The "Minataur"

My little diatribe in the last post seemed to take the steam right out of me. Damned if I care about much of anything, history, politics, or the state of the onion. Mainly I feel like some kind of old locomotive, trying to muster the momentum to go uphill on a half-load of coal. This retirement thing's not all it's cracked up to be.

Plus, there's Mina. I'm getting on her nerves. She's not one to mince words. Doesn't truck fools and has even less tolerance for a whiny 68-year-old geezer, even if she married me. Fact is I feel like she's expecting me to answer a question she hasn't asked. Familiar feeling, that. And there it is, above: Me, the Minotaur, doomed to struggle in the labyrinth that is the female mind, when what I'm supposed to be is the Mina-taur, reading Mina's own ever- superior mind. Though she's the first to say this is not about her. This is about my own "pressing need" (her quotes) to explore who I am as a man past his prime.

Or in Mina-speak, it's about me taking a look at my anima, my female side. The yang needing to take a look at the yin, I guess.

Fact is, I'm getting on my own nerves. Don't know what to do with myself. Done teaching. Bored with the so-called scholarly research. Don't quite know who I am, retired. Isn't about the money; Mina's always made the big change. Never minded that, much. No man's value is quantifiable.

Or woman's.

But here I am. Not quite sure who "I" is any more. Or even where "here" is. Mina's the lucky one. Knows who she is, where she is, and what she wants to do. And she'll do it 'til the cows come home. Which you can see them doing here as they do every year at the end of September in the Désalpe de Lignières, courtesy of John Walker's fine photo.


I said it before. I'll say it again. Mina lives in the world, and I live in my mind. But my mind's no picnic these days. And if Mina's right and I should be exploring my own damn anima, how do I do that if I don't have a clue about the female sex? What do women want? Hell, even Freud couldn't answer that.

So I ask Mina. Here's the conversation, blow by blow.

Me: So how'm I s'posed to explore my own damn anima when I don't have a clue about women? What do women want, anyhow?

Mina (without looking up): Equal pay. Women still make only 77 cents on the male's dollar.

Me: Well, not a whole hell of a lot I can currently do about that, other than state the case.

Mina (looking up in exasperation): I'm trying to work, Hyde. Give me some space here. Don't look to me for answers. Find your own.

"Hyde." There you have it. May as well just disappear. Mina'd probably not even notice. And there's the rub. I don't have a clue. Can't go forward (we know where that ends), and don't want to go back (been there, done that). No wonder all those retirees kick the bucket shortly after retiring.


Mina: Don't go all feeling sorry for yourself now because I'm too busy to pay attention.

Me: How can I figure myself out when I don't even know where to start?

Mina: How about start with admitting you're mad as hell that you can't get my attention? All this "Marvelous Mina" stuff is just another ploy to make me responsible for how you feel. Not my job, Hyde.

Hmmph. Mad at Mina. Marvelous Mina. S'pose I can't rule that out. So that's what she wants, is it? Me to admit I'm pissed? Okay. I can do that.

Me: You win, Mina. You're not so marvelous and you're right, I'm mad as hell.

Mina: That's a start, Hade. I don't belong on any pedestal. I can't figure you out any better than you can figure yourself out. Retirement's what you make it. And remember what Bertrand Russell said, "Many people would rather die than think." It would come as some surprise if you were one of them.

At this she returns to her reading.

And I'm about as locked out of my own mind as this Defendius Lock below.


She's right. It's not her job to figure out my retirement. She could be a little nicer about it, though. Don't suppose she'd treat a client like that.

On the other hand, I'm not her client.

I don't want to be stay stuck in this maze, I'll tell you that.

"We are all minotaurs, lost in the sealed labyrinths of our brains." That was original with a man named Weir, I think. And the fact is, it's no Minotaur in the labyrinth above, but a Centaur. So maybe there's hope for me yet.

Big Boys

Eleven years and about 7 months.

That's the answer to my last post's question about the equivalent developmental age of the U. S. of A.

Mina and I figured it out over a late night dinner and a nice bottle of Beaujolais. Of course, Mina's the psych expert in the house, but we figured we could use the equation of one human developmental year for about every twenty historical years. When it comes right down to it when we're talking America we're looking at a very young nation here, relative to most other empires current and has-been. You figure historically our country's 233 years old; in human years, the great U. S. of A is about the equivalent human age of... like I said, a prepubescent.

Let's say a prepubescent male, since the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment suggests the white males with property (and those under the influence) are still very much in charge.

So what do we know about boys that age? Well, they're not children entirely, but nowhere near grown-up either. Aren't much capable of thinking things through. Know there are consequences, but figure they can get around them when the time comes. Old enough to know the rules but they've usually put together you have more fun if you break 'em.

Fun's mostly still the name of the game, as defined by who wins. Big is good. Faster and noisier the better. Might is right, for all practical purposes. If you're a near twelve-year-old boy with a bit of power.

As for other boys, twelve-year-old males are still not entirely sure how to get along with them either. Most near twelve-year-olds think there's some kind of alpha-male system ordering the universe. They're trying to figure where they fit in. Starting to put together that the ones with the most swagger and the least conscience usually end up Top Dog. Such as goes for what looks like confidence, a certainty about how to get by in a rough world.

The nice guys stand around mostly confused about what to do and hoping the big boys don't notice them.

And girls? Well, they don't rate much where prepubescent boys are concerned. Not much use for them, yet. Maybe that explains the failure of the ERA.

Still, our U. S. of A. isn't entirely an alpha-male macho wannabe. More the kind of rich, entitled kid who tries to look like a goody-goody but is often up to no good when everyone's back is turned. Hasn't entirely developed a conscience yet. Thinks if it's good for him, it's good. Look at the history of the CIA in developing nations and you'll see what I mean.

Still, he's not entirely a bad kid, our boy. No kid starts out bad. But spoiled, rich kids - they're a whole other order. Usually it takes some kind of comeuppance to get their attention. Would've thought where the U. S. was concerned Sept. 11 would have done that. So maybe the kid just needs to grow up, start to put together that he who dies with the most toys still dies.

No, there's no equivalent of a Gandhi driving U. S. foreign or domestic policy right now. There's little boys, with their little minds, and too much power.

Eleven year old boys. When I was growing up, there was this one, Manuel King. Got written up because of his skills as a lion tamer.


Ended up being in a flick, "Darkest Africa."


Don't know what happened to him after that.

'Course that was a different era, 1934. Don't want to go getting all nostalgic for the old days, though. Greed ruled same then as it does now.

And lording it over a captive beast is hardly ranked right up there with being Mahatma Gandhi.

Mina Takes Aim

Mina took aim at my last post in short order. Said far better for me to have ridden her coattails than to have "reduced complex social phenomena to a simplistic equation," were, I believe, her exact words. Insists my having done so points to my penchant for trivializing her work. Told her there she is wrong, and she knows it. She countered it was clear there were two different genders in this conversation.

She may have a point there. Ha. Not sure at whose expense I'm making such a conditional comment.

Certainly the dear girl has a far greater tolerance for irreducible complexity. I may be a victim of my gender here, wanting to fix things.


Mina reminded me that there's nothing like gestation to put in perspective the necessity of just sitting out a situation. Nine months sounds about this side of what would push your regular gonad-bound chap over the edge.

On the other hand, she knows who to call when the sink won't drain.

Cheap shot. I got plugged again. She reminded me we were talking about complex social phenomena, not plumbing. Countered with the old meditation dictum. Don't just do something, sit there.

And added, keep your trap shut until you know what you're talking about.

Her yin, my yang?


We settled on that. Viva la difference.

As an aside, I was curious about the yin-yang symbol. Turns out it isn't just a bit of clever drawing. Learned from Wikipedia that:

When observing the cycle of the Sun, ancient Chinese simply used a pole about 8 feet long, posted at right angles to the ground and recorded positions of the shadow. Then they found the length of a year is around 365.25 days. They even divided the year's cycle into 24 Segments, including the Vernal Equinox, Autumnal Equinox, Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice, using the sunrise and Dipper positions.

They used six concentric circles, marked the 24-Segment points, divided the circles into 24 sectors and recorded the length of shadow every day. The shortest shadow is found on the day of Summer Solstice. The longest shadow is found on the day of Winter Solstice. After connecting each lines and dimming Yin Part from Summer Solstice to Winter Solstice, the Sun chart looks like below. The ecliptic angle 23 26' 19'' of the Earth can be seen in this chart

.



What's a fellow to do of my generation? I'm of the gender that heretofore has ruled the earth. White Male with Property. Who, at the time of the writing of the Constitution, 1790, were the only ones allowed to vote. It took another 50-60 years before those restrictions were removed and almost all adult white males could vote.

So much for "government by the people."

It was Freud who said ontology recapitulates phylogeny. As goes the individual, so the species.

What chronological/ontological age is the United States of America? Have we come a long way, baby? And if so, where have we yet to get to?

That latter's one question I won't presume to 'fix' at this moment. Waiting for the next election.

"Let Not Your Left Hand See What Your Right Hand Does"

So how do they end up there in the first place, those inmates we (however tangentially) have been discussing?

Let's begin with the most convenient answer, one that surely might have been raised by many a felon: Alien (or anarchic) Hand Syndrome (AHS), as demonstrated saliently by the above photo from Jon Jacobson.

AHS is a medically verified neurological disorder in which one hand appears to have what we can only call a mind of its own. This disorder can occur owing to systemic infections, brain injury or surgery, or strokes.

Was it originally described in the Biblical injunction, "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth"? Couldn't say. That's the earliest verbal reference to the phenomenon. The scripture itself seems to suggest that only brain injury could account for charity, a rather jaundiced view of human motive even for yours truly.

You will be interested to learn that AHS is also known as Dr. Strangelove syndrome, in recognition of the eponymous character who found his right arm compulsively struggling to engage in a Nazi salute, shown below.


As the eminent Dr. Sergio Della Sallo of the Unversity of Edinburgh describes, "The idea that ‘Man is not truly one, but truly two’ (Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), perhaps half good and half bad as in Italo Calvino’s Cloven Viscount, is entwined with the history of humanity, and certainly is fascinating from the artist’s point of view."

Calvino's Cloven Viscount. How can we fail to expand upon this 1952 novella in which in a battle wound in 1716 the Viscount Medardo was split in two and sent home as half a man. Below we see a sculpture of the not entirely Cloven Viscount in Austria.


In Calvino's work, one half of the Viscount is insufferably cruel, until, necessarily, love intervenes. As Gore Vidal in his review notes:

In due course the other half of the Viscount hits town; this half is unbearably good and deeply boring. He, too, is given to celebrating halfness because "One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand...." A charming young girl named Pamela (homage to Richardson) is beloved by both halves of the Viscount; but she has serious reservations about each "Doing good together is the only way to love," intones the good half. To which the irritable girl responds, "A pity. I thought there were other ways."

Sounds like a girl after my own heart.

But I digress, as is my wont. We are nonetheless left with the question, why does no less than one percent of the U. S. population end up incarcerated? Leaving out, necessarily, the alien hand/anarchic/Dr. Strangelove syndrome.

Certainly excuses abound. Unhappy childhood, or variants thereof, being principal. So who had a happy childhood, other than Christopher Robin?

You'll think from that I'm a supporter of abominations such as the death penalty. Not at all. The fact of the matter is, in my opinion (we're leaving Mina's expertise out here, since to invoke it gives the unfortunate appearance of coat-tailing) happy or unhappy childhoods are probably irrelevant to a life of crime. Two factors, my friends. Fear, and successful crime - those are the pertinent considerations.

What stops most children from the life of selfish impulse they inevitably long to live? An internalized sense of the common good? Fool to think so. It's fear. I'll get caught, and I'll get punished. That's what stops the average happy or unhappy lad. And what keeps the average criminal lad violating the laws? Simple. Success. All it takes is one or two successful illegal undertakings with no consequence and a powerful reinforcement is initiated. I can do this, and why shouldn't I?

The "why shouldn't I" asked for a number of reasons. Nothing to lose, being chief. Those who have nothing have nothing to lose. Then there are those who have much and want more. A lecture for another time. But what keeps the rest of us on the straight and narrow? Fear, pure and simple. And bad luck. We got caught. Those who didn't, or who could bear the consequences, continue the life of crime, until such time as either bad luck or bad judgment catches up.


Fear is the biggest inhibitor, but success is the best reinforcer. It is Mina's personal goal to redefine the parameters, the human world having so miserably failed our inmates.

Perhaps in the wild there are options heretofore not considered.

In Need of Greater Guidance, Honey

Questions have been asked as to exactly what would constitute a viable "higher self" totem animal in prison populations. See the nudiustertian post.

Bet that got your attention.

No nudes, boys. And no nudes is good nudes where my particular physique is concerned.

But to return. It has been asked: just what does Mina prescribe in her program to have inmates choose a totem representing their animal embodiment and then a "higher self" animal? That first part is fairly self-evident, although it does require extensive knowledge of various animal species in order for an individual to select his (or her) totem animal.

Having inmates choose a "higher self" animal, however, is where the real work happens. Raises questions not just of who they are, but who they might ideally be.

Initially Mina worked only with female inmates, whose purported wider corpus callosum allows for greater facility with symbolic thought. I have no quarrel with any argument giving moral superiority to the fair sex (though despite what the Marvelous Mina would seem to demonstrate, intelligence itself is obviously less gender-biased), but research has yet to establish superiority in the female corpus callosum.

Lost you already, have I? Keep up the pace, mate. You're letting yourself slide here.

Corpus callosum. A white matter structure connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres. Here's an illustration, for those in need of visual support.


Often regarded as the "seat of the soul," such as there could be said to be one. Descartes was even more specific in locating that particular site, calling the pineal gland, a pea-size gland in the same vicinity as the corpus callosum, the true seat of the soul. You might have heard of it as the third eye pictured above in a mask from Bali.

But I.. tigress, as illustrated in this spectacular photo by Nirmal Ghosh.


Considerations of 'higher animal self' are complex, and better left to a more thorough explication when it isn't quite so close to my afternoon libation. Let it suffice to say it's a process requiring considerably more thought and knowledge than one might expect. You don't just pick a species out of thin air and think you've got it, by Jove. Wouldn't one, for instance, tentatively think the choice of a Greater Honeyguide, Indicator indicator, as one's "higher self" would be a perfectly fine choice?


One would be wrong.

Sounds salutary at the outset. Found in sub-saharan Africa, vital to the subsistence of indigenous groups such as Bushmen who depend on the honey found in the bees' nests where these Honeyguides feed. Even serves that function for ratels, otherwise known as the honey badger.


But what further investigation yields is that it is what is known as a brood parasite, laying each of its eggs in a different nest of another species. That in itself would be merely a case of maternal abandonment. Or euphemistically, distributing the task of rearing among one's community, a wish dear to the heart of any aggrieved parent. However, upon hatching in these hospitable host's nests, the Greater Honeyguide chick has a membranous hook on the bill that "it uses, while still blind and featherless," to kill the host's own offspring.

Heard of bite the hand that feeds you, but murder its young is altogether another matter.

Some "guide" that.

Well, it's time. Off to badger my own honey for a tall glass of Mr. Beam.

'Mina and I Promenade' - courtesy of Chagall

It is Mina's opinion that I am of late lost (according to her estimations that is to say the last 68 years) in the labyrinth of my subfusc mind. Says I need to get out. Attentive readers (of which I am certain there is at least one) will note this is my second use of the otherwise obscure term subfusc in as many posts. Well, to repeat oneself in the prime of life is a humiliation; in one's senescence it can be revenge.

But I digress. Out. I pressed her on her definition, getting in return a disquisition on the possibilities, among which was the dreaded spectre of volunteering. When I reminded her that in the event of having to volunteer advice I have at my disposal exactly two responses - Get over it, or the more benignly muttered, This too shall pass - she admitted the error of her ways. "Go for a walk, Hyde," were, I recall, her exact words, as she returned to her manuscript.

Go for a walk, Hyde. Even I, a dunderhead of profound literality, cannot fail to see the nearly poetic irony. You'll note that I'm "Hade" when she is feeling (or I am behaving) more magnanimously, and "Hyde" when she is (or I am) shall we say... in a pique. But for me "go for a walk" and "hide" are typically redundant, unless one is of the promenade disposition, as shown in L. S. Lowry's On the Promenade below.


You can guess which of the irritable fellows is I.

Laurence Steven Lowry. There's a fellow. Died in 1976 at the age of 88. Called Laurie by the sickly and probably insufferable mother who had originally been hoping for a daughter such as the "three splendid ones" her sister had. Arguably a mildly overrated artist (there's an entire museum devoted to him in the city of Salford in Greater Manchester, England), but most certainly an underrated humorist. When asked about his interest in art he replied, "Started when I was fifteen. Don't know why. Aunt said I was no good for anything else, so they may as well send me to art school." He described his father as a man who "realized he had a life to live and did his best to get through it."

My favorite anecdote about him, however, is that he kept a suitcase by the front door so that when uninvited guests dropped by he could claim to be on his way to the train station.

Appears to be of the stoic and schizoid generation to which I have attached myself.


But out, Mina advised. The door. And in need, perhaps, of a bit of cobweb-sweeping of the mind herself, she took my arm and we took our leave. Our own proMinade.

I repeat: fruition's a bore. The sere, flat, unyielding smugness of a hot summer's day is my idea of the doldrums, though Mina urged that we go in the early evening and approach the shore, where criticisms of sere have less credibility. It was there I took this photograph and wrote the following (it is your task to find the damn bird).

My mind is a noisy crow,

but for once

it has been stilled.

"Why, you are a poet," noted Mina (mincingly, I thought). First time she's given me the nod in that department.

Though she likes what I do with a rhyme, Mina does. And what Coleridge does even better in his own Rime, describing the very real Doldrums in both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, a geographical region afflicted with the Intertropical Convergence Zone which produces a low-pressure area.

All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody Sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the Moon.

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.



Talk about take the wind out one's sails. That's for possibly weeks at a time.

Don't have that to complain of. Summer 'round these parts is often confined to a couple of weekends.

Well, Mina was correct in thinking I would be restored to bearable, if not good, humor. Sees me as a tad cantankerous, evidently. I reminded her of my deepest-seated humanistic affiliations as she brought me my early evening whiskey. Like his protégé Sheila Fell said about Lowry:

"He was a great humanist. To be a humanist, one has first to love human beings, and to be a great humanist, one has to be slightly detached from them."

At which point Mina poured the remaining whiskey on my pate.

AHPM

Time we addressed the Miracles of St. Mina, depicted somewhat facetiously above (the miracles, not Mina), and whose inventiveness in the Animals Humanizing Prisons Movement (AHPM) is chief among the reasons I have personally forsaken all others. Well, that and the fact that there's a decided lack of romantic interest in me on the part of anyone over the age of eight and with less than four legs.

As you may know, there has been considerable success using a variety of animals in partnership with prison populations. Dogs, dolphins, birds, rabbits and horses have all greatly facilitated the HAB (human-animal bond) that gives rise to the possibility that those who are incarcerated might find greater pleasure in tending a relationship than tormenting it. Clearly there is a statistically perceived benefit in fostering such human-animal bonds, in that it lowers the recidivism rate by about fifty percent.

It's Mina's idea that these bonds need not be limited to the above animals. She has devised a system whereby inmates both self-identify their preferred 'totem' animal as well as ultimately are given an animal to take care of that would be the equivalent of their 'higher self.' This process of successful identification and nurture of what are often two different species becomes criteria for conditional release.

Questions abound, of course, particularly in the matter of practicalities. Suppose, for instance, some felon chooses a Komodo dragon as his totem animal of choice. One can hardly argue on behalf of the pragmatics of raising a 160-lb. flesh-eating reptile in captivity.


Mina recommends a different tack, however. She agrees it would be a cold day in hell before any prison in its right mind took on the challenges of hosting Komodo dragons. No, for Mina the point is once the 'totem' animal has been self-identified, the inmate's task is then to explore the significance of everything there is to know about the species. Young Komodo dragons, for instance, are at great risk of being eaten by cannibalistic adult Komodos, for whom their young is about ten percent of their total diet. Komodos are nonetheless able to successfully pair bond as well as bond with their human captors. Therapeutically this opens the question of which adult humans "cannibalized" the inmate. Which ones were exceptions. The idea is that the felon might be better able to understand himself through the imagery of an animal than through direct self- and other-observation.

Talk therapy has its limitations, as the picture below so reasonably demonstrates.



Yawn. Enough of Mina's miracles and now to the more distilled wonders of Jim Beam. It is, after all, 4:30 on a sultry summer afternoon. Inspires an "Ah, PM!" of my own.

Cheers.