Gray Street Revisited

That I learned of my adoption at age twelve is not entirely true. The learned part is; the adoption part is not. I was placed with the Andersens at three days but not adopted by them until age thirteen. They purchased me through the black market. That made it hard to thereafter process an adoption. When it finally transpired, they simply lied about everything to the court: name, date, state, story. That is the theme of my adoption.

Ignoring the details, the major consequence of this discovery was an emotional split in my existence. This happened about two seconds after hearing that I was "adopted.” It is not clear how I recognized the split. There was no neon sign. I did not have a conversation with myself. But the whole concept seemingly condensed into an awareness, the content being that I was merely biding my time until I found my real family and began living my real life. This conception existed on a level more basic than language and was more determinate of my behavior. Everything from then on for many years was contingent on something occuring in the future. Life happened while I waited for it to begin.

The adoption component of this book is a necessary part. To know who we are we have to see who we were. I had occasion recently to review the essentially completed first section of the book. (Badgerhillpress.com). It was important to write this, and I did not feel detached doing so, but for sure I did not want to give the impression this was an adoption book. An adoption book can easily become a waiting for reunion story, which becomes like waiting for Godot. It is one thing to learn from the past and another to hope for a do-over. The first goal is always to undo the loss. Then we repeat that which we cannot accept. And finally, lessons serve as consolation prizes. The premise becomes that some adjustment to yesterday will make everything better today.

There are several problems with this. One is that we cannot erase the past. “I kept you in my prayers” does not cancel thirty years of consequences. Another is that the unavailable becomes idealized and thus held even tighter. Finally, we grow by doing, not from receiving, and life is lived playing hurt. Everyone is an All-American when waiting for the perfect moment, which of course never comes. The only moment we get to make a difference is the one we have right now--sprains, tape, headaches, et al.

I have totally bought into Ernest Hocking’s belief that life is about finding one’s task and doing it. It is not relevant whether the task is possible or not. The important questions are, 1) does it need to be done, and 2) does the finger of responsibility point in your direction?

I bring this up because on reviewing the adoption section of Requiem it appeared to deserve better than a backward glance en route to today's task. I probably fear getting stuck again waiting for reunion, but that is all the more reason to pay attention. The past does affect us. There is and will always be a pull to what could and should have been. In me at least, nothing erases the loss that occurred when my life became a charade.

The problem was not that the Andersens were not my natural parents. It was that they were not honest adoptive parents. Instead, they pretended to be natural parents. My father once said that he always treated me as if I was his real son. He gave that no thought, but he would have noticed had I responded in turn that I always treated him as if he were my real father. My legal status had nothing to do with this. Even black-market parents would have worked had they been truthful about it. Why should I care whether or not I was not processed through a social service agency? The problem was lack of honesty, not lack of blood ties or paperwork.

Anyway, I am elevating the first section of the book into a component worthy on its own. Adoption is not the point of the book. The point of the book is to find my task and do it, and that for sure does not involve sitting on the sideline waiting for lightening to strike. But the adoption stuff matters. It has a place in understanding how best to respond to loss. I cannot say it has a place in the adoption community today because my idea of resolution and their prevailing dogma that adoption is win/win are antithetical. But it should belong there, just as I should have belonged with my natural family.

I think one needs to emotionally realize a loss and understand that it is a part of one’s life. This means feeling the experience, reliving it when it returns in its manifold presentations, and holding on during those storms until they pass. This exposes the experience to our reasoning abilities thus expanding our capacity to process it. The pithy line “you have to feel before you can heal” makes sense. Trying to blow sunshine does not. The crucial element is to hold on when the storms occur. "What if I can't," asked Marvin in group? "Hold tighter," came the answer. Weather never goes away, but storms do. They will return. But so what? It is a small price to pay for gaining some control.

We will always hurt revisiting loss, no matter how many years have passed. But that should not keep us from doing our task. It might even help because it can direct us to that which is important. It is impossible to explain vision to the blind. It is necessary to have grieved in order to empathize and experience loss in others. Empathy is a strong motivator, without which one might have little to do other than perhaps watch reality television. Fortunately, that does not appear to be my task.

Mindless humanism does not work for me either. My natural concern is for animals. I have always had an honest relationship with them. They are less prone to become entitled than are people. There needs to be reciprocity in relationships, and animals appreciate this better than people do. Anyway, it is my task to choose, not someone else's. So I care for the critters. The issue is between me and Nature, not me and some ethical flavor of the day.


The CliffsNotes: Adoption matters here but only as a means of looking forward, not as an end when looking backwards. Adoption finds itself in the broad category of loss, with the caveat that the ruling class of the adoption community has a political interest in denying there is any loss at all. Those who see loss in adoption and those who do not cannot both be right. There is a truth here, a reality that corresponds to the situation, and the first person perspective gets my vote on just what that reality is. That determination is easy enough; it is just that the reality is difficult.


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Adding Yeast

John Searle has written twelve books. Every time he sends one off he wishes he could write it over. One time he got the chance. The publication was put on hold and several years later he had a new version. No difference. He then wished he could rewrite the rewrite.

So it shall be with Requiem. As a concept a book can be whatever one wishes, but as reality it falls back to earth. Choosing a sport’s metaphor excludes a literary one. Things fade; alternatives exclude. We live in a real world, not a simulation.

Previously I could imagine an endless span of time, allowing for philosophical completion. But there are limits. In medical school one gave up Gray’s anatomy for Woodburne. Woodburne was manageable, Gray’s was not. And in philosophy one does well to study a few philosophers in depth rather than many superficially. I will major in Spinoza, Hocking, Russell, Searle, Hayek, and Becker; and minor in Kant, Locke, and Hume. Any more would be planning not to graduate.

The problem here is that the process enters the physical world, and with it comes physical things, ultimately death. As an immortality project the book fails. Life goes on and it fades until it disappears. We know that, but then we do not. We subconsciously think something is always going to restore the color, although it never does. So Plan B becomes more important. My Plan B involves recognizing that biological existence is a second choice and not pretending otherwise. At least it shall attempt to connect to more than fiction. Maybe that is the whole point.

So we can just paint a big melancholy backdrop and carry it along in order to not lose sight of the fact that nothing worthwhile comes easy. “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare,” proclamed Baruch Spinoza.

This relates to the current tone of the project. It is no longer just a daydream. I have done some reading and have an appreciation of the assistance and limitations of yet more information. One cannot just read until ideas begin to pour out. At some point the project attains a perspective, third person becomes first person. Then it is just you, the mound, and a ball in your hand. Game on.

There is no getting around the big existential issues. That is what the book is about, so I cannot avoid them. And it is a response to these issues.We live in a physical world. We are physical creatures. When the brain stops working, we stop working. I do not much like that, but it is the hand we are dealt. So play it. Ignoring the limitations of biological existence simply allows those issues to address us on their time. Better we select the time and place, even if our options are limited. Mostly it is not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game. Those who think otherwise simply fall harder when they lose. And everyone loses.

But it gets brighter at times. The world is also about living, and that option remains. I see several tactical issues at this point in time about the book. The first is that it must be entirely self-funded. By this I do not mean financially, but rather, emotionally. I experience major dissonance between how I view the necessities of satisfactory living and how other people do. Perhaps I am more driven. To me life is not a beach. We are not placed here to enjoy ourselves, and to believe otherwise probably guarantees dissatisfaction.

Few are interested in this writing. I have been helped enormously by the work of John R. Searle, and I often think are he and I the only people who realize how important his work has been. He solves the mind/body dichotomy. We can see relatively clearly what we are, and this allows us to determine more accurately what we can and cannot do. Yet no one cares. People appear to prefer illusion and distraction. So be it. No one can teach motivation. Nothing bothers me more than having to wait for someone to assume responsibility. If they do, they do, but nothing can influence that happening. A reporter once asked Lou Holtz how to motivate a football team. He answered, “Get rid of those not motivated.”

Actually, that works for me. Instead of feedback from others, which never happens on these issues, one gets the chance to implement the insights. If the system is going to work, use it. We travel best with our nose to the particles and waves, and most of that advantage cannot be taxed away. This sounds a bit like the principle of capitalism—where everyone working for their own interest best serves everyone else. The point here is not to try to influence others. They will do what they will do. But paradoxically, when the goal is more limited our influence is increased. One cannot motivate the non-motivated, but one can offer an example to those searching. So we perhaps lead by example, although that rides along for free on our efforts to walk as upright as possible.

The benefit on this path is that it increases confidence in one's algorithm from top to bottom. Intractable issues in life are more often due to emotional than to intellectual challenges. It is not that we can’t see; it is that we won’t see. Or it can be that we have two premises that conflict, both of which command our allegience. So with this plan you can stay with logic all the way up and down rather than diverting to authority. This brings you to conclusions not shared by most, but thereby not manipulated by those who play the masses.

For example, consider the economic crisis. (Facts plus aphorism):

1. No fiat currency has ever survived. Since 1971 we have had a fiat currency, even though the Constitution forbids it.

2. We got into trouble by borrowing too much and the proposed solution now is to borrow still more.

3. Never let those who caused a problem be the ones to fix it.

The crisis is not that difficult to understand: 1) all fiat currencies fail; 2) we have a fiat currency; 3) therefore, it shall fail. How hard is that? And it can not end well. Thomas Jefferson said, “Those who expect to be ignorant and free expect what never was and never will be”. So maybe we just do not care. And maybe we have to trust authority because we cannot trust ourselves. It is hard to trust ourselves if we believe in tooth fairies. Perhaps we have to believe this “all in it together” crap because we cannot trust our own reads. Thus we ignore the crass selfishness of the ruling elite in order to keep our illusion that they care about something other than themselves. Society does not usually get what it wants, although it usually gets what it deserves.

But the economy here is only offered as an example. It is not the issue. It is all to easy, for me at least, to get lost in such distractions. Perhaps anarchy or servitude, while we can do little about them, is easier to look at than death, which we can do even less about. But death is ultimately the issue here.

If you have a fear of dying, and who does not, it does not suffice to just turn away. It appeared to work better to grab for salvation. Religion was the usual move throughout history, but it got into a battle with science three hundred years ago, and science is currently leading. Religion has lost influence. If you believe in organized religion you do so by faith, which essentially means you have no evidence. For example, some question whether the Bible speaks the word of God, to which the believers respond, “of course it does, it says so in the Bible”. But when veracity is in question that which is being questioned cannot vouch for itself. That begs the question, which means it takes as given precisely what is in doubt. And if the believers had evidence they would not need faith, trust would be sufficient. You trust that your car will start tomorrow because it generally does and companies now make automobiles to be quite reliable. You do not need faith the car will start tomorrow. You have something better, evidence. Faith might have greater effect, but then so does luck. Faith is invoked on the really big issues, where trust is not sufficient (i.e. immortality). But its dependability is in question, which is not assuaged by the fact that faith is in fact based on, well, faith. You just jump. If you trusted you could just walk across and save yourself the trouble. If you had hope you could build a bridge. But with faith you just jump, perhaps doing what you feel is expected and trying to convince yourself that doing so will have some influence on a power that apparently derives some satisfaction from your devotion.

I do not see a rabbit to pull out of that hat. But then faith is not about my doing something. It is about letting something greater act. What are the chances of that happening? Well I like the odds of there being something greater. It’s a complex and vast universe. But if that something needs constant affirmation from us we might wonder if we would do better on our own. But we can’t defeat death. So are we stuck? No, we can redefine our perspective of a higher power or idealize someone locally. But that is precisely our problem. We can’t handle finality, so we turn to someone who convinces us they can, albeit usually for a fee. But they cannot fix it either, and we are just out the expense, which might be better spent on superpails of hard red wheat—in this life, at least.

I am fond of saying that during a basketball game I can keep my mind on only one thing at a time, which usually is whether we are playing man-to-man or zone. All the rest is reaction. You can skip the above two paragraphs and apply that approach here. The point is that you are either in or out, meaning either you decide for yourself or someone decides for you. It is all or nothing. If you intend to self-direct, then nothing can lay outside your purview, not death, kings, or God. If at any point you blink, then you turn over your center to someone else. Reason and commitment has a chance. Authority and passivity not so much. We cannot delegate basic responsibilities. If only one beam is missing in our mental scaffold the whole structure becomes suspect. Hocking says we cannot be happy if there is an issue we cannot confront because we know we cannot handle it and remain vulnerable to surprise at any time. Perhaps we incur additional costs by not facing death. It is a door we cannot leave to faith.

On a different line, my frame of reference is changing. Much of my identity used to relate to work. Now, since I am retired, it relates to my reading. This works for me, but it makes it hard to imagine an audience for the writing. The vets are not interested in this except perhaps for its practical implications. Writing for therapy groups is not going to suffice. And few anywhere are interested in metaphysics. But some are.

The book keeps its value as a final goodbye present. That is a response to death, perhaps not as comforting as eternity, but genuine nevertheless. It crosses my mind that someone like me might profit from this work. Perhaps that is tautological because these are in fact my lessons. But even if no one reads it, the book must be written. It is my task. I am lucky to have found it, and the joy is in the doing. So—

"Put me in coach, I’m ready to play today,

Put me in coach, I’m ready to play today,

Look at me, I could be. . . . centerfield." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTl-NnuLjaE

Faster Than the Speed of Night

February 7, 2009: So far, so good on the reading. But so far is not so fast. An infinite regress into authors and works will not allow time for writing. Four months has not given me the feeling of being one-third through the reading. More like four years might work, but even that is questionable. I have to be selective, which means at some point exchanging books for a word processor.

It is useful for me to understand quantum mechanics and relativity theory. But much of those disciplines are spoken in mathematics, without which a complete understanding is impossible. So I entertain the idea of studying mathematics, but I only need to know what math does, not how to do it. And the physics theories are mainly important because the mind is always constructed on physical analogies. Freud’s drive theory implied a battery analogy. Operant conditioning suggests blazing a path through the woods. No matter what theory we choose we will try to visualize the mind as something objective. This causes error because mind is abstract. Actually, there is more. We need to know how the world works if we expect to know how the mind works. Mind is a part of the world. But essentially I need physics just for the metaphor. And while math is necessary to construct the theories of physics, one does not need it to understand them. In fact Einstein could not do the mathematics involved in the general theory of relativity (his greatest work). He delegated the task to an associate.

Math itself does not create. It verifies. Its role is to confer logical possibility and suggest avenues for empirical verification. In other words, without mathematical confirmation a theory is just a daydream. With math it gains validity, which warrants the effort of the next step, empirical validation. It does not break my heart that I need not study mathematics. But there is an emotional downside. This book is all tied up with finality. It is a synthesis of my life, a response to nature’s plan for us, and a gift of what I found most important in this life. It is easy to puff such an endeavor into a quest for immortality. But if it is not perfect, which it shall not be without mathematics, how can it deserve immortality? Silly, but not thereby inoperative.

This work will be the product of considerable effort. It will touch on issues that hopefully matter. But it will only be a point of view. It might be similar to running the Boston Marathon—worth the effort, but not offering any chance of winning a medal. Still, it might be a victory, if only in the sense that everyone who finishes is a winner.

The more important issue that commands attention, however, involves my social network. I have never been a joiner. The last organization I belonged to was the Boy Scouts. School and work provided most of my contact with people. Yet as a psychiatrist one shares intimate details of life with people on a daily basis, so it is not like I was locked in a room with test tubes.

But when I am not at work, I am typically by myself. My dogs are my only constant companions. I do not get together to “socialize”. If I get together at all, it is in relation to an activity. When athletics was a part of my life, I would get together any time, any place for a game. And a game is a social event, but the activity was the glue. I have never gotten together just to get together. It has always been getting together for some specific purpose. Perhaps everyone is that way. But for sure I am.

I can be criticized for being like this. Finger pointing is useless at this stage of my life (not that I endorse it in general), but fact finding is not. A crucial issue in life is to determine how much we contribute to an experience and how much is determined by outside forces. Getting this right directs attention. The courage to change things is cool as long as they can be changed. I can think of nothing more awful than a lifetime of futility. And the serenity to accept things is great, but only when they cannot be fixed. Our role in these situations factors into every assesment. With respect to truth and my lack of social interaction, I am going to say that being sold and lied to for many years about the fundamentals of my life makes it difficult for me to find common ground with others. Most do not share that experience. And football chat only goes so far. It does not bother me at all that I am this way, although if someone insists that the cause lies entirely within me they will never be on my Christmas card list—if I ever have a Christmas card list.

School and work have been my social context for my entire life. I have neither now. I do not mind this situation. I currently relate to friends who are dead (Hocking, Locke, Spinoza, Russell) rather than those who are alive. But we share the same interests, and I am a good listener. The last twenty years at work centered on the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. That was our common ground, since I have the same problem. Relationships develop with shared experience, especially when relationship is the avenue with which to explore the experience. So closeness was built into the experience. For twenty years more than just my intellectual interests lay with the experience and effects of war (chiefly Vietnam). This mattered to me. It was not just waiting for Godot.

I was not personally exempt from the Vietnam War but never fought in it either. In 1968 a coin flip determined whether I went to Cam Ranh Bay or St. Louis. I won and stayed home. That deferred my service until 1971 when I served for two years as an Air Force Major at Scott Air Force Base. My main contribution there was publishing a paper on the twenty-nine prisoners of war who processed through our facility during Operation Homecoming. I thoroughly enjoyed my military tour, but it was military-light. Our basic training was two weeks at a Holiday Inn in Wichita Falls, and the closest I got to a weapon was when they showed us the effect of relativity theory on ballistics. They shot a watermelon to impress on us the importance of velocity (which is squared) as opposed to mass (the M-16 fires a .22 cal bullet), and we watched how far it splattered the melon. Our group incurred no casualties.

But there were no watermelons in Vietnam. Still, I had grown up with people pretty much like those who went to Vietnam, so finding a common basis for understanding was not difficult. I think we were successful in our efforts together.

However, with every major social change in my life, the relationships have not traveled well. This is another way of saying the relationships were superficial. I think that is true. We shared daily experience but not personal truths. It would not be accurate to say that I had no personal truths. But it would be accurate to say that consciously and unconsciously I was sure no one would tolerate listening to them.

Retirement is yet another of those social changes. Without the context of work, I feel a drift from the vets. I am not unlike an adopted child in the combat family, albeit an adopted child in an honest family. We did real in group, but real included my employment, and without that element I drift to what is more naturally me. I am now less mandated to follow their leads. And while many of them define themselves by Vietnam, I do not. And perhaps they should not as well.

I still continue to run two groups a week. This appears to work as long as we recognize the change. The Universe is becoming more important to me and Jefferson Barracks less so. There has always been a parallel process in my work, in which I compared my adoption issues to their combat issues. I think this was a useful analogy. But as time passes it becomes more important for me to speak from my own position, not a borrowed one. For sure Vietnam will not define me. For sure my work with the vets is a part of what I have become. But it is only a part. And it is an acquired part, not an intrinsic one. However my contact with the vets eventually gets labeled, it will not fall under the title of Vietnam.

The difference at work is that I no longer work there, at least not to pay the bills. Work no longer provides that benefit, retirement does. In the past that has always meant the end of my social contacts. Will that happen again this time? Perhaps not, but group will have to be based on a different context. We can formulate a new relationship that works, but it will necessitate finding common ground. Vietnam is a part of that but does not define it. Vietnam veterans, being brothers and having to stick together and all, does not apply to me. It never has. I do not know what defines me. Writing this book is in part an attempt to answer that question.

For sure my philosophy of life differs from the norm. But then so does that of the veterans. Perhaps sound common ground lies in that direction. We shall see. In any event, it seems likely that people would do well to live their lives from their personal truths. Too bad there is not an instruction video on finding those truths.

A Blog For a New Book

January 19, 2009: Writing a book can be hazardous to one’s health. Bertrand Russell said he spends three years reading about a topic before starting to write on it. Then, if he is lucky, the material somehow pulls itself into a unified whole and he simply describes what he sees. I was pleased to notice that my approach is similar. The three years of reading is the dangerous part. Cramming too many facts into one’s head can suffocate the reader. He needs to take time out to breathe. But one cannot just blab about warped space or explicit performatives to friends. They look confused or horrified, and quickly find reason to leave. Other philosophers might be interested but are not easy to locate. They are like ships at night in the harbor, but without lights. I could perhaps signal the whole harbor. Doing so, however, would be aiming at nothing.

Enter Immanuel Kant. He felt that external reality is not entirely external. Kant viewed reality as a combination of perception and conception—we presuppose a component of reality, which of course then comes from within us. He postulated four constructs that contribute to our experience of the world: space, time, cause, and substance. I am adding a fifth—communication (this is just a blog). And there might be a sixth, God, since we instinctively think in terms of purpose rather than cause. We do not see these suppositions; we see with them. Without them, color, sound, texture, form, etc, are merely sensory input. With them, sensory input becomes information.That is close enough. Someday I might describe it more accurately, but it illustrates the point—that dialogue might be essential to conceptualization. In other words, we perhaps grasp things more clearly by observing physical actions rather than mental images. The mental may require physical pollination in order to bloom. This means Requiem might not just rise out of the pages by itself.

Another problem for a blog is that it presumes usefulness. But not much about my life warrants attention. Solipsism and abstraction sounds like a formula for indifference. No trees will be lost, but what value can be created? Perhaps I would do better simply by tending to my blueberries.

Still, I will not know unless I try. And Requiem is not for my benefit as much as it is for the people and things I care about. I have a limited number of years left and want to give something while I still can to those who matter. Requiem is my life task, a final synthesis of personal experience, hopefully leading to a plan for moving into the future. It is also a goodbye.

The blog then is my effort to continue to relate to the world while on sabbatical from the world. I direct it to no one in particular, but neither is it for everyone in general. In writing Second Choice my birthmother was always in my mind. No such “listener” exists today. Today’s audience is probably an abstraction of all the people in my life who cared. It is also an exclusion of those who should have cared, but did not.

So with this introduction the blog begins.