PARADOX DEVELOPMENT PT. II–JAMES RANDI

I had another, stronger encounter with paradox recently, watching this TED lecture by magician/conjurer, James Randi.  Let this small article serve as an exploration of this physiological paradox… as well as a challenge to James Randi himself and his foundation.

Having been in the profession of “magic” for a long time–he’s also known as “The Amazing Randi”–he turned his attention to debunking other so called magicians, psychics, and professors of the supernatural, and often works with Michael Shermer, founder of Skeptic magazine.  The fact that Randi made his fortune as a magician and now debunks others who make money off the willingness of human beings to believe, is pretty interesting… but is not the paradox I became aware of in watching this lecture.  In general, I believe him when he says he’s debunking psychics because they end up causing more pain than they purport to relieve, i.e. he has a sense of the good and is trying to carry it out.  In this talk he debunks several sectors of alternative belief: homeopathy, psychics communing with the dead, and people claiming psychokinesis, such as a water dowser.  On stage he swallows a whole bottle full of a homeopathic sleeping agent and then reads a label saying to call a poison hotline if overdose occurs, or something like that.  He explains the philosophy of homeopathy which is that by distillation of some herb, or dilution, it becomes vibrationally more potent… but you’re watching him talk for a while and he doesn’t appear to get sleepy, as one would expect if you’ve swallowed a whole container of sleeping pills.  So he debunks homeopathy that easily.  (By examining his body on stage in this talk, I get the sense that he’s a guy that takes a lot of naps though; I think those pills are having some cumulative effect on him.)  He describes exposing a faith healer, Peter Popoff, many years ago, who claimed to be healing his congregation through the holy spirit and by divine connection knew a lot a priori about the people who would come to his televised megaplex for healing, when in reality he had a small radio in his ear and his wife was giving him information about the attendees.  Shortly after the exposure, Peter Popoff claimed bankruptcy.  I watched some of the footage he gives of Peter Popoff here and was a little nervous about his conclusions.  Here’s why: I am as big a fan of any of the dissolution of basically anyone who heals people through Christ on TV… but watching the people get healed in Popoff’s congregation, I suddenly could see that they truly believe in what they are experiencing.  Randi opens that youtube interview with this statement: “I want to be sure–if I can–of the real world around me, the world as it really is, as is possible.”  I couldn’t get that statement to dovetail with these people getting faith healed and then expressing actual relief from arthritis, or rheumatism, or a bad hip or whatever.  I mean, even though this guy is a fake, aren’t these poor people actually getting help?  If they are, there’s a paradox there.  A really big one.  We will explore it in a few sentences.  The first thing I would ask Randi is this: OK, you’re exposing a fraud… but this fraud is providing televised entertainment, as well as actual–albeit temporary–relief from real pain that Western medicine probably doesn’t have a cure for.  So I ask, how much is attendance to one of these congregations?  $30, $50?  How much was a ticket to one of your magic shows back in the day?  Are the two really so different?

Then comes the harder question.  If people get bona fide relief from something fake, is the treatment actually fake?  It turns out that the very institution that James Randi would rely upon for his reality, i.e. Western Medical Practice, actually has a whole doctrine for this gray edge of its science: it’s called the placebo effect.  The definition of the placebo is a sham or fake procedure that produces a real effect.  The phenomenon is so strong that Western science often has to conduct a double blind placebo in clinical trials in order to insure that the results of a REAL procedure aren’t placebo induced, meaning basically that the patient isn’t just healing himself because he’s being treated by REAL doctors in a real office, etc., meaning that both the doctor and the patient do not know if what is being administered as treatment is real or false.  If nothing happens, it’s false.  If, however, a patient is suffering from something which either can’t be treated with normal drugs, because of the condition itself–as in the case with some severe respiratory diseases–or because the condition is simply undefinable, a placebo is often very practical and effective.  For example, with a case of severe pneumonia where a patient needs to reduce pain and slow the heart rate–but where the use of opiates or morphine derivatives would compromise the condition even further–a physician will inject saline solution into a patient hypodermically and tell the patient that he is getting a dose of the strongest pain killer there is.  Often, that alone will create tremendous relaxation in the patient and achieve the results the doctor is seeking.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo)  There are vociferous debates all over Western medical practice about the morality of placebo induced results because it is a practice based on deception.  But often, because placebo procedures widely reap good results, doctors say that they should be employed because anything to aid in the healing process could be interpreted as part of the hippocratic oath, and in the aforementioned article, based on scientifically conducted polls, medical journals report that 60% of physicians around the world utilize the placebo effect.

That there is stated scientific doctrine for the placebo effect, including a placebo effect for homeopathic treatment, is grounds to form a conclusion about the actual and documented power of human belief.  It is at this point that I cannot see the entire logic of James Randi’s crusade to dispel the efforts of alternative medical and otherwise practitioners, when those individuals are not competing with or excluding the care of rigorously tested treatments (of the West) that could heal the same ailments.  In other words, if Science itself grants power–and a relatively large domain of power at that–to the placebo effect, wouldn’t it in fact be more of a detriment to individuals receiving this treatment to debunk and demystify the practice?!

The paradox for Randi is that perhaps in thinking he is doing good, he is in fact, not.  Perhaps just as he allowed his audience to believe that he was actually bending a spoon, so should he allow a psychic let his patients believe they are receiving real treatment.  Because the power of belief is REAL and documented under scientific conditions.

Not too long ago I read a volume about hypnotism, and pretty shortly after starting the book, was able to hypnotize myself.  The author, Raphael H. Rhodes, in Hypnosis: Theory, Practice, and Application, says this:

This phenomenon [hypnotism] first attracted my attention several decades ago when, as an impressionable adolescent, I witnessed an operation in a dental surgeon’s office.  The dentist was cutting deeply into the patient’s gum.  The patient sat back, composed and comfortable, though no drug had been administered.  She had merely been hypnotized.  The hypnotist had told her to relax.  He had said that she would feel no pain.

At the conclusion of the operation, which lasted about half an hour, the dentist laid his instruments aside, and nodded to the hypnotist.  The latter then addressed the patient: “When I wake you, there will be no pain, no headache, no after-effects.  You’ll feel well and happy.  Now when I count to ten, you’ll wake up.”

Upon the final count she opened her eyes and smiled.  “When does he begin?” she asked.

(From the Introduction)

When you consider this: that surgery, or something which would be considered quite painful, is possible without anesthetic, it becomes evident that within our own physiological/psychological construction, there are internally higher tools to aid in healing.  The body knows that pain is a map towards wellness; it also knows how to turn the pain off in order to surpass the negative effects of the pain itself, to achieve the wellness it seeks.  Read this for another example of surgery under hypnosis.

I would argue that a hypnotist, who in 30-60 seconds is, able to subdue a patient properly for a 90 minute typical Western surgery is equally as “magical”–if not more–as someone who could bend a spoon or speak to the dead.  I haven’t witnessed any of these things, but knowing that the former is entirely possible and has been documented by science, I would like to submit to James Randi that a broad stroke effort to debunk the world of alternative healing is short sighted.  The path to hell is paved with good intentions, etc.

James Randi has a one million dollar challenge available to anyone who professes a paranormal, supernatural, or psychic ability.  I would like to recommend that the $1,000,000 challenge offered by James Randi’s foundation, to find someone with supernatural, paranormal, or psychic powers come to rest with this article, and be submitted to ME for use in a positive way, in the formation of a new foundation which works on the fostering of hope as opposed to the erosion of it.  For if a hypnotist can make you think you’re a cat, so that you’re saying, “I’m a cat, I’m a cat!” or can put you to sleep while you undergo open heart surgery, then you’ve got a psychic power there, insofar as that person has used his mind to manipulate another body into undergoing a totally unexpected event, and that’s more psychic than turning the page of a dictionary with your mind or bending a spoon.  I personally would love to take responsibility for the $1,000,000 and do some work in Haiti, rebuilding, and putting the money to good use…

PARADOX DEVELOPMENT PT. I–WHO ARE WE!?

I originally posted this as one article and it proved a little rambly I think.  So i have reformulated it into two ideas; two different formulations of paradox.

I would not be surprised if every field of study arrives at a somewhat gross paradox in one way or another, a paradox which seems to bring the entire field of study into question in one way or another.  I would like to provide a couple of examples of significant human paradox, the first being a psychologically based dilemma, the second (which will appear in PARADOX DEVELOPMENT PT. II) a more physiological one, and one which has a particularly high profile character sitting right in the middle of the problem.

I just finished a book by Adam Phillips and Barbary Taylor called “On Kindness“  which is a thorough exploration a possible ‘instinct’ for kindness and psychological groundwork for what is actually a pretty mystifying component of modern culture: being kind.  To grossly paraphrase the project of this book, the author(s) ask, ‘Why are we kind to one another?  Or: are we kind to one another.’

The authors do a very good job of presenting the idea that perhaps being kind is not as simple as it seems.  This proposition then turns into an exploration of everything else connected to that impulse to be nice: our love for brethren, for a lover, for a parent, for humanity, and perhaps finally for oneself.

In good philosophical fashion, the authors arrive at some stiff paradoxes with regards to our instinct to be kind.  These are a few of the components to the paradox: our original sense of love and attachment comes from a connection to the mother.  We feel unbounded love from her, at first.  But then there’s a sense for the mother that her child is not reciprocating this feeling, he just cries and makes messes and expresses no gratitude, and a sense of resentment is born in her for the child, according to the history of psychoanalysis.  The child ages and begins to learn to ask nicely to get what he wants… and the scope of what he wants broadens as he ages.  He begins to foster a resentment for the mother as a part of normal formation of individuality alongside sexual awareness.  There is then a complex series of evolutions into independence between parent and child.  At the end, even if all severance is made in a “healthy” way there is this paradox about the meaning of the act of kindness:

The kindness of childhood–upon which parenting depends–makes a problem of desire in adulthood.  Affection is inevitably entwined with strong feelings for parents; it becomes a nice word for incest.  Kindness and prohibition are inextricable; kindness is our recognition of the forbidden and our refusal of it… Because of the incest taboo our desire is experienced as a risk.  Our kindness, in other words, is the key to our sexual problems, and not the other way around…. If there was to be a viable modern kindness, the psychoanalysts had begun to believe, it had to be allied to aggression, it had to possess a more forceful vitality; it couldn’t be a wishful refuge from the patent brutality of human nature.  The kindness of Christian humility had begun to seem, from a psychoanalytic point of view, very suspect.  Freud had said, before the First World War, that kindness split off from sexual desire breeds a fundamental frustration which in turn leads to a destructive hatred that, directed against the self, becomes impotence and frigidity.

(Excerpted from pp 86-88)

I don’t really even want to comment on the material quoted there… but to point out the glaring, wonderful paradox that a human comes to when he investigates something so intrinsic to our condition as loving and hating.  This paradox encompasses the Oedipal Complex, as well as–in part–the nature of war, and the nature of disharmony between the sexes in relationship.  And it is at the end of a string of paragraphs like that–written by an accomplished expert–that I ask, “Who are we!?”

My sense is that there is a natural quality to this fundamental paradox.  In other words, perhaps part of being human, is to dwell within paradox.  Paradox itself is easy to say and easy to point out.  Zeno’s paradox, for example.  Or the paradox of the river crossing with the fox, the chicken and the feed.  But to be within a real paradox, and to be aware of it, is something else altogether and requires a skill somewhat alien to human practice, even though the actual paradox is not at all alien; on the contrary, it is intrinsic.

My father wrote a book recently with a PhD psychologist, called Quicksilver:

… in which they generate a nice formulation of the effect of a paradox upon the psyche, or the mind.  The doctor with whom my father wrote the book calls this dwelling-with paradox a PDQ, a Paradox Development Question… and when a paradox is presented, or self-presented, the mind–as well as the subconscious–latch onto the problem of the paradox.  The mind loves puzzles.

There are myriad examples of thinkers dwelling-with paradox throughout the ages; a famous example would be the challenge to Archimedes made by King Hiero II–who suspected that a goldsmith who’d recently made him a crown, did not make the crown entirely from gold and had kept some for himself.  This is a paradox because the king wants to know if the crown is solid gold without opening it up and verifying, melting it down to discover it were some kind of alloy.  This gives rise to the famous tale that Archimedes made his revelation in the bathtub, when he realized that the specific gravity of that volume of pure gold would displace a different amount of water to that of an alloy…. and ran through the streets, shouting Eureka!… which in Greek means, “I found it!”… which conclusion led to this article by Malcolm Gladwell, which details another interesting psychological phenomenon in the presence of paradox, which is the necessity for relaxation after concerted effort to solve a problem; in other words, that it is only when the mind relaxes after a diligent effort to solve a puzzle that the subconscious is able to enter its 2 cents.

One of the best cognitive exercises we can engage in is paradox formulation.  But it also turns out that we are involved not only in cognitive paradox, but physiological paradox, with respect to our own health and wellness.  Please continue on to PARADOX DEVELOPMENT PT. II.

stump house

james hedberg, my longtime friend from St. John’s College (www.sjcsf.edu), and the architect and builder of this website, just found this article on the etherwebs, which is a house i wandered past a couple of years ago during construction, introduced myself to the builder and ended up building several parts of the house for him: the two steel front doors, two large steel bamboo planters, and some railing systems for him:

http://unhappyhipsters.com/post/396678872/they-found-it-was-the-best-way-to-greet-the

this house:

and this shot, which appeared in the April 2009 issue of Dwell:

here’s the article in which that photo appeared:

http://www.dwell.com/slideshows/stumptown-rock.html?slide=1&paused=true

more soon.

signing my name here:

ceci n’est pas une porte

a leather satchel

I made this computer/courier bag recently for a friend:

It’s top grain brown leather, all hand stitched and riveted

bulk food

Several months ago in the early evening I had an little design revelation in the local grocery store–New Season–shopping for some bulk ingredients.  It was a busy time of the evening, rush hour type traffic through this part of the market, about six p.m., people busily gathering supplies to take home to their families for dinner.  It was so busy that I could not easily access a few of the containers I needed to get to.  I backed up and watched the scene for a minute.  People were in a rush, scooping food, hurriedly scrawling codes onto twist ties, returning to the bins they needed, food was going onto the floor, employees were trying to re-stock several items (probably by request), and some people were coming to the top or bottom of the isle, looking at the congestion and continuing on, not wanting to engage in the crowd.  I looked carefully at what was going on and had an epiphany.

I know many people for whom the bulk food section is their favorite part of the store.  It is certainly one of the most tactile and intuitive: you go there, see what you want, and take EXACTLY as much as you need.  In this way it is as raw as the deli, the meat department, or the produce department: you take only what you want and use minimal packaging.  The means and methods for delivering the product to the customer seem to be a holdover from the old days, like the old fashioned hardware store, where you slip all the bolts you need into a paper bag, and tell the cashier what’s in the bag; he or she weighs it and checks you out.  It is based on the honor system and seems to work better when there is no real rush.  There are several places where significant delays occur: procuring the right code–which means remembering, if only for a short time, the code for the thing you want–getting a bag, and then most often SCOOPING material into a bag and tying it off.  There is also the chance that a code could be misremembered or even intentionally misconstrued, adding confusion and possible loss of revenue.  There is the additional risk that when people are scooping, they make an error and spill food onto the floor.

Standing there, watching this display of modern food gathering, the epiphany I had was this: that about 95% of all the food in the bulk section could be gravity fed.  Basically all of that which is currently scooped could be put up overhead in gravity-fed dispensers and fall through a supply channel to a demand faucet or sluice.  Additionally, if there were a ticket with a pre-printed code on it for each item, dispensed with the item, and bags obviously displayed, the customer could much more easily procure the food, label it and be done.  With this design innovation, almost none of the bulk food would be stocked from the ground.  All stocking could take place overhead, where bulk food could be stored, easily accessed, and re-stocked at basically any time of day, without employees getting in the way of the client. Notice the tremendous real estate over the bulk food area.  A significant volume could be stored over the bulk food section. Only the essential items such as pineapples, dried pasta, dried apricots and so forth would be stored below, where tongs or scoops were needed.  Everything else would flow from above.  If scoops and open containers were eliminated, the system would likewise be much more hygienic, with virtually no chance of spreading germs to the product.

A couple of drawings I generated along the lines of this idea:

And some precursory solutions:

Thus ensuring that human hands touch as little of the bulk food goods as possible.  I think we like the experience of the interactive media as well: grasping a bronze handle and watching the food tumble out.

The Palouse on our Way Home

christ massy time

Preface: the photography attached to this blog is a bit shocking, and does very much have a context in the discussion, if you can be patient enough to get through the entry.

In the coming to the end of the year, as we advance into the new, it is also nice to recollect, and to return to the origins of [not just] the year, but also those of our calendar, our culture, and our community.  For myself, this year was particularly colored by dramatic changes in the economy, the way business and work have functioned in the past, which in turn has partially changed the way people treat one another… and the changes on the whole have been kindly and occasion to be optimistic, if not about material gain, about a growing richness of community.  It sometimes takes dirth to realize that kindness is true richness.  I would like to back up, however, and look briefly at an earlier time.

I think often about this earlier time; a time before television and rapid communication, a time before mechanization and industrial process, a time in which people arrived at conclusions so powerful, we began to inherit them in our biology.  Christmas, so called, is one of these mimetic inheritances.  I say “people arrived” here as though they made the discovery of this religious episodic narrative… and I think they did.  That’s the way I choose to think about it, which, I’m sure would be staunchly contested by the seminary (though I’m not sure these days).  That “they arrived” would be an interpolation in comparison to the commonly received notion that Christ happened, and then changed the world.  And here’s where I think they “arrived”: Christ was an answer to a previously nagging question; a question which preceded him by a couple of thousand years.  The Israelites dwelt with this question for so long that they began to forget its importance.  The question is something like this: If God is all powerful, all seeing, all knowing, etc., then why do good people suffer?  Which, as a question (especially for an academic), might turn into this: Since good people suffer (obviously), is God actually all powerful?  And then to this: “Who is God?”… which is not a terrible question to ask in this time as the days grow dark, the earth cools again.

Strangely, these are the questions people ask in the face of integrating the chaos of their lives with a deeper faith, and the questions are answered by the church like this: God works in mysterious ways.  Or so I gather.  I have never been a big fan of churches.  What I think is fair to say, however, is this: as people come into closer proximity with this question, “Why do we suffer?”, the church offers answers, rather than pointing to the books from which all the practices originate: The Bible.  Meaning, the church does not point to the actual narrative.  In the Torah, the reader is presented with all manner of mysteries and blunders on the part of God.  (Recall Nietzsche’s question, “Is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s blunders?”)  To speed read through it in an attempt to find a pretext for Christianity, let us think about Noah, and then Job.  Noah is more than 400 years old (book of Genesis) when God decides to wipe everything out.  Noah is one of the good ones, one of the only good ones apparently, and God warns him before hand that he is going to flood everything and start over again because He doesn’t like what he sees going on amongst the “youth.”  This is a particularly human yearning to start over again, almost like a child smashing a sand castle to build a better one, another day with better weather and potentially better tools.  In the unfolding narrative, God visits his creation with various forms of pestilence, storms, a huge flood, suggestions of infanticide, and tremendous personal suffering… coming to a climax in the story of Job.  Job is put through seemingly every possible form of human suffering, by God–in a strange dialogue between God and the Devil, a bet, to see who’s right about what Job will do in the face of meaningless iniquity.  Here is a fantastic reading of the story: http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/zizek.html.

Around Samuel II, it could be argued, the Israeli community becomes weary of the suffering their God has visited upon them.  If this were looked upon in more dramatic terms, like an audience member getting to peek behind the curtain, backstage, and then back onstage again… it could be interpreted as the Israelis becoming weary of suffering in general (whether or not their God is responsible for it) and yearning for another story… another play.

Enter Christ.

We move from a narrative in which God visits untold suffering upon his creation to one in which God Himself suffers to an infinite degree.  It could also be viewed this way, in a phenomenology of God: the followers of Yahweh became weary of their vengeful God and invented a new one: a more caring, merciful God; one who understands their condition better.  The Hebrew God may realize the errors of vengeance and realize the need to experience the human condition first hand.  So He “comes down” to do it… and when he’s in the garden lamenting, “Father, why have You forsaken me?”  (Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani?) … he is not so much asking, “Why do I have to die?” as “Are you there?”… I mean, why else would Christ be asking if He’s God after all?  The answer to His question may very well be an empty reverberation… because His “Father” is not there… He has taken the place of the Father and must now go through the only unequivocal act a human can choose to do: die.

I find it remarkable and beautiful that these questions can be found in the texts themselves which seem to be so commonly passed over.

Christ did not say, “I die, so that you don’t have to.”  He just bucked up and did what He knew He had to.  He may have known, that in order to prove something greater than the individual, He must die… and in so doing proved his point right then.  Then the church came up with a lot of nonsense, in my opinion.

And now we celebrate this individual…

…except that there has been a painful bait and switch.  Christ got swapped for Santa Claus, and a practice of endurance and radical kindness was replaced with one of creature-comfort-consumer-capitilization.  I don’t mean that in a negative way necessarily; I am as guilty as anyone of enjoying the more trivial pleasures of this “holiday.”  I just want to faithfully and respectfully look backwards, at that which offered the groundwork for our contemporary culture, our calendar, and Christmas.

I know I cannot discuss God and please everyone… but what I find so entirely remarkable about the discussion is the unfathomable depth of the texts themselves… and how they seem to indicate a strange absence of God the character and Presence of God the spirit of compassion.

Consider this statement by Adam Phillips in On Kindness:

People want safety, whatever the cost.  Perhaps it is one of the perils of secularization, that if we no longer believe in God–in a Being who is himself invulnerable and so is capable of protecting us–we cannot avoid confronting our own relative helplessness and need for each other.  If there is no invulnerability anywhere, suddenly there is too much vulnerability everywhere.  How do we deal with this?  In his novel Raw Youth (1875), Dostoevsky describes a morning when people wake to find themselves alone in a godless universe.  Instead of bewailing their loss, they turn to each other, substituting their own tenderness and concern for divine protection.  Acknowledging human vulnerability, they respond to it positively.  Kindness, for them, becomes a way of experiencing their vulnerability that tests the strengths and limits of their resources to deal with it.  When God is dead, kindness is permitted.  When God is dead, kindness is all that people have left.

And if Christ is alone in his questioning of the “Father”–He leaves us alone in his dying, leaving a powerful encouragement to find kindness for one another, and perhaps God there, rather than a faith in something that could not be real.

Holiday Cookie Label

Here’s what Nicci and I came up with for our little holiday healthy cookies’ label:

Sons of Jefferson

Many fail to grasp what they have seen,

and cannot judge what they have learned,

although they tell themselves they know.

–Heraclitus

I’m sure there is a portion of the brain  in which resides resolution.  The place where a pattern, a wish, a design, galvanizes and takes on the hard sheen of a determined will to make that fleeting dream become real.  A little cloud of electrostatic neural syanptic impulse which takes on the aspect of a small storm, in that part of the brain which makes a plan about physically accomplishing something hitherto immaterial, fleeting, and dream like.  The storm of this section of the brain–let’s call it the backal lobe–floods the nervous system, courses through the spine, proceeds into the liver and informs muscle tissue and ligaments of its intentions.  And a person begins the work.

The Thanksgiving holiday of 2009 brought a cold clear layer of weather over Spokane, Washington, where my family lives, and where I grew up.  During the last couple of visits I had heard about a friend of a friend of the family who was working on a somewhat crazy project at his property about an hour and a half away, near remote Ford, WA.  I was intrigued with subsequent descriptions of this project and proposed to go visit this fellow, working on a dream of his.

Earlier that day he told my father on the phone, “Thomas Jefferson spent 32 years working on Monticello; I have only been at it for 12, so be prepared.”  He likewise told my father that the fee for a tour of his project was a copy of The Times, since the drive to get one was about an hour.  So we went out there.  Reading my dad’s handwritten directions to the place, which were just a reporter’s scrawl of an almost verbatim monologue about the subjective experience of the drive, was like reading a physicians prescriptive course of action for a patient… things like, “R.  10 miles, you’ll see a Chevron and a Starbucks… a few minutes later road forks… R.  then another three.  wait for dip.  four more.  look for marker 43.  mail boxes.  take first right.  special dirt drive…”  (reads like dirt diet)  “then take diet… 100 yards…”  (reads like pills)  I’m reading it, saying, it looks like we’re supposed to go on a dirt diet and take 100 pills.  (Which seems about right for some mental health issues.)  No road names, no definitive distances.  It was remote too, about forty minutes north of Highway 2… and because of the confusion about the diet and the number of pills, it took some time to find the right dirt drive.

We arrived.  The first thing that struck me, besides the remoteness of the place, was the large circular turn-around drive, demarcated with substantial highway DOT style bollards… which seemed old, like maybe from the 50’s with bits of re-bar bearing through the well used concrete uprights.  A weighty gray blanket of clouds had rolled over this part of Washington and flattened the light.  I could see coming in the signs of a long-time building project: piles and piles of bricks, previously used bricks, piles of plywood, limestone, building lumber, etc.  We pulled in behind a half sheeted out-building and got out of the car.  This is what we were looking at:

It is a 3/4 version of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.  It has been under construction for 12 years.  He wasn’t using metaphors.  His name is Dan Sisson, and he’s building Monticello.  Emerging from half used piles of bricks, expired batches of mortar, ladders, mouldings, building membranes, and gravel, is a history professor’s own personal version of the life work and home of one of the most innovative founding fathers.   It is not exactly clear what the strategy has been with the building process, but it’s clear there’s been one: make Monticello.  By any means necessary.

The building is situated on a bluff which, just behind the house, drops off steeply.  It looks out over a valley which returns up about a mile to the west.  This positioning gives the 3/4 Monticello a grandeur and stately quality… if in more Northwest terms.  In examining the house, there is no question that the mind behind this building is about as native to this valley and its neighbors, as the building is.  I circled the front the of the property with my dad before approaching the front door, eying the components of the house… the individual pieces, the window packages, the roof, the flashing, the masonry… were disparate in a sense, but there was a strange cohesion to the building, almost in spite of the potentially discordant ingredients.  Christopher Alexander speaks about a palpable spirit to a place… a beingness to a building which supercedes the mere sum of its parts (in Luminous Ground).  This place has that.

We had a brief welcome and glimpse of the inside before beginning the tour of the outside.  Upon meeting Dan, I realized he had that ageless quality (like over 45 and under 100) typical of a professor who has used the pursuit of knowledge to preserve himself.  He explained that Jefferson had done a lot of the work on original Monticello himself, and that he too had experienced many setbacks in the building project.  It was very hard not to imagine Jefferson marching around his Virginia estate with armfuls of bricks, or pulling measurements off a ladder, maybe with a wig on and a slave balancing the ladder for him below.  I learned that Dan’s largest passions, as a history professor, are Thos. Jefferson and Lewis and Clark… which seemed appropriate: you sort of had the perfect distillation of those two right here, just 150 miles north of where the explorers had first portaged in the Columbia basin, this part of the world seemingly as populated as that when L & C first ventured west.

Compare to the original:

The building shown on the $2 bill:

“What are these from?” I asked, pointing to the concrete bollards in the drive.

“Those are from some road work that was being done about 14 miles away,” he began.  “I was waiting in a construction line on the highway and got out of the car and started talking to one of the flaggers.  I was looking at all these uprights and asked him, ‘Are you putting these in?’  He replied, ‘No way, we’re taking them out!’  I asked him what they were going to do with them and he said they were just going to take them to the dump.  So I told him I would love to have them.  The flagger said, ‘Tell us where you live, we’ll back up and drop ‘em off.’  So that’s how I got those,” he said, looking at me, and with lifted eyebrows added, “Free!”

With that we commenced the tour of a house built, for the most part, out of materials Dan had scavenged from some other part of the world.  Lumber from off-cuts at a mill up the road.  Tons and tons of bricks from an old woman that had deconstructed a brick building on her property.  A window kit from a window maker in Bend, OR that liked what Dan was doing and gave him first dibs on all their surplus: $50/window instead of sometimes $3,000 and up.  He pointed to the garage/out-building and said, “that cost about $2,200.”  It wasn’t sided yet, but was a sizable building.  The cost of much of the building, as Dan carefully re-iterated throughout our tour, was Free!  As I learned more, any funny discrepancy in craft or material began to fade away, and what emerged was a truly authentic endeavor, built by someone working from a passion, not a prescriptive idea about his life.

The distinguishing feeling here was very simple: for nearly ten years, I have been designing and building things… as well as studying how others do so; a predominant theme throughout the endeavor of building is COST.  And more often than not, what are thought of as the “coolest” things are also the most expensive.  Humans can be like crows in this wise: they love shiny pretty things, and they do whatever they have to to get them, which, these days, often means going into debt.  So here, watching the story of this building unfold, I became aware of a man abiding by principles foreign to [basically] the rest of the populace… principles which were espoused in the founding of our country, not least by the man who designed the original Monticello.  The other detail that follows from this distinction is: that which is made in a strict adherence to principle will inevitably LOOK different from what most people make, and are accustomed to.

(When we arrived, we passed into the house over a partially finished European marble floor in which was circumscribed a 14′ diameter compass, indicating cardinality and correctly oriented.  The room was about 18 degrees Farenheit.  To the left rises the elliptical staircase, going up into the dome.  To the right is a classical library, about 50% finished, replete with books and a 12′ high rolling library bookcase series.  Pass through double doors and come into the only warmed part of the building, heated by a lovely wood stove… a large room with 12′ ceilings, large living area with a whole wall of West facing glass, a grand piano that Dan’s wife, Karen, plays and a cute kitchen made of salvaged cabinetry, butcher blocks, and eclectic set of appliances.  Karen was sitting next to the stove reading with their German Shorthair Pointer laying next to her.  Their bed had been moved into this room for purposes of efficiency.  And there was plenty of room.)

At every move along the tour was a story of re-use, re-claimed material, salvage, economy (the Greek root of economy is oikos nomos… law or way of the house), thrift and ingenuity.  Of course this guy could get a loan and make this house more polished, more like its predecessor, more shiny, but instead he is making it more completely like his dream, which is doing it on his own, without borrowing anything.   Among the stories of how he accomplished the various sections of the building, one stands out, and it is how he was able to make the dome to 3/4 Monticello.  Six years ago Dan had finished the hexagonal upper wall section of the building and was ready to have the capital fabricated.  He contacted several aluminum fab. shops and had bids originated… which ranged from $60-85,000 to accomplish (which is about right) and, obviously, this is probably more than he’s spent on the entire building thus far, so he forebore on the construction of the dome.  One day–after this–he was driving along a country road and passed a property on which was a man and the crackling blue light of a tig welder, working on what looked like a boat.  Dan stopped and started talking to this guy, who, it turns out, is a doctor with a peculiar nervous system condition, in which he cannot sit still for very long, or sleep for very long; he has therefore adopted several hobbies passionately: one of them aluminum tig welding and fabrication.  He had many hulls of aluminum boats sitting around his property.  Dan began conversing with the Doctor and, luckily, the topic of his Monticello project came up.  He described the dome he was trying to build and at some point inquired of the Doctor if that would be something he might entertain building.  The Doctor looked at him and said, “That would be wonderful.”  Soon after they met at the project and the Doctor-Welder said he would love to work on the dome.  They made measurements and arrangements for fabrication and delivery and strategy of installation.  Dan finally worked up the hard question: how much will this cost?  The Doctor said he would call him and let him know, after he’d figured out material costs, etc.  A week later they talked on the phone.  “Well?…” Dan inquired.  “…Well, the materials will be about $1,400,” the Doctor explained.  “Yes…?” Dan said on tenterhooks.  “So, how does that sound?” the Doctor asked… ending the question by implying that the dome would cost as much as the materials alone.  And that is what he intended to build it for: the cost of materials… because the building activity, for him, is how he stays alive.

With a few reasonable exceptions, the dome basically came out perfect… especially considering the cost and context:

Apparently, it was quite a feat to place this dome on the building.  The plate for it seems to be about 30-35′ off the ground, and Dan placed it on the building with a telescoping front-loader.  He then temporarily bolted the aluminum shell to the plate.  One day not too long after installation, he came home to discover the dome had shifted dramatically off the plate, such that about three feet of daylight was visible at one edge of the plate.  Dan could come up with no explanation for how this VERY HEAVY shield of aluminum could have shifted so dramatically.  He nervously took his question to the engineering department of his university, and found an engineer who was able to explain that he had basically added a wing foil to the top of his building and it had created so much lift that it skipped off the plate.  He said it needed way more attachment and that Dan was lucky it didn’t tear the whole building apart.

He looked at me and winked.

We turned inside after a solid hour tour of the building.  We went in to have tea and discuss Dan’s theory about how the past Presidential Administration has effected a coup d’etat.

As we crossed over the threshold into the foyer and compass floor room, Dan tucked the Times we’d brought him under his arm, looked at us and said, “You know the best thing about this house?”  I nodded in question…

“I don’t owe a dime on it.”

Where The Wild Things Are

I don’t write about movies often.  I’ll just leave it at that: I don’t write about movies often.  AND, several weeks ago I went with my girlfriend Nicci to see Where The Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze, who actually bears some resemblance to the protagonist,  Max Records (who lives about 1/2 mile from my house in Portland):

http://vastate.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/spikejonze1secondfilm.jpg and http://weloveyouso.com/wp-content/uploads/maxrecords.jpg

Of course I had read the books of Maurice Sendak as a child, had them read to me, and pillaged the pages in exploration of the secrets about how one gets the walls of one’s room to turn into a jungle and become the territory of escape and adventure, rather than the clammy chambers of adolescence.  The film is many things, and firstly, an explicit testimony to the power of the book’s illustrations.  The film is kind of a hipster film maker’s version of the DC Comics films.  That being said, it is not trite, the way some hipster philosophy can be.  Immediately, the film removes the viewer’s expectations of a fantasy.  The first scene is a raucous jolting attempt to follow Max, the boy, around his house, wearing a fur monster pijama get-up, terrorizing his dog, nearly falling down stairs, screaming and exploding out of his skin.  The situation is very middle class, there is no expression of architectural design or any cinematic romance of any such quality of a working class home.  Shag carpet, cheap furniture, lighting, surfaces, etc.  Max is trapped here, trapped by the culture that built this place.  Trapped by a family, trapped in this culture.  Max makes forts and creates imaginary wars.  He builds a snow bulwark and starts a snowball war with his sister and her friends; they too seem trapped in the dimension of their development (somewhere around High School) and fight back with snow, then crush Max’s snow building.  He is equally crushed and terrorizes his sister’s room, destroying a gift he’d given her, among other bits of malfeasance.  His behavior snowballs until an eruption at his mother (Catherine Keener) in front of her new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo), in which he meets a psychological wall and cannot listen, cannot observe, cannot feel anything beyond himself, and he rages.  He flees.  He goes to be where the wild things are.

They do not live within the wall paper here, however; he goes to a body of water and gets in a boat and sets sail.  He sails some nights and some days through the tempest of his feelings and arrives at a savage coast line…

…in a land populated by these creatures whose forms take us into the imagination of this boy.  They seem to be nothing less than the puppeted pantheon of his own psyche, sized disparately and discordant; when he arrives, Carol–the sometimes leader of the wild things (played by James Gandolfini)–is erratically destroying these large woven nest type things that comprise the Wild Things’ homes.  None of the other Wild Things know why Carol is destroying their nests, except that it feels like it’s happened before.  When they turn their attention upon this boy–interrupting this seemingly independant episode of emotional selfishness and eruption–they bare sharp teeth and circle around him menacingly.  Max explains that he is a king with a long track record and that he can lead these things. They are intrigued by this offer and ask him if he will be able to keep loneliness away.

It is really at this moment that the film begins to offer its darker interpretations of the book, almost re-writing the book, or at least creating a vast subtext.  The Wild Things qualify Max’s trip by getting into his head, getting into your head, and creating a raw reality to the delicacy of human development.  The film makes the story a frightening reality, rather than a fantastic escape into the imagination of a better place than being in trouble with your parents.  In the theater I could sense a palpable discomfort in the audience, akin to the unease a play like Sartre’s No Exit might occasion.  The Wild Things employ Max to ward away loneliness, their greatest fear, probably the cause of the rankling discordance between all of them, and distancing all of them from themselves.  There is a striking discord between Carol (the sometime leader) and KW, who seems to be like a troubled girlfriend.  This discord mirrors Max’s parents divorce probably and colors the interactions of the rest of the group.  KW’s new friendship with two owl friends breeds distrust and jealousy on the part of Carol… and Max is suddenly completely unable to repair the actual problems of the group… because they are, in fact, larger-than-life manifestations of his problems.  He wants to show them how he knows how to rage, offering a solution to their woes: a big dirt clod fight, in which the Things’ feelings get hurt and Carol even rips off Alexander’s arm in anger and inability to look inward.  (Alexander is the small goat-like creature, soft spoken, the injured ego feeling:)

The story spirals into a chaotic emotional war between the Wild Things and Max, unable to preside over them, over his feelings… which are seemingly too big to change, too wild to manage.  In the small sample of his “real” life that we are given, we see this boy who is unable to account for himself; he does not understand the feelings of other people.  This dilemma is compounded by his imaginative impulses to create games and battles; when others are not interested in playing with him in his own way, he cannot mend the fracture between his game and theirs: he cannot feel himself in their lives.

This phenomenon is common, probably to every single developing boy in the world… yet it is never observed as such.  It is mended, punished, pushed away, or forgotten about.  It is rare to see an open exploration of this scary emotional wasteland, which is in large part destructive.  (The main pastime of the Wild Things is uprooting trees, making holes in them, scratching them, pile-driving one another, destroying the homes of one another, and so on.)  For a mother, witnessing this behavior in her son, it is equally frightening; the tools to navigate this terrain are not readily available in our society.  We have systems of reward and punishment, systems of education and athletics, systems of eating and medicating, but what of the methods of securing a growing individual’s feelings, helping that developing being to interpreting his own feelings, gaining perspective on them, moving through them?  The reality of the film is stark: at the moment of this breakdown, Max’s mother is tired from a long day at work and dedicated to a couple of hours with her boyfriend.  She cannot spread herself between everyone in the house.  She’s often gone, works late, etc.  Max’s sister is consumed by her social experience of puberty and high school friends.  Max IS alone.  And so are we when we watch the film.  Forced into his loneliness.  This is the feeling which, given the wrong set of circumstances, can lead a kid miserably astray.  (Drugs, violence, etc.)  The sense of loneliness in growing up may be one of the most terrifying thresholds of all human development, and the only real way to deal with it is to go through it; if you’re a parent, be there with the kid and try to go through it with them.  The consequences are dire.  The things have sharp teeth and will eat the boy.

The book may actually carry these undertones, but they are distant (if there at all) and must be extrapolated.  And the end of the book seems to contain a euphoric exhaustion, like, whew, after that breakdown it was nice to go into the wall and spend three days in the wild rumpus with the things of my imagination, and, yes, I miss my parents, and how nice it is to be back and have a hot dinner.  WHERE, in the film, Jonze does not give the viewer this kind of resolution: the feelings are real, they are outside the house, in the real world (Max had to come back through the front door), and his mother is happy to see him because he’s ALIVE.  The final scene is remarkable: she feeds him and he eats as though he’d been gone for three days, ravenous, a boy becoming a man… basically without any recognition that he has these lethally selfish feelings, and his mother is simply exhausted, and still loving.  She falls asleep while she watches him eat.  And it ends.  And nothing has changed.