts of the brain, with similar rewards in both mental practice and grown-up playtime.

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Tim Leong, chief graphic designer for Entertainment Weekly, sadly disappoints with his attempt to create graphic representations of themes running through Star Wars. Not because it isn’t colorful, or packed with content, but because there isn’t much to do. Though beautifully designed, this paragon of licensed merchandising has little content per page. There’s little to hold my attention, and nothing I, the audience, can contribute.

Leong’s brightly colored illustrations sometimes are just cute pictures, like Chewbacca or C-3P0, with colors supposedly representing something informative: how often C-3P0 says “We’re doomed,” for instance. Others are actual statistical graphs, like how much of certain characters have been replaced by cybernetic parts, or who saved whom how many times. Sadly, with little text, readers will flip past Leong’s quite good designs quickly, in less time than most dinners.

And unfortunately, anybody considering this for Christmas presents will be sorely disappointed. By then, Episode VIII will have premiered, and this volume will already be out-of-date. What good is a gift book that’s destined to be obsolete before gift-giving season? This book offers no participation, little complexity, and minimal content. I like the idea, but Leong, a designer, needs a writer to give his content heft.

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In conclusion. I’m a new convert to coloring and activity books for grown-ups. We adults deserve both the sensory pleasure and the mental complexity that completing the picture provides. But a pretty picture isn’t enough; we need something we can contribute to creating the finished product. Audience members who consider themselves too cool for coloring, only deny themselves the pleasure and education that finishing the picture can provide.