Zelda's Inferno exercise: a prose poem on the topic, "where does stuff go?"

The snow is gone. Where did it go to? There were billions of snowflakes, in my backyard, each perfectly detailed, dazzling faceted. Now they have gone, and my yard is mud.

Did they go to snowflake heaven? Did they reincarnate as packed powder on some ski slope?

Each snowflake was a nexus of conditions, of water and temperatures and altitudes of clouds. Each snowflake was a mass of Arctic air, plus an ocean breeze, plus a low pressure system. Each snowflake contained the cycle of seasons, the tilt of the Earth's axis, the deep ocean currents that make the climate, the Milankovitch cycles that make the Ice Ages. And more: the formation of the Earth itself, the Sun, the element of oxygen born in a dying star, the hydrogen that condensed out of the Big Bang, the whole universe in each snowflake.

And then those elements move apart, no longer overlap and the snowflake cannot be seen. But it is not gone, because the seasons, the Earth, the Sun, the Universe, remain.

A recent study by San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge looked at Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) test results for high school and college students from 1938 through 2007. (The results will be published in a future issue of the Clinical Psychology Review.) The MMPI is one of, if not the, most popular personality tests, which measures (or claims to measure) people's mental health along ten different axes.

Twenge found that in 2007, five times as many people surpassed the threshold to be considered to have mental health issues as did in 1938. Especially high were the increases in hypomania and depression. And this doesn't even consider the vast numbers of people taking antidepressants and other meds that alleviate the symptoms the MMPI asks about.

Now, add to the fact that as a nation we're going crazy, the fact that we're exporting our model of mental health to the rest of the world. We've been aggressively preaching that "mental illnesses" should be considered a "brain disease", in the theory that this would help remove the stigma around them.

According to the research of Professor Sheila Mehta of Auburn University, though, this in not actually the result: considering mental illness as a neurological defect actually tends to make other people treat the sufferer less kindly. Mehta has actually studied how other people treat those they believe have a "brain disease", versus those who they believe have a psychosocial problem. She says, “Viewing those with mental disorders as diseased sets them apart and may lead to our perceiving them as physically distinct. Biochemical aberrations make them almost a different species.”

This may be why schizophrenics in the United States and Europe, where the "brain disease" idea holds sway, have a significantly higher relapse rate than those in other countries. More "primitive" notions of mental illness may actually help keep the troubled individual in the social group, and religious beliefs that attribute their problem to "evil spirits" or somesuch may allow for calmness and acquiescence and a less stressful response.

This is probably going to piss off some of my friends. But best to get it out of the way now, rather then whatever future time my book is published.

I'm including a chapter in my book-in-progress about the dark underbelly of the spiritual quest. The idea, basically, is

There is an old aphorism, often attributed to Otto von Bismarck, that those who love sausages or the law should never watch either being made. I've always disagreed with this -- if people saw the truth behind the production of these things, we'd have many more vegetarian anarchists, which would seem to me a positive development.

And so it is too with religion and spirituality. The hazards of cults, superstitions, delusions, hypocrisy, and manipulation are very real. A peek behind the scenes of both ancient traditions and the modern cults of personality around self-help gurus and peddlers of enlightenment-lite, is an unpleasant but necessary requirement for spiritual health.

In this chapter I talk about scandals in Zen (Japanese and American), about Chögyam Trungpa's misbehavior, about sex scandals in the Pagan community, and about some new age-y sort of "Plastic Shamans and Goofy Gurus". And one of the folks I deal with under that heading is Daniel Pinchbeck.

I first mentioned Pinchbeck over three years ago, when Rolling Stone profiled him. I was not impressed, but I didn't give it much more thought than that.

A year or so after that, my good friend Robin Gunkel, whose opinion I regard highly, met him at Burning Man and she was impressed. So I suspended judgment -- maybe the Rolling Stone profile was an unfair hatchet job. That happens.

Robin has since become involved with Evolver, a social network arising out of Pinchbeck's blog, "Reality Sandwich". I've gone to several events put on by the Baltimore "spore" of Evolver, and heard some good discussions.

But with that said, when I sat down to look more deeply into Daniel Pinchbeck, what I found was not favorable. Here's a first draft of the section about him that will go into my book.

Daniel Pinchbeck is the guy probably most responsible for kicking off the idea that some great transformation is going to occur in 2012. In his book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, he claims to have received "transmissions" from the Mayan deity Quetzalcoatl telling him about this momentous event. An excerpt from these transmissions:

Do you remember 9/11? It seems Rudy Giuliani doesn't. In the wake of the failed "underwear bomber", Rudy has claimed that "We had no domestic attacks under Bush; we've had one under Obama."

This requires forgetting not only 9/11 -- for Giuliani, a remarkable feat -- but the anthrax attacks and the shoe bomber.

I can only see two options: 1) Giuliani is so blinded by hatred for Obama that he's come down with hysterical amnesia and believes what he's saying, or 2) Giuliani is deliberately lying but has such a low opinion of the American voter that he thinks the lie will stick in some people's minds.

A similar malady seems to be effecting Dana Perino, who actually said "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term," and Mary Matalin, who claimed that 9/11 was a problem inherited from the Clinton administration. (To refresh your memory, it was not the Clinton administration that, in August 2001, received and ignored a memo titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US".)

I posted previously about the strange case of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who was in Hiroshima on a business trip on August 6, 1945 and his hometown of Nagasaki of August 9th, and thus was the only known survivor of both nuclear massacres.

Yamaguchi has died after a battle against stomach cancer. According to NPR,

Last month, Avatar director James Cameron visited Yamaguchi. Cameron is considering making a film of an upcoming book by Charles Pelegrino, The Last Train From Hiroshima: The Survivors Look Back.

After meeting with Cameron and Pellegrino, Yamaguchi told The Mainichi Daily News that he believed it is the director's "destiny" to make a film about the bombings.

I have fond memories of Omni magazine -- I think there might be some old issues up in my attic. Slate looks back at Omni's look forward into the future world of 2010:

For anyone who was raised in the '70s and never had a date in the '80s or who thought the 2000s would look like a cross between a Yes album cover and Journey concert T-shirt, Omni magazine was essential reading—one with a ready answer to all your robot and rocket questions. And to a 10-year old getting a subscription for Christmas in 1979, Omni was The Future.

The magazine was a lushly airbrushed, sans-serif, and silver-paged vision dreamed up by Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione and his wife, Kathy Keeton. It split the difference between the consumerist Popular Science—which always seemed to cover hypersonic travel and AMC carburetors in the same page—and the lofty Scientific American, whose rigor was alluring but still impenetrable to me. But with equal parts sci-fi, feature reporting, and meaty interviews with Freeman Dyson and Edward O. Wilson, Omni's arrival every month was a sort of peak nerd experience.

A week or so ago, I found myself in a conversation about the nature of mental health diagnosis. I've always found it interesting how no one is "hysterical" any more -- if you read books on psychology from a few decades ago, there's a great deal of discussion about that condition, where as it seems that now it's almost never discussed. I've always taken that as an indicator of how at least part of the concept of "mental illness" is a social construction.

However, I stumbled across this abstract of a paper in the journal Social Science & Medicine, which notes "Experimental and clinical studies of nonhumans and humans reveal somatic and behavioral effects of hypervitaminosis A which closely parallel many of the symptoms reported for Western patients diagnosed as hysterical and Inuit sufferers of pibloktoq ['arctic hysteria']. Eskimo nutrition provides abundant sources of vitamin A and lays the probable basis in some individuals for hypervitaminosis A through ingestion of livers, kidneys, and fat of arctic fish and mammals, where the vitamin often is stored in poisonous quantities." [emphasis added. -tms]

Excessive vitamin A is well known to be toxic, and can result in birth defects, liver abnormalities, and CNS disorders. There's also some evidence linking excessive intake with osteoporosis, but the picture is not clear.

Just in case you need something fresh to worry about: recent observations of T Pyxidis, a rare "recurrent nova" consisting of a white dwarf and a sun-like companion orbiting each other -- show that it is much closer than previously thought (just 3,260 light years) and that it could eventually (in about ten million years) go supernova.

A supernova that "close" (in cosmic terms) could alter our atmosphere and destroy the ozone layer, with cataclysmic results for life here on our pale blue dot.

Advocates of eating animal flesh often ask me, "Well, what if the animal is raised and slaughtered humanely?" Besides that fact that the notion of "humane slaughter" is at odds with the physiological reality of concussing, electrocuting, slashing open the veins of, and/or decapitating an animal, the idea that one can be "humane" while killing for profit is self-contradictory.

I stumbled across a perfect illustration of this today in an article about Joel Salatin, an advocate for local production of flesh foods who's gotten somewhat famous after being featured in Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and in the documentaries Food, Inc. and Fresh:

“If we continue to look at these beautiful turkeys the way we do, just as a protoplasmic mass that can be put into any food product,” he says, “it won’t be long until we look at people, and especially people from other cultures, the same way.”

Walking away from the turkeys, a reporter and the film crew in tow, he says, almost casually, “This is the first time in human history where people can have no real connection, or relationship, with their natural ecology.”

It’s an observation that hits like a thunderbolt. The reason a trip to a real farm can be so jarring is that it challenges the way we are used to confronting our food, which typically involves walking past rows of brightly packaged jars and boxes— often featuring faces of cartoon characters— or hovering over displays of neatly packaged meats, without ever thinking about how they got there.

“It must be sad when it comes time to slaughter them,” says Boston-based film producer Paul Dewey, who was clearly moved by Salatin’s speech about his beautiful turkeys.

“Nooooo, that’s payday,” says Salatin. “Are you sad when you get a bonus?”

It is sad indeed if we look at sentient beings as "just as a protoplasmic mass that can be put into any food product". But it is no less sad if we look at them as a "payday"!

Salatin mentions the influence that how we think about animals has on how we think about people, but doesn't follow through. If killing turkeys isn't sad but "payday", what does this prepare us to do about exploiting humans when profit is involved?

Consider the words of Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, who became a vegetarian while imprisoned in Dachau: "I think that men will be killed and tortured as long as animals are killed and tortured. So long there will be wars too. Because killing must be trained and perfected on smaller objects, morally and technically."

It makes no difference to the turkeys whether their dead bodies are roasted whole or processed into paste, even less than it matters to me whether my corpse will be buried or cremated. Respect for the corpse is a very poor substitute for respect for the being. Both I and the turkeys would rather live out our natural lives -- nothing that fails to respect that, regardless of how we might be killed or what happens to the corpse afterward, is humane.

(Good site about the "humane myth" here.)

First poetry attempt of the year -- Happy New Year!

Zelda's Inferno exercise: free write around the phrase, "It should be free" (selected at semi-random from the Baltimore Sun). This came out stream-of-consciousness, not very sensible but some bits I like.

It should be free, unbound, unrestricted
It should be free, without cost
It should be free, able to choose without coercion
It should be free, lead-free, BPA-free, cholesterol-free, sodium-free

It should be free, free beer, free lunch, free with the purchase of a second item of equal or greater value, free bird!, free to be you and me, I'm free to do what I want any old time, free at last, free at last, praise god almighty I'm free at last, free free set them free, free of dyes or perfumes, fragrance free, free and easy, peaceful easy feeling, feeling free and easy, easy, easy to be free, is it? No, not so much. To live outside the law you must be honest, said Dylan; just so, to live outside control you must be brave and strong. Easier to let someone else make the decision for you -- and then have the blame. Mankind, someone once said, cannot bear too much freedom.

now that you have your freedom, how will you keep it safe from robbers? take your freedom and lock in up in a heavy chest bound tight with many chains, yes. Tie your freedom down firmly. How will you get free from your freedom, the heavy freedom you carry around like a spy with an attache case handcuffed to his wrist, the freedom that weighs you down and holds you back.

It should be free to be free from freedom. Write today for your free brochure about freedom from freedom. It should be free It should be free to follow me It should be free four five six seven eight nine for the lost god, freedom of religion, freedom from religion, freedom of the gods or lack thereof, free to find your own way to hell. Everyone in hell is free to leave at any time, but the damned demand their punishment, keeping the demons hard at work. Of course, the demons are just as free to quit...but the dammed and the demons keep up their dance.