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.
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