Psyched out

When I am trying to make sense of things I am grateful for the help I find, even in the oddest places. I just finished Till We Have Faces and that contained some helpful passages, even if it did not end with me reconverting to Christianity. Or converting to Christianity. I'm not sure I ever really gave it any particular devotion. It was just the one meal on offer throughout my first two decades. When the only meal is fish you can declare yourself a proud eater of fish, even though you don't really like fish that much and would probably eat other things given the opportunity.*

Legion, oddly enough, offers me some help.** I mean, it's a wanton dive into psychological craziness. Kind of a joyful counterpoint to Lynch's heavy shamanic dream states. I appreciate both for the enthusiasm it embraces the Marvel telepathic mutants and all their attendant craziness and for the questions it brings up. Frankly these days I like any work that tries to make any sense of how the human mind works and dives in without hesitation. Plus that show is pretty dang creative. Just mesmerizing to watch.

I just love the way Legion talks about ideas, as living things, good or bad. I think I need to read more book on psychology (and, again, see a therapist). Like everyone on the show seems half mad, but it seems to be a sort of good natured ribbing about the kind of monkeys we tend to be, and how even the shallowest analysis of how we think leaves one with that impression. My favorite element this season is Division 3, an organization trying to defend against imminent psychic assault but without only one half-crazed mutant on the roster with any actual ability in that realm. Any scene set there features an announcer in the background describing various symptoms as signs of psychic attack. "Disorientation is not normal. If you feel something, say something." and so on.

We have such a rich and detailed vocabulary surrounding physical health, as limited as we know that knowledge to be, but it's much harder to describe a healthy psychology, at least for the non-psychologist.  Is this because of an overall trend towards materialism and reason? We know the mind is a product of a brain so we tend to focus on the health of the brain and its attendant chemicals rather than the thoughts it thinks and the feelings it feels and their intrinsic coherence. Or maybe it's capitalism, and we can only define sane as that which leave a body producing and consuming at an acceptable rate. I'm not sure I like where we're at in thinking about our thinking, is all I'm saying. Which is why I like shows like Legion and Twin Peaks: the return.

One of Vonnegut's books (the Sirens of Titan?) starts with someone babbling about a primitive age was so primitive it didn't even understand the 53 portals to the soul (or something like that). Which I took as Vonnegut's acknowledgement that as limited as our knowledge of bodies is, our capacity for discussing and assessing the mind and the soul is even more so.

Which is why I like reading C.S. Lewis. For all the christian apologist stuff, he seems to be one of the few authors that takes the struggle to reconcile how best to reconcile the needs of our feelings and the needs of our intellect. We live in a materialist age and we talk with a faint embarrassment when it turns out our feelings exist at all. How unreasonable. What a lack of discipline.

In David Brin's uplift series he talks about an alien race that is composed of a series of layered rings, each with its own thoughts, that makes decisions by consensus. And the race called the Jophur, which employ a master ring to provide a coherent sense of identity to the composite being, and brings order to the stack through electrical shocks. I'm not sure we are meant to be the Jophur exactly.

I'm not sure we should live lives in constant religious ecstasy. Or forever committing horrors against other people out of fear of the gods. Or at the whim of whatever emotion takes us. But I don't think we are complete without letting that side of ourselves free on a semi-regular basis. This, to me, is the central benefit of religion, the freedom and permission to feel your goddamn feelings without shame. Taking the time to feel deep down what it means to be part of something bigger than ourselves, which we transparently are even from the most secular point of view. We are all very reasonable now but we are also very repressed as a result. We remain creatures that feel first and think second,  and maybe it serves us poorly to shackle and punish that first part of us 24/7.

I think we might have over-corrected in our pursuit of reason and it worries me. And I feel it a lot in this culture and it bothers me. I just want an understanding that our feelings are as important as our thoughts, and that there's such a thing as thinking that does more harm than good as much as there is such a thing as emotions that hinder more than they help.

 It's balance, baby, balance. That is all I am trying to say. There's a time to think and a time to feel and we could be less shit about how we talk about that in this culture.


*Not to be crass, but it occurs to me this metaphor, while not clever, works equally well for sexual orientation.

**Help that I should probably be seeking form a qualified therapist. But who has the money for that shit?