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Places and interiors                                                                                   Edited 07/ 04/ 2024

“There’s a mystery that can surround or locate itself at the center of a house’s life. It was there in my grandmother’s house, and I recognize it when I think of Father D. [priest] and his brother. The house’s very structure, the number or arrangement of its rooms, has a powerful effect upon the decisions people make by which they live and know themselves….”  From Seeing through Places  by Mary Gordon

“Every day silence harvests its victims. Silence is a mortal illness.” Natalia Ginzburg

Today’s post, more or less, centers on two women writers, their books and the places that shaped them.

Mary Gordon

“Memory is the tether that connects us to our past, it is what keeps us anchored and alive,” Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon’s book of essays, Seeing through Places: Reflections of Geography and Identity, first published in 2001, explores the role that places and interiors play in the formation of our identity. She weaves the connections between how we experience places, houses, objects and people and how we become ourselves. As we move with her– from her parents’ flat to her grandmother’s house, to a beloved rented house she inhabited in Cape Cod for eight years, about which she writes: “of the “washashores,” the non–Cape natives, she inhabited a marginal, almost but not quite secure place”, to Rome, to her houses in Barnard first as a young student and later as a mature writer, wife and mother– we  follow the different threads of personal narrative, social commentary and ideas on religion and other matters.  Gordon reveals the relationships between the emotional, intellectual and physical architectures of our lives. She demonstrates how places become the building blocks of our psyche, as they inform and shape our lives and who we become.

She begins her book with her grandmother’s house on Long Island because in many ways it became the centre of her childhood and adolescence, and seemingly this was the house that left a more lasting imprint on her.  Her grandmother’s house she says had nothing to do with postwar life in America, it expressed a historical era that the twenty-one grandchildren vaguely understood: “Each object in her house belonged to the Old World. Nothing was easy; everything required maintenance of a complicated and specialized sort. Nothing was disposable, replaceable…… My grandmother’s house had no connection to prosperity; it had righteousness instead…… Her house was her body, and like her body, was honorable, daunting, reassuring, defended, castigating, harsh, embellished, dark. I can’t imagine how she lived, that is to say how she didn’t die of the endless labor her life entailed. Nine children. It’s easy either to romanticize her or utterly to push her aside.”

Gordon grew up as the child of an Irish-Italian Catholic mother and a Jewish father, who had converted to Catholicism. Religion permeated her upbringing. She writes: “We didn’t have a television. To watch television, we went either to my grandmother’s or to my glamorous aunt’s. ……. On Tuesdays, we went to her house to watch Bishop Sheen. Those nights after the moon vanished and the screen filled in its image, what you saw first was an empty chair. His. The bishop’s.  And then himself…..  We watched as the bishop sat in silence, a few seconds before he spoke. His eyes seemed transparent. They knew everything. They looked into your sinful soul. There was a blackboard on which he drew diagrams and wrote key words……”

When she was seven her father died and she and her mother had to move in with her grandmother and aunt. She describes how words had failed her in expressing her grief over her father’s passing and how as a means of consolation or distraction she was allowed to choose the paint colour of the room she and her mother were going to occupy in the house. This, Gordon says, allowed her to enter into a world without words, which had failed to explain the enormity of her loss and to console her. She writes: “Color did what words could not. I surrounded myself in questions of pure color……. First I had to decide what basic color I would choose. Colors, to me, were always people. My favorite color was blue (I was named for the Virgin, and it was her color) but I knew that blue was the favorite color of many people, and so I said my favorite color was orange, which I knew no one liked best. But this sacrifice made me hate orange, and from that day on I’ve never bought anything orange, except the fruit. I didn’t want blue for my bedroom, it was too much like the color of my inner world. I didn’t want green; green was efficient and official, committed to getting on with things. Red was dangerous, purple was too old, yellow was a blond. I wanted something entirely unlike my life, but representing what I wanted my life to be. I chose pink. But I felt, deeply, that some pinks were hateful….”

Through her descriptions of the various houses and places we learn about change and loss and about her childhood world and that of others. In one essay about another family and another house, that of her baby sitter’s, we catch glimpses of the role of religion in her upbringing, the dynamics of her parents’ relationship, and that of the baby sitter’s larger household and its influences on her. After her grandmother’s death she writes of her house, which now was her mother’s: “it was not a loving house; it was a house that required service from a devoted lover, and perhaps, the limits of devotedness having been tested and reached, it would return regard. But we failed the house and it punished us and we, like whipped creatures, huddled against it, trying simply to survive. We needed a protector, and it had to be a mother or a man.”

Gordon explores the role of reading and play in her early life. One chapter begins: “AS A CHILD, I was not good at playing, which means I was a failure at the duties of my state in life..The phrase “Go and play” had for me the ring of a sentence handed down by a mercilessly careless magistrate.” She explains that running tired her, climbing frightened her and she couldn’t catch a ball because she feared being hit by it.  Even her reading choices didn’t involve adventure stories, but consisted mostly of fairly tales and saints’ lives. Thankfully, she adds her parents never suggested alternatives to reading..“When I read,” she writes, “ it didn’t matter that I was only masquerading as a child. There was no falseness in my position as a reader. If I lost myself in the fates of virgin martyrs or fairy princesses……… there was nothing shameful in the shiftiness of my identity. It was expected that ordinary human beings lost themselves in that way, it was only the proof of a serious or ardent nature, not the evidence of a crook’s sleight of hand.”

However, in her chapter, Places to Play, Gordon writes about the playing activities that she did engage in with an amazing awareness of her young inner world. Her child self was entranced by her Sally doll and her paper dolls, that were called cutouts, rosebuds and crinolines, bonnets, pansies, frills and bits of silks, rejected from the linings of the coats that her grandmother made, which she transformed into veils and gowns.  She writes: “A china tea set, miniature, white with pale forget-me-nots. I became not a figure or a character, but a color and a texture, soft, edgeless, inviting. I became an atmosphere. I lost my history, my face.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In describing her favourite play place in her father’s small study, we learn both about her relation to her father and her playing preferences. She writes that while her father was at his desk trying to write books that brought in no money, in a corner of his study was a space she loved to play:  “On the floor of the closet, alongside my father’s shoes, was my toy box: a tin rectangle, two feet by four, painted in a circus design in circus colors. That I was given only this inadequate space for play explains, perhaps, or at least provides a lively metaphor for, why I didn’t have more appetite for play, why I didn’t think it was important. It was because my parents didn’t think it was important.”

She would spread out pictures and objects to create a world where all was lightness and prettiness, ”a world impossible to my family’s imagination: a world without martyrdom. A world without heroics.  A world where nothing was at stake.” She returns to the theme of being afraid of being martyred. She writes that many of the Roman martyrs whose names they said each day at Mass, whom she imagined stood in rooms devoid of furniture, except for a chair, were women who met horrific deaths like being devoured by lions or being pierced at their breast by a sword.

Italy is a significant geography in Gordon’s psyche.  We witness the Rome and the Vatican of her childhood imagination integrated with her adult visits. The first time she went to Rome by herself was to interview Natalia Ginzburg, an Italian writer whom she much admired anδ believed was underappreciated by American audiences. I also read Natalia Ginzburg and other Italian writers in my late teens and twenties. I found some of these books on my bookshelves, 1970s and 1980s editions. I re-read Caro Michele and The Dry Heart in one sitting. Memories came up, and the language and the ambience of her stories became known to me again.

Natalia Ginzburg

From The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg

“What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken.”
“And perhaps even for learning to walk in worn-out shoes, it is as well to have dry, warm feet when we are children.” 
Ginzburg was born in Palermo in 1916, the child of a Jewish father and Catholic mother. She came from a left-wing intellectual household and she grew up among thinkers and writers, who defended human rights and freedom. She is considered writers’ beloved writer, and one of the significant Italian writers of the 20th century. Her distinct “voice” is direct, raw, wry, minimal and unadorned, and a sense of sadness seems to linger over her writing.

In her book of essays, The Little Virtues, that I’m currently reading, novelist Rachel Cusk has written that her voice “comes to us with absolute clarity amid the veils of time and language. Writings from more than half a century ago read as if they have just been—in some mysterious sense—composed…. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original. It is an authority grounded in living and being rather than in thinking or even in language, an authority perhaps better compared to that of the visual artist, who is obliged to negotiate first with the seen, tangible world.” And in her book, The Dry Heart, Hilma Wolitzer writes: “The raw beauty of Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity.”

Although the essays in her book, The Little Virtues, were written separately and in distinct circumstances between 1944 and 1960, they read as a memoir of sorts. In many of these essays Ginzburg writes about places and interiors and through these accounts her circumstances and the historical background become visible to us.

In her first essay Winter in the Abruzzi, written in 1944, Ginzburg writes: “We were in exile: our city was a long way off, and so were books, friends, the various desultory events of a real existence. We lit our green stove with its long chimney that went through the ceiling: we gathered together in the room with the stove – there we cooked and ate, my husband wrote at the big oval table, the children covered the floor with toys. There was an eagle painted on the ceiling of the room, and I used to look at the eagle and think that was exile. Exile was the eagle, the murmur of the green stove, the vast, silent countryside and the motionless snow.”

In her essay, Worn-out shoes, written in 1945 in Rome, where she temporarily lived with a friend, after her husband’s tortuous murder, two unembellished sentences reveal her circumstances and the times she lived in: “We have a mattress and a bed, and every evening we toss up for which of the two of us shall sleep in the bed. When we get up in the morning our worn-out shoes are waiting for us on the rug.”

In Portrait of a Friend, written in 1957, Ginzburg describes the shifts that have taken place in her sense of a place, which we see can be both home and not simultaneously: “Now, we live elsewhere in a completely different, much bigger city, and if we meet and talk about our own city we do so with no sense of regret that we have left it, and say that we could not live there any longer. But when we go back, simply passing through the station and walking in the misty avenues is enough to make us feel we have come home; and the sadness with which the city fills us every time we return lies in this feeling that we are at home and, at the same time, that we have no reason to stay here; because here, in our own home, our own city, the city in which we spent our youth, so few things remain alive for us and we are oppressed by a throng of memories and shadows.”

“Writing is an act of courage – it is a way to dive into the depths of oneself……. Writing is a way to make sense of the world, to find meaning in the chaos.”  Mary Gordon

In the last chapters Gordon ponders on the distance she has travelled and asks: “How has it happened that I have become someone who, as a child, I would never even have thought of? Someone I would not have seen on holy cards or in movies. Someone I might not even have read about.”

First she imagines what could have been her destiny.  Then she explains how she got to this very different and desired place. She contributes, who she has been able to become and the place she inhabits and feels she belongs,  to many things, including “a great good luck that has allowed [her] to be back where [she] belongs” and her love for great public buildings. She goes back in time and describes how her love for these was born:  “It was on these trips, especially the ones with my father that I learned to love great public buildings. They came into my life naturally in that we didn’t visit them especially, we were on our way to someplace else, to see someone else and the buildings just happened to be there.”

She is where she wants to be and for that she feels gratitude. She writes: “I am where I want to be, where I have always wanted to be. I might have longed for temporary sojourns in one or another of the great capitals of the world, but this is the place I’ve always wanted to call home.” And elsewhere she says: “I am where I am because of the benevolence of an institution. The same one that admitted me as a student and opened the world to me hired me later to teach young women like my former self, and provided me with a dwelling so that I could afford to live in this place.”

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Part four

[The first two parts of this thematic thread were posted on February 21st and the third part on March 2nd, 2024]

A painting, and a sympathetic yet critical perspective on meditation and mindfulness

Today’s post is two posts in one because I finished both things I was working on simultaneously. It includes a painting I’ve been working on over the last two months or so, part of a current art project [you can read more in my February 8th post], and a presentation of Dr Miguel Farias and Catherine Wikholm’s book, The Buddha Pill.

 In their book, The Buddha Pill, Oxford psychologist and researcher .Dr Miguel Farias, and psychologist Catherine Wikholm, examine meditation and mindfulness practices, their potential value and benefits, limitations, the current hype and similarities with the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement and marketing, the validity and quality of the research, the potential adverse effects, and the darker side, in an attempt to tease out facts from fictions. They discuss what the empirical evidence, including their own study on yoga with prisoners, suggests about the benefits, limitations and potential negative consequence of these practices. They explore both the value and benefits and the illusions and delusions concerning these practices and the promises of personal change and well being, and they identify and propose corrections to seven myths:

Myth 1  Meditation produces a unique state of consciousness that we can measure scientifically.

Myth 2  If everyone meditated the world would be a much better place.

Myth 3  If you’re seeking personal change and growth, meditating is as or more efficient than having therapy.

Myth 4  Meditation can benefit everyone.

Myth 5  Meditation has no adverse or negative effects. It will change you for the better (and only the better).

Myth 6  Science has unequivocally shown how meditation can change us and why.

Myth 7  We can practise meditation as a purely scientific technique with no religious or spiritual leanings.

Farias and Wikholm provide a sympathetic yet critical review of both the research literature and the history of the practices. The authors display reflexivity throughout the book making their own experiences with these practices explicit, as well as, their relationships and encounters and how they changed as their examination of the research material and knowledge increased.  I think, their narrative is balanced and cautious one could say, in an attempt perhaps to not throw out the baby with the bath water.

The book tells the story of their scientific examination into various meditative practices. It provides food for thought and can be helpful for anyone considering taking up contemplative practices or mindfulness in terms of what they need to know, in order to seek appropriate guidance and engage with the most suitable practices, and also, to be aware of potential risks or difficulties, and how to deal with them. It could also benefit people teaching and promoting these practices in making them more aware of the bigger picture or more willing to be transparent about the aspects of these practices that are not talked about, and finally more able to provide better guidance to people.  The book promotes critical thinking about meditation and encourages our questioning some of the claims of meditation advocates. To some extent, one could say that it contributes to more transparency in the field, which I think can only be a good thing.

Farias’ first contact with meditation in childhood was through his parents’ engagement. His father was in the army, where he had been introduced to Transcendental Meditation (TM). He describes how when he began examining  the research on TM a wave of nostalgia overcame him when he found the publicity images for Transcendental Meditation he had seen as a six-year-old: “young men and women smartly dressed (the men with ties and well-ironed shirts), all levitating. Their faces beamed with smiles as they sat cross-legged some 15 centimetres above the ground….”

Not knowing much about TM I actually I found the chapter on TM quite informative and mostly useful in understanding the current reality. It basically focuses on Farias’ examination of a great quantity of research on TM, part of which included many studies attesting to the impressive effects of the practice: decreased hypertension, reduced asthma and insomnia, improved intelligence, and positive changes in certain personality traits, such as neuroticism, etc.. He poses the question on whether meditation can really have such deep influence on the individual and society as a whole, as TM research and advocates claimed, and he looks at the major scientific findings in an attempt to tease out facts from fiction.

Farias mentions, for instance, that in 1976 two studies were published showing that TM didn’t produce effects any different from those of relaxation. The second study published in 1976 examined the physiology of five experienced transcendental meditators and found an unexpected result: “the measures of brain activity suggested that the meditators spent a substantial part of their meditation time sleeping. The authors wondered if, although fully awake, meditation put the group in a brain state similar to that of sleep. It didn’t. The meditators themselves declared that they had fallen asleep in most of the sessions. The article concludes that meditation gives rise to different mental states, but there is nothing physiologically extraordinary about it.”

The evaluation of the research revealed many methodological limitations. There were problems like ‘sampling  bias’ and lack of random allocation. Another significant problem with meditation research is finding the right kind of activity for the control group because it is very difficult to find a placebo for meditation. The writers claim that “most scientists would say that you can’t, which is why the active control groups in meditation research usually consist of people undertaking relaxation, hypnosis or exercise. It’s not an ideal solution – you inevitably know whether you are in the meditation group or the control group. The best studies try to overcome this problem by ‘blinding’ the researchers.”

There is also reference to Jonathan Smith study, who used a bogus intervention called PSI that no one was aware of. He had actually written a 70 page manual about this bogus intervention. In addition to the TM and PSI groups, he also had a passive control group, where participants did not engage in any new activity.  “Before and at the end of three months, all participants were assessed for anxiety, muscle tension and autonomic arousal. The results showed that, compared to the passive control, TM and PSI led to a significant reduction in anxiety and a more relaxed physiological functioning. However, there were no differences between the TM and PSI groups; they both showed the same level of improvement.”

There is also a discussion about Maharishi’s announcement  concerning the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment, his claims in relation to levitation and TM’s potential to reduce crime if enough people engaged with the practice. Farias writes that there was a glitch in the results of the research that studied TM and its potential to decrease crime if enough people meditated. Data was mispresented or bits of data were selectively removed. Farias writes: “The combination of sociology, forensic psychology, and parapsychology make the research into the effects of TM on collective consciousness one of the most uncanny enterprises in the history of modern science…………….. There is something troubling in the idea that a single factor, such as collective consciousness, can play a more important role in rates of aggressive behaviour and crime than factors such as an individual’s level of education, wealth or emotional maturity.” Summarily, their review of this considerable body of research into TM concludes that it has moderate beneficial effects and that better studies are required to address the grander claims made by its advocates.

The book also includes an overview of the psychology behind change and transformation. It touches upon topics like how change might occur, the obstacles and difficulties we humans face when trying to change, a short history of related theories and ideas from ancient Greece to more recent times, traits theory and critical perspectives like Dan McAdams’ that “argued that traits offer no context. His view is that traits don’t tell us anything about who the person is, or that person’s goals and motivations throughout life.” They discuss peak experiences, holotropic breathwork, the procedures and dynamics of conditioning and Pavlov’s accidental discovery that showed how it is possible to eliminate conditioning, which in turn has strong implications for the idea of personality change. There is also reference to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which I wrote about in the previous post.

The examination of the evidence for personality change suggests that meditative practices and yoga may have the potential to bring about transformation since intense physical stimulation can cause changes in our physiology & psychology, and meditative techniques can transform how we experience our flow of thoughts and feelings similarly to many psychotherapeutic modalities. However, the authors discuss whether mindfulness techniques are as effective in changing people’s thoughts and behaviour as more established psychological therapies can be. They write that both third-wave therapies and traditional CBT acknowledge the important role of our behaviour and cognitions in affecting how we feel. However, they continue: “with mindfulness-based interventions, the aim is not to change your thoughts, but your global beliefs about thoughts – essentially, you’re expected to stop believing that your thoughts are necessarily true or important. This is where the Buddhist philosophy really kicks in: your thoughts are mere ‘mental events’ – just thoughts, nothing more – and they don’t necessarily warrant any action. All you’re aiming to do is to be aware. From its early psychoanalytical beginnings, the goal of psychological therapy has also been about increasing awareness, bringing into the light what was previously hidden, unobserved or unacknowledged. But unlike in mindfulness practice, we don’t just stay with the awareness; we move onwards to explore what we have observed. In this sense mindfulness as a therapeutic technique seems somewhat limited in reach – but quite heavy on time….”

Another issue they raise is the fact that it is difficult to pin down what factor has contributed to a successful outcome when evaluating the use of mindfulness in therapy, for instance.  They pose questions: Could a relaxation technique have brought about similar results?  Could the passing of time bring about change or shift of mood? Or more crucially, could it be the therapeutic alliance? They assert that thirty-years-worth of studies suggests that the most important factor, in terms of what leads to change or a good therapeutic outcome, is not the particular interventions or model of therapy used, but the quality of the therapeutic relationship. They suggest that a good therapeutic alliance is of great importance. They claim without a supportive environment and informed guidance any change that is achieved through meditation practices may be less significant or slow or may have a variety of negative passing effects or more long term adverse consequences, which have been documented by psychologists since the 70s even though the majority of research still ignores these risks.

For instance, in the 70s Lazarus strongly criticized the idea that meditation is for everyone and argued that ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison’, and that researchers and therapists need to know both the benefits and the risks of meditation for different kinds of people. In the late 80s Stan Groff and his wife edited a book on spiritual emergencies, in which they caution psychologists and psychiatrists to be aware of and respect what on the surface may look like mental illness, but is, in fact, the expression of spiritual experiences that are having a profound and at the same time stressful effect on the individual. They also cautioned that not all difficult experiences associated with these practices are necessarily ‘spiritual’. In 1992 David Shapiro, a professor in psychiatry and human behaviour examined 27 people with different levels of meditation experience and found that 63 % of them had at least one negative effect and 7 % suffered profoundly adverse effects. Finally, a new category was added to the 4th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) that of Religious and Spiritual Problems, which acknowledges that some mental health problems may arise as a temporary result of spiritual practices.

Farias also refers to Willoughby Britton, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Brown University, whose interest to study adverse effects arose from witnessing  people being hospitalized after intense meditation practice, together with her own experience after a retreat in which she felt an unimaginable terror.  While reading through the classical Buddhist literature to try to understand what was happening to her Farias and Wikholm Britton realized that these negative experiences are mentioned as common stages of meditation and that these negative effects could turn out to be a stage in one’s spiritual journey, but if we don’t address them properly they can be destructive and harmful.

[You can read more about Britton’s work and adverse effects in previous posts mentioned above]

Moreover, they confront the myth that unlike other religions Buddhism is an exclusively peaceful religion. They provide historical examples of Buddhists and violence across historical contexts that prove that Buddhism, like other religions, has a history that links it to violence and forced conversion. They asked people, who specialize in the study of Asian religions like Torkel Brekkel and Bernard Faure about violence in the Eastern spiritual traditions. They refer to Zen Buddhism during WWII, which provides a powerful illustration of the link between Buddhism and militarism, and also, of how meditation can be used toward violent goals.  They also refer to many historical, and also, current violent conflicts, and also, texts and views held by significant Buddhist figures in support of violence. In particular, they refer to the concept of emptiness and how it has been used to justify violence.  They write that one of the crucial teachings of Buddhism is that of emptiness: “the self is ultimately unreal, so the bodhisattva who kills with full knowledge of the emptiness of the self, kills no one; both the self of the killer and the self of the killed are nothing more than an illusion.“ They also mentions the Kalachacra-tantra, in which it is stated that the final battle of the world will be between Buddhists and heretics.

They discuss the idea proposed by many that meditation could eventually eradicate violence. During this endeavor the writers interviewed various people from the science and clinical world, people working in different settings like prisons, and monks in Christian and Buddhist settings. They quote one of the people they interviewed: “There are various factors that explain violence, right? Some psychological, others societal Put them all together in a statistical regression model: start with level of income, education, access to health, then consider psychological factors such as the presence of childhood abuse; see how much of these explain the likelihood of my neighbour being in a fight at the pub or hitting his partner. Then, add meditation to your statistical model – would it add anything in predicting violence compared to the other factors?……  Would it have made a difference if Hitler had meditated?” So, really it is common sense to acknowledge that we can’t remove people from the larger context, their psychological makeup, their ambitions and motivations, and so on.

Farias also recounts a visit to an Indian yoga guru’s ashram, where he was confronted by machine gun-carrying guards and where they were advocating for the death penalty.  He writes that his doubts about meditation and yoga having a role in solving the world’s violence substantially increased after this trip. Some of his relevant commentary; “I was coming to the conclusion that meditation is only a process: it can sharpen attention, quiet thoughts and angst, increase positive emotions towards ourselves and others and, in the extreme, it can lead to a deep alteration of our identity ……. But with the wrong kind of motivation and without clear ethical rules, that very spiritual selflessness can serve all kinds of ill purposes…… To start with, you need to have a healthy ego; what kind of self are you surrendering if you don’t have a stable sense of who you are?……. Perhaps meditation was never supposed to be more than a tool to help with self-knowledge; one that could never be divorced from: a strong ethical grounding, who we are and the world we live in.”

It is probably self evident that people come to meditation from all walks of life and with different goals, life stories, traumas, personalities, expectations, support systems, beliefs, interests, ambitions and political ideologies. The authors argue that a positive ethical framework is required to ensure that the changes that meditation can contribute to at a personal and collective level are not damaging either for the person or others, and that this framework is often missing.

“An ashram in a prison cell……..”

In the first chapter the writers introduce the notion that a prison cell can be conceived of as an ashram or a monastic cell, even if it is not of one’s choosing. They speculate how prisoners might have an increased opportunity for self-reflection, personal growth and even moral development. They note that the notion that incarceration could be reconceived of as an ‘opportunity’ to develop the self, through the use of meditation, requires a shift in thinking and was espoused by Nelson Mandela, who was forced to remain in prison for 27 years..

Farias and Wikholm considered how yoga could facilitate transformation and rehabilitation of inmates, considering that these interventions may be appropriate and effective with a population that might be more defensive and less willing to engage with more intrusive or verbal approaches. In addition, yoga sessions are more cost effective compared to other modalities and inmates can also practice on their own. While examining the available research they found that most of this research had serious shortcomings. For example, sample sizes were usually very small or / and there was no control group, or the research drew evidence only from questionnaire measures. They realized that if they were to draw any realistic conclusions about whether or not yoga is effective in bringing about measureable psychological changes in incarcerated criminals, there was a need for better research evidence. And so the seeds were sown for their own study.

They claim that their study that looked at the effects of yoga, in seven UK prisons,, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research (2013), was simple: “we wanted to randomly allocate prisoners to either a yoga or a control group for ten weeks… we first needed to check that yoga worked better than doing nothing.” They add that despite its limitations, it provided the first robust scientific evidence that yoga has a positive effect on wellbeing, mental health and self control in prison populations when compared to the waiting list group.  Additionally, they found that although yoga did improve attentional control and inhibition, statistically, it didn’t make a difference when it came to levels of aggression or how prisoners behaved towards others. So, despite the other positive results, there were no real changes in how aggressive prisoners felt. They speculate that prisoners learning these new techniques might require additional emotional support and guidance as they begin this new journey of self-exploration. They also found that the more yoga classes prisoners attended, the greater their psychological wellbeing, and that the likelihood is also that continued benefit would require continuing practice.

I will end with how the book owes its title to an analogy. Farias and Wikholm argue that meditation is similar to a pill. It cannot always cure an ailment, it doesn’t work for everyone and it can have side effects.  They write: “like medication, meditation can produce changes in us both physiologically and psychologically, and it can affect all of us differently. Like swallowing a pill it can bring about unwanted or unexpected side effects…” They discuss how we’ve been increasingly buying into exotic ideas of personal change, and because meditation has been marketed to us very well, “greater numbers of people are jumping on this fashionable, money-making bandwagon, with companies finding ever-more ways to create something modern out of something ancient, to seize the imagination of the self-improvement generation.” However, they continue although “meditation and yoga are not a panacea; nevertheless, they can be powerful techniques for exploring the self. Probably more important than the type of practice is the choice of teacher and knowing why you want to put time aside to meditate.” 

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Books and art                                             Edited March 13th  / A Greek translation is also available

“With the correct kind of conditioning, you can start dreading its [a flower’s] sight and smell. English novelist Aldous Huxley vividly portrays this concept in his novel Brave New World (1932). In the story eight-month-old babies are conditioned to be afraid of books and rose petals.” Miguel Farias and  Catherine Wikholm

“I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.” Nina Simone

Today’s post includes four drawings from me inspired by life, children’s literature, Nina Simone’s music, Anton Chekhov‘s well known play, The Seagull, and Aldous Huxley’s cautionary tale, Brave New World. I’ve also included two books for children related to racism and diversity, and also other important themes like injustice, inclusion, friendship and loyalty, and how stories can bring people or animals, in this case, together.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Huxley’s book, Brave New World, presents a futuristic society engineered meticulously, in which everyone is comfortable, compliant and content, at least at first glance. In Huxley’s book, unlike Orwell’s 1984, technological progress does not lead to mass surveillance and oppression. Instead, Huxley paints a future in which “everyone is happy now,” mostly thanks to drugs and frequent non committal sex. Babies are produced in factories, grouped into social classes or castes, A, B, C, D, Es [there’s even a relevant rhyme: A,B,C,Vitamin D], and conditioned heavily from their first day to fear all kinds of things like books and flowers, and as they get older to love their roles and place in the world not to question,  to consume and to take soma pills to disperse any “negative” emotions or thoughts. However, all this surface peace is disrupted when John, a young white man who reads and recites Shakespeare and has grown up outside their world with Native Americans and whom they call “Savage,” and his middle-aged mother, a prior citizen of the brave new world, enter the picture. The first cracks in this meticulously engineered societal structure occur.

Although written in 1932, Huxley’s dystopia, Brave New World, feels very relevant, and one could say is a political critique and satirization of a society where privacy, individuality, strong emotions, free thinking, thinking about the past and future, parenthood, old age, and many other things are highly discouraged or forbidden, and where citizens resemble cheerful robots drowning in gleeful ignorance. As a tool of social control when citizens experience strong negative emotions or certain kinds of thoughts, they are encouraged to use a freely distributed drug called soma that creates pleasant hallucinations and a sense of timelessness.  They take a soma “holiday” to distract themselves and to experience pleasure.

In relation to art in Aldοus Huxley’s book citizens are deprived of art in an effort to maintain a form of drugged contentment, suggesting that art leads to social instability and unrest. Mustapha, the chief controller with the deep voice, believes that a societal structure that creates art and literature is dangerous.  He says: “you can’t make tragedies without social instability. The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.” He also explains that people would be unlikely to appreciate art, anyway because brainwashing has successfully alienated them from the human experiences, such as death, love, and pain that art can reveal or express. Also, art has the potential to enlighten people about their oppression, and cause them to feel dissatisfaction, which is bad for production, and furthermore, if the citizens were sensitized to their humanity, and inspired to question the meaning of their existence or the way things operate, then this brave new world would cease to exist in its current form.  Mustapha asserts that “Universal happiness keeps the wheels steadily turning; truth and beauty can’t….”

As I was considering this post I was thinking about how we each bring our own subjectivity, ideas, personality and experience as we engage with art products and stories of various sorts created by others.  I’ll expand a bit by using an example of a painting I came across by an old acquaintance artist, while I was searching for something online.  Considering the unusual experience I had today, involving a young cock or maybe hen, it was not surprising that I was reminded of this particular piece of art.

The weather was lovely this morning and I thought it would be great to walk to town.  As I had emptied our waste paper baskets I took the rubbish with me and dropped it into the first bin on my way to town, and then I heard a sound that resembled a hen. And sure enough a bird was at the bottom of the container trapped under the light bag I had thrown in.  It was making sounds of distress because it could not free itself from under the thing that had landed on it, and I could reach neither the bird nor the bag. Then I caught sight of a young man in a car parked a few metres away. I asked him to help me free the bird and he willingly came to the rescue.  Together we tipped the container and he reached inside and freed the young bird that seemed dazed, picked it up and left it in the field next to the road. So, that ended well and hopefully the little cock or hen is okay now.

As I sat to write this post and with the morning event on my mind it was almost inevitable that this particular painting would come to mind. It is a self-portrait of the artist in grey tones mostly and the word KOTA is written in big black bold letters at the top of the head and the canvas. KOTA in Greek means hen, chicken, but in slang it can mean several things like coward or slow driver, and when referring to women mostly, things like frivolous or stupid or worse. Maybe there are other meanings in slang that elude me. In any case, as I mentioned above, the experience and meaning making of a particular piece of art is person dependent to a great extent. When I saw the painting I wondered whether the artist was recreating or processing a private experience or whether he was making an accusation, challenging the audience to feel a certain way, think or consider something. We may never know what the artist had in mind and that’s fine, because what is important is what we the audience make of it, and what has arisen in us. When we come into contact with an object or process of art it becomes, at least momentarily,  a part of us.  We get the chance to think, to feel sensations or emotions, to free-associate if we choose. We may compare, remember, meditate on, consider its symbolism or implicit message, treasure it or let go of it, but art stays with us for a little while.

Two illustrated books for children:

Jack and Jim by Kitty Crowther for younger children

Jack, a forest blackbird yearns to explore the ocean. He ventures to the beach where he meets Jim, a white-feathered seagull. They become friends and Jim invites Jack to his home and village, but Jack grows uncomfortable at the other gulls’ hostility and feels sad because they don’t seem to like or accept him.  However, Jim remains loyal to Jack, who ultimately gains acceptance by demonstrating a skill that the seagulls lack: an ability to read. His story reading unites them beyond their differences.

NINA: A Story of Nina Simone written by Traci Todd and illustrated by Christian Robinson for children and teenagers

It is a picture book biography of Nina Simone born Eunice Waymon in rural North Carolina in 1933. Nina was a child prodigy, pianist, singer, and composer. With the support of her family and community, she received music lessons that introduced her to classical composers like Bach, who influenced her music throughout her life. After high school she left North Carolina for New York and Juilliard. After several disappointments and indignities she began performing at a nightclub and her growing fame led her to change her name to Nina Simone to hide her “unholy” music from her mother. Meanwhile, the momentum of the ongoing civil rights movement proved impossible to ignore. Nina felt internal and external pressure to speak out against racism. Todd ends her story with the sentence:  “And when she sang of Black children — you lovely, precious dreams — her voice sounded like hope.”