Cerebral Inscriptions

I am currently reading a book entitled The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force. The erudite and perhaps esoteric sounding title belies a powerful and (for the most part) easy to follow argument for volition, or in other words, free will. I will not seek to recapitulate the arguments, but rather to share an idea I thought relevant to myself as an English major.

Two excerpts from the book really caught my attention:

"[T]he arrow of causation relating brain and mind must be bidirectional. Conscious, volitional decisions and changes in behavior alter the brain" (95).

"[H]abits are behavioral expressions of plastic changes in the physical substrate of our minds" (165).

The implication, not so much implied as stated, is that the mind, our thoughts, moods, what we consciously choose to attend to, affect the neural pathways of our brains. Experience and the mind literally inscribe themselves onto brain matter.

Our lives are literally recorded as a narrative, a text, and that book can be read by those who understand its language (PET/CAT scans, brain mapping etc). We need look no farther than our own minds to find the Book of Life. English is as much a scientific inquiry into the mind as science provides into the brain. When we write it is mimetic of the process which has already occurred physically.

Violence and Inception

From an email-discussion about the violence in Christopher Nolan's film Inception:

I think there is a way of approaching violent movies where the violence in the film reveals something about the nature of violence. Take, for example, superhero films. The violent masculinity that is typically glamorized in cinematic males is also typically incapable of having lasting human relationships (Batman, Superman), especially with "the feminine," or more simply a woman in a relationship where children (another powerful symbol of futurity, prosperity, fecundity etc) are a possibility (an extension of the self beyond one's own life). So if you watch correctly, you see that the movie isn't glamorizing the hero, it's a revelation of the consequences of that kind of living, of that philosophy, mindset, etc. The worship of violence as a solution is an effective death wish that leads to impotence and infertility on a metaphorical and literal level (metaphorically - psychological castration, loss of personal relationships, etc).

In Inception, the lead male has to open up to a female (Ariadne) and reveal his most vulnerable broken self in order to regain futurity (his children). He cannot "man up" and just do it himself. His character arc throughout the film is the antithesis of Batman's, who shuts women out (what's her face) in order to accomplish his goals. The masculine/female dynamic is very important, as on the symbolic level "the feminine" usually represents the balancing traits to an over-exuberant masculine notion of violence and self-dependence. In Christopher Nolan's film The Dark Knight, which I think is one of those violent movies thatreveals something about violence rather than celebrates it, the Joker remarks that Batman's character, the extreme that Batman is, allows for and created the Joker in the first place. Escalation is an inborn characteristic of violence, and reciprocity is its tail end. One of the ways in which Christopher Nolan begins to weave the "anti-violent" message into his film is through Batman's belief that Harvey Dent, the non-violent hero, represents the kind of modality that will bring true justice to Gotham. The fact that even "the great White Knight" of Gotham (as Dent is referred to) succumbs to violence is a recognition of how pervasive violence is and how tempted we are to resort to what we see as justified violence. The Joker reveals the truth....violent solutions escalate the violence our efforts set out to quell in the first place.

So in Inception we are told right off the bat that we are witnessing violence done towards projections of the subconscious...perhaps revealing to us how violent certain ideas are metaphorically, like the unhealthy hold the business-inheritor-son's dad has on him. The idea that he has failed his father's image of who he wants his son to be violently castrates his psychological well-being. The release, the moment where the hero overcomes the main obstacle is when the violence ceases and catharsis a la Jacob and Esau is achieved. Son reconciled to his father and thus enabled to progress and produce and create, and then Leo who releases himself finally from the violent hold of his projected wife (a very violent character in the film...and thus a representation of Leo's capacity for violence) and returns to his children, another symbol of creative possibility and production. Violence is something to be quelled, discovered uprooted, but not by violence. By catharsis, byatonement, by reconciliation, and injury for your nonviolent approach is to be expected....the victory is in reconciliation and catharsis, not violence and subjugation. Projections must be freed and let loose, not jailed and pent up like the criminals whose violent deeds are sometimes overshadowed by the violence committed to contain them. Superheros produce supervillians which produce the need for superheros and on and on in a self-replicating chain of escalating violence.

Christopher Nolan (the director of both Inception and The Dark Knight) has taken violence on as central modalities of action by his main characters in several films (see alsoMemento) and come out the other end with profound insights. His violence is not the same as violence in other big screen names like The A-Team, The Bourne Identity films, any of the other superhero films (Iron Man, Spiderman, or evenTwilight). The violent male is a broken one...is Dom Cobb before he sorts out his issues (his wife's departure)...is Batman, who is both unable to have a relationship with his main squeeze and actually creates, according to the Joker himself, the villians that plague the city and kill his loved ones. I have no problem with Nolan's violence because it is vitally important we understand the problem of violence which exists at epidemic levels in every sector of our existence - especially because we are often unconscious of the ways in which we precipitate and help escalate the various forms of violence (gossip being an easy example of metaphorical violence). I do wish more people could see that Superhero films, in the lives of their protagonists, reveal why they are such broken narratives or broken approaches to the world.

Anyways, I loved Inception and this director's other movies, and think that if we are smart about the way we watch movies these "violent films," especially these films, can entrench those values that prevent us, perhaps, from seeing other violent films which lack the depth or self-reflection of these, in my estimation, far superior thinking-peoples'-films. I'd be interested to hear of other movies you (yall) have seen that are violent, but perhaps espouse anti-violence sentiments.

-Wareing

Outsomnia - Welcome Back

For the first time in a long time I have been sleeping regularly and consistently. I do keep my soporific stash of salvific sedatives (redundancy for the sake of alliteration, folks) in close fellowship so the sleep I've been getting isn't 100% natural but it certainly is rejuvalizing, a word I have made up and used because it makes me think of the words jovial and jubilee, the first which I feel more of than as of late and the latter what I feel like having in celebration of this new child, the offspring of my union with the best of what science and mother earth have to offer. It's a blessed union, and our kids are beautiful.

I have chosen to re-engage my blog in cobbed-conversation (cobb web, eh? see how the juices flow when I'm rested? also a reference to Dom Cobb - protagonist from the dreamy filmInception) because I hold what I write less suspect than when I was writing under the torpid urgency of insomnia. To be an insomniac, for me at least, is to experience a paradoxical fusion of a near-suspension of time and the galvanized, formula-one-racing-thoughts-track of sleeplessness. I *hope* to write no longer because I feel compelled by an alien captor (i n s o m n i a) but out of a desire to employ writing to articulate my life's narrative, something Freud seemed to feel indispensable in healing neurosis. I think sometimes our self-obsessiveness (twitter/facebook/blogs) gets out of hand but I also think there can be positive creative output in processing ourselves for mass consumption.

Food is useful to us not in it's aboriginal form but in its synthesized form, once it's been re-orchestrated into the fabric of our organic selves. Experience, I think, is like food. Alone it is only the potential of life. But if we process our experiences, writing being one excellent way of doing just that, we recreate experience into something meaningful, we give it shape, definition, and transformative power. It is an act of creation. The right foods can ameliorate the effects of disease and even cancer, experiences processed correctly (symbolically, I feel) can indubitably heal psychical wounds. What are psychologists if not coaches in how to process what we have experienced? Perhaps I'll someday go into business as a dietologist.

I am not an individual without a network, a cob-web or relations that sustain and define me. The statement "I am Sam" is only significant because I am a son, brother, uncle, friend, enemy no doubt to some, nuisance to others (I got ticketed for longboarding through a pedestrian walkway the other day), etc. This is not a blog about me but about the way I process my relationships....the provenance of all my experiences, the womb of consciousness and the "other than I" that enables "I" to be a self-consciousness. The true "inter-net" is the inter-relational web of contacts each of us lives at the center of. I will cease talking in circles and philosophizing. Suffice it to say that I am content with a return of dreams and a restoration of night as the property of dreaming. I yawn as I plunk out this final sentence, my eye lids stoop and eyes water and

[...]

-Wareing

post script:

My blog will now be comprised of responses to the books I read and the movies I see. Less in the way of a critique and more in the vein of what I have learned, discovered, or am now thinking as directly or indirectly affected by said medias. Blog alpha was more focused on the creative capacity latent in the subconscious. Blog beta will be focused on cogent (hopefully) analysis and discussion about the film/book I have "consumed" (see Ezekiel 2:8 to 3:3 --- eh? see? that whole discussion about "processing" our experiences like food? God has Ezekiel eat a book---there is something about digestion that is significant in our approach towards lit and film).