More Adultified

A very nice, unexpected day today. I took a mental health day from work, and since it was so beautiful outside (rainy all yesterday), called up James to see if he wanted to walk in the park. Instead, he suggested heading up the hill to take an hour walk around the neighborhood. I agreed, but with part of me wanting to hang out here, alone, and trying to do something productive. But I thought an hour would be nice.

Turns out he was waiting for Robin, to go to the Herbst Theater for her SF Chamber Orchestra performance. Now, I'm not a great fan of classical, but as we walked around Mt. Davidson, I realized that a day with friends and people would probably be a dose of what I needed. So we got some aerobic goodness in by humping some of the outrageous streets on the Mt., and then climbed up onto the hill itself to get that glorious view over the city and East Bay. Our conversation swirled around video games, technology, future popularization of virtual reality...and architecture.

The latter is often a topic for us, and Mt. Davidson gives a wide swath of small houses to check out, from cute and whimsical pieces, to downright bunker-ish abodes built in the 50's. We talked about how almost no building is beyond redemption, but that each structure must be related to in it's original integrity, even if that is the integrity of a slap-dash physical expression of despair and depression (I was describing a house Heather and I saw off the highway, in Vacaville). And I was noting what I've often thought, even with the worst structures, that with a bit of attention and love, flat, sad structures can be vitalized and brought back into the social fold.

Then we took off for the concert, and got to wander backstage with the violin diva (aka, Robin), en route to our seats. The house was packed; the Orchestra offers all its shows for free, but this was even fuller than they expected. So the band tore it up for a couple hours, and Robin was the soloist for the second half. I liked the Mozart more than the Mendelssohn, which seemed a bit like lite jazz. But I'm a philistine at this stuff, made even more pronounced by the unread copy of "Classical Music for Dummies" that sits on my shelf.

Afterwards, we went for dinner at Max's, with the conductor and a conductor from Napa, and they talked a lot of shop. Which was fine, though I thought I must have come off as rather spacey or irked. Neither was true. Actually, what was catching my attention was the presence of what Adyashanti points to as "that which is looking through our eyes," which I seemed to see in Benjamin the other day. I was noting how it was there in each person at the table, but was trying to understand the difference in tone, seemingly between this shared "presence," and the relatives of each person's persona/ego. It seemed to come down to how much people were aware of that presence from the stance of their persona. But the presence itself was not colored by the persona; in fact, it seemed as if the persona was made almost gossamer to the presence. It didn't disappear or get contradicted or denied--just turned transparent, like a hologram.

Then we drove home and hung out with B-Dude a bit before he headed off for a fitful sleep. And to cap the night, the three of us fell into a spontaneous couples therapy session, in which I was a little surprised at how James and Robin went for it and actually allowed themselves to go into the nub of the issue. Then we talked about trauma and EMDR, and I gabbed excitedly about therapy and healing. At the end of the day, all the strains and stresses of this work and doing a private practice, I really do love this profession.

And getting home, an adult decision presents itself, and again I'm struck by what an illuminating question is, "What is the most adult thing to do in this situation." Partially because of the information it gives, and partially because it points to the nature of adulthood.

When I really surrender to the question, the answer is, "Whatever is most integrated." So instead of doing nothing, or playing a video game, I cleaned the kitchen, and then sat down to check email and write this report on the day, in order to feel more integrated and cleared out. And the result is that I do feel more cleared out, which itself is a feeling of being open to the through-put of my life.

Report on recent adulthood-ification

An old friend, anxiety, came to visit this morning, and I've learned that there are two cuts to the downhill skiing that is anxiety: you either take the path which is steep, but manageable and eventually brings you to fireplace at the lodge...or you cut onto that path which looks treeless and powdery, but you never get the momentum to make it home and end up cold and shivering in the middle of nowhere.

I'd like to say I end up at the lodge every time, that I skillfully choose the right course each run, but no, not so. However, I notice that in the last year, I choose more skillfully more frequently, but it takes varying amounts of time. This morning started with some lag time in bed, after playing a new game we bought yesterday (for the xbox 360) until 3am (natch)--that was not the adult decision, by the way--and then sitting for the regular morning meditation. What came out of that wasn't much enlightenment, but was a remembering of the need to focus in front of me (long range thinking is a great place for anxiety to breed, fertilized by all the uncertainties and uncontrollables) and do something active.

The thing about anxiety is that it encourages a management strategy which is exactly opposite of what you need to do to feel safe. The introverted voice of anxiety is, "Be small. Hide. Don't do anything. Wait for the danger to past. For God's sake, don't draw attention to yourself." (There's an extroverted version which involves "counter-phobic" things like adventure sports and bar fights, but I'm not so familiar with that permutation). So what you get from your mind is exactly what your body/heart don't need.

What you need is to be present to the sensations of anxiety in your body, with a recognition that these sensations will release if not opposed, and then activity that reminds your whole system of connectedness and relationship--those are the essential things.

So this morning, I remembered enough to barely overcome the contraction of the anxiety, and got myself suited up for a run. It was a bit like having a small child keep yanking at my pant leg, but I gently put him on a shoulder and stroked his head, and took off on my regular run around the park. And sure enough, as my legs got pumping, I could feel the groundedness come on that accompanies my body recalling that it is not isolated. It's a familiar feeling, that transition, but something that's easy to forget when I'm circling around in anxiety's orbit.

Dan Seigal, the popularizer of neurobiology and what's called "interpersonal neurobiology," states plainly that the definition of health at all levels is integration. So what's happening on the right side of the anxiety mountain is that the belief systems and psycho-somatic looping of anxiety are being exposed to both new physical information (the experience of running) and new cognitive information (experience of the "outside" world, memories of relatedness in city life, and the physical sensations contradicting the isolation fears of anxiety--i.e., the body remembers it's integration into the larger world, and the mind then shifts with this different reality) which ends up in an integration of body and mind and belief systems. Anxiety is about forgetting our inherent relatedness to a supportive, loving reality (maybe family, maybe community, definitely Spirit), forgetting integration. From that perspective of isolation, as a statement of truth about reality, then the contraction and hiding (or ego-projection) makes a lot of sense. So it takes an act of faith to remember and trust that acknowledging anxiety's injunctions but not acting on them is going to, essentially, feel good.

I ran the regular course, and felt much better towards the end, when I went to my favorite coffee shop and got a large coffee. Unfortunately, coffee does often act as a support for my system as an anti-anxiety (I'll write about this some time, as there's a whole history to my relationship to coffee, like any addict's love affair with his drug of choice), and it did help me correct my course for the rest of the day.

It's been a nice afternoon, hanging out in Heather's room, working on the finances and then me writing and doing some email stuff regarding a therapy group I'm planning with a colleague. Now we're having pizza and Heather's playing the new game ("Bioshock," truly about the most gorgeous and smart video game I've seen in my whole 30 year dalliance). Toasting my feet at the lodge's fire...

The man whose eyes don't flicker

I spent last night down in Palo Alto, at Adyashanti's "Christmas Intensive." Ok, so to me, a boy trained in the Theravadan Buddhist (read: old school) tradition, a word like "intensive" means a LOT of sitting meditation and a bit of discourse. So I walked in with my pile of vipassana accoutrement --pillow, REI blow up sitting pillow, and Indian shawl--only to see that everyone was sitting on pews at the Unitarian Church. The vision in my mind came from day-long sittings I've attended, where everyone sits on the floor in a conference room.

Arriving late, I sat outside till the doors opened at 3:30pm. When I sat down, Adyashanti began to speak, commencing satsang (which technically means, from Sanskrit, "In the company of truth"). Then, before the break, a bald-headed guitarist sang a couple songs, and people broke for dinner.

Well! I wasn't quite sure what to do with all this. My judging mind wanted to latch on to the totally un-Theravadan doings, but part of me was just tickled at being surprised, and at the strange mix of stuff. I sat during the dinner, just to be ornery, but also so I could move up in the pews to be close to Adya for his next talk.

But before that, more guitar and singing, including a couple carols. Yeah, traditional Christmas carols. Natch. We all got carol books to sing from, but I wasn't there yet, so just listened.

Then Adya took the stage, in his odd, David Byrne-ish big brown jacket, and began speaking, or continuing to speak about the Christ story, setting it in a non-dual perspective. It was great to hear his take, which struck me as dead on, that the story is not about a historical human, but about the experience of human awakening.

So I took that in, but much more so, I watched his eyes. Being up close now, I could see his face and eyes clearly, and though his physical eyes would twitch about the room, especially when answering the questions at the end of his talk, the energy of his eyes never wavered. It was really both amazing and utterly common to watch, in the way that all mythical things are when you see them happening in front of you. Enlightenment has all sorts of images attached to it, but seeing the awakeness right there in his eyes, it gives some meat to the bones of stories.

Listening to a cd of an intensive he gave some time ago (a "real" intensive, with periods of sitting and all), I had a moment in which the emptiness he always speaks of flashed in relation to him. The form of this man--his humor, physicality, mannerisms, speech patterns and tones--all became totally empty, like what he had been saying showed up as literally and simply true. There was an "Ah!" he was speaking metaphor, just describing the actual situation, and my mind held it for a second.

Not that it was an experience of eradication or void, something dead or deficient. His eyes bore some similarity to a sharks, in their unwavering awareness, but a shark's eyes are dead. His eyes are alive with something most people don't manifest, that is unwavering but utterly alive...but not alive because they change, but rather, unendingly alive because they don't flicker.

I kept watching because though I believed what I saw, I wanted to keep experiencing it, to let it sink in beyond just the thought level. And I also wanted to see what impact it had on me, particularly when he (at least seemed) to look at me.

On the last point, I remember a time in Northwestern Malaysia, when I saw the same energy or essence in the eyes of a young monk, descending a flight of stairs to board the funicular railroad car. There the experience was almost shattering. Being seen into like that felt akin to suddenly finding yourself stripped naked on stage before a huge audience. Utterly exposing because utterly disarming: my defenses weren't overwhelmed, just negated.

But last night, what I noticed was a joyfulness in the experience, and a willingness to be seen. There was certainly a narcissistic strain, wanting to be seen as special, different and better than my companions. And there was a loving sense of relief, of seeing myself emptied, but without any judgment or criticism. Empty. As he said of a student's narrative, "To call it a story is totally without judgment, the same as calling this microphone a microphone. It's simply what it is."

What also was apparent was that while there was some craving and grasping to control the experience, a substantial part of me saw the absurdity of that desire, how utterly unnecessary that is. And it wasn't some big high of perception, some huge acid trip of a state change, much more common than that and it felt much more substantial.

Then, Adya's banjo playing friend took the stage, the fellow wearing the buck teeth and Harley Davidson shirt, who when I spotted him earlier I was on the verge of judging till I felt the same emptiness of form that came through in Adya. He commenced to tell a string of raucous Tennessee jokes, play some beautiful banjo (he apparently was on Hee Haw and the Grand Ol Opry), and then told some more jokes, including reading a hick version of "The Night Before Christmas." Then the guitarist and three women (including Adya's wife, Mukti) led a slightly rag-tag bunch of carol renditions. And the guitarist sang, "Baby Sings the Blues," about what an infant might thing about this new life thing, set to a far south blues riff.

And then we all went home. A sweet, wonderfully weird.

Will Smith is a Mensch

Heather and I took in the new Will Smith movie, "I am Legend," (trailer) what would be called these days a "re-imagining" of the book that was made into Charles Heston's unforgettable "Omega Man" (1971 trailer). A solid "B" movie, with a plus for seems to be Smith's basic mensch-iness. There was a little making of video that I watched last night, which at least made him out to be a nice, thoughtful dude.

I used to really go in for these "last man on Earth" stories when I was a kid. I suppose I was struggling to find a sense of the heroic in what felt like a pretty bleak existence, so these tales really caught me. "Earth Abides" was one that my father had read as a kid, and turned me on to. Heather read a bit and said it was poorly written, but I remember it as at least giving some warmth.

So "I am Legend" tells the story of an Army colonel who is a virologist, living alone in Manhattan after a genetically altered cancer cure goes very very wrong. As far as he knows, all humans are dead, except for the "dark seekers." Apparently, 4% of the population turned into these methamphetamine accelerated, Peter Garrett (the singer from Midnight Oil) look alikes, who huddle in dark buildings during the day because their skin bubbles when exposed to UV rays, but come out at night to hunt. There were 1% of the population which were immune to the virus, but the 4% ate them. I suppose that's a kind of democracy.

But Smith was not one of them, and he's spending his time looking for a cure, or maybe antidote, to the virus. His only friend is Sam the dog, and some mannequins at his favorite video store. He's pretty lonely. But then a couple survivors arrive and he makes his life meaningful.

OK. The real star of the film is New York. How often has this city starred in films? It probably has a longer filmography than any actor, including Klaus Kinski, who was in over 200 films. Apparently he would work a day or two, and that was it because the directors could not stand to have him around any longer than that.

New York is a favorite city to destroy, but here it's not blown up, but rather it's handed back to nature. Streets have become rivers, Central Park is overgrown, there's grass growing in the streets, and all you hear is birds and the winds. Beautifully quiet.

But, as Roger Ebert said in his review, "The movie works well while it's running, although it raises questions that later only mutate in our minds" (link). You know, parenthetically, Ebert is almost always right in his reviews. If I want a nearly always spot-on take on a potential movie, he's a great guide. Or, well, at least for me. Our sensibilities seem to match up really well.

So, here are some of the mutations that formed in my mind after leaving the theater:

1) There are 1,611,581 people (according to the 2006 census) living in Manhattan, which means that 1,531,002 (rounding up) people died, 16,116 were immune, and 64,463 turned into "dark seekers." Why is there no sign of the 1.5 million dead people? If we say that the typical human weighs 160 pounds, then that's 240,000,000 pounds of flesh and bones. Where is it? If you say that the dark seekers ate it, did they only eat the dead bodies inside of buildings? And even the bones?

2) If the typical human body begins inedible within, say, a month, and if that's what the dark seekers were using to stay alive, what have they been eating? They are not smart enough any longer to open tin cans, and there's no sign of stores being looted. So?

3) It's implied that the dark seeker's metabolisms are about 6 times as fast as humans (it takes six times the normal sedating dose to tranquilized a captive dark seeker). So, presumably that's at least six times the normal calories required for a human. Where are they getting all those calories?

4) You might say from the wildlife of the island--the first scene of denuded New York is of Smith hunting deer in the city--but if 64,000 cranked up super piranha were sweeping through each night, the already small population of deer (zoos I assume) would be gone in the first month. Manhattan is 13 miles long by 2 miles wide, which given how fast the dark seekers move, would probably take the 64,000 hairless hungers a brisk evening's jog to cover.

5) What does Neville (Smith's character) think he's going to do with a serum? My understanding is that human brains begin to cook past about 106 degrees F. The dark seekers have internal temperatures of about 200. Even if he did "cure" them, wouldn't they be so fried that they couldn't function as normal humans anymore?

6) How did the colony of survivors put up those huge cement walls around its village?

7) Why is the road through rural Vermont totally clear of debris after 3 years of being untended by humans?

8) Why did the government decided to seal off New York, when such a virus couldn't possibly be contained by such crude means?

So, the reason why I bring these points up is not to be snarky, because most sci-fi collapses on the verisimilitude front about as fast as rice paper exposed to water.

It's that there's such attention placed on the reality of a post-human urban environment, with details lavishly thought out and presented, that it makes the unbelievability of the actual happenings rather strange.

Anyway, a fun and sad movie with problems, but well executed as a set piece, and with some genuinely touching and scary scenes. Natch.

The Finger: Adult, ou bien?

Heather and I found ourselves, on a whim, riding the new scooter to see "The Golden Compass" yesterday. On Geary, a funky looking cab drifted over into our lane, making me drop back and to the side. It's one of those situations which are moderately dangerous, but the mood was on me, and with a gloved hand, I flipped him off.

Now, the last time I flipped someone off on the road was at least five years ago, when a MUNI bus driver stopped, opened his door, and told me my bicycle night light was too dim. I gave him the bird and he shrugged and drove off.

So maybe I'll make this a bi-decade event. It was, I'll admit, quite fun. And then when we got up behind the cab, both Heather and I made the universal sign of, "Hey, what the fuck?!" He, an older gentleman, made the universal sign of, um, well, actually we weren't sure, but it looked like, "Calm, calm, slowly, slowly." You know, as if you were trying to calm an angry cow that was paused, quivering with anger, in front of you.

Heather asked, "What did that mean?" and for me, it was like the ritual was complete and if the fellow was outdoors, I would have said something like, "Well done, brother!"

I don't get to participate in many social rituals in my citified, Western life, so I guess this will have to do.

The Adult Month, Day 6: On Adulthood

This Adult Month is a much more interesting experiment that I had anticipated. It's a curious thing to give yourself a basic question to apply to all your decisions, in this case, "What is most adult in this circumstance." So here are some preliminary thoughts.

First, Adulthood is about not grasping. Adyashanti has described the process by which people pick up and hold energy that comes from outside them, others anger, depression, whatnot. And he talks about a visualization one can do where you actually imagine both the front of your body being open--this is open heartedness, empathy--as well as the back of you body being open. The effect is that you are both feel the world and people around you, but you don't take on any of the energy (information) that when it comes to you, allows you to feel. You know but don't hold.

I feel most adult when I'm both most in open and most non-grasping. Awakeness seems to be a quality of adulthood, a willingness and readiness to remain in contact with whatever is happening in your life, without contracting in. You see, acknowledge, and accept. You don't pout, refuse, or deny.

And when there is call to act, you do so with a compassionate take on the lay of the land, and move forward without apology for your need or desire, while also taking responsibility for the consequences of your actions.

An Adult does not deny responsibility. And also, an Adult does not deny their own emotional experience in the process of taking responsibility; you don't stiffen in acceptance of your actions, you soften. If a tough decision is to be made, one neither denies ones own emotions, nor allows one's emotional reactions to overly determine the action.

An Adult accepts their fundamental lack of control and lets go of making control a primary motivator of action. Truly mature people hold their sense of Self lightly and ironically. It's there, it's active, but it's not very important.

Adult Month: Day 4, Striking Claims by Various Minds

On the Adult Choice scale, I think today would rate maybe a B-.

I woke at my regular Tuesday time, to sit before heading off to my BNI group, my business marketing group. But, with this cold lingering and it raining outside, and it being 5:30 am, I decided to crawl back into bed, in the space-heater heated bedroom, and get a few hours more sleep before going to see clients.

My first session was with a couple I've been seeing for about 10 weeks, who have been struggling for a while, and today felt like they were back on their cliff edge. Couples are both a joy and a pain to work with, and such is this duo. Well, clients in general...well, like therapists often say, what a strange ass profession we've chosen. It was a very rough session, with the male half saying he was going to leave her, and that's how it ended.

Now, it's difficult not to get attached to your clients, especially your couples. Well, at least for me, and it feels like a chunk of my work to find a detached compassion. Because when the therapy seems to go south, it can be incredibly wrenching, calling up all sorts of feelings, usually negative, in varieties of "I'm terrible at this," "I made horrible mistakes," and "Other therapists are going to think I suck." And apparently these thoughts never really go away, you just get better at managing them. It's no work for dedicated control freaks. However, for CF's in recovery, it's a wonderful practice in letting go and acceptance.

My second client, I struggled to stay present with her as the recently departed couple's energy kept intruding. I asked their ghost traces to stay out in the lobby, and I'd be back for them after the session, but they kept coming in to complain or point fingers at me, or each other. But the session ended pretty well if not real elegantly, and my client seemed to get some benefit.

Then I had coffee with my mentee, a brave soul starting his practice from the ground up, just recently being out of grad school. It was a good, ranging talk

So, heading home, I debated what the most Adult thing, but felt more like curling inward. Heather helped me recenter a bit, and did some EMDR with me. Then we went to see "The Mist," for distraction. Thus the B-. ("The Mist" was a credible B monster movie, but with a contrived, emotionally manipulative, falsely bleak denouement.)

Home, still carrying my stuff from session, I sat, which was somewhat clearing, and then came to write this. Well, actually, I spent some time with this new program called Sketchup, a simplified AutoCAD program, which I'm using for sort of a virtual abstract sculpture. And now, at the end of a long day, I'm glancing up to watch Heather play Halo on the new Xbox 360.

Brain is more or less fried, so not much depth for this one.

Adult Month: Day 2

Today started with a bought of anxiety. I woke up in our space heater-warmed room, and I groggily thought, "Isn't it nice to be able to stick my leg out from under the covers." But a familiar, nebulous anxiety jumped on me like a puppy who sees your eyes opening. Laying there, wondering what to do with it, I sort of fell into the thought of, "Oh, just love." So I dropped into a generalized loving space, and it felt like I, as strong and compassionate parent, was there with myself. And it seemed that the anxiety and compassion couldn't co-exist, so I basked in that as it waxed and waned, and reflected sleepily on what the effects of the Adult Month might turn out to be.

I couldn't say for sure that the anxiety isn't also a result. You change one part of the puzzle, and rest often moves in tandem.

But as it was Adult Month, I got up asking myself what, among the myriad choices available to me at 8am, was the most adult. I chose meditating, and sat for an hour in pretty good concentration. Then I was up and sent off a note to a colleague I'd promised to introduce to an esthetician I'd met recently. Then I walked for my morning coffee at Javaholics, around the corner from our house, and returned to work a bit on the December "Tame Your Mood" newsletter, sketching out a piece on cultivating one's own Nurturing Parent.

Ok, so points for morning Adulthood.

Then Heather and I drove to work together, and perhaps something about the sluggish gray weather, combined with a lingering sickness led to a low-grade bleakness and loneliness, as I drove down to work in Redwood City. I picked up a message from the female part of a couple I see, who continue to struggle with each other in rather profound ways, and something got tweaked inside. I did some EMDR as I drove (probably not the safest way to practice) and came to an image of my parents sitting us down for the announcement of their separation. I've noticed that with couples, I'm often struggling to hold the crisis conflicts. It seems a young part of me gets all stirred up, thinking, just like back then, that if I can't fix their crisis, I'm going to go down with the ship. So I tried working with this Adultly, but it didn't clear easily and lingered on as I got to work.

Then I checked in with Matt, my co-worker at the psychiatric rehab house, who let me know that a recent graduate of the house had killed himself by stepping in front of a train. I felt a slow rush as he told me, but it passed quickly and we were able to discuss our work with the man, and the ways our work put us pretty close to death. With this fellow, it came as little surprise that he offed himself. But there's an odd feeling of non-tragedy to this, not because his life wasn't empty and barren, but because his definitions of himself were not ones I was attached to. The body gets recycled one way or another, and the mind that destroys it, that's about as much compost as the meat. The suffering was real, and I have compassion for that. But thinking I actually know what death is about, and that it's tragic, that I can't buy into. He's off to who knows where, and best wishes on his journey.

A co-worker came to relieve me so I could attend the coordinating meeting for next year's Non-dual Wisdom and Psychotherapy conference, and I arrived at the little Pilates studio in Emeryville a few minutes late. John P., a big non-dual name in the Bay Area, motioned me to put my shoes in the corner, then join him and the five or so other folks. One I recognized from my old internship site, and a couple from the conference.

It was a little stilted at first, but then as we began talking and interacting, the group warmed up and I felt comfortable speaking to several points, and describing why I was there. Adult-wise, not too bad, though the young anxiety kept with me throughout the meeting, not helped by my rising temperature (this seems to be one of those colds that ramps up in the evening). We decided to take all comers for the selection committee, and Kerry, John and I (and the tech guy) will work on the website upgrade. It was a loosely formal organization, and decisions were made organically and without a lot of ego. I'm quite happy I made the effort to go, as it had that kind of scent which I've mostly learned to follow when it tickles my nostrils. It's an ingress into a community which it's time to join, moving in a direction in my work and practice which is very natural right now.

Then I drove back to work in the dark, always an odd experience (since I'm almost always commuting in daylight). Heather and I chatted on the way, but I was still feeling this underlying bleakness until just around the corner from the house, when it just shut off and there was a surge of optimism.

I set to work and avoided the evening movie, for the most part, though there were scenes in "Perfume" which were hard not to be attracted to. But I asked myself what the Adult choice was, and so worked some on the Christmas decorations (per bosses' directive), and then worked on notes and listened to a few Ken Wilber clips. Then wrote this.

All in all, a pretty good Adult day.

Margot at the Wedding: And if you thought your family was bad...

(Click here for the trailer.)

David and I took in "Margot at the Wedding" after a pretty good, but kinda-expensive-for-this-town Thai meal at Oshas. It was playing at the Embarcadero theater, which I'm guessing either is financed by a cinema sugar daddy/momma, or runs guns out of the back entrance, because with the wacky and oddball films they run, how do they possibly afford the rent at their location? But it's a nice theater, with good coffee and a nice, mature staff that never seemed to have had to read an employees manual--i.e., are not nice by design. (Going to the AMC 1000 on Van Ness is like being in my suburban mall haunts as a kid, with angst personified giving me my popcorn and coke.)

"Margot" reminds me a bit of the other film I saw in the theaters recently, "No Country for Old Men." Both are like slightly different hell realms. Both are visions of a life without Spirit, though "Country" is much more totalisistic in its vision. "Margot" doesn't say there isn't Spirit anywhere, it just focuses its lens in a way that excludes Spirit from the frame. Or even just a representative of sane human relationships.

"Margot" tells the story of two sisters coming back together after several years of estrangement, for the event of one of the sister's wedding. The details are not very important, nor the plot. It's the portrait of scathing dysfunction that's the real raison d'être, scathing not because it is writ so large or luridly, but because it is so unconscious and common.

Margot, the titular character played by Nicole Kidman, can't reflect on herself with any effectiveness; her sister says, "She can be a monster when she's angry." But it seems that she's angry all the time, and for her, that means attacking wherever it will hurt the other. She is brutal energy channeled through sophisticated means. She has gathered language and culture to her as a way to defend a fragile, scarred interior. Her way of creating a sense of safety and control in her life is to destabilize others. At the beginning of the film, she criticizes her son for not wearing his new glasses, and then at the end, when he puts them on to prepare for his solo bus ride away from his mother, she says, "They make your face look fat." Her persona is that of an aware, observing woman, but what she does and says is disjointed and fragmented, because her m.o. is not truth but defense. She says to her sister, "I'm a speaker of truth," while delivering a cruel verbal blow.

The other characters are not much more developed than her, though their personas are of relative sophisticates. Jack Black's character, the groom to be, is perhaps a bit more honest in his being "cognitively disheveled" (one of my favorite phrases from Ken Wilber), but really, they all are lost in the idea that their beliefs and thoughts are true and coherent. These are very lost people who are "very" lost because even their attempts at self-reflection can find nothing substantial to rest their gaze on.

They are not empty people here, just internally fractured, with "self-knowledge" which is created as works of fiction, not the result of self-inquiry. Margot doesn't know herself: she either holds concepts about herself ("I'm a speaker of truth") or touches on her own pain and pathology, but looks away so quickly, distorting her vision with self-disgust, that she can't learn from her seeing.

These are people who don't learn because they essentially cannot tolerate their own pain long enough to have it tell them about who they are. Jack Black's character says at the end of the film, as he's unraveling, "I ate the cake and I don't know why." There's a surface cohesion to these psyches which is belayed by their disjointed actions and words. Often communications will drop from each mouth to plunk in the mud at the others feet, without being picked up and understood. "I masturbated last night," says the son out of the blue, before getting on the bus to leave his mother. "You don't have to tell me things like that," says Margot, not stopping to understand or reflect on her son's confession, or maybe sharing.

These are damaged people in sophisticated personas, which makes them more toxic to each other than the merely ignorant. This is what mind-fucking is about, and it's often coming from people whose selves are broken and the fragments are being defended even more fiercely for the brokenness. Margot is a legion of lawyers charged with protecting a pile of shattered glass.

But like "Country," it's a particular hell, and it's a big mistake to view it as any coherent vision of life. "Margot" is what life looks like for a child stuck within their toxic family. There's no way out, there's no sane "other," there's no sanctuary of escape. Such a child does the best they can to survive and protect their Self from the literate and sophisticated desperation of their parents, trying to experience love despite it's union with pain.

"Margot" has a claustrophobic pain which describes a particular type of family, not families as entities, or life as an experience. "Margot" has no one who sees it clearly; even Baumbaugh, the director, seems to be grasping for sanity simply by articulating the insane. But there's no sense of seeing these people, this hell realm, in perspective, in relationship to what is sane, grounded, and self-aware. There's no mature touchstone anywhere in the film, which is what makes it a partial vision, the depiction of a family made hellish because there's no "outside."

Not to say I didn't like it. I did like the film, quite a bit. And I felt empathy for the people. I just wouldn't want them anywhere near me.

The Adult Month

I just went to see "Margot at the Wedding," with my old friend David, my first collegial date when I arrived at grad school. He's living over in the East Bay now, and is plugging away at his hours at a brand spanking new counseling center. We'd been trying to arrange dinner for weeks, and gotten hung up on scheduling, and then on illnesses. I barely made it, as a flu found it's way into my nasal passages, and laid me out all yesterday. It seems to be passing through quickly, but I had to cancel a few appointments yesterday and this morning.

So, coming out of the movie, I was struck with an impulse that also struck me some time back, after watching "The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill," which was to limit myself to adult entertainment. I think that fizzled because it was so open ended, so I've decided, as an experiment, to make December '07 "The Adult Month."

Today was a mixed start to The Adult Month. I meditated in the morning and read my teacher's EMDR book in the bath, then asked Heather out for a walk and hot cocoa. Adult. Then, when she shooed me off for another hour of sleep, I played a video game we got for the new Xbox 360, which captured my attention for an hour and a half. Not adult. Not bad, just not adult. Then we walked and went to visit a sculptural exhibit at the De Young. Adult. Then we got into a heated fight for an hour and a half (or more). Not so adult. Then we sort of made up. Adult! Then we did an EMDR session, which, while Adult, was not well-advised. With all the transference and countertransference, it was a bit like trying to pass a tennis ball through a Velcro tube. More fighting ensued, but pretty quickly resolved--Adult. Then dinner and some talk, a little gaming, then off to dinner with David. Dinner was about catching up and talking about our practices and thoughts about therapy (Adult), then into a dark but Adult movie. And home to write, not watch TV or vege on the Xbox. Adult!

I'm really kind of curious what this sort of limited choosing will do. What happens when your choices are pre-oriented in this way? We'll see and I'll keep you informed.